MTG Salvation

It's a control deck, trying to resolve 3~4 Archive Traps as early as possible (by Trapmaker's Snare, Snapcaster Mage, Mission Briefing).
There's also an Azorius version.
Looking for suggestions and evaluations. Thanks.

I was trying to do a mill deck as well. Someone who I play with was thinking of doing it too, and gave me some ideas to get it done.

The deck is, without sideboard for the moment:



It's basically a mono-blue deck, with just a tiny splash to black for those creature based decks for Crypt incursion. Even this card works fine against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.

Sanity Grinding in this deck, can be really powerful, almost like an Archive Trap if we are lucky and get cards with blue mana symbols.

I will run 4 Mission Briefing, just because we are going to play almost all of the cards in our graveyard to mill the opponent. And as I said before, for tron decks that runs emrakuls, even if you get rid of them exiling it, you will have to mill your opponent again since it will shuffle the graveyard to library.

Also, instead of Remand, Deprive would work better in our deck, since we can play lands and get crabs ability to trigger once more on the next turn, or if we didn't played a land yet. Also, with Sanity Grinding would help it with mana symbols.

For sideboard I was thinking on adding more creatures/removal.

• Delver of Secrets
  
• Jace's Phantasm
  
• Thing in the Ice
  
• Fatal Push
  
• Damnation
  

Mill requires stringent mana efficiency in order to compete competitively or with most of the decks you’ll see at your fnm. Pushing more than 4 colorless lands will cause you to mulligan more and will make playing your mana efficiently that much harder. Mission Briefing is a great card in mill but it puts certain demands on your mana base. However, field of ruin and ghost quarter are a few of the ways to turn on Archice Trap. The answer here is the sweet spot number of how many colorless lands can you cram in without misteps. Some food for thought. Happy brewing!

Totally true. I remember when I was playing slivers with just 2 copies of Reflecting Pool, and sometimes I was drawing just one land and it was that one, or both of it.

In this case, running 4 Field of Ruins can help fix that by filtering your deck and turn on Archive Trap.

Also, I was talking with a friend, and I think we both reached that Logic Knot it's better, because of not returning lands to your hand, that can delay a precious cryptic. It can help with crab, but maybe it's not that worth it.

I’m personally not a fan of Deprive, especially in a Sanity Grinding deck. The goal in this type of deck is to include high cmc spells with the gameplan of casting them at alternate costs. However you should definitely still build your deck with the plan b of being able to hard cast these spells because in reality a lot of games will reach that point. Deprive sets you back on this gameplan and in my opinion this heavily outweighs making a land drop every turn for a hedron crab that may or may not be on the battlefield.

I agree that Logic Knot is better here, but it’s much much weaker without Mesmeric Orb stocking your yard.

Just from my own experience brewing around Sanity Grinding, I found card filtering to be very important. Being able to scry a few lands away before casting a Sanity Grinding made it hit that much harder. Card filtering will also help set up your miracle spells when they’re not functioning as mere Sanity Grinding ammo.

I'm putting together the list from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmb2KGk7xCA

That's the video my friend shown me, and I found it really interesting.

Alright, took this for a spin today although I've made some changes. Notably I've added 4 fetches to increase potency of Hedron Crab, swapped Logic Knots for Mana Leaks and swapped two Sanity Grinding's for two copies of Fraying Sanity. As far as sideboard goes, I took out Delvers and put in two copies of Surgical Extraction and Pithing Needles.



Round 1: Bushwacker Zoo with Pelt Collectors - Lost 0-2
Round 2: UR Arclight Phoenix - Won 2-1
Round 3: Dredge - Lost 0-2
Round 4: Dredge - Lost 0-2

Creeping Chill is really annoying and so are Phoenixes which means I'll be running Surgical Extractions in mainboard next week. With Cryptic Command costing 4 mana and Devastation Tide being 5, it feels like there is something missing till you get there. Relying on Miracle'd Tide is too iffy. Perhaps some copies of Echoing Truth?