[Standard] UMill deck idea

[Xavious]

Recently I've been thinking of throwing together a Blue Mill deck. Problem is, I rarely use blue cards as most decks I've made are aggro in nature. I decided to go against my norm when I realized I had amassed quite a few cards which would be excellent for making a mill deck. Though not a full deck list, here is a list of cards I have that I think I could get to work together.

4 Hedron Crab

4 Divination
4 Ponder
4 Foresee
4 Tome Scour
4 Jace's Erasure
4 Archive Trap
4 Traumatize

1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor (I would add at least one more of this card but I only have one and buying another is way out of my price range)

4 Seer's Sundial

4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Evolving Wilds

The Hedron Crab in conjunction with Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds is what I consider to be the core part to this deck. Hedron Crab's landfall ability has the opponent discard three cards. When used with either Terramorphic Expanse or Evolving Wilds a single crab causes the opponent to discard six cards. Both the Expanse and Wilds are included to help ensure that there will be plenty of times to trigger the landfall ability twice in a single turn.

Jace's Erasure is the second primary part to this deck. Every time I draw a card the opponent must put a card from the library into the graveyard. With this in play that guarantees at least one card per turn. Divination, Ponder, and Foresee would also help with this.

One of the interesting combos is thanks to Seer's Sundial. With it and Jace's Erasure in play, I use Terramorphic Expanse or Evolving Wilds. That triggers the Sundials landfall ability twice so I draw twice. That forces the opponent to discard three cards already since the start of the turn. Assuming at least one hedron crab is in play as well it becomes a total of nine to discard.

Lastly the Tome Scour, Archive Trap, Traumatize, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor all have good effects putting cards from the library into the graveyard.

And there we have it. I also thought of including a few Redirect's or Cancel's in there as an additional defense measure but ultimately decided to leave them out. So what I'm asking for is some advice on how well others think this will work out. Any other blue cards that would work well here? Any cards I should scrap from this list?

[Hexejager]

I just played a similar deck at Friday Night Magic. I ended up going 2-3-1, with my draw coming from an eldrazi legendary matchup. I would have won cept that we ran out of time. Beware of the white leyline, I lost my UW control matchup to it. It has been winning turn 5-8, loosing to fast aggro decks.

I saw a U/W turbofog version with timewalks that looked interesting.

Here is my version - if anyone can give me some pointers on how to survive or tweak the deck I would appriciate it.

Creatures
4 Hedron Crab

Mill
4 Tome Scour
4 Archive Trap
2 Traumatize
2 Call to Mind

Draw
4 Preordain
4 Ponder

Other
2 Trapmaker's Snare (Used to pull out Achive Traps or SB)
2 Twincast (Can Copy Mill or Counter a Counter)
2 Into the Roil (Draw, Bounce Leylines/Creatures)
4 Mana Leak (Stall)

Planeswalker
2 Jace Beleran (Draw/Mill)

Land
4 Scalding Tarn (Speed up Crabs)
4 Misty Rainforest (Speed up Crabs)
3 Halimar Depths
12 Island

Sideboard
2 Trapmaker's Snare
3 Whiplash Trap
2 Telemin Performance
4 Relic of Progentous
4 Spell Piece

[browncoat]

There is a major problem with the mono-blue mill deck: it is almost completely reliant on hedron crab. Game one you may be able to mill them for a decent amount before they kill it but for the next game or two they will know immediately that you are milling them so will target it immediately. This hurts a lot when you consider that a number of tier 1 decks are also running targets that can be crippled by removal.

For mill to work I would recommend adding black for mind funeral, haunting echoes (which is of course an excuse to run traumatize) and black removal. You may even want to run no creatures main deck to make their removal dead. Another card that is quite amusing in mill is keening stone which can chop libraries down to nothing quite quickly.

[Hexejager]

I am loving that new Scars millstone that they previewed, Grindclock. I like how no mana is involved after the initial drop so you can have free mana for protecting it. With proliferate it could get pretty crazy.

[Talltree]

I recently tried to build a mill deck around Hedron Crab as well here is what I have:

4 x Hedron Crab
4 x Primeval Titan (landfall for hedron / fatty)
4 x fauna shaman (find hedron or primeval)
4 x Cultivate (landfall for hedron)
3 x harrow (landfall for hedron)
2 x keening stone (I had more in my first builds...)
4 x ornithopter (free blocker for early game)
3 x Palladium Myr (mana)
2 x traumatize
4 x tome scour
2 x Archive Trap


4 x misty rainforest
4 x terramorphic expanse
8 x forest
8 x island

My thinking with my version of the mill deck was that to be succesful with hedron crab you need to get him out quickly AND you need lots of landfall. This can work really well in a game one with a good draw but game two gets tricky.. this is just the most recent attempt I made at this deck. I tried just about everything I could think of to have it work reliably and never succeeded in having it work consistantly during testing. Was particularly vulnerable to fast poison decks.

[AppleIIGuy]

Why no Deprive? It gets you another land to drop next turn