Lands:
3 Reliquary Tower
17 Island
4 Shelldock Isle
Creatures:
4 Plumeveil
Other Spells:
4 Jace Beleren
4 Howling Mine
4 Sanity Grinding
4 Twincast
4 Boomerang
4 Broken Ambitions
4 Cryptic Command
4 Evacuation
Sideboard:
4 Glen Elendra Archmage
4 Remove Soul
4 Unsummon
3 Negate |
 Turbo
Mill 2009 Standard.
Description of deck by its author
(quoted):
This is not a Sanity Grinding deck. People
will say it is, they will make the misstep of looking at it and thinking
“Sanity Grinding in a deck = the same deck as any other deck with Sanity
Grinding” and they will be wrong. This deck is not only designed
differently than the Sanity Grinding decks on Magic Online, but it
functions differently while playing.
So why is it called “Turbo Mill”? Generally the name
of a deck is not that important, and is often a reflection of the
creator’s, or the person who takes credit for creating the deck’s,
biases. The most egregious deck naming error is trying to insert one’s
own name into the title (something Mike Flores is often erroneously
credited for doing, despite the fact he has rarely if ever actually done
so, but simply had large swaths of the community do so post facto to
distinguish his often unique designs from other traditional builds of
similar decks). I stuck the name “Turbo Mill” on the above list because
it seemed accurate.
Yes it has Sanity Grinding in it, but it’s not a
Grinding deck. It’s a Howling Mine deck, and like any true Howling Mine
deck dating all the way back to Turbo Stasis, the very first, it is
called “Turbo” because the act of playing Mine speeds up the game.
Adding “Mill” to the moniker seemed appropriate because it’s the big way
the deck ends the game. This is important, because simply referring to
it as “Sanity Grinding” is misleading; your game plan depending on deck
against this build is different than the one you have against
traditional Sanity Grinding decks.
All that said, players will call decks what they will,
but in an attempt to be honest, it seemed appropriate to include not
only the “Turbo” nomenclature, but to avoid misrepresenting the deck as
“just” a Sanity Grinding Deck.
The Breakdown: Turbo Mill’s goal is to open on a draw
engine, either Mine or Jace, and disrupt the opponent while spitting out
a land about every turn. Against control oriented decks like Five Color
and the Sanity Grinding mirror, you will dominate the game by sitting
back on your counters, building up a perfectly sculpted hand, and
out-resourcing them on the back of Reliquary Tower. While they mope
around discarding each turn, you’ll simply accrue cards until you’re
ready to pull the trigger. It’s entirely possible you just never will,
instead allowing them to deck themselves in their draw step or with Jace
instead.
Specifically against Five Color you are just
overwhelmingly favored. Their deck is as much as 60%+dead against you
when you take into account the amount of cards they’re playing to beat
creatures, and the high land totals they run. Their attacking threats
are almost entirely irrelevant, and the only spells they truly have that
can disrupt you are a sparse suite of counters (yours are often cheaper
thanks to Twincast), and Esper Charm. Making Turbo Mill discard two
cards of its choice, however, is a losing proposition, particularly as
you accrue a larger and larger hand thanks to Mines, Jace, and Reliquary
Tower. The discard effect just doesn’t matter. So far the only plan
identified from them that’s relevant is that of Banefire, in which they
slowly bleed your life total using Volcanic Fallout, then send a
massive, uncounterable Banefire at your head. Fortunately for you,
Twincast sends it right back at their head for a Turbo Mill win through
damage, so do the best you can to hold your Saviors of Kamigawa reprints
for that exact moment (you’ll probably need two).
The mirror is a bit trickier. It plays a number of
cards that aren’t very functional (Godhead of Awe, Overbeing of Myth)
but make their Sanity Grindings more powerful than yours. While Turbo
Mill’s average Grind is in the area of 10-15 cards, traditional Grinding
decks will be higher. The good news is that you will have a bigger hand
and more resources to combat them with thanks again to Mine, Jace, and
Tower. It is a traditional control mirror where the first player to
flinch is generally the one that will lose. As a final note, Boomerang
is generally only used in a few situations: to knock out Shelldock Isle,
on the second turn after winning the die roll to set them back a land,
or to bounce a Jace that has loyaltied up to nine counters.
Against non-burn oriented aggro decks, meaning Boat
Brew, Black White Tokens, Faeries, and all varieties of Kithkin
(including those that have some amount of burn in them), you stabilize
the early game with Boomerang, Plumeveil, and Broken Ambitions until you
reach a critical mass wherein you essentially lock out their combat step
each turn with your “wraths”: Evacuation and Cryptic Command. Boat Brew,
Monowhite Kithkin, and Red White Kithkin play no disruption save for the
occasional Ajani Vengeant, a minor nuisance provided you have Boomerang
or Cryptic Command to bounce it should it approach its ultimate. Brew
and RW Kithkin have small amounts of burn, but they lack cheap burn that
could allow them to capitalize on the fact they got in for 4-8 early
points. Instead, they try to maneuver a sufficient Banefire or
Siege-Gang Commander, but that path rarely works out and prevents them
from redeploying the creatures you bounce or tap with Evacuation and
Cryptic Command, buying you more time to set up and easing the stress on
your game plan.
Faeries and Black White Tokens run some amount of
disruption elements, with Faeries providing the biggest challenge of the
above listed aggro decks. It can Thoughtseize, Mistbind Clique, and
counterspell its way to victory, but in testing the matchup still felt
like it was about .500. That means it could go either way in real life
when facing down a solid, competitive Faeries player, but you needn’t
fear walking into the battle. Black White Tokens, on the other hand, has
at best Thoughtseize and Tidehollow Sculler for disruption against a
deck whose very nature makes it resistant to handkill simply by way of
drawing massive amounts of cards. It also doesn’t hurt that BW’s
Coercion comes from a pseudo-Mesmeric Fiend that can be undone with a
simple Boomerang.
That leaves Blightning Aggro as your final matchup,
and it is as difficult to win as the Five Color matchup is easy. That’s
the problem inherent in designing a leveraged deck; you trade matchup
percentages against one section of the metagame for a huge gain in
another section. For Turbo Mill, the “unwinnable” matchup is red. In
testing, the only games won came down to winning the die roll, having
Boomerang to slow down their land drops and prevent them from quickly
establishing themselves, then comboing early with Sanity Grinding +
Twincast, followed by enough to deck them the following turn. That often
left them in a position where they were unable to attack enough early to
follow through with damage later in the game, but it is not a chain of
events that occurs often. If your opponent is playing a version of the
deck heavier on creatures or more reliant on expensive creatures instead
of cheap aggressive ones, then the matchup brightens a little. The
fundamental issue is that Turbo Mill’s game plan is to lock out the
combat step, which the majority of beatdown decks in the format are
banking on, while aggressive red decks can switch gears to reaching
through a wall of Evacuations or Twincasts and sending their “attackers”
straight at your head, 2, 3, or 4 points at a time. |
