Tonight was not fun in any way. In fact, Jon wiped the floor with me to the point of frustration for three straight games of Magic. However, I should point out that he barely squeaked by on a couple of those victories. I still have faith in the deck, but let’s take a look at what the primary cards are that I’m using to capture that elusive win.
Traumatize
It’s a dick card to be sure, forcing your opponent to discard half of their library. Of course, while it is fun to play, it can certainly backfire. Such was almost the case tonight as I hadn’t anticipated that Jon would have a card in his deck that dealt 1 damage to me every time a card went into his graveyard. Which, yes, that means after the first 25 card Traumatize I would have effectively murdered myself. Thankfully that wasn’t the case though.
Of course, with only 4 allowable instances of any one card in a deck (mostly) I couldn’t solely rely on Traumatize to do the job, so I also paired it up with…
Haunting Echoes
Let’s forget for a moment that this also does its mill deed well by bleeding your opponent of even more cards and also realize that if you’re going against a deck with abilities to return cards from the graveyard, this will pretty much put a huge dent in that strategy in a hurry. I was fortunate enough to pull this combo twice last night and while I didn’t win, it was still a lot of fun watching Jon frustratedly counting his cards for the traumatize and then revealing all of his library to me while I plucked cards out of existence.
Defensively, a lot of the rest of my deck revolved around Unsummons, Remove Souls, and Cancels for defense and generally to keep the board clear while I kept trying to draw out my two superstars up there. However, I did through in a few of this nasty little bugger as well…
Nemesis of Reason
Sadly, beastly as he is I didn’t get the chance to pull him out.
So after all that planning I didn’t land a single victory, but hey, that’s what Magic is- iteratively finding what combinations of cards work best and hoping that you get lucky on the draw. One of the glaring weaknesses I found in this particular deck was that I didn’t have quite enough creatures thrown in to deal with his early creatures that kept pinging me while I waited to ramp up my mana. I could have unsummoned them most of the time in my opening hand, but it’d be risky to waste it-especially considering Jon’s affinity for late game fatties.
In the end it was fun though and I loved seeing how the deck played out. With which mill deck combos have you found success?
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