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There are a couple of ways to play this deck. One being a turbo mill deck based around Muses, Howling Mines, Fonts, and Erasures. The other is a slower, control mill, which may or may not win based on mill. It's not that there's anything wrong with turbo mill, and I don't feel that either build is really superior in terms of how they perform against other decks. But you guys know me, I like control decks, and the turbo mill is a bit too risky (not that I dislike it), giving your opponent more cards or potential answers to your stuff. One of the common comments about turbo mill is that it usually wins the turn before your opponent would kill you. This deck can win more comfortably, hence I enjoy it more.

Creatures - 15
2 Hedron Crab
4 Jace's Phantasm
2 Aether Adept
2 Clone
2 Body Double
1 Sturmgeist
2 Chancellor of the Spires

Other Spells - 21
3 Thought Scour
2 Unsommon
2 Visions of Beyond
2 Counterspell
2 Into the Roil
2 Mind Sculpt
3 Crippling Chill
1 Dream Fracture
1 Sword of Body and Mind
1 Sleep
1 Archive Trap
1 Mind Control

Land - 25
25 Island

General Strategy - Work on getting a little mill in during the early game, enough to activate the phantasms and to give you some choices for Body Double. Use the bounce, crippling chills, and counters sparingly, you don't want to run out mid-late game and then have nothing to show for your stalling. Use Crippling Chill during your opponent's turn, before their combat phase. Given summoning sickness, you can lock down one of their creatures for 3 turns, and draw a card to boot. Speaking of card draw, there's loads of cantrips here, so it's not hard to draw into the stuff you need.

Once you get phantasms online, get a creature swinging with a sword, or body double/clone/mind control something, it's on. Given 5/5s with flying you can easily take out your opponent's life total if a few turns. Heck, this deck can occassionally become an aggro deck given an opening hand of Chancellor, Phantasm, and some other cheap mill card.

For the card analysis, I won't go through every card, but I will pick out a few of the notable cards, and why I made some of the choices I did.

Mind Sculpt/Archive Trap/Tramatize - 2 Mind Sculpts may seem strange, but I generally don't need to play more than 1 to get things going for Phantasm/Body Double. Since this deck generally isn't going for the mill victory, I don't need to see multiples of them, and given the amount of cantrips in the deck, it's not hard to find enough mill cards. You could run 2 Tramatize in their place, but I don't care for tapping out on turn 5 just to mill more cards, when I really want to be playing Body Double. Tramatize will generally give you more options for your Body Doubles and Chancellors, but I have had few complaints about the graveyard choices I already get from the Mind Sculpts. Archive Trap is nice because it's an instant, so you can use it at the end of your opponent's turn when it's convient for you. It can also, rarely, be used as a combat trick for an umpumped Phantasm. The ability to occassionally cast it for free is also a nice bonus.

Sword of Body and Mind - 2 swords may lead to some occassions where you have swords and no creatures to put it on, but the sword is worth it. It's a really game winning card, filling up the graveyard for Phantasms and Body Doubles.


Clone - This card can bring lots of fun. Body Double something awesome from your opponent's graveyard, then clone it. Clone a Chancellor, Clone a Phantasm for another 5/5, or Clone another crab and go for a mill win.

Sturmgeist - I don't know why more people aren't using this in their control builds. It's a one-sided card advantage engine, and gives you another creature that can swing a sword. With all the cantrips in this deck, it'll usually come out as a 3/3-5/5.

Mind Control - idk about this one. Stealing something is nice, but it doesn't seem as good as it was in 2012. Like the sword, I usually don't like seeing multiple copies of this. Decks in this game seem to have more answers for enchantments, or bounce, or too many weenie/exclusive creatures (ex. Liliana's Shade) that aren't worth stealing. It's still great in the late game when your opponent does have something big and juicy, and that's why there's still one copy. It also has some dissynergy with the sword.