Oh come on, no one thought of this yet?



Spell Recursion Spam! .... and also stealing stuff, owning them and some infinite Warp... but that's obviously not important....

So, I'm not sure if there are any Jeskai Self-Mill builds floating around at the moment. The last time read this thread it had only 10 pages. Here is one I've built, anyway and it is so incredibly fun to play. You mill yourself tons and block where you can. It's great because to your opponent you look like you're losing... until you win.

The win condition is Laboratory Maniac. And the most common way to win with Laboratory Maniac is to Seance a copy of him onto the battlefield at the start of your turn with no cards in your deck. For those who aren't familiar with some of the intricacies of the beginning phase of a turn, it has three steps:
The Untap Step: In which you can do nothing except untap your permanents.
The Upkeep: This is when you can cast spells and when "during your upkeep" effects happen.
The Draw Step: You draw a card.
So during your upkeep you choose a Laboratory Maniac in your graveyard to create a copy of with Seance, then you attempt to draw a card and instead win the game. In DotP it happens so fast your opponent, if they don't quite understand how it works, will be left scratching their heads. In fact, it happens so fast you don't even see the token appear on the battlefield before you see the "You Win" screen.

A few things of note for anyone wanting to try this deck: Warden of the Eye is there to regurgitate Seance or, if necessary, a sweeper. The sweepers are dangerous; the white one will destroy Seance and the red one will exile Laboratory Maniac as well as other utility creatures, so be sure you need to use them before you use them. Laboratory Maniac shouldn't enter the battlefield until right until you need to win. This deck can lose to a well timed Suffer the Past and aggro-rush was giving me a bit of trouble during testing (hence why I slowly but surely ended up installing all of the sweepers).

If anyone has a go with this thing, let me know what you think.

It looks okay but you only have six EtB creatures to go with your two Seance. Then there's the fact that your self-mill cards don't impact the board at all and just put you down a card (Enquiry/Scour/Chill is a whopping 11 slots here). I'd also be mildly worried about feeding opposing graveyard strategies with Burning Enquiry and Chill of Foreboding. Unearth creatures, Bloodghasts, Think Twice, and Spawnings are all things and that's just off the top of my head.

How has it performed in action?

so I tried it out and the first thing I noticed was burning inquary sucks esspecially when you have a seance or a warden or a sweeper in hand so yeah that wasn't fun

This is an incredibly effective deck in the right matchup; it mills itself much more quickly than others. Plus I lived the dream and got several wins from Burning Inquiry; finally a use for that card has emerged. Thanks for the build, it's fun. Seance plus Laboratory Maniac seems like a semi-reliable wincon.

I think the advantage is four board wipes plus three ways to recur them. Seance does not have as much value as in witch maw.

On the bright side, I play against soo many witch maw self mill decks that I do not want to play it myself.

I guess burning inquiry = 3 cards self-milled but I don't like it. I think I would like to see either more archaeomancers, more bounce, or more Resolute Archangel.

I tested the deck with -4 burning inquiry -1 chill of foreboding +2 Archaeomancer +1 resolute archangel +1 void snare +1 peel from reality.

Basically the crabs are the only self-mill you need. If you can keep them on the board you can win the game rapidly. I rarely cast chill of foreboding either from my hand or flashback - I was either getting enough mill from my crabs that I didn't need more, or I was worried enough about losing that my focus was on getting/casting board wipes. On the other hand, tome scour is very cheap. If you find yourself milling your opponent a lot and they play a self mill deck, you can simply target them with tome scour.

I think I cast Thassa's Bounty like once in several games. It should be good in this kind of deck but it is just too expensive and slow.

I like the idea of adding even more bounce to the deck. The board wipes are awesome against aggro decks that go into topdeck mode - you just wipe them up, and a few walls cast from your hand will slow them down enough. But even planar cleansing is ineffective when your opponent has a handful of fatties and you have to use a board wipe on every single one. The plus side of bounce is that it can be used to save your crabs / seance / ArchaeoWardens, and in the case of ArchaeoWardens you get to reuse their EtB.

I think my second round of changes would be:
-3 Guard Gomozoa
-2 Thassa's Bounty

+1 void snare (2 total, used to save Seance pre-wipe)
+2 peel from reality (3 total)
+2 vapor snag

I think the combination of bounce, board wipes and a single resolute archangel will see this deck through much better than MOAR SELF MILL.

It has performed pretty well for me and was created more for the fun of playing it. I'm glad people like it and some of these changes sound great. If you're going to run I'd have a look at making some of these changes (in particular, I think Resolute Archangel will give this deck the extra longevity it needs), I mean, isn't the whole point of posting decks to the forum to get feedback on how to make it better?

This is how I run Seance: The way I run it it doesn't really care too much about ETB effects, instead I use it to get extra blockers on my opponent's turn (and extra crabs on mine). Novice players don't seem to realise that you don't have to exile and copy a creature every turn. Often I won't even cast Seance until the turn before it wins me the game if my mill works fast enough.

Regarding Burning Inquiry: I think it's a really fun card and usually don't care if I discard something useful from my hand. It also has the added bonus of frustrating the carp out of your opponents.

DJ: if you want to include burning inquiry because it is fun, then more power to you. However, in terms of being an objectively useful card for this deck I have a few problems:
1) The effect is not symmetrical. You just spent a card in order to draw 3 then discard 3. You are at -1 cards, if you started with 4 cards in hand before casting this you will be at 3. Your opponent's hand size stays the same.
2) Random draw and discard will, on average, not hurt or help either player. Maybe you made your opponent discard a high CMC bomb he was waiting to cast. On the other hand, maybe your opponent was mana screwed and you just got him the lands he needs. I will say it is very annoying to have someone resolve this effect on me if I have a good hand, but it can also help.
3) You can't run this deck completely from the graveyard. We don't have cards like bloodghast, vengevine, and masked admirers that have a direct effect while in the graveyard - think twice is the only exception. We need either seance or warden in hand in order to fetch seance.

Okay, so I've taken your comments into consideration and amended the deck somewhat. It now has more resiliency, but due to less mill it is a little slower. Here are the changes:
-1 Mountain
-2 Thassa's Bounty
-4 Burning Inquiry
+1 Boros Guildgate
+2 Resolute Archangel
+2 Void Snare
+2 Peel from Reality

wait why void snare? vapor snag is strictly better

It hits all nonland permanents.

oh I see now...

Which is very important because you have this non-land permanent called Seance that you want to keep when you use planar cleansing...

I made this deck since a lot of Jeskai Aggro builds I find are focused on tokens. I wanted to capture the "feel" of prowess in someway, whilst also keeping the element of my Jeskai Standard deck IRL. To some it may feel like Hero of Iroas or Satyr Hoplite suffer from a bit of wasted potential, but they still perform well as (on average) 4/4s for most games who occasional have first strike to deal with threats/blockers, or dodging with Artful Dodge and occasionally Gods Willing.

Can't find Mega's old decklist in the forum to quote, but this is where I ended up with the deck (Only 3-4 off the original list). Super fun control/permission deck. I was going to swap out an edict, but with all of the seance silliness they have been great.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

I would run inferno titan over hellkite

In every other deck.. yes. In a counterlash deck.. no. Hellkite has HUGE upside if you can lash it out.. you get 12 evasive power, which can snowball into 24 power the next turn. It's basically GG if not answered, and the opponent only has one turn to stop it.. so if the answer isn't already in their hand.. GG.

you have 2 counterlashes, I would rather run minions that are actually effective for their cost instead of holding a 8 drop in my hand hoping to draw a card that makes up 3.33% of my deck

This deck is never meant to tap out for a threat on your turn. Even the BSA and Stormbreath should be held in most circumstances until you can protect them and hold some mana to answer another threat. It is a slow strategy, but it works great.

Edit: If I had to trade the hellkite out inferno titan would be my first choice for replacement though. Hmm...maybe Charmbreaker would benefit the deck more.