Welcome back guys. I’ve been getting emails from my lovely readers about their opinions on these combos, even some suggestions! It’s really nice to hear from the community so much. So if you have any ideas, want to discuss deck-building, or just wanna say I’m awesome, feel free to send me an email.

Okay, so let’s start. I’ve been debating for the past few days whether I wanted to focus on one of my favorite styles of play, Mill, and the fun things you can do with that, or do something completely insane. I decided to focus on mill strategies. First, mill is the term for when a player makes an opponent (or themselves, if they want to do that) discard cards straight from the top of their deck. A basic example of this is Tome Scour, which is for one Blue, where an opponent discards the top 5 cards! Cheap and effective.

Let me share one of my favorite secrets with you.

What you need:
-Archive Trap
-Path to Exile

Optional:
-Ravenous Trap

Archive Trap is great when you can activate it without paying the mana cost. Hey, look. Path to Exile. With this card you can remove target creature from the game, and yes, you are included as a potential target. It’s controller may search their library for a basic land card and play it. Normally you would target yourself and a token to get a land, but with Archive Trap, you can target an opponent and say: “Oh, by the way? When you’re done? Top 13 cards to the graveyard.” If you’re really mean and happen to be running 3-color mill like I am, you can throw down a Ravenous Trap in response to Archive Trap’s ability resolving. Not only do those 13 cards get removed, anything else you might have milled during the rest of the game does, too!

Ravenous Trap is especially useful against those opponents playing black with necromancy spells. I once had a game with a card called Valor. Valor says: “as long as Valor is in your graveyard and you control a plains, creatures you control have first strike.” Yeah, so most players would willingly kill that creature for the advantage. Well, they don’t get the advantage if it’s been removed from the game! A card like that, against a player that has it on the field, is a good thing to choose as your Path to Exile target.

This combo works well if you have everything. Trapmaker’s Snare is a good card to have, as it lets you search your library to find a trap card, which you reveal, and put into your hand. It’s a small drawback, but I’ve noticed most players don’t look at revealed cards.

Okay, on to something a little more fun. These aren’t really combos, but I’ve found that they are really strong in a mill-style deck that needs defense. These are creatures I chose because of their defense and abilities.

What they are:
-Hedron Crab
-Gomazoa
-Walls

Oh, Gomazoa… so fun to say and so useful! It may be a 0/3 for 3, but it has flying! A lot of times, people run into problems dealing with creatures with flying, but Gomazoa is a good way to work with it. Not only that, but it’s tap ability: “Put Gomazoa and each creature it’s blocking on top of their owners’ libraries, then those players shuffle their libraries.” There are spells that let you enchant creatures so they can block multiple attackers. This then shuffles those creatures into the deck, meaning it’s unlikely any player will have them back for awhile.

Hedron Crab is my personal favorite in a Mill deck as far as creatures go. Yes, it’s weak, but it’s not useless. Whenever a land comes into play under your control, target player puts the top three cards of their library into their graveyard. Yes, this ability stacks. I once had 3 of these babies on the field and a hand full of lands to play. Imagine this with, say, Terramorphic Expanse. With 4 Hedron Crabs, a Terramorphic Expanse can potentially mill 24 cards, if you tap and sacrifice it as soon as you play it.

The last card I chose is a really big wall with a nice ability. Whenever Wall of Frost blocks a creature, that creature doesn’t untap. So all of those big creatures you’ve been attacked with all game? Yeah, just block with this wall and you get a turn to not worry about it. Walls in general are great defense. There are flying walls, indestructible walls, giant walls, and others. They’re great defense, sure, but you can still pump their attack so they not only absorb damage, they can dish some out, too.