In Magic: the Gathering, you can either pull off a win by reducing your opponent’s life to 0 or by having them draw a card when their deck is empty. You can base your entire game plan around depleting the cards in the other player’s deck as quickly as possible, this is known as ‘milling’ them. Mill decks often exist on the fringes of the competitive meta, but in the current standard format, a new mill strategy has appeared that’s seeing some major success.
Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed is happening over this weekend. Mill players will be delighted to see that a quarter of the decks in the top eight are built to provide some elusive deck out wins.
The ‘Dimir Excruciator’ mill strategy derives its name from its star card, Doomsday Excruciator. When this excruciatingly evil entity enters the battlefield, each player exiles all but the bottom six cards of their library. That means you’re 90% of the way to decking your opponent out already, although you’re also putting yourself in danger, as you’ll only have six cards left in your own library. This is a risk that’s heightened as Doomsday Excruciator forces you to draw an additional card during each of your turns, speeding you towards doom.
Fortunately, by using the deck depleting effects of cards like Restless Reef and Insatiable Avarice,you can ensure that your opponent’s library will run dry well before your own does.
Doomsday Excruciator was released in the set Duskmourn back in September 2023, so why is it suddenly topping tournaments now? Well, as a card with six black pips in its mana cost, Doomsday Excruciator is exceedingly difficult to hardcast. Superior Spider-Man is able to copy its effect exactly for a mere four mana, accelerating the onset of the endgame much more quickly.
Beyond the Excruciator, and its spider-themed copycat, the rest of the deck is composed of a brutal suite of control cards. These are designed to restrict the opponent’s options, destroy their creatures, and help their controller draw into the tools they need to win the game. Both of the Excruciator decks in the top eight run four copies of Deceit, the Dimir evoke elemental from Lorwyn Eclipsed, showing the impact that the game’s newest set is having on the success of this unconventional strategy.
Do you enjoy running mill decks, or do you prefer keeping the graveyard and the library as far apart as possible? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord.