Aggressive Dimir land kill mill deck. No, don't stop reading, it works and is really mean/fun control.
Our wincon is exploiting
Mind Funeral
. Because it discards their library until four lands are milled we seek to aggressively remove the lands from their library so that this hits hard and frequently finishes them. As such we destroy non basic lands then use our
Extirpate
and
Surgical Extraction
s to lobotomise every copy. Also casting
Yahenni's Expertise
to boardwipe into a
Bitter Ordeal
allows us to seek and remove a heap of basic lands.
This deck is designed to exploit the regular modern use of shocks and fetches with a low land count. Many decks dramatically thin their own land count for you with fetches and run a very low number of actual mana producing lands. Our opponent regularly searches library (
Archive Trap
) and deposits non basic fetch lands into their graveyard (
Extirpate
/
Surgical Extraction
). Many modern mana bases lack robust colour support and disintegrate into handfuls of dead cards once you learn their deck and target a few critical shock lands. Other decks like Tron builds are very vulnerable to straightforward land kill and sit about with handfuls of unplayable high cost cards.
Shadow of Doubt
is an all star on the terror stakes. Early on the play: Turn one swamp, pass,
Archive Trap
when they fetch (hopefully add
Extirpate
), then turn two draw, play island, and pass. They crack their second fetch and you
Shadow of Doubt
to kill it, then lobotomise it with
Surgical Extraction
or
Extirpate
. Long pause. Then Turn 3 you
Smallpox
or cast
Rain of Tears
. They have no land and you're on two to three. Watch a shiver pass round the fnm tables.
Late game
Shadow of Doubt
still kills fetchlands and turns your
Field of Ruin
/Ghost Quarters into sink holes. It also stops Tron
Expedition Map
etc.
Make sure you learn the opposing decks. Use t1
Archive Trap
in response to fetches and consider extracting counterspells and hand destruction first. If they're looking like control, you're running faceless so their hand contains many dead kill cards and with them lacking a strong early clock you can proceed slowly and pull their deck apart. Identify their colours and having done the homework of learning the land builds of the common modern decks try to lock them out of much of a colour - simply exiling two fetches for a given core shockland really drops their chance of getting to it. Once you kill and lobotomise a few shocklands their mana base starts to struggle. You love it when they start fetching their basics as they are actively helping empty the deck of the harder lands to remove and once they're out of basics then your
Ghost Quarter
and
Field of Ruin
are now ersatz Sink hole .
Your graveyard lobotomy cards can also hit fetchlands/shocklands in their opening hand. Sometimes you
Archive Trap
after their t1 fetch and fortunately extract the second land that they had in hand and totally choke their opening. Seeing their hand thanks to the lobotomy also helps give you excellent information - as well as knowing their deck archetype and likely mana base you can look at what colours their current hand depends on and if they have any counterspells.
Very fun and quite evil. Would welcome thoughts especially sideboard suggestions and how to adapt to their likely sideboard ins.
Leyline of Sanctity
and
Rest in Peace
seem the main troubles. Maybe return permanent to hand spells?
Also should I consider main deck
Pithing Needle
to blank some fetches?
