Mind Grind

Sorcery

Each opponent reveals cards from the top of his or her library until he or she reveals X land cards, then puts all cards revealed in this way into his or her graveyard. X can't be 0.

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Pioneer	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (48)

wallisface on U/B Mill

5 months ago

Mill decks only ever want to be running Hedron Crab and Ruin Crab as creatures. Any other options are just not helpful or conductive towards winning. Specifically:

• both Consuming Aberration and Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker cost such a high amount of mana that the game should already be over (mill decks should be aiming to win by turn 4). and both barely does any amount of actual milling for their egregious costs.

• Duskmantle Guildmage is only useful as a combo card with Mindcrank. On its own it's basically useless. If you are doing the Mindcrank combo then there's no real reason to run any other mill cards.

• Fog Bank does nothing and gives your opponent more time to overwhelm you or assemble their combo.

Other cards that i'd suggest are bad choices:

• Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver does very little for its cost. milling 3 cards for 3 mana is a very slow rate.

• Fraying Sanity is a massive trap card that a lot of casual mill players fall into. In almost all cases it doesn't speed up the clock for you beating your opponent.

• All of Mind Grind, Increasing Confusion, Mind Funeral, and Pilfered Plans just do faar too little for their mana cost. Memory Sluice is also a really bad return unless you can really reliably trigger it's Conspire ability.

I would suggest looking at cards like Fractured Sanity, Maddening Cacophony, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter *list*. Archive Trap is also a mill-must-have, but may be less-useful if your playgroup isn't using fetchlands. Jace, the Perfected Mind is also serviceable as a planeswalker.

Your deck also really needs some interaction - mill decks are typically too slow to out-race aggro and combo, so you need options to make sure you slow those decks down enough to win the race. Options normally include Drown in the Loch, Fatal Push, and Surgical Extraction

Hordebane on Big Booties Tapping to Mill for a Million

8 months ago

KongMing, I actually played around a bit with Mind Grind and Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker in the list.
I honestly just found that they weren't the best value of mana to mill, or moreso in the case of Mirko that he didn't fit as well with the defender wall feeling I liked going for with the deck.
They were both late cuts that almost stayed in, so they've still stuck around in the Maybeboard for the deck.
Undercity Informer, on the other hand, is one that I hadn't actually considered yet.
Like you said, it's an interesting retaliation for a board wipe, assuming I have plenty of open mana.

dr.kronski, I think Captain N'ghathrod definitely has some potential to pull a lot of good creatures out of my opponents' graveyards.
The one downside I see is that he only triggers on MY end step.
The reason this is a problem is because a big strength of this deck and commander is that I'm able to leave all of my high-toughness blockers up to block for me and just tap them down to mill at the end step before my turn.
So as a result, the majority of the mill that the deck dishes out isn't actually during my own turn.

KongMing on Big Booties Tapping to Mill for a Million

8 months ago

A lot of decks like to run low land counts and thin themselves to boot. Although they don't trigger keyword Mill effects, the cards Mind Grind and Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker can become real threats to those builds.

Also, Undercity Informer can be good for grinding someone out in response to a boardwipe, or when you have enough expendable bodies to just take them out.

wallisface on Jace, the Fox Cutie Mill

9 months ago

Some thoughts:

• the only creatures ever worth running in a mill deck are Hedron Crab and Ruin Crab. The current selection of creatures you’re running are all extremely slow, durdly, and low-impact - i’d suggest ditching them.

• a bunch of your mill spells are extremely weak and/or resource inefficient. Specifically Mind Grind, Tome Scour and Traumatize shouldn’t really be played. I’d suggest more powerful options such as Fractured Sanity, Tasha's Hideous Laughter, and Archive Trap.

• Similarly, a lot of your other cards are just really suboptimal. I’ll list these and potential replacements below.

• Brainsurge is just worse than Visions of Beyond or Preordain. 3 mana for this kind of effect is just too slow/weak.

• Psychic Strike is just a worse Counterspell or Drown in the Loch. Milling a lowly 2 cards will never be worth spending an extra mana.

• Sleep is just a worse Ensnaring Bridge or Crypt Incursion. Its effect being only one turn makes it too limiting to be useful.

• I know you built the deck around Jace, the Mind Sculptor, but he doesn’t do anything useful for mill. You’d be much-better off running Jace, the Perfected Mind

• Hurkyl's Recall is a sideboard card at-best.

• Part the Waterveil is just too mana expensive to ever actually get cast. There’s zero reason to run this.

• I have no idea why you have Talent of the Telepath, in the deck.

• Mill is supposed to be fast and efficient, so there is no room for Chromatic Lantern, or Manalith in the deck. You need to lower your mana curve drastically, instead of trying to accomodate all these high-mana cards.

If you’re looking for an example competitive mill deck, this one here is a good baseline to build from.

AThiccNacho on Eldritch Captain of the Deep [Lovecraftian Primer]

1 year ago

(I had something about mind grind, but i missed the section that explicity talks about it! DOH!)

Amazing deck; I'm bookmarking this one! Also, really awesome job with the description!

NV_1980 on The Horror ... THE HORROR! *PRIMER*

1 year ago

You're right of course; shouldn't have called Mind Grind a mill-card; I stand corrected :):) It will definitely still stay in the deck though, even if it doesn't synergize with the cards you've mentioned. Aside from it being very powerful on its own, it still fits in a horror-deck in terms of flavor (as horrors would drive opponents insane, like the person on Grind's illustration).

UltimateRoxas40 on The Horror ... THE HORROR! *PRIMER*

1 year ago

Yeah, Roaming Throne is pretty pricey, since it can be slotted into pretty much any deck that Typal/Tribal or has a commander with great activated abilities, so everyone needs a copy (And this deck has both groups haha).

And that's cool to hear about the Medallions! It's good to know that they've been useful. I might give them another try later on.

If you do end up adding both Roaming Throne and the Everflowing Chalice combo, you can double the triggers when you cast a spell and bounce all your opponents nonland permanents to their hand, thus soft locking them out of the game! It's brutal, but we are here to Mill our opponents, we aren't trying to be gentle haha.

And I hate to say it, but Mind Grind isn't actually Mill. Mill just puts the card in the graveyard. The act of revealing cards until you hit X lands is somehow different enough for WotC, so it wont trigger the Captain or Zellix, Sanity Flayer, who specifically care about the Mill Keyword. I ran Mind Grind in my Mill deck when it was helmed by Lazav, Dimir Mastermind, because he doesn't care how the card enters the graveyard to copy. Once I switched over to the Captain, I was pretty sad that I could keep Mind Grind in, because it was so powerful and flavorful.

NV_1980 on The Horror ... THE HORROR! *PRIMER*

1 year ago

Thank you for the great feedback UltimateRoxas40! I'll make sure to check out your Cap'n deck as well :)

Roaming Throne sounds like a fun addition; bit expensive though but I'll see if I can obtain one. It would fit nice in some of my other tribe decks too, so the investment is probably worth it.

I get what you're saying about Everflowing Chalice. Maybe it would work to replace the medallions with other rocks (this being one of them), though I would have to stress that thus far the medallions have been very useful to me in games. What I like about them is that you don't have to tap them in order to use them. It wouldn't hurt though to switch them out with other rocks during my next game, just to see if I would notice any differences. I wouldn't add Chalice for the Hullbreaker combo though, as this deck doesn't have that much use for infinite colorless mana (Brainstealer Dragon would benefit a bit of course).

Drown in Dreams is nice, but in a deck that's not really about X-spells (like this one) it wouldn't fit so well. The exception to this being Mind Grind as it mills way more than the X you put into it.