Tasha's Hideous Laughter

Sorcery

Each opponent exiles cards from the top of their library until that player has exiled cards that have a combined total converted mana cost/mana value 20 or more.

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
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
Pre-release	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Standard	Legal
Standard Brawl	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (51)

wallisface on Jace, the Fox Cutie Mill

3 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.

UltimateRoxas40 on [Zellix] Kill with Mill (unlikely)

10 months ago

Fun looking deck! I've got a similar Mill deck too.

Something to note though. Tasha's Hideous Laughter exiles those cards, so if you're trying to capitalize on the Mill keyword to work with Zellix, Sanity Flayer, that won't work. Same with Mind Grind, it technically isn't Mill, so Zellix, Sanity Flayer won't trigger.

I'd suggest Court of Cunning. It's a good way to hit multiple opponents at the same time, potentially getting you three to four Horror tokens each upkeep. And it introduces Monarch, which can cause all kinds of shenanigans haha.

Apollo_Paladin on Sea of Attrition [Arena] [Beta]

11 months ago

I don't think Hullbreaker Horror is doing much for you here. He's way too high a mana cost to just have floating around in a 22 mana deck that has no mana ramp or some way to cheat him into play or reduce his cost.

I'd look at more mill-based stuff like Fraying Sanity, Tasha's Hideous Laughter (though, this doesn't work with Fraying Sanity - important note), Drowned Secrets, or things of that nature.

Hope this helps! Add me on Arena if you ever want to deck tech or run some test games (info on my profile).

Balaam__ on Power cut at the source

1 year ago

If I were to chime in and offer any advice, it would be to double down on refining this into 100% pure mill. The archetype is most viable when literally every non-land card contributes toward milling out your opponent in some way.

For instance, a card like Profane Memento might seem good on paper but ultimately doesn’t push you any closer to a win. Then there’s the simple fact that some cards are better than others—Curse of the Bloody Tome is very poor compared to something, like, Tasha's Hideous Laughter.

Take all of the above with a grain of salt, since you did tag this build as Casual. I don’t know how your playgroup functions, maybe the ‘quick decisive win’ isn’t what you’re after for maximum fun. In any case, there are many people on this site more than willing to offer suggestions for improvement (this was a great help to me when I built my own Modern mill deck).

wallisface on Modern Mill

1 year ago

Some thoughts that you can take or leave:

• Fraying Sanity is a card that can only really be justified as a 1-of at-best. Drawing a second copy will almost always lose you the game as you’ll never get time to play it, and mill games can easily be lost by one useless draw.

• Running 4x Jace, the Perfected Mind seems excessive. 2-3 feels like the most a deck can justify before its high mana cost impedes deck functionality.

• I get what you’re aiming for with Scheming Symmetry, but it’s far more gimmick-than-useful. The fact this card puts you down 1 card in-hand means its almost always hurting you more than helping you - it might help with one strong turn, but the card disadvantage will ruin your ability to close-out games. Imo just run the full playset of Field of Ruin and aim for more ”individually strong” cards.

• imo your mainboard feels lacking in quantity of both interaction (Fatal Push, Surgical Extraction) and mill-spells (Tasha's Hideous Laughter). I think Fraying Sanity, Scheming Symmetry, and Trapmaker's Snare are all taking up a lot of space in your deck, and taking away your ability to compete.

wallisface on Mill deck

1 year ago

Lord_Olga I should add that Tasha's Hideous Laughter is strong enough to be mandatory in top-tier competitive mill decks

wallisface on Mill deck

1 year ago

Lord_Olga

On Fraying Sanity, mill decks typically want to win a game by turn 5 at the latest. It’s often the case that by the time you can profit from the card, the opponent only has less than 20 cards left in their deck anyway (or would have if you didn’t take a turn off casting this enchantment). The card will usually only act as a single mill spell on its own, because the game is over before it can do any more damage. Best case scenario is it mills an extra 10-12 cards, worst case is its drawn at a time you need anything else and does nothing. The reason drawing a second Fraying Sanity is always bad is because its entirely redundant - the first one already gives you more than enough ability to close-out a game that should be almost-over anyway. Drawing the second copy instead of an actual mill effect is likely to give your opponent a free turn to win.

On Tasha's Hideous Laughter, to mill on average only 8 cards your opponents deck has to have an average cmc of 2.5 in their deck, including lands. That’s a very, very high number (that would mean, excluding lands, an average cmc of 4.15 in a deck with 24 lands). Even for decks this slow, the matchup is almost-always a free-win for mill regardless (because the opponent will be too slow to represent lethal). Most decks have an average cmc (including lands) between 0.8 and 1.4, which means you’re milling 14-25 cards.

Lord_Olga on Mill deck

1 year ago

wallisface I can go either way with Jace's Phantasm, in more casual settings I've had it work just fine, as 5/5 cards can really make people pause if they dont have enough removal on hand, and since its not vital to the strategy you can throw it around pretty risk free. Really depends on what kind of setting this will be played in.

The Fraying Sanity I use quite a lot, and I personally love the card. It effectively re-casts every mill spell and ability you've played that turn. Playing 2 of them means that you double the last Fraying Sanity's ability too, so its not a waste at all. Say you played a Glimpse the Unthinkable, then end your turn. The two Fraying Sanity go on the stack. The first one resolves and the opponent mills 10 more cards, which ups the total amount of cards milled this turn to 20. The second resolves and the opponent mills 20 more. That's a 40 card mill with just Glimpse the Unthinkable assuming you cast these 2 Enchantments at some point before.

Tasha's Hideous Laughter, applied against general decks you'll play against with a prerry average cmc distribution, will snag maybe a few 3cmc, a few 2cmc, a few 1cmc, which gets you maybe like 8 - 10 mill on a good cast, and a couple lands too. And its also not great they go into exile cause that doesnt allow graveyard play, which is a big part of mill. There are some specific decks it could work really well against like you memtioned, and for that I would probably sideboard it.