Mindcrank

Artifact

Whenever an opponent loses life, that player mills that many cards. (Damage dealt by sources without infect causes loss of life. To mill a card, put the top card of your library into your graveyard.)

Combos

• Duskmantle Guildmage + Mindcrank
• Bloodchief Ascension + Mindcrank

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Alchemy	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
Freeform	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
PreDH	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (48)

SaberTech on mimeo

2 months ago

I saw your post asking for help with cuts to the deck. Mimeoplasm decks are fun and there's all sorts of interactions to play around with so I get how it's tough to trim the list down.

I don't know what exactly you personally consider fun to play and what cards you are more inclined to keep in, so I think that it might be easier to just highlight what looks to be the core of the deck and try to build outwards from there.

Win-Cons:

• Necrotic Ooze + Phyrexian Devourer: I'm not sure when the change happened, but on Oracle the errata's text for the Devourer's activated exile ability now reads "Remove the top card of your library from the game: Put X +1/+1 counters on Phyrexian Devourer, where X is the removed card's converted mana cost. If Phyrexian Devourer's power is 7 or greater, sacrifice it." Before, you never had to worry about the sacrifice part because it was a triggered ability so the Ooze didn't copy it. Now that the self-sacrifice effect is built into the activated ability it means that the Ooze will kill itself if it activates the ability and ends up going to 7+ power. I don't think this combo is feasible anymore and that you can cut it.

• Blightsteel Colossus: You don't have a way to reanimate or copy this at instant speed in response to its shuffle trigger when it is put in your graveyard, so your only way for it to stick on the board is if you hard-cast it. I don't think that it's worth the effort. And I think that most games will end before you risk decking yourself and needing the Colossus to keep shuffling itself into your library. I'd cut it from the deck.

• Blighted Agent/Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon + big creatures under Mimeoplasm: This is what I would consider your main means of knocking players out. Death's Shadow, Impervious Greatwurm, Lord of Extinction, Titanoth Rex, and Yargle and Multani are your main targets to remove for counters on Mimeoplasm, so these are 7 cards that should definitely be staying.

• Jin-Gitaxias, Core AugurGC: Reanimating this early in the game and getting it to stick is a backup win condition. Buried Alive, Entomb, Fauna Shaman, and Frantic Search are your best ways to try to get Jin into the graveyard. Animate Dead, Necromancy, Reanimate are your best ways to reanimate Jin early. So that's 8 cards you should definitely keep. Victimize helps too but it is a little unreliable early due to needing 2 targets in your graveyard. Still worth running in my opinion.

So that's 16 card + your commander that you know that you want to run to help you win. From there you can mark out the slots for land, ramp, draw, and interaction. What slots are left goes to what best supports you reaching your win conditions. You'll need to really consider which cards help you reach your win conditions and which are there more for fun.

Looking at your list, some things that I can note are:

• You shouldn't count thinks like Conduit of Worlds as ramp since they don't help you get ahead in mana. They just help make your land drop each turn. Matzalantli, the Great Door  ^Flip and Aftermath Analyst also don't help ramp you in the early game. So on the whole your deck is actually suffering from a pretty notable lack of cheap ramp.

• Cards that mill opponents but not you like Mindcrank, Psychic Corrosion, and Ruin Crab do technically help you by getting cards into your opponent's graveyards that you can reanimate or exile with Mimeoplasm. However, they are less useful to you overall than cards that can also mill you because you know that milling yourself helps you reach your deck's build-in win conditions while milling opponents is a gamble.

• Memory Plunder can be fun but you might be better off running a card you are pretty certain that you can use than gamble on useful opponents' cards ending up in the graveyard in a timely manner.

• Archon of Cruelty isn't as impactful in multiplayer games as it is in 1v1. It's still an ok reanimation target if you don't currently have anything better.

Goldberserkerdragon on a milli

9 months ago

Seems really awesome. Seeing some good things! Seeing some odd choices, but I know the struggle of having what you have to work with. Budget, etc are factors. Anyway, been playing Syr Konrad since his release in 2019, have had many different builds and i cant stress enough: ramp. The deck can do things on its own but for the most part Konrad needs to be out asap. I would recommend cutting a few lands to thin it out and directly add ramp pieces. Play test and see where you need to go either less or more or for personal preference, but mana is Konrad's best friend. Even if you cant do anything but Konrad is out, you can dump all you got into his secondary.

Mesmeric Orb, Mindcrank, and Tortured Existence are golden here. Glad to see them! Hard to really play Konrad without them. Fun fact, Basalt Monolith combos with Mesmeric Orb. You just pay into itself to untap, tap it again, pay, untap... with the orb you got as much mill as you want.

Butcher's Cleaver, Collective Brutality, and Cruel Grimnarch seem a touch odd here, but again maybe it's the best you can do! And nothing wrong with that. Konrad really just cares about moving those bodies around however you can so abilities are secondary.

The last thing I would add is to focus more on mill that mills multiple or everyone instead of just yourself. I can't tell you how many times i've milled myself for a cool 3, hoping for mad creatures, and milled my vampiric tutor and mind crank itself and maybe that land I was really needing next draw... ha.

Anyway, hope this helps

• Cheers!

wallisface on U/B Mill

11 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

dnthymamai on Everybody Hates Winter

1 year ago

Nice deck with a straightforward goal!
May I add, in case someone may not have noticed, if you want your Commander's second ability to work, you could put some more fetchlands in the deck. (with Mindcrank here some may think Winter counts card types from all graveyards) There are some cheap ones, the casual ones: the Panorama Cycle from Shards of Alara that also give you 1 colorless mana and the upgraded Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanses: Escape Tunnel, Riveteers Overlook, Maestros Theater, Cabaretti Courtyard. Also, Fabled Passage got reprinted in Bloomburrow.

But it seems you already know this, because even with adding some more fetchlands, you cannot rely on having Delirium with only 3 sorceries , 2 instants and 2 enchantments that can reliably go to your graveyard.

But this is a nice damage from afar theme! Your opponents will be dealt A LOT of damage by drawing those extra cards!

sdtech58 on sdtech58

1 year ago

Demonic Tutor Grim Tutor Vampiric Tutor Mystical Tutor Entomb

Those would be the tutors I recommend.

If you want to stick with the mill theme, i'd recommend going to edhrec.com and putting in Gisa & Geralf as your CMDR and then you can choose the style of deck (Mill, Zombie, etc.) They will give you many more recommendations for the best cards to add. A few that I run with a different mill themed deck are:

Mesmeric Orb Mindcrank Maddening Cacophony

I personally think The Scarab God is a better Commander for a Mill themed deck because his activated ability can pull a creature from anyone's graveyard. So you can mill the crap out of yourself (and others) then pull their best creatures out of their graveyards

legendofa on Seeking Advice for Lazav., Dimrir …

1 year ago

Welcome to the club, Danutercisd!

For being a first deck, I'm impressed to see the Mana Crypt, Cyclonic Rift, Fierce Guardianship, The Meathook Massacre, Underground Sea... I'm going to guess that budget isn't a major constraint here.

One of my pet cards for this sort of thing is Geth, Lord of the Vault. It offers milling, reanimation theft for creatures and artifacts, and a pretty big evasive body.

If you like instant-win combos, both Bloodchief Ascension and Duskmantle Guildmage set up full-deck milling and lots of damage with the Mindcrank in the deck.

Another suggestion is to diversify your copy/theft effects. There's a lot of ways to copy opponents' creatures, but you can take them directly with Control Magic, Beguiler of Wills, and similar effects, steal and copy spells with Talent of the Telepath or Twincast, or yank something from their deck with Praetor's Grasp. You opponents are probably going to be doing things beside throwing creatures around, and being able to react to different threats and take advantage of different opportunities is always good.

DemonDragonJ on Savage Destruction

1 year ago

I have replaced Mindcrank with Thought Vessel, because this deck does not care about plundering my opponents' graveyards, and it is always nice to have both an additional source of mana and a way to increase my hand size. Unfortunately, I no longer have an infinite combo with Bloodchief Ascension, but that combo did not fit with the theme of this deck, either, so I have replaced that enchantment with Dockside Chef, which is a quite awesome card, in my mind.

legendofa on Anowon ***Need feedback please!***

1 year ago

Welcome to the club, DadCommander!

I'm neither a mill expert nor a Commander expert, but let's see what kind of advice I can offer. I think Traumatize is the most useful sideboard card here. It's a huge chunk of milling, and commbined with Bruvac the Grandiloquent it can take a player out of the game on the spot. For a suggestion that's not in the sideboard, either Duskmantle Guildmage or Bloodchief Ascension can mill all opponents out and win the game with Mindcrank.

But right now, you're three cards over the maximum. The deck also has a pretty heavy mana curve, so I recommend putting in a few more lands. My first thoughts for cuts are Scourge of Fleets (reliant on islands, lots of cards with similar effects, high mana cost), Spinal Embrace (good combat trick, but clashes with all the bounce and destroy effects, high mana cost), Latchkey Faerie (doesn't do enough for its cost, in my opinion), In Garruk's Wake (very high mana cost, and has several redundancies), and Marsh Flitter (four mana for a 1/1 flier is very expensive, you can pump it four times max, and the two Goblins in the deck are more useful for their abilities than as sacrifice fodder). That's five cut cards, bringing you down to 98. Add two lands, one of them can be the sideboard Tainted Isle, and this will be smoother and more reliable.

There are a few different themes here. There's mill, Rogues, bounce, and reanimator theft. Most of your higher-cost cards look like they're there to take opponents' graveyard cards, which is good support for mill, but you can probably trim down the number you have here. Geth, Lord of the Vault will also help combine the mill and reanimator--I would replace Fated Return with Geth.