wickeddarkman

I completely agree with KJSJ3 on the mana.
To reliably play ensnaring bridge you need a minimum of 21 lands so only 18 lands will slow down the bridge.
Also, since most decks like burn, affinity, infect and other fast beats can kill at turn 3-4 most of the time you also want to be able to empty your hand down to 0 fast enough so that they wont hit you. (Infect goes as fast as turn 2-3)
Archive trap will lock down your ensnaring bridge unless you play against someone really dumb.

Lanternmill evolves around being able to avoid being beaten to death, so focus on making the bridge count.
Since most of your deck involves artisfacts you might play simian spiritguide which both empties your hand and generates mana to play stuff faster, especially the bridge.

Protecting the bridge will also be an issue. Apostle's blessing is one way to do that, and it will play well with simian spirit guide.

Surgical extraction will also thin out your hand faster, and will help you remove stuff that tries to take out you or your bridge.

This strategy leaves 3 cards as unplayable. hedron, trap and path.
Try out replacing them with 4 simian spirit guide, 4 surgical extraction and 4 dismember and see how the deck behaves.

Also ditch out codex shredder and use pyxis of pandemonium to remove those pesky emrakul's...

Use thoughtseize instead. You have 2 lands that gives you 2 damage, I have 4. You have 8 fetches I have 4. You play 2 surgical, I play 3. You should be able to play with 3 thoughtseize based on that. Remember that I have just played around 60 games against affinity which kills between turn 3 to 4 and I found my lifeuse to be good enough to dare playing stuff like fetching into a watery grave and then play a surgical for 2 life.

As a general rule, don't use more than 4 life on any stuff unless you can secure a win by doing it.

So when's your next tourney :D

There is one miller in modern that used to advocate the esperbuild, and historically he's been the one to win the most with espermill. I have gathered all of his versions into one build by using statistics.
Steal his mana, and you should be able to prosper.

http://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/godica-king-of-modern-mill/

There is one miller in modern that used to advocate the esperbuild, and historically he's been the one to win the most with espermill. I have gathered all of his versions into one build by using statistics.
Steal his mana, and you should be able to prosper.

http://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/godica-king-of-modern-mill/

By the way, a lot of millers seem to adapt spellskite into their mill these days, so I'm adding it as a possible sideboard. It might also be your way out of wur/UR

My own strategy has always been to have so much mill that countering it doesn't help. I usually defeat WUR by first extracting snapcaster mage which will cripple them. Next target is any spell that burns and draw or counter and draw.

My brute force strategy always center on milling fast and locking down the keycards at first opportunity, which has proven a solid strategy in all my years with mill. It's also why I prefer to have nothing but mill in the deck.

To know what you want to keep/remove you have to have a gameplan on what you want to beat, what you sideboard against and what you just fold in on. Compile yourself a gauntlet of testdecks!

What is the main "gauntlet" in magic ?
So far most modern guides will tell you that a deck must be fast (And flexible) enough to beat infect, affinity and burn. Would you agree on that? (I certainly do)

My current goal are these three + elfball as I was humiliated by an elfball player at the gp.
If you can gear towards beating the trinity then your deck should be fast enough to deal with almost anything else due to speed alone.

So far I'm testing against these decks, and the ones that I do worst against will be the ones I sb against. It's a good thing the sb will be similar in all three cases :D

I can understand the tradeoff with drowners vs hedrons. Drowners mill less but beats for more.
I also like the "cheap critters + memory sluice" which allows you to sometimes conspire it.

I'll also claim that with thoughscour and visions you can toy with a much lower mana.
Try out playing your deck with 18 islands and increase it slowly from there. After all your stuff costs 2 at the most.
18 lands support 12 2cc's and 30 1cc's.

Sanity grind is an interresting choice, but with 1 third lands it will probably hit 1 third lands so you reveal 5-6 cards with a cost of U which mills a total of 5-6 cards. Not valid enough for 3 mana. Shriekhorn would probably mill more with an average of 5.xx (Can't remember the xx part, but it's around 55-77 depending on how many turns you have left to live)

Try out your current deck but remove the mind/body and 3 islands and insert 4 surgical extractions. Surgical extraction is your best strategy against anything you know well enough.
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WIDEk ??!!
I'm "WICKED" (Meaning nasty/naugthy) "DARK" (at least mentally) "MAN". WDM in short.
WDM stands for wicked dark man
MDW stands for mill deck wins ;D

Hmm! must have misread blight at a time, thought of it as -3/-3 to everything :C It may still have some use against tokens, but should perhaps become sb.

As for mesmeric orb I have just been testing it against affinity. And in my own setup I will cut down to 1 mesmeric. (Had 3 against merfolk) and those replaced were replaced with mind sculpt. Affinity has too many ways around the orb. In all cases I've tested within you draw an amount of cards, and the times where you draw more than one mesmeric orb it will mill less than those played first. Enough of these incidences and it becomes measurable. Having 4 mesmeric orbs will statistically degrade one of them to work less like a mesmeric orb and more like a mind sculpt, so a full transformation is justifyable. Consider them as a package where you have 3 mesmeric orb and 1 mind sculpt.

When I test I use paperstrips inside sleeves to keep track of each individual millcard and how it performs. I always play out the highperformance cards first so when I draw multiples I can see the effect of a card being played later than the others, which is why I claim 4 mesmeric is 1 too many if you meet merfolk, while 1 is the best number against affinity.

Using the same arguments I have some preset numbers you might use:
3 hedron crab (When using 4, one performs more like a tome scour)
3 mesmeric orb (When using 4 one performs like a mind sculpt)
3 archive trap (The pro's never activate the trap, so 4 dead cards as you die a lot around turn 4)
4 tome scour (optimize those surgical extractions)

Using my knowledge on topdecks:
2 damnation in main
2-4 mind funeral. The longer your game takes the more lethal it becomes, but the longer you play the more you draw, so a more controllike deck will use 2-3 of these.
a lot of designs exclude breaking//entering for more space. use 0 or 3.

Alternately you may use blinkmoth nexus instead of tarpit if you really want to use sword of mind and body.

What decktypes do you defeat the most, and which do you lose to more often?

Bile blight is a card that I have considered a lot myself, but it demands 2 black mana so your mana has to be able to support it.
I have had a long history of playing with river of tears as a means to manipulate my chances of having blue mana as a priority and be able to get black mana when needed. I generally play the river, getting black mana, but during the opponent's turn it's blue, so I can use blue instant stuff. I've also started experimenting with darkslick shores, playing a single one. You might want to try out these lands.

In case your meta is seeing a lot of fulminator mages, or other landdestruction I can tell you that 4 mesmeric orb, 4 shriekhorn and 2-4 memory sluice might be of use.

Anyways, 2 bile blight and lose the drown.
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Counterspells are usually a bad thing in mill.
In general you mill to kill. The less mill you have, the slower you kill. To protect yourself you start to think on how to handle it, and counterspells pop up in your mind, so you remove mill, getting even slower, needing more defence, and soon you've watered the deck out to some weak thing that just get's stumped. If you take a carefull look at all the decklists with modern mill that has ever won top 8, you will notice that discard has a higher successrate with mill than counterspells have it. Test out some inquisition of kozilek for measure and see how it goes. If you insist on mill, either have it in sideboard as a surprize effect or use stuff like remand (which softcomboes with surgical extraction) or spellpierce, these are the best in counter mill.

Your sideboard seems more refined, but there is one contradiction.
When faced against a creaturedeck you are likely to use blight, which will kill of your crabs or stalkers, while spellskites will survive.
The reason for using stalkers is that they bypass creatures, but you also use blight against creatures so one of these "teams" has to go. ditch the stalkers and consider adding creeping tar pit which may not be easy to equip but will fit the idea. (Plus against landdestruction you get some more lands)

Try basing your mana on Godica's design. He is the singlemost player who have won the highest amount of victories with espermill in the history of modern.
http://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/godica-king-of-modern-mill/

HMM!
When you need to fix a manabase, have the following in mind. Merfolk which uses a lot of UU lords, always plays a minimum of 12 islands, so if you want a surefire manabase all of your colors have to somehow hold 12 ways to manifest. Fetchlands and duallands is one way of doing this, so find a way to fix your mana so you have 12 ways to play a land in each color. The easiest way to do this is to study the past of previous esperdecks and their manabases, but you can also start from scratch! Keep in mind that when playing against merfolk they will turn your non-basics into islands, so make sure you have exactly 12 islands and focus on the black and white landparts :D The above is an advice I have given to a lot of players in the past. Propper mana really runs this game :D

26 cards that mill or can potentially mill seems like a good number.
15 cards protecting ashiok also seems enough.
You have contained the essence of espermill both in picks and numbers.
Sideboard is also good, but I feel that you lean a bit agressively towards artisfacts :D

+4 from here :D

UGANDANP****:
Well, you're slanging it a bit more than most do it in here :D
Most mtg players like to think of themselves as intellectuals, though a lot fall through the criterium.
Since I can see from a few above comment's you do have the capacity for propper writting, so keep up the slanging, pepol nead moar expince in undastand prime speaks :D

Ounce ay prawn ai dime their wars au lid-ail ghoul nay-med read raidinghoard!
(translates into: once upon a time there was a little girl named red ridinghood) Accents rulez!
Can I has more slang?

He wanted to collect some good millcards, then reap some of them again and increase the lands.

I think most millers on an average settle at 22 lands.

Drowned catacombs are doable, but it takes heavy testing to see how many can be added without slowing down the deck. However using too many special lands makes for vulnerability against bloodmoon.

Drowned catacombs are doable, but it takes heavy testing to see how many can be added without slowing down the deck. However using too many special lands makes for vulnerability against bloodmoon.

From extreme experience with taplands in mill, I can recommend you to cut down to only 2 dismal backwaters.
If you want this to be budget, try out river of tears which makes mana a little complex but is a great fixer. (I recommend 2 of these as well)

I like the overall look of both mainboard and sideboard.

My guess is that shred memory is there for fetching mind funerals?
In that case it might take to long, and I think you would be better with going with 4 surgical extractions instead as these has a nice history of soft-comboing with remand.

Playing counterspells in mill is very daring and only few have gotten top with it, but since most of these have been using remand or have had the counterspells in sideboard I think you could actually pull this of.

If you are an active tuornament player I would like to know which decks are causing you the most trouble...

Nighthowler seems to be creeping into milling decks lately, so nicely spotted with that one.

You need to replace curse of the bloody tome with mesmeric orb! There IS a reason why it's inside more than 25 out of the 28 milling decks that have won top 8 places in modern. A lot of upstarting millers fear to mill themselves to death, so let me assure you that it takes quite an effort to mill yourself to death with it, even if you play 4 in a row (turn 2 turn 3 and two on turn 4), AND tap out all of your mana each turn AND attack with a turn 1 and turn 3 played hedron crabs just for shows it wont kill you before your turn 5 :D In any case most decks won't let you have that many attackers to let the orb bother you, and if you get that many in play, then they fold to beatdown. Mesmeric orb beefs up your critters and allow you to play increasing confusions from being milled into the grave instead of drawing into them...