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Bruvac Run of the Mill Petitioners [$100]

Commander / EDH Budget Mill Mono-Blue Storm

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1. Sphinx and Friends (31)

2. Untap (3)

3. Mill On Draw (3)

4. Mill (3)

5. Ramp (4)

6a. Removal Targetted (5)

6b. Removal Counters (3)

6c. Removal Wipes (3)

7a. Draw Engines (4)

7b. Draw Burst (6)

Other (33)

Commander (1)

Commander: Bruvac the Grandiloquent

Run of the Mill Petitioners

Mill generally doesn't scale into EDH since you have multiple opponents which have larger libraries than any other format for which Mill cards are often balanced. In the interest of threading the needle between infinite-mill-combo and awful trash, I'm trying to build a $100 budget power level 4 Bruvac the Grandiloquent to be played online in "No Infinite Combo" matchups.

Persistent Petitioners of course! This deck starts milling for 24 pretty early on (around turn 5 usually) and has a few tricks up its sleeve to quickly accelerate the milling to obscene levels. With dozens of petitioners to muck up the board, we can survive being under attack from multiple opponents and even use those attacks to generate more milling power with Faces of the Past. Additionally, Sphinx of the Chimes combines with a Psychic Corrosion can shred huge portions of all opponents' libraries.

  • Sphinx of the Chimes is a classic add for petitioner decks and for good reason. Being able to pitch two Persistent Petitioners to draw four cards (with 1-2 of them being petitioners again) leads to a "soft loop" that can be iterated several times to trigger the hell out of draw-based mill engines.
  • Persistent Petitioners are obviously the bread-and-butter of Mill, and I think Bruvac is proof that WotC recognizes how hard it is to mill (outside of infinite combos) in EDH. Being able to ding someone for 1/4th of their deck with a quadruple pile of these 1/3s can threaten individual players very quickly.

We can supercharge our Persistent Petitioner milling power with some untap effects. Ideally we could afford Intruder Alarm which is super busted in petitioner decks, but this list is on a $100 budget, a lot of which is eaten up by the petitioners themselves.

  • Faces of the Past stands in as our budget Intruder Alarm. Whenever a petitioner/human dies, untap all petitioners. This makes attacking us very difficult for people with shredded libraries, and gives extra petitioners added value in that they chump block with big benefits.
  • Mask of the Mimic is a way to trade a tapped petitioner in for an untapped one. At the time of designing this deck, petitioners were around $1.50 each, so this also takes the place of petitioner #31 in our list to save us a $1!
  • Dramatic Reversal allows us to untap all our petitioners basically reading as " Mill target player for 24" when everything is going well.

Our backup plan is to draw enough cards to grind people down with classic milling enchantments. This obviously gets very dangerous when we have a Sphinx of the Chimes in play, and quickly becomes a win condition all its own.

  • Psychic Corrosion is one of the strongest mill-on-draw enchantments because it hits each opponent.
  • Sphinx's Tutelage has the Grindstone effect attached, as well as a mana-dump ability to trigger itself, making it probably the best of all the mill-on-draw enchantments. Note that this card has been errata'd so that Bruvac mills them for four, and if any two match in color, they mill again. Against a mono-colored deck this might be a one-shot kill.
  • Teferi's Tutelage is one of the weaker mill-on-draw engines, but the fact that it loots when it enters the battlefield gives it added benefit for helping us power through petitioner/island flooded hands.

In addition we have some normal mill cards. Generally we want to run cards that mill in addition to doing things that we already want to do, since mill is generally much weaker in EDH than other formats.

  • Thought Scour is a great cantrip for this deck.
  • Drowned Secrets gives dead petitioners a little extra power in that they can mill 2-4 cards whenever you cast them. This card is great as sort of board-wipe recovery option since the turn after a boardwipe we generally are going to cast four petitioners which will mill them for 8, and then tap them to mill for another 12.
  • Memory Erosion I'm still on the fence about. In lower-powered games players often only play 1-2 cards a turn so this nets 2-8 cards milled by each opponent per turn rotation. Because we can't really control how many spells are being cast by opponents this certainly less abusable. I will mention that this pairs well with the "Unsummon" boardwipes that we are running in that it forces our opponents to recast their creatures and trigger Erosion again.

Not much ramp in this deck since the average CMC is very low with 30+ two-drop creatures and spells.

  • Mind Stone makes the cut because it can be cashed in for card-draw to trigger our mill-on-draw engines lategame.
  • Solemn Simulacrum gives us a nice blocker, sets up our lategame big plays, and is another great target for our "sacrifice a creature" spells that are in here to trigger Faces of the Past at will.
  • Kefnet's Monument provides a cost reduction to all our Petitioners as well as a control effect to slow down aggressive decks looking to overrun our meager army of 1/3s.
  • Midnight Clock is a nice mana rock that eventually free-casts Time Reversal on us. In a 4-player pod, this will pop 3 turns after being cast, but it gets worse/slower in smaller pods. It's still a great budget option for drawing a new seven cards without shuffling in opponents' graveyards into their libraries which must other options do.

In addition to traditional counterspells, we're going to run a few tap-down and unsummon-all creature effects to slow the game down long enough for our petitioners to do their great work.

  • adds another effect onto the generic 1/3 petitioners, allowing the little filibusterers the ability to tap down bigger threats.
  • Curse of the Swine is great in this deck because Persistent Petitioners are 1/3s and can easily block any number of 2/2 boars.
  • Reality Shift similarly creats a 2/2 that is of no threat to us.
  • Abjure provides us with a counterspell and sac-outlet combined into one, which is ideal for utilizing extra petitioners as well as triggering Faces of the Past.
  • Negate and Counterspell are our traditional counterspells.
  • Tidespout Tyrant can turn petitioners into Aether Mages, allowing us to bounce threats of all types to owners hands, forcing them to recast them later and re-trigger Memory Erosion.
  • Opposition, Tidal Force, and Tolarian Kraken provides a controlling tap-down engine which is useful for triggering Verity Circle as a draw engine.
  • Washout and Whelming Wave provide us our affordable (both monetarily and mana-intensivity) board wipes. It's important to keep the CMC of these spells low because we want to get a head start over opponents in rebuilding our board, deploying follow-up petitioners or Bruvac.

We focus a lot on draw in this deck because it has a high density of "Dead draws" or cards that are bad in certain phases of the game. We want to be able to find the types of cards we need (removal, land drops, mill-on-draw enchantments) in the correct phases of the game, so its important that we aren't constantly drawing petitioners when they are no longer effective plays.

I haven't had a lot of actual gameplay with the list, but focused my goldfishing on smoothing out the gameplay of the deck. Like most all-in decks like this, it is very susceptible to disruption as it requires many moving pieces in place to operate at maximum potential. But that's pretty much how all Johnny decks operate... a single wrench can break down the whole beautiful machine!

I will say in the game that I've played, I was impressed with how quickly Bruvac was able to bring opponents to the brink of death and posited the tough choice of opponents using removal on Bruvac or waiting other more traditionally threatening effects. YMMV depending on how your playgroup views mill; either as a minor nuisance or an atrocious denial of their favorite cards.

Competitive

Optimized

Focused

>Casual<

Jank

N/A

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96% Casual

Competitive

Revision 2 See all

(5 years ago)

+1 Chemister's Insight main
+1 Counterspell main
+1 Medomai's Prophecy main
+1 Opt main
-1 Persistent Petitioners main
+1 Wash Out main