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AVHer

Date Joined: Feb 13, 2011

Posts: 588

Let me know what you think of it. I threw it together right before the duel decks came out but then added a couple cards from it. My issue is finding the right win condition. If I can get venser out by turn 5 and just start blinking my Stonehorn Dignitary

then play one from my hand as I make the emblem I can win a few turns after that but it doesn't always happen. Just let me know! Thanks!

Land
11x Plains

9x Island

1x Celestial Colonnade

2x Seachrome Coast

2x Azorius Chancery

Planeswalkers
3x Venser, the Sojourner

Creatures
1x Admonition Angel

4x Stonehorn Dignitary

2x Man-o-War

3x Pierce Strider

Instants
3x Saving Grasp

2x Momentary Blinkl

Enchantments
4x Oblivion Ring

4x Journey to Nowhere

Copies of Tobias Andrion

so far:
Twenty Three!!

I'm Johnny/Spike. I want to win, but I want to win with fun and awesome deck ideas and/or great card combos.

skeindubh

Date Joined: Dec 12, 2007

Posts: 2,450

Most of your creatures should have enter or leave abilities. Not sure what benefit you expect from some of yours like the mindshrieker or wurmcoil.

Also any venser deck that does not run the sundial of the infinite

is silly. Most of the time when I see such a deck it is because the person making it does not understand how the stack works.

No reason to run two curse of exhaustion. Run one and a tutor instead such as enlightened tutor

.

Your deck is costed to high. You will waste the first 2 turns. The only low mana effect you have is saving grasp and it does nothing for you. If you are going to key that high you might as well run 12 or so come into play tapped lands. Not really advisable though since pumper infect goldfishes on turn 2 if you have no blockers or removal.

You are Red/Blue!
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JBTM

Date Joined: Nov 27, 2011

Posts: 1,714

Mar 31, 2012 -- 10:25AM, skeindubh wrote:
Also any venser deck that does not run the sundial of the infinite is silly. Most of the time when I see such a deck it is because the person making it does not understand how the stack works.

I don't see how the Sundial and Venser would work together. The two make use of different types of abilities, and they don't work with each other unless you're trying to permanently exile your own stuff.

skeindubh

Date Joined: Dec 12, 2007

Posts: 2,450

As I said, people who do not understand how the stack works do not understand it.

Take a simple example such as oblivion ring. If you bounce your oblivion ring with venser an ability gets added to the stack returning the permanent exiled with oblivion ring back to the battlefield.

This is not automatic though, it is just a triggered ability and uses the stack like any other card ability. You could stifle

it for instance and then it would be gone forever. Sundial does exactly the same thing. When sundial resolves it exiles the stack.

The same thing can be done with the dial with the galepowder mage. Wait for the renter trigger to be added to the stack and then end the turn. the same thing can be done with the fiend hunters.

Cut the heels and grasps for sundial of the infinite

, momentary blink

, and curfew

.

Cut the shriekers and wurmcoils for a low mana creature with a good enter the battlefield ability such as sage of epityr

or even spellstutter sprite

if you want to use come into play tapped land.

You are Red/Blue!
Take The Magic Dual Colour Test - Beta today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

You are both rational and emotional. You value creation and discovery, and feel strongly about what I create. At best, you're innovative and intuitive. At worst, you're scattered and unpredictable.

JBTM

Date Joined: Nov 27, 2011

Posts: 1,714

I understand the stack just fine. You get the same effect much more reliably just using bounce spells without the Sundial. And Sundial doesn't work at all when the opponent kills your stuff on his own turn.
Also, ending your turn with Sundial skips past your End of Turn step, leaving whatever Venser exiled out of play until the end of the opponent's turn. That is almost never a good thing.

skeindubh

Date Joined: Dec 12, 2007

Posts: 2,450

A boomerang

is certainly more reliable then waiting on venser BUT IT COSTS A CARD. Using the venser and sundial on the other hand costs nothing(actually gets you closer to an emblem with venser).

Your oblivion ring coming back at the end of your opponents turn is also NEVER A BAD THING. It is actually the perfect time for it to come back rather then the non optimal time you seem to think it is. When oblivion ring comes back into play you just exile whatever they did on their turn and prepare to bounce the ring again in the post combat main phase of your turn with venser.

The sundial does indeed have a minor protective nature in your turn but that is by no means its strength. The reason to use it is so that you can exile come back into play triggers after you bounce something. Or so you can keep the angels with something like the geist of saint traft. Oblivion ring is only the begining of what you can abuse, it is by no means the end. For instance in my venser deck I use the parralaxes to get rid of far more then just one permanent at a time.

This for instance is my venser deck,

2 Venser, the Sojourner

4 dream stalker

2 Fiend Hunter

2 Geist of Saint Traft

1 Sage of Epityr

1 flayer husk

1 wall of omens

1 Leonin Relic-Warder

1 mortarpod

1 stoneforge mystic

1 kitchen finks

1 glen elendra archmage

2 sundial of the infinite

2 oblivion ring

1 everflowing chalice

1 jace, the mind sculptor

sideboard
4 mana leak

4 squadron hawk

2 scroll rack

2 myr retriever

2 sundial of the infinite

1 land tax

You are Red/Blue!
Take The Magic Dual Colour Test - Beta today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

You are both rational and emotional. You value creation and discovery, and feel strongly about what I create. At best, you're innovative and intuitive. At worst, you're scattered and unpredictable.

AVHer

Date Joined: Feb 13, 2011

Posts: 588

I see what you are saying. The reason I have the Wurmcoil Engine

s and the Mindshrieker

s are in there is because without them and a few other cards I have no win condition. Plus mindshrieker is nice late in the game when I have lots of mana sitting around and can hit someone hard with a flyer. I can exile stonehorn off the field and back as many times as I want but without anything to take advantage of it it's pointless.

As I playtested the deck I found I could get it going moderately quickly but it would drag on for turns and turns before I even came close to doing any respectable damage.

I understand the stack, if I didn't I would not have made the deck at all nor would I have put the Saving Grasp

s in to bounce the Fiend Hunter

for a perm exile or the vensers to bounce the Oblivion Ring

s.

I never thought of using living weapons, which would be doable. I'd absolutely use the Geist of Saint Traft

but it's a 25 dollarish card and I have none.

I'll take out the Curse of Exaustion

s. They are nice but don't really follow the synergy of the deck and I feel like I'm wasting 4 mana when I play them.

Maybe I could use allys... hmm... They would lose their counters (if they have them) but all the others would benefit and either mill my opponent, help me gain life, or gain 1/1 counters. Also I thought about putting clones in the deck too.

Copies of Tobias Andrion

so far:
Twenty Three!!

I'm Johnny/Spike. I want to win, but I want to win with fun and awesome deck ideas and/or great card combos.

Elfears

Date Joined: Apr 25, 2008

Posts: 146

I'm not sure you quite understand what Skeindubh is saying, simply bouncing your own fiend hunter

will not result in a permanent exile, as it will still have left the battlefield, returning the creature. What the dial does is end the stack, negating any effects yet to trigger, so for example: You play fiend hunter (exiling a creature), bounce it with venser and then trigger the dial, resulting in the stack instantly ending and thus the exiled creature not returning.

Keino

Date Joined: Aug 27, 2009

Posts: 2,905

You could use sundial, but I prefer to use things like vedalken mastermind

and crystal shard

when dealing with cards like fiend hunter

. I also like using cards like stonecloaker

, dreamstalker

, and whitemane lion

to bounce for the same effect. On top of that, there is dance of many

, which can give you clones of your mastermind, or anything else for that matter, repeatedly. Reality acid

is another way to get around permanents. For extra mana, I am using palladium myr

, only because I can easily save it if someone tries to destroy it, otherwise I would use thran dynamo

or something.

I never got around to trying out stonehorn dignitary

, but I think that is a soft combat lock if you use dance of many

on it every turn, then just attack with them like crazy.

If you use blinking effects with your opponents' stuff, then sundial is the way to go. If you abuse abilities going onto and leaving the stack, then things that bounce are better.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: (If you play oblivion ring

and it resolves, it enters the battlefield, putting its first ability on the stack. In response to that ability going on the stack, you can use vedalken mastermind

to bounce the oblivion ring

back to your hand. Since the first ability never resolved, the second ability goes on the stack, but fizzles. Then, the first ability resolves, exiling whatever you targeted, forever, because the O-ring is no longer on the battlefield to declare what was exiled.)

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Are you making a casual mill deck? Please read. Show

Control is the key of a mill deck. You should free up your mana as much as possible so that you can respond to whatever your opponent is doing. Having some way to remove threats, both real and percieved, is necessary to survival. Real threats are those that are already on the field, and are something a simple unsummon

or doom blade

can remove. Percieved threats are those that aren't on the field, something a simple duress

or counterspell

can deal with. Controlling the board will allow your mill deck to continuously perform, if you use permanent style mill, that is.

One-Shot Mill spells are something you should avoid. You can toss tome scour

s at your opponent until your hand runs out, but that isn't going to be enough to mill them to death. With 1-shot mill spells, like tome scour

, you have to treat them like burn spells. Therefore, the only "good" 1-shot mill spells are sanity grinding

(in the right deck) and mind funeral

. Try to find more permanent styles of milling, like memory erosion

, hedron crab

, and curse of the bloody tome

, so that you don't have to waste your mana each turn doing something that those permanents can do with a single mana/turn investment. Keeping your mana open allows you to respond with control elements.

Traumatize

Rant. Traumatize is a terrible card for a multitude of reasons. First, it costs 5 to cast, which is a large investment for a mill deck. Milling half a library sounds neat, but if you do the math, it really isn't that much. An average 60 card deck starts with drawing 7 cards. Then, barring any draw spells on their end, or ramp on yours, 5 turns will go by, where they draw 5 more cards, leaving 48 in the deck. Unless they had a deck with more than 60 cards, or you ramped it out, the most you'll ever mill with a single Traumatize on turn 5 is 24 cards. That's not too shabby, but hang on, there's more! If they drew any additional cards or if they were milled before turn 5, that number will be much lower. In addition, any more Traumatize's you draw will only mill less and less as the game goes on...which is the point of a mill deck. My whole point on Traumatize is the it is NOT worth the 5 mana investment, not even with haunting echoes

. You can mill more than 24 before turn 5...which you can then cast the echoes.

If you look at a mill deck like a burn deck, you'll notice that it takes longer to win with mill than with burn. For example, lightning bolt

costs 1 and does 3 out of the 20 damage needed to win (barring any lifegain or damage prevention). For mill, that same investment of 1 would have to mill 9 cards out of an average 60 card deck to be the equivilent of lightning bolt

. The problem is that there is no mill card that can do that...except hedron crab

, over a period of time. The initial investment of 1 will pay off in 3 more land drops to make the crab equal to a bolt. However, the crab nets you more mill beyond those 3 land drops, making it better as the game draws on. Other cards, like curse of the bloody tome

, are excellent ways of milling an opponent because the initial investment of

is all you have to pay in order to put your opponent on a clock. All you have to do is stay alive, which is the true goal of a mill strategy.

There are other ideas for mill decks that are specific to certain types of strategies. Combo mill decks can mill an entire player's library out from under them. Secondary mill strategies are usually tied to another strategy, like drowner of secrets

in a merfolk deck, or halimar excavator

in an ally deck. Milling can be done in certain decks that are able to ramp out enough mana to make use of the higher costing mill spells, like using 16 x post

to pay for X on sands of delirium

or for ambassador laquatus

. Multiplayer mill decks are even tougher to build, but can be done. Being a slower environment[/c], it is easier to ramp in multiplayer, allowing for big X spells, like mind grind

, to be useful. Consuming aberration

is another star player. The more straightforward strategy is to use mesmeric orb

and dreamborn muse

while being the only deck at the table that can deal with it

. There are always new strategies coming out with each new set, so check gatherer for any new mill cards that you find to be the most fun for you!

Now you can say that you haven't fallen into the trap that most new players fall into when they build their first mill deck!

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