Extirpate

Instant

Split second (As long as this spell is on the stack, players can't cast spells or activated abilities that aren't mana abilities.)

Choose target card in a graveyard other than a basic land card. Search its owner's graveyard, hand, and library for all cards with the same name as that card and exile them. Then that player shuffles their library.

Discussion (46)

Neotrup on How does the stack and …

1 month ago

Sacrificing a creature is the cost of activating the ability, as such it's already in the graveyard before opponents have a chance to respond and won't be able to target it as a creature. If they do target it with something like Extirpate (as it is in the graveyard now) that won't stop you from scrying. If they counter the ability, it won't return the creature to the battlefield as it only counters the ability, not the cost.

Braska on Competitive Dimir Mill

2 months ago

Hot takes from a randomer who plays a lot of mill: Meta is pretty fast at the moment with decks like DS, UR aggro and heliod combo. Control is not doing well to keep those decks in check, so Mill has to adapt to become a little more aggressive with cheap spells to deal with them. Luckily, with the printing of the new crab and madenning cacaphony, this has become the natural progression.

So personally, I would consider the following. These are my own opinions based off of playing and seeing which decks are doing well.

• Shelldock Isle is awesome but too slow considering the number of 1 and 2 drops. Most people have stopped playing them. I run one max.
• Darkslick shores is very good, would run at least 2 (you can cut a couple islands or a swamp)
• Ensnaring bridge is sadly too slow. If you cut it you can run Lurrus in the sideboard which is really good when you run out of steam
• Inqui is not that good right now. By that I mean I'd rather be running pushes or drown. When the format becomes slower, I would consider running it, but not now.
• 2x push and 2x drown is not enough. I'd run a combination of at least 6. Which ones depend on your local meta. Generally it's more pushes, but drown has more versatility if you're struggling against combo decks.
• With this mana curve shift, you can go down to 20 - 22 lands.
• Also depending on your local meta, you can move a surgical to the sideboard.
• Sideboard looks quite old - I'm guessing you took it off Sqlut's guide :D a lot has changed since. Generally you need faster answers, like Soul-Guide Lantern , Mystical Dispute , Aether Gust , Bontu's Last Reckoning , Extirpate and of course Lurrus of the Dream-Den !
• Mission briefing is awesome and I love it. A lot of people would argue it's too slow, but I like it.

IMO the toughest part about a mill deck nowadays if finding the right balance of cards. We no longer are looking for cards to supplement our strategy, but finding which cards to cut! As you can tell by my points above, they're all very minor (except maybe the lurrus point). All these cards are powerful and awesome and you have a good deck here. It's just about adapting to the meta. From your deck here, it's going to be about 95% how you play, and 5% the minor adjustments.

Best of luck pal!

wallisface on Modern Mill Deck Help

2 months ago

antacidbrn your option 1 of playing it as a control deck is certainly the way to go. It has indeed been the case that Mill got a LOT stronger since the printing of Ruin Crab , so don't give up hope on the archetype just yet! As far as the threats you mentioned, i'll give my thoughts:

• Infect should be pretty straightforward. The goal is to have a hand with Fatal Push and Surgical Extraction . Kill the first infect boi they put into play and extract away any infect creature that hits the graveyard. They'll quickly run out of ways to hit you with infect damage, and you should be able to mill them out before they can kill you with Noble Hierarch . Ensnaring Bridge is pretty good for lasting into the late game. When sideboarding, you want to be going full killspell/hand disruption, and removing most of your mill spells - with the assumption that you win when once they can't play anything meaningful anymore.

• Tribal decks such as Goblins, Elves and Spirits is a pretty wide basket. Between Ensnaring Bridge and Crypt Incursion these should largely be free-wins. Spirits and Humans will give you the most grief, and Humans in particular is considered a bad matchup in general - but the other tribal decks should be easy picking provided you keep the right hands and sideboard in all the beforementioned cards. I'll put Collected Company decks in this same bucket, as in general any creature based deck has a hard time getting through a resolved Crypt Incursion . Generally in these matchups we sideboard out our Surgical Extraction just because there's not a single-threat we can cut them off that shuts down the gameplan.

• Dredge decks are possibly the easiest matchup we have. Mill often runs both Surgical Extraction and Crypt Incursion mainboard, as well as having 6ish graveyard hate cards sideboard in more Crypt Incursion , as well as Extirpate , Ravenous Trap , and sometimes Ashiok, Dream Render . The goal here is to not mill them, but wait till they mill themselves and then get rid of any value they may have put in their yards. Within a few turns of this, they'll have nothing left to threaten you with, and you can finish them off at your leisure.

• In general, anything with a "grave resource" is easy pickings, because we have mainboard Surgical Extraction , and often a playset of it (or at least 3). We also have very strong matchups against any deck where we can ruin them by extracting a single card for this same reason - so matchups against Tron, Storm, and various Combo are generally considered almost free-wins.

Our bad matchups include Humans (but its certainly not an auto-lose, and the matchup still feels close), as well as Burn (its a race we often lose, but they also often sideboard wrong so there's hope), but otherwise I'd say we have good-to-great matchups versus most other decks I can think of right now.

If you're wanting me to have a look at your list and help you out versus matchups where you're struggling, let me know (PM me a list). It sounds like your control build was close-to-the-money, but perhaps lacked a bit of interaction and sideboard tech to get you competing well in your lcoal meta.

Balaam__ on 8rack

3 months ago

Looks good overall. Maybe look into Fatal Push or Tragic Slip as creature removal over Hero's Downfall . They can both be triggered pretty easily by way of Rotting Rats or if you added some fetchlands to pull swamps. Also, Surgical Extraction might be a better overall pick than Extirpate , but your mileage may vary.

legendofa on Seasons' Approach: How the seasons go by...

4 months ago

Extirpate is better in a mill or discard deck, where you can forcibly fill your opponent's graveyard.

Anguished Unmaking is good general-use removal, but not required. I find 1-2 aren't as punishing with the lifeloss, but that again is a personal choice. Use whatever removal you're happy with and fits with the rest of the deck.

seshiro_of_the_orochi on Seasons' Approach: How the seasons go by...

4 months ago

legendofa: I'll do that, thanks a lot. I have another question I'd like your opinion on:

I pulled a copy of Extirpate from TSR. As I have never played it before, I'm not sure how much of a drawback the restriction of having to choose a card from a graveyard is. Would you play it instead of Lost Legacy ?

One final thing regarding your suggestions: I actually have some copies of Anguished Unmaking , I always forget it's such an expensive card. I've removed it after playing it for quiteva while. The lifeloss can actually be quite taxing.

TheVectornaut on my attemp at a deck..

4 months ago

It can often be bad manners to put silver bullet cards in the mainboard. Usually, you'd put such cards in the side and swap them in for games 2 and 3. I know a lot of casual playgroups don't play best 2 out of 3 though, so if this player is using that deck a lot and consistently winning off of a single card, they can't really be surprised if you include some way to answer it in the 60. That said, Duress and Languish effects are the kinds of answers that are extremely common in black anyway. I personally wouldn't bat an eye at seeing them here. Underworld Dreams and Fate Unraveler , definitely not so much.

What is the card in question, by the way? That will obviously affect what's an appropriate response. When I played modern elves, it was pretty rare to bother with drawing the deck when you could just dump it with Collected Company and Genesis Wave . But, from playing other green decks over the years, cards like Lifecrafter's Bestiary , The Great Henge , Vanquisher's Banner , Beast Whisperer , Soul of the Harvest , Primordial Sage , Zendikar Resurgent , Glimpse of Nature , and Regal Force are what come to mind. For the creatures, they would be easy enough to deal with given enough Murder s. For the artifacts, things are rough. Black really hates destroying artifacts, so the very weak Phyrexian Tribute was the best option I could find. However, there is always the nuclear option of running Extirpate or Surgical Extraction with discard to essentially lock a single card out of the game. These are very much sideboard cards though, so running them main has a good chance of drawing a negative reaction.

TheVectornaut on Budget vampires black splash white

4 months ago

Like Surgical Extraction , Extirpate is a card that usually fares better in the sideboard. Without the assistance of Duress effects, you'll have to wait until you successfully destroy the offending card or hope that your opponent is running a graveyard strategy, and in matchups where your opponent has more of a singleton toolbox build, it may never do anything at all. I'd rather have more hard removal in the main to kill off any additional copies of enemy threats that do get played. For vampires, I always love the Zendikar one-two punch of Feast of Blood and Urge to Feed . Feast is the better card in most cases, especially if you're gonna play around Vito or any other Sanguine Bond effects. Urge is better in situations where you have plenty of small vampires that can capitalize on higher power through lifelink, evasion, and the like.