Mill is an often misunderstood and maligned archetype that gets people hot and bothered in multiple ways. As a reanimator player, I love watching my deck flip into my graveyard, but for the rest of the player base, it’s often a frustrating sensation as a world of possibilities unravels before their eyes.
Well, there are a ton of cards from Duskmourn that support a mill package, and I want to focus on one today: Doomsday Excruciator. Doomsday Excruciator is a throwback reference to the card Doomsday, which strips your library down to only five cards that you hand select. The potential of this card is bananas and is the backbone of combo decks in Vintage and Legacy. Unfortunately, Doomsday Excruciator is nowhere near as good with twice the mana investment, and it doesn't allow you to select the cards you're left with, which means it just doesn't do the same thing.
What the Build Around Does Well
Fortunately, though, this card has an important upside that Doomsday lacks – it hits the opponent as well. Both players are left with six-card libraries, and the clock counts down from there. The Excruciator draws extra cards on upkeep, so if the board stalls, your clock will run out first. Additionally, the cards removed from the game are face down, so this type of mill doesn't give you any information on your opponent's deck, nor do you know the cards you're left with. In order to ensure a mill win here, we need to simply tag our opponent with a spell or effect after the demon triggers.
Many common cards in Standard today are used because they can draw a lot of cards (Caretaker's Talent, Up the Beanstalk, Preacher of the Schism, etc.), and that power will be our opponents' downfall in many cases. One or two extra cards drawn after the Doomsday turn means a mill for as little as four can be a perfect kill shot – a mill shot, if you will.
The Mill Shots
Jace, the Perfected Mind is our best friend because we can establish it early and use all our resources to protect it. We don't care about dealing damage, so any creatures we have can focus on blocking, then as little as a 2 on his -X activation can be lethal after we do the thing. Be careful with Jace's loyalty leading up to the Doomsday turn and make sure not to use his -2 after Doomsday has hit, and you should be fine.
Restless Reef is another resource that costs us very little and provides a ton of utility throughout the game. After we Doomsday, you can target the opponent with the attack trigger and bring them down to two cards. Even one extra draw from them at this point will be enough to kill their deck.
The primary goal of Cruel Somnophage is to hit their deck for four after a Doomsday, but don't underestimate its value as a blocker early or an opportunity to fill your own graveyard. This deck does require some amount of self-mill in order to execute our plan quickly, and Somnophage provides a lot of flexibility that can help us line it all up early and late. It's also compatible with Overlord of the Balemurk, which is a nice bonus.
The Ancient One is an interesting design that can be coupled with any card that cares about creature power, but it also works great as a powerful creature the opponent will likely spend removal on, that can activate to kill a Doomsdayed opponent. It's only a one-of in this build because it's legendary, but if you wanted to add a second, I wouldn't fault you.
Leading Up to Doomsday
Doomsday Excruciator has the clause in its enters trigger, “…if it was cast,” so we can't cheat it out in the traditional ways. Fortunately for us, the Lazotep Convert is a clone that enters as a copy of any creature in a graveyard, and when you win a battle, the back side is cast. This allows us to simply flip the siege after we mill a Doomsday Excruciator into our graveyard. Render Inert is primarily here to flip Invasion of Amonkhet, but it also does double duty with the new overlords.
This is quickly becoming my favorite new card in Standard. For as little as two mana, it fills our graveyard perfectly and can pull back our adventure creatures or Jace, the Perfected Mind. It being a 5/5 that recurs threats on attack is also a very real clock the opponent will have to deal with. They likely will, but the resources spent focusing here won't be used elsewhere. One word of caution, however, is don't cast or attack this after you've triggered Doomsday Excruciator unless the card you're getting back kills the opponent's library on the spot. Milling yourself for four will often spell your own doom.
Deadly Cover-Up is amazing in a number of matchups as it can strip our opponent of their key pieces and demolish the pressure they're putting on us. Since nearly all of our creatures are optional for what we're trying to do, sweeping them up to hurt our opponent is a price we'll gladly pay to buy ourselves the necessary time. Harvester of Misery is also here to do something similar against go-wide decks or be spot removal as early as turn two.
Sideboard Considerations
We have Leyline of the Void back in Standard, so I think it's fair that we use it. Rite of the Moth decks are running around, but there are also plenty of decks featuring Abhorrent Oculus and Tolarian Terror that need to have a graveyard to live in order to execute their gameplan, even if they aren't pulling from it directly.
Ghost Vacuum is also good for these kinds of situations to have a critical mass of graveyard hate. It's definitely better when there are specific hot cards in the yard like Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Valgavoth, Terror Eater to pick off, but bring it in whenever graveyards are relevant.
Given that our own graveyard is pretty important, Withering Torment should come in against any slow matchup that will likely be packing Rest in Peace or their own Leyline of the Void. It's also fantastic against Caretaker's Talent decks.
Malicious Eclipse is best against the red decks or go-wide convoke builds. The fact that it exiles the affected creatures is especially fantastic when your opponent is trying to get value from Cacophony Scamp or Heartfire Hero.
Final Thoughts
As a fan of silly combos, this deck definitely scratches that itch while also having a brute force win option by milling with Jace or maybe even winning the ground game on the back of our removal and punching with Overlords for the win. If you like milling, this is a solid option and could give you a jumping-off point to find a shell that fits your preference.
An early draft included The Mindskinner, but I couldn't quite make it work. Stay tuned for more decks featuring that nightmare, though, because it's definitely on my mind.
In the meantime, thank you for reading, and happy brewing!