"Not all nightmares can be escaped by waking."
-- Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
Overview
Ashiok's Torment is my take on a modern U/B mill deck. Lots of fun to play. Race to deplete your opponents Library while stalling his efforts with some basic control.
Strategy
Obviously, with a mill deck your win condition is to attack and deplete your opponent's library. This deck tries to quickly setup and spin a few cheap, repeatable combos simultaneously to begin disrupting the opponent's setup as quickly as possible, and then pepper in a few one-off kidney shots to deal the killing blow.
Glimpse the Unthinkable
was really the inspiration for the entire deck. It's extremely cost effective and is basically a neutered
Archive Trap
, but much cheaper to cast via conventional means.
Mind Funeral
is also very powerful for its cost - if played early on the land removal can really screw over an opponent if they got a bad draw or are running a deck that's very thin on lands. It can be a bit variable in terms of how much damage it will do and is therefore a tad unpredictable, but later in the game, if they've already got all their lands out of their library (either on the battlefield or milled into the graveyard) its a 1-hit KO for 3 mana. Damn. If you've got a
Fraying Sanity
on the board, then you'll get an encore during the end step, which can be even more nasty, depending on the circumstances.
Hedron Crab
s are good for some near-guaranteed damage every turn, but are also great for chump blocking in case of emergencies..
Generally,
Fraying Sanity
is good for slowly leeching cards from the opponent whenever they cast an instant, sorcery, or sacrifice a permanent, but it's also a potent force multiplier that basically doubles every mill effect you manage to activate.
In many cases, simply messing with your opponents hand/library in such an aggressive manner will be enough to prevent them from mounting a meaningful resistance, but in case they're able to muster up some legitimate threats, you've got a healthy amount of control and spot removal to stall for time.
Winds of Rebuke
can help get a threatening permanent off the board and back into their hand long enough to counter it with
Thought Collapse
.
Sideboard
It's modern, so you have a ton of options to construct your sideboard based on whatever threats you think you are likely to face in a given setting, but I've included some obvious choices here to cover some common bases:
Echoing Truth
will give you some added protection against token-based beatdown decks and
Hurkyl's Recall
does the same for artifacts.
