Mill is a wonderful strategy with a wealth of exciting and excellent cards to choose from. There are so many fun things to mess around with when building a mill deck, no matter what format you’re in, that picking something dull but efficient almost feels like a copout.
Despite that, sometimes you have to acknowledge that a card is good, cheap, easy to play, but also absurdly boring. It’s an annoying compromise to have to make, but if you’re in a position where the best cards simply cost too much, and that’s definitely the case a lot of the time in MTG, then picking the boring but affordable choice is going to do you a lot of good.
There are so many of them
Advisors aren’t the most exciting creature type, and a two-mana 1/3 isn’t the most exciting array of stats, but this blue creature will absolutely ruin any opponents that can’t deal with it. Persistent Petitioners is a creature that allows you to pay one mana and tap it to have a player mill the top card of their library. More importantly though, it reads, “Tap four untapped Advisors you control: Target player mills twelve cards. A deck can have any number of cards named Persistent Petitioners.”
As soon as you’ve got four of these things out you can take twelve cards from an opponent every turn. That may sound slow, but assuming you’ve also got a few one mana creatures like Ruin Crab, which mills whenever you play a land, and maybe a couple of copies of Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, then you can easily take someone out by turn six or so with this strategy.
Turn one, Ruin Crab, turn two, Persistent Petitioners, turn three, you can play one more advisor and another crab, and then turn four you get two more Petitioners. By this point, you’ll have milled nine cards with the first crab, three with the second, and you can then do another twelve with the four petitioners. That’s twenty-four cards, and that’s assuming you don’t have any copies of Archive Trap or fetch lands. Honestly, you can crush people with this deck, and it’s far more affordable than most.
