Dimir Mill

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Happy Wednesday MTG peeps,

Way back when we started playing Magic: the Gathering, we just played a bunch of derpy cards in builds with no real strategy at our kitchen table - and had fun.  When we finally left the comfort of our domicile and went to our first Friday Night Magic event (in 10th Edition / Lorwyn), we saw a great many new cool cards and prompty had our butt handed to us in short order.  One build of particular note which was particularily annoying was a mill strategy using Millstone (Tenth Edition rare) coupled with several other cards designed to drain your library into your graveyard and lose you the game.  As a result of this in our formative MTG years, we were traumatized by any mill deck.  We can now proudly say we're over this and now have a standard-casual mill deck of our own.
 

Well that said, our interest peaked after Gatecrash was released.  When we was the abilities on Duskmantle Guildmage, specifically the ability to ping your opponent for one life with each card hitting the 'yard.  This Guildmage, along with the M13 Jace's zero ability to mill ten cards at a time had us salivating.  Unfortunately, when we attempted to put it into practice, we ran into trouble having that go off.  We finally decided to drop that altogether but were still quite decided to have a list shake out of all the new options available.  Here's what we have so far . . .

4x Thought Scour
4x Dream Twist
4x Jace's Phantasm
3x Think Twice
2x Essence Scatter
4x Mind Sculpt
3x Wight of Precinct Six
3x Augur of Bolas
2x Mind Grind
3x Talrand, Sky Summoner
2x Jace, Memory Adept
2x Consuming Aberration

15x Island
4x Drowned Catacomb
4x Swamp
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One Drops
Thought Scour - Mills two, draws a card
Dream Twist - Mills three, with flashback available
Jace's Phantasm - rapidly becomes a 5/5 flyer with their 'yard filling up.

Two Drop
Mind Sculpt - Mills seven, now we're cooking
Think Twice - Essential card draw with flashback
Essence Scatter - Cheap creature counterspell (for our local meta, easily switched out for other counter magic).
Wight of Precinct Six - Only three of these, they can grow into monsters but you don't want to drop 'em too early.
Augur of Bolas - Great early blocker that will likely get you another mill card with it's eotb effect.
Four Drop
Tallarand, Sky Summoner - Sad to see no-one likes / plays this card.  He's not that bad, and with a deck with a lot of instants / sorceries, we think we can generate a load of 2/2 drake tokens.

Five Drop
Jace, Memory Adept - We think we want to use the '0' ability every time to mill ten cards each turn.
Consuming Aberration - This Dimir monster not only is a fatty with all the cards in your opponent's graveyard, but will also mill too.

X-Cost
Mind Grind - late game mana sink and tip-top milling machine.  Love that it mills up to and including a land card, which in our opinion may pay dividends.

We would have liked to have Snapcaster Mage in the list but we don't own any - sad Panda is sad.  Perhaps we'll break down and collect a pair from MTG Mint Card before they rotate out of standard.
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