wickeddarkman

Polymorph ?

So, my guess is that the 4 missing cards is the legendary kaldheim squirrel :)

Oops...
Search for decktag: wdm 2018
Click on the mill deck.

I guess I was thinking too fast there :)

Heh, I remember these pieces of advice :)
Tyliwrath is still around if you haven't reconnected with him already.

Since 2017 mill has gained ruin crab which could replace hedron crab.
Maddening cacophony could replace traumatize.

And since visions of the beyond has gotten even worse due to the mechanic escape, it could be replaced by vantress gargoyle.

I wrote up a post about mill just yesterday.

Search for the decktag: wdm mill
Click on the mill deck, which also has an article about why I still play test against decks from 2018.

I'm still developing my paperstrip projects.

A devil is usually a demon that have gained rank.

It's really a religious mess when you start trying to speculate them.

In some lore, the demon strain was already in the world but got spread more by lilith.

Satan, were an angel demoted from angel to devil, so in some way devils would be Angel's stripped of their rank, but they'd still sort of be from the angelic line.

Going deeper into this, lilith was made by god, but when she left him to mate with demons instead, did she do it on earth or in paradise ? Did paradise actually become hell when we left ?

Why were demons there in any of the cases?
If they are a separate species, how did lilith even mate with them, or were they pre-angels like djinn and efreets?

It's all pretty muddled :)

Morph is such a cool concept, I've considered many times to create the perfect morph manacurve :)
It would be difficult work thought, which is why I've never done it.

One aspect could be to include a color that I didn't really needed just to force a reaction in the opponents gameplay.
Like having a blue/red deck with black lands in it to make people fear seeing an array of black cards. It's always been fun to play with blue mana and never tap it, it always stall the combo player a turn or two :)

:)
You could have andded and sex and drugs, but I felt the same pressure.

You should add the decktag: rock&roll

I'd say it would help you a lot if you exchange the three thought scour with three relic of progenitus.

You need relic to take out those uro and kroxa.
Against discard relic also "hides" a card for you, letting you keep up the steam.

Duress does not have the best synergy with into the roil when you meet aggro.

With 6 cards costing 5 mana, your deck should use at least 24 mana, preferably as high as 26 lands
The math behind this can be seen in some of the work of frank karsten.

It's been a while since I've seen a new deck from you.
Partying a lot?
Or just trying to hibernate ?

I brewed a d&t version of the concept.
Changed the decktag: wdm highland

I have no idea what to put in instead of a removed vial.
I usually spend days play testing to find out what works best.

I do have one curve that could be fun to use for death and taxes.
Search for the decktag: highland
Then click on the deck titled something like"project highlander"
It has just a single vial, and would give you a hell of a lot more creatures.

It can even support thoughtknot seer without eldrazi temple though it wont hit the table at turn 2-3.

The flagstone scenario is only used when you have no leonin in play. As soon as that happens you start on thinning out your own deck by removing lands from it, increasing the speed at which you draw a new leonin, then you revert back to eliminating the opponent lands :)
I'm ancient in magic, so I can tell you that some of the older versions of death and taxes had phyrexian revoker to lock down fetchlands, which made the leonin/thalia lock even better. And they used weathered wayfarer to draw the ghostquarters at a faster pace.

It's a robbers world :)

That brings some more context :)
I'm a big fan of proxying cards and decks before buying them, which cost me almost nothing. It usually turns out that I don't need a full playset or that the card didn't work as intended.
That saves a lot of money.

Also the cards muktol lists are a halfdeck, not suggestions to the above deck :)

Mutavault does add to the rat count ;)

Done. Title is:
packages (design concept):

Heh, you forgot 10 forest :)

But yeah add 4 of each card and 10 forest and you got a halfdeck
Muktol has some nice halfdecks, and also still got the mindset ;)

Muktol: I've recently remembered how I ended up building halfdecks, and is writing a post about it.
It might be of interest to you. I'll seek you out when I'm done.

Hey johawk.
First of all, how competitive is your group of players going to be ?
People have very different reasons for joining the game.

That your friend wants you to build the deck, and that you need to ask for help on building a deck, hints at some social complications. Either you want to impress or he wants to do a minimum of effort. Both reasonings will end with you being set up as a slave.

Theres also the chance that this is a cover up, and you want us to be the slaves!

The clever way to solve this is to have you do some more work, and then your friend will have to do a freaking lot of work afterwards which will show that he is devoted to the game rather than wanting a slave.

On mtgvault I built up a concept called halfdecks.
You build a deck of 30 cards that can sort of stand alone.
Then you build several other decks that can also stand alone.
Then you start shuffling two of those decks together into a 60 card deck and see how well they work together, and you try to figure out how to improve each part so it fits the other better.

If you build 10 of these decks (two in each color) and focus on what the colors do naturally you can build it up very quickly.

The smart thing is that there are 49 ways to combine these 10 decks.

Let's say we build 1 red half with nothing but burn. Then we build another half with nothing but fast red creatures.

Then we build a black deck with a lot of discard and some destructive large black creatures. Then we build a black deck with lots of removal and cheap efficient black creatures.

We can combine the two black halves into one big black deck, and we can combine the red halves into a red deck.
Or we can combine burn with discard or burn with removal.

Or we can combine red creatures with discard or red creatures with removal.

That's 6 different decks made of 4 halves.

The more halfdecks you have, the number of combinations will explode.

If we added an eleventh deck to a group of 10, there would be 10 more ways to combine the old setup. It had 49 combinations, the 11th deck adds 10 more on it's own. Making it possible to combine it all in 59 ways

Search for the decktag: halfdeck
And look around what other people have already made.

So build 5 half decks for your friend and he really has 20 decks to try finding out his playstyle.
You only need one deck in each color to do this.

Work wise you have to work with the cards of two and a half real decks, but your friend will work with 20 decks, so you place the real workload on him, while watching from a higher ground.

In exchange for this advice, if you have it in you, you can post your halfdecks, tag them with the tag halfdeck, and describe the concept in the deck description so others may learn of it.

Most place one half at maindeck and another at the sideboard.
Some uses the commander decks which can hold up to three different halves.

Design wise this concept can be taken quite far, and you can actually try splitting pro decktypes into separate halves to try out your hand at mutating the current meta beyond comprehension.

I originally designed decks in very small parts with different purposes when I got this idea.
One day I will try to go back to building smaller parts again, there gotta be certain statistical numbers that hold up for themes, like people always play 3 inquisition of kozilek and 2 thoughtseize in some combo packages. That means we have a 5 card package called "discard support" one day I will break "package magic"

But you...

You can start working with this, or you can go an buy jumpstart packages.
Some years after my concept was launched, wotc launched their own version.

Barkchannel pathway hints at phyrexia by referring to tree of tales :)

Yeah.
I just hate that mill is used more by copycats than deck builders.
It's my pet theme deck type, so I perhaps expect more than on other decktypes.
My mill experiences stretches as far back as visions...

I was among the first who tried out a blend of noble benefactor, fertillid, veteran explorer and archive trap in legacy.

I had good times with grimoire thief + mothdust changeling.

I've been through So many mill variants.