I could see Disciple of the Ring being solid here to continually tap down opposing creatures. I'm not sure what to cut since turbofog mill isn't my thing, but Displacement Wave is my first thought alongside Countermand. Nissa also looks attractive because her creature side replaces itself and her +1 would be great here. I'd rather have another win condition than counterspell protection but I know you probably don't want to win that way.

Disciple is an awesome card and I'd include it if it wasn't the only creature beside Jace. I still like jace because he's cheap and early removal costs them a turn, but I wouldn't wanna spend 5 when they still have every removal spell in their deck. Even though she can counter it, the protection makes her even more expensive and you need some mana open to nullify their attack.

Nissa is a different story, because she flips right away. She's also pretty good at providing mana or spells and this deck needs a lot of both. Maybe I try her in Countermand's spot.

After testing I'd suggest replacing Jace with Nissa. She's easier to flip and fetches useful stuff.

I'm liking this deck. Would you swap both Countermind? You could drop in Nissa and Disciple while keeping the curve down.

I'm down with that. Ever thought Talent of the Telepath over Countermind? I haven't faced very much Enchantment hate on Live.

Right now, I took out Countermind for Nissa and the Disciple. Jace is good for dumbing down creatures and flashback, so there is still awesome value in him. Just only play him to flip.

I don't like Talent of the Telepath. With Tutelage Inspiration mills at least 4, sometimes 8+ and it provides guaranteed 2 cards you put in your deck because they're useful. Talent MAY cast up to 2 spells, but they're random spells and probably not helping much. I'd never cast this and hope that it'll solve my problems.

Makes sense. The Jace, Nissa, and Disciple version I'm running seems pretty solid.

Talent is a sideboard card for a tournament.

When the perfectly reliable average mill build is found, you gonna take your control build; and slot it in game 2 and own them.

I say this since I met a guy doing a monoblue mill when I was doing sultai. I came out racing with T2 vial T3tutelage T4vial + visionary. Was ahead whole game but his countermands and maindeck talents got him right back into it. I was much

Well, getting out a Tutelage first doesn't guarantee you'll mill faster, you need the right cards to support it. I even had somebody get 2 Tutelages out before I played my first, he had a 20 cards lead and still lost the race. I bet he was pissed

Maindecking Tutelage, Telepath and Countermand might put this guy ahead in a mill mirror, but I bet he loses to pretty much everything else. It's a sideboard card at best.

Really loving this deck. It is monstrous in 2HG.

I like gegs build. the one i posted at the start of the meta works better vs balls to the wall agro, but i prefer his longer take on things as the people unlock cards and the amount of midrange/control grows.

my cuts to his offering ?

-2 countermand -1 wave.
+2 disperse +1 Nissa

lowers curve a bit, you might feel like shaving a land for another card, but i think it would be a mistake.

This sultai build can play the long game. Nissa can ultimate in this thing, skaabs chump and get dispersed only to wreack havoc to your opponents clock next turn. I think these are very good changes. wave has both synergies and huge nonboes in this deck. Since I think this shell enables jace and nissa to win games on their own, I wanna cut a wave for obvious reasons. On top of that , disperse handles surgical removal AND protects tutelage for way less mana than countermand.

Cudos geg, good build. Played 9 games after making my cuts. 8/1 ain't bad From playing sultai heavily before, I would hazard this is close to the best mill build currently possible.

I like the changes. As you don't need the Countermand to answer threats, Disperse is indeed the better option to protect Tutelage - keeping 2 mana open is much easier after all. The syngergy with Skaab is a nice bonus and it is a cheap way to deal with auras.

Nissa already made her way into my deck. I replaced Jace with her as he's harder to flip before he dies, he doesn't have an etb effect and I think his +1 is less useful than Nissa's. I keep both Displacement Waves for now. Casting this for x=2 is a nice way to delay aggro and get Vials/Visionaries back for a second draw. Of course it can also be another out to bigger threats, you just have to recast the Tutelages after that. This saved my life a couple of times. I don't mind bouncing Nissa either. I can simply recast her, drop the land she fetches and use her draw ability right away. The only thing this delays is her ultimate, but it's not like you really need that.

I'm gonna edit the post with these changes, thanks for the suggestions.

Jace helpped me a couple times flashbacking Fog, but your right, he isn't pulling his weight. Gonna try Disperse tomarrow, seems solid. Disciple has been a beast if you wanna work it in. Also tried Inspiration over Telling Time. Yes, it does cost more and doesn't filter the deck, but your emptying your deck faster and triggers Tutelege. Worked awesome in 2HG, gotta do more solo play to see which is better.

Geg I am loving your build. I have seen you post a few different mill builds and I think this is the best you have come up with by far. I don't have a great grasp on the meta yet because I haven't played much online since I can't unlock my last 3 packs.

Basically my problem with most turbomill decks that they don't have a plan "B." Play tutelage quickly, mill your opponent and slow them down a bit. This isn't difficult and there are a number of viable builds. What *is* tricky is failing to draw tutelage early, or having it removed. I just played a game where all 3 tutelages were in the bottom 15 cards of my deck, so I had to stall for a very long time. I did manage to mill my opponent, with one card remaining, although I could have killed them using Nissa's token and a skaab.

Displacement wave has tremendous synergy with the 8 cantrip permanents and the skaab. Languish and possessed skaab work together and both work well with fogs. You can easily take a turn off to cast skaab in order to get back languish as long as you have a fog at the ready. Some posters have suggested inspiration but I would keep telling time, I think grabbing the right lands in the early game is very important.

One thing worth noting about this combo is that it allows you to use your mana. Generally speaking decks that use 100% of their mana every turn are going to win against decks that don't. Slow control decks in this forum don't have anything to do with their mana past a certain point. This deck hits every land drop thanks to the draw engine, and then it can abuse 12+ mana to lock other players out of having any permanents while drawing extra cards thanks to replaying cantrip permanents.

At this time my only suggestions are to fix the mana a little bit and add reclamation sage. Right now (including evolving wilds as a full land) you are at 17 blue sources and only 10 black sources. To be honest, this will only rarely matter in gameplay thanks to the draw engine and fogs. But 17 blue is unnecessary. It might have made sense when you were playing with countermand, but right now your only UU spell is displacement wave. I would suggest going from 9 islands and 2 swamps to 7 islands and 4 swamps. Hitting languish on time is important.

Reclamation sage really speaks for itself, it is totally abusable with displacement wave. Not sure what to cut here, I think 4x elvish visionaries may be unnecessary, maybe go down to 3.

This is the issue I have with Mill decks as well. If you don't get your "win" card early enough, it's pretty much game over. Even with multiple stall cards, it's still a random puzzle that has to perfectly fall into place. I keep revisiting this kind of deck in Duels, and the consistency is just not there. As HenWen said, there is no plan B. I mean, if you want, you could consider Nissa your plan B, but that is pretty sketchy at best. Maybe the next set will introduce cards that help smooth out the very rough edges that are going on with this style right now. When it works, it works. If it doesn't early enough though, you're pretty much hosed to any number of deck types.

Like, what are you supposed to do against a Chandra that was turned into a Planeswalker extremely early and you have no Displacement Wave? Basically pray that you draw one in the next three turns? What are you supposed to do against 6/6 fliers? Fogs, Disperses, Vials and Hydrolash can only do so much. You either have to run them out of cards before you run out of these spells, or that's it. Do you keep taking mulligans until you have a Tutelage first turn?

If anything, I think Fleshbags might be mandatory for this deck, while dropping three draw cards. Similarly as HenWen said with Reclamation Sages. It needs more ways to deal with threats. You can still always mill them to death manually with Tutelage if you need to once you have your second out.

This is the ideal starting hand: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... EAFB734EF/
Here's how it looks at the end typically: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... EB1F36ED8/

Sanctuary traditionally these decks have been split between two types: control mill and turbomill.

Most of the early turbomill decklists I saw were in simic colors or izzet, relying on a few fog effects or burn spells to slow down an opponent. The core of these decks is the draw engine, drawing a lot of cards not only helps you win faster, it allows you to run relatively few answer cards against your opponent. Geg's build is a turbo approach because it devotes a lot of cards to the draw engine and few cards will permanently answer a threat. However it is much more resilient than a typical turbo list, there aren't many answers but they are very flexible. You can hold out a long time.

I gravitate towards more of a control approach. Start with 2 tutelage instead of 3, and then instead of filling the deck with cantrips focus more on answers that can deal with whatever your opponent throws at you. You presented a lot of "what if" scenarios, a control mill decklist should contain answers to anything in the meta. But these decks take much longer to win and are more vulnerable to draw randomness. A control mill deck might take 40 turns to win vs 20 for turbomill. I posted my decklist in the Jeskai thread and some people have had success with it, although I don't consider it a finished list due to my limited testing.

I don't think there is necessarily one best approach, it depends on the meta, and metas are different on each platform. Just keep in mind that while you can build a deck that tries to answer everything, it will end up creating other problems.

Ironically, the Chandra scenario popped up with Nissa instead during the next game. Fortunately, I had a Fleshbag in hand. Fleshbag also stalls the game after a Languish, and synergizes with the Skaab. Like I said, it needs permanent solutions, otherwise you're just basically spraying and praying that you get the cards you need to finish them off. Look at the above screenshots.

Also, one of the games that I lost when playing the build exactly as it is here, was to a 6/6 flier that I had absolutely no answer to after a Languish. Even if I had a Fog, that's just one fog, and there was only a single Tutelage in play. Good game? Plus, mixing around Skaab, Fleshbag, Dispersion Wave and a few draw cards isn't having too many cooks in the kitchen. It might win 1-2 turns slower than the version with three more draw cards, but it will be more consistent. Although I'm not sure what the right mix would be yet. I keep ending up with Skaabs being held with nothing really to use them on. Should I just be dropping them to get more draw cards out of the grave, instead of holding off for another Fog or possibly Languish? More often than not I am holding Dispersion Wave for the majority of the duel, and then when I am about to use it, I draw the second. Which never gets used.

While this isn't indicative of the functionality of the deck, duels like this are always fun too: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 71090056B/

Anyway, I'd like to know what your win rates are with a Mill deck, regardless of what kind it is. Both of the R/G variants seem to blow it up easily. Or at least, I've never been able to beat one, and I've also never been beaten by a Mill deck when playing either of them myself.

Aura flyer? Reason I ask is they modified to that with Disperse.

I've just had a few rounds with this deck and I can say it is prolly one of my fav Mill decks I've used so far.

I made up a really solid Dimir mill deck that I hardly lose with but this is just so much fun to use. I stalled out a RDW player for about 10 turns, he had a board of about 6 creatures and had me down to 9, finally got the Languish and I lol'd, soon after got 2 Tutelages and just milled him out while pissing about with his 1 lil Gobo he got after the wipe.

Nice job on this deck dude

@Sanctuary



Come on now...

This deck runs 4 fog, 2 disperse, 4 alchemists vials (6/6 flier can't attack). Then at land 6 you can skaab + fog. Land 8 you can bring back skaab and his koptophet with displacement wave. Then land 9 play tutelage, play skaab, hold up fog.

etc etc

I'm not saying fleshbags aren't potentially a good idea (I wonder how key the visionaries really are...), but this deck has the tools to do its thing in the face of a 6/6 flier unless ofc you kept a hand like in the screenshot

Reave soul after languish is a bit clunky, but would potentially work too I guess ?