wickeddarkman

I really like this deck :D

I agree on deepchannel mentor. frogtossers are not enough to make them that fast.
I'd keep two of them as a lategame stalebreaker. The obvious replacement will be + 2 knowledge exploitation.

You are missing mothdust changeling, which will enable you to play noggin whack at turn 2 against combo.

Visions of beyond is one of the most powerfull band waggon Cards I've ever seen.
People play it because they see other people play it, and perhaps it hangs on because we all keep reminding each other how powerfull drawing cards is. At the time where the card showed most talent everyone was playing it with snapcaster mage, because you could then play your visions during the early game and snapcaster could recast them lategame to get that cardadvantage they offer. However, snapcasters role in mill diminnished as decks became more linear, and visions can't be recast like they used to. Since mill had it's heyday, the meta has grown to support graveyarddecks which really beats mill, but even against those visions of beyond rarely brings you those three cards. I've been campaigning for a long time to get people to play compelling argument or mishra's bauble instead. It draws you a card early game just as the visions, and it can actually kill lategame which which isn't something visions can. If you should Draw three Cards, one of them will frequently be a land which you really don't need at the time. There are several other reasons why visions is obsolete, like challice 1 or discard. Mishra's bauble manages to avoid both of these, while visions would be dead in it's tracks.

He has them to thin out the deck, which is an important thing for most magicplayers.
Each flooded removes 2 Cards from the deck, which Means he is essentially playing only 14 lands (He has ruins too)

That means he's playing 38 spells and 14 lands. (A total of 52 Cards)
That way people can beat the minimum 60 Cards limit which makes their deck Draw into what they want more often.

It would :D

The 12 1cc slots can be spent in many ways.
(For example, 4 æther vial, 4 surgical extraction, 4 extirpate. The last 4 will rip their removal appart)

I also remember that I calculated the perfect number of mana for playing a deck with only 1cc's which is 16 lands, and I calculated one for 2cc, 3cc and 4cc as well.

I think the number was 22 lands for 2cc. That means you could play a deck with only rat colony and lands...
2 dread statuary, 3 blinkmoth nexus, 4 mutavault and 13 swamps is a perfect mana solution I generated for a number of decks.
(That project also had 4 arbor dryad, so the landcount was 26, but cutting those makes it 22 lands)

So, to sum up,
38 rat colonies, 2 dread statuary, 3 blinkmoth nexus, 4 mutavault and 13 swamps.
Such an easy decklist to write down :D

It could all be streamlined into something even faster if you modify the numbers a bit.
Also throwing in some 1cc cards like relic of progenitus, chromatic sphere and chromatic star will allow you to exploit your mana when you have the odd numbers like 1, 3 or 5 mana. But that's a lot of Work.

Relentless rats will be swell within this deck.

I've been using a lot of computergenerated manacurves in my past, and would let the deck be more like:

14 swamps
4 blinkmoth nexus
4 mutavault
12 rats costing 1 mana each.
12 rat colony
14 relentless rats

Fill your sideboard with the problemsolving and just go all in at game one.

I can see where you are heading with this :D

I've spent quite some time with Building mill-decks, so I can suggest some innovations you can try out.

Your main problem in vintage will be all the combo-decks that try to go turn 1 kill.

My own favorite package against that sort of "show" has been to pack 3 chancellor of the spires (Three's the perfect number, I've spent an extreme amount of games to test the perfect number and more than 2000 testgames went into that knowledge.

Add 4 surgical extraction and 4 chrome mox. After your chancellor's throw some value into the grave you can play chrome mox with chancellor imprinted for blue mana. That will usually mean that you can play a turn 1 glimpse the unthinkable.


Against aggro you can pack some wall of blood and ragged veins in the sideboard. wall of blood Works well with phenax and altar of dementia as a finisher, and an opponent attacking you will let you play ragged veins on their critter, you boost wall of blood with all your life except 1 and they usually die. (Splash red for lightning bolt, or play with zuran orb)

If you splash red, you can play faithless looting which can let you use breaking//entering as mill or reanimation. This Works very well with those chancellor of the spires.

Ah, why didn't you tell me you joined in on this :D

Here's my oldschool "forum"
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/9394-format-forum/

I'm glad that you've gotten under the skin of modern, that means you are ready for some of my nitpicking :D

Surgical extraction has made it's impact on the format a long time ago, and one of the many adaptions I've seen towards fighting mill is playing with relic of progenitus, sure they mean to use it against graveyard-driven decks, but it's a small move to sac a relic as resonse to surgical, which empties their graveyard, sort of fizzling your card.

Counterspells make their moves against surgical as well, even though it's a lesser threat, and then there's good old chalice of the void.

All of that means I've moved away from surgical extraction and embraced extirpate as my favorite. Sure, surgical is for free, but it's impact has simply lessened.

I've also told a lot of people to ditch visions of beyond to use either compelling argument or mishra's bauble.
The major reason for this was once to fight chalice of the void, but later I started to use these two cards to fight discard as well, and mishra's bauble does that way better than argument. The trick is to play the bauble early so that you can draw a card later during your upkeep, which means you get to sneak a random card around their thoughtseizes or liliana. Even later I started to fight discard by also playing relic of progenitus, with the odd result that I automatically got some protection against graveyard-decks.

I'm also ditching path to exile a bit from my espermill to play with two other interresting cards.
Drown in sorrow, which scryes, and doomfall which forces a sacrifice or works as a discard. (The major reason for using these two cards have been battles against affinity, especially etched champion) Of these two cards doomfall has a lot more potential. hero's downfall might also get a spot in there

These are the cards I think might be usefull for you to test in your deck.

Thrummingbird's a nice catch :D

I'm trying to think of a name for my own mill, since it's removed itself too far away from godika's design
(I never thought it would take more than 3 generations to beat the meta, but there's so many new decks)

I'm leaning towards "Wallstreet millers" because of the many walls, but I'd like suggestions.

I've also decided to experiment wildly with the next generation of the deck because I will run more evolution than usual, so I'm splashing into green to add collected company to the deck. (I'll fix the mana later if evolution prefers the Card) I got the idea from playing talent of the telepath against GWX-vizier and I hit a Company, and got two augurs in play and drew 2 Cards, so I thought that it could be very interresting to play with collected company.
I've also thought up a prototype of a UWG deck focussing on the drawengine of my deck and 4 talents and 4 Company. (I'll post it in a few days)

I've been through the interaction with minister and shielded aether thief myself while developing my own mill with evolution:
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/evolving-modern-espermill-v5/

The major problem is that minister runs out of steam if it doesn't get energy, and neither itself or aether thief generates energy (unless you manage to block a lot with the thief, which is very very unlikely since it'll get removal or a 5/5 after it before that happens)

Try to base your build on these two Cards instead:
Shriekhorn, an 1cc artisfact that gets three counters and each can mill 2 Cards.
Glint-nest crane a 1U bird with flying and 1/3 which lets you look at your top 4 Cards and put an artisfact in your hand.

Compared with the two others the crane dies easier, but it can attack (I usually attack planeswalkers) and 100% gives you a Draw.
Shriekhorn can't block but it does not bother your manabase if you opt for a splash color.

Instead of select for inspection you could use echoing truth which will bounce either shriekhorn or glint-nest crane.

Making this change will allow you to cut the Whole energy theme, getting a lot more versatile Cards into the deck :D

I like the fact that you are keeping your older builds, not many people do that.

I understand budget fine, but won't waste time on looking up whats cheapest to get.
I've run several commonkill decks vs legacy while trying to show people how far you can get with artificially created mana-curves. In the end I simply became so competitive that I only buy what fits into my small Collection of evolution-made decks.

We each have our own pets.

But since I am very competitive I like giving away hints on how to beat the big players with odd card-picks, and you fell target to that by being a budget player, since I always assume that other budget players like to beat the big League in the end :)

The differnce in mana-cost between spells isn't that wide, but you got it reversed somehow :D

You have 17 Black spells, 12 blue and 3 White (I gues the White is for the cycling alone)

Yet you've focussed the mana towards Black.

I've experimented enough with mana to know that you could improve this with almost no problems, without going into fetchlands and too many duals.

Take the average merfolk deck in modern and you will find that they play around 12 islands, and still plays a lot of Cards costing UU. This means that you could do pretty much the same that they do by having a mana that have 12 blue and 12 Black mana. With 22 mana your minimum requirements are 10 islands, 10 swamp and two duals which should be enough to drive the deck.

The "danger limit" for your basic lands are 5, and 9 is close to perfect if your deck had no UU or BB costs but rather had B and U all the way through.

So try out playing with 9 islands, 9 swamps and 4 duals.

Stony Locks down the bells and cranial archive, which is 6 Cards which is a tenth of your deck :D

It's a work in Progress :D (It leaves the appartment a bit messy to focus that much on a build though)

I went to two small tournaments this weekend with the generation 4 version, and got around 45-50% wins.
The most interresting part was meeting a semi-pro player who played with a very similare bloodjund to the one I have been testing against. During tests my opponent's always start and I never draw the eigth Card, and I allways mulligan a full hand for for free for the opponent until I have two lands and at least 3 spells. I lost 10 games in a row to the bloodjund testdeck I have proxied, but since we had time during the tournament several times I got to play 6 games against him, winning half of them, which means that the way I test my decks is much harsher than I thought!

Learning that I punish my own deck in the extreme makes me think that it's actually having a much better winrate than I usually write out from the tests.

I'm updating the post today.

How competitive do you want it to be???

I write aggresivelly about my own inovations, but I back them up with lots of tests...
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/evolving-modern-espermill-v5/

Points for originality :D

The current modern meta is swimming with decks that add tireless tracker to their decklist.
Stony silence is already a stable in any deck splashing white, but the consequence of a spread in trackers
will very likely mean an increase in the use of stony silence, which will cripple your deck whenever you encounter it.

So you need to deal with stony silence, perhaps with something in the sideboard ??? (Go with echoing truth or leave no trace)

-----------------------------------------------------------
Playing esper mill myself I usually find the odd card for my sideboard once in a while.
Since the current meta has a variance of cards currently using +1/+1 counters, I've begun flirting with fate transfer.

By using fate transfer you will be dealing with cards like:
tireless tracker, scavenging ooze, archbound ravenger, that land from junk that gives all their creatures +1/+1 counters at a slow pace, at least two critters from "humans" and walking ballista (which is harder to steal the counters from).

Hope you find these details usefull, and congrats with the victory ;D

You might find these two "links" usefull:

My own esper-mill, designed by "evolution and paperstrips": (Loong story)
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/evolving-godicas-mill-v4/

How to use paperstrips to gather data from your games: (Either by testing alone or if your friends allow you to use them)
https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/datagathering-with-paperstrips/

You can just pay 2 life and cast the revival without letting green mana wash out your other lands.
But ancient stirrings is a clasic :)

The "hastemare" deck is part of a series I made that I dubbed "Naked decks"
The concept is that you have a manacurve that can be applied to ANY deck simply by selecting your creatures to fit all of the manabase. The manabase is perfected to play out the deck in as many turn 5 kills as possible as long as your creatures have the same pow as their cost. (Evolution perfects my decks for me)

By using the same number of 1cc, 2cc, 3cc and 4cc and copying all the lands in my deck you will get a very fast deck no matter what you build (as long as the guidelines are followed) Exchange Mountains with plains and you can build a White weenie. Easy peasy :D

https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/project-naked-deck/

I think the deck is split too much between trying to be a low mana-cost lantern deck and a largecost eldrazi beatdown.

I would add noxious revival to the deck, which is an instant, which makes "the promised" 1 cheaper and will be able to return the promised too your hand.

Ghoulcallers bell is better than the lionhead because it's not a targetting effect and will allow you to mill depending on information from both libraries. (Pyxis of pandemonium will also be good with this)

You could also consider mesmeric orb which allows you to selfmill, Thus increasing the chance of making the promised cheaper very very fast, but this pick should be made at consideration because it nullifies your lantern permanently.