Mono Blue Mill has been my go-to Standard deck for the past month on stream. It has fantastic passive mill effects with Teferi's Tutelage and Ruin Crab, and we're able to control the board with bounce spells and counter magic. We covered this Standard list that uses only common and uncommons in another article, but today we're going all the way down to just commons in Pauper. Mono Blue Mill was something I tried putting together around a year ago but I couldn't quite get it there. Well now after having some experience with the archetype in another format, I think I have finally put together a list that has what it takes to mill your opponents out in the Pauper format.
Passive Mill
I believe the foundation of any good mill deck should be its ability to mill passively. Having to dedicate fewer slots for strictly milling cards like Tome Scour allows you to make room for more cards that actually allow you to interact with what the opponent is doing. Jace's Erasure is milling cards whenever we draw cards, but it isn't enough to mill one for each card we draw. We would have to draw most of our deck if our opponent isn't playing a self mill strategy to help us out. To help us we have Iceberg Cancrix which becomes our Pauper Ruin Crab if we play Snow Lands, and they trigger themselves in multiples since it is a Snow permanent. Four toughness allows us to block early aggression as we mill by hitting our land drops. Curse of the Bloody Tome is another consideration for the deck as it mills passively and curves well after any of these two drops. I'm choosing to focus more on the card drawing aspect to fuel Jace's Erasure and exploiting the triggers with Iceberg Cancrix. Card Draw
To draw through our deck to trigger Jace's Erasure, the deck has plenty of draw power. We have cantrip staples in Ponder and Preordain to help smooth out our draws. Accumulated Knowledge scales beautifully throughout the game was we draw more cards for each copy of Accumulated Knowledge in all graveyards, meaning we get bonus draws if the opponent also has copies in their graveyard. Tragic Lesson is a card I have been in love with ever since it was printed back in Hour of Devastation, and it works well with Iceberg Cancrix as we can bounce a Snow-Covered Island to get another trigger. Bouncing a Lonely Sandbar is another good play as we can cycle it for another card. Another way for us to draw cards is the one copy of Fathom Seer. With this we can pay three to play it facedown as a morph creature and then immediately flip it we're willing to bounce two lands back to our hand. This is an amazing late-game draw as we get to draw two cards which will trigger Jace's Erasure and if the two lands we bounce are a Snow-Covered Island and a Lonely Sandbar then we can replay the Island to mill two with our crab and then cycle the Sandbar for another trigger on the Erasure.
Control
For controlling the board we have Counterspell to make sure nothing resolves and we have Vapor Snag to bounce anything that slips through the cracks. Controlling the board can also mean blocking and this deck has ways of putting up blockers. Jace's Phantasm is essentially a one-mana 5/5 flier that can block Delvers and trade with Gurmag Angler. We also have Merfolk Secretkeeper that mills four cards and then can come back from its adventure as a one-mana 0/4 to block early creatures. This isn't even counting Iceberg Cancrix and Fathom Seer which also have high toughness. Sideboard
For the sideboard, we have three copies of Blue Elemental Blast for hate against red decks. Three copies of Relic of Progenitus is a must against graveyard decks as we'll be enabling a lot of their strategy for them. Dispel and Deprive are our extra counterspells against the Dimir and Izzet decks. Deprive works very well with our main deck and could be slotted in there. Winds of Rebuke and Echoing Truth give us some different options for more bounce spells and we have Fall from Favor for grinding matchups where we can control the Monarch token more easily. To finish off we have another Fathom Seer which could also end up making the main deck and a pair of Stormbound Geist to deal with Delver in combat.
Mono Blue Mill has become one of my favorite archetypes across formats and I'm excited to bring this list to you for Pauper. I hope you enjoyed the list and if you did then make sure to check out our YouTube channel for deck tech videos. Also, check us out on Twitch where we stream Magic Arena every Monday. We'd also love for you to join our Discord so we can talk about brews and even spoilers for Kaldheim. Thanks so much for reading and for joining the Fellowship!
