#turbofog

need more reason for snow topped peaks in your red centered turbofog deck?

There are few things more fun in Magic than milling an opponent out. There’s just something so satisfying about it. This deck is sitting at ~55$, with around 30$ of that being the mana base. Replace the lands with common tap duals, put in something over the Treasure Maps, and you have a 15$ TurboFog Mill list.

FOG

3 Commencement of Festivities  4 Haze of Pollen  4 Root Snare 

MILL

3 Patient Rebuilding 3 Psychic Corrosion 3 Fraying Sanity

GLUE

3 Fumigate 4 Cast Out  3 Glimmer of Genius 2 Hieroglyphic Illumination 3 Opt 2 Treasure Map

LAND

2 Forest 2 Glacial Fortress 3 Hinterland Harbor 3 Ipnu Rivulet 2 Irrigated Farmland 4 Island 2 Memorial to Genius 1 Plains 2 Scattered Groves 2 Sunpetal Grove

One thing I found really fun about brewing this list is that it remains a work in progress that I fully intend to continue working on and tuning. Normally when building budget decks, you tend to hit the problem of a paywall and optimize as much as you can within that wall without much stylistic wiggle room. You find the best cards to do what needs to be done in budget, and run them. Where this deck of course has that problem too wanting cards like Teferi, Search, and Settle, there is just so many on-budget cards that can be moved around to change the style of play. Sometime in the next week I will be building this deck on MTGO to either stream or record a Standard League of it in action because I love it.

Here is all of the precious babies that will aid us in tilting creature decks. Haze of Pollen is strictly the best, as even in a dead matchup it will remain a cycler. We run 11 copies of Fog effects total, and both getting to them when we need them and saving them are important. Against creature decks like Big Green whose only gameplan is to turn creatures sideways and lack direct damage, it is going to be extremely annoying for them to get there. Against them, we can almost always afford to take any amount of damage we need as long as we remain alive. Against R/B you should be more careful to keep your life threshold a little higher, as we only have so many ways to interact with Chandra and Hazoret pinging us for 2 every turn. Against control, we will have 10 dead cards in 7 fogs(Haze isn’t dead) and 3 fumigates, but they also have a comparable amount of dead cards against a deck with absolutely no creatures. 

Fraying Sanity can be both our worst and best Mill Enchantment. When the wheels start turning, doubling all of our milling is going to clock them out quickly. It just does little by itself. Psychic Corrosion comes down early and starts doing work immediately pecking away at their library. Paired with draw spells and cycling, it gets the work started. Patient Rebuilding was probably the main card that made me want to build the deck. It will almost always draw you a card, and paired with Psychic Corrosion and/or Fraying Sanity the steady card draw and milling should put you in a solid position to wrap up a game. You often won’t be able to play Rebuilding on curve because you’ll need to be wrathing or fogging, but once you stabilize it will bring the pain and refill your hand.

The answers in the deck have moved around. Initially it played several counterspells like Essence Scatter mainboard, but I found I’d almost always rather have a fog than them. Cast Out became a playset as it will have almost no bad matchups, and will allow us to interact with problematic walkers and creatures who can live through wraths. One thing that is very lucky for us about the meta is that this deck would be playing Settle the Wreckage if it could afford them and it looks like it would play them, so people will likely be forced to play around it anyways as almost all of our spells are instant speed. This means we should often be benefiting from a card we can’t even run. :D 

As far as the sideboard goes, I would dedicate most of it to U/W Control as it is possibly our worst matchup with the most dead cards and our hardest path to victory as they are fine with sitting around not doing anything just like we are but they have Teferi and shit. A full playset of Negates, Jace’s Defeats, and maybe even Syncopates should be fantastic. Turn into a permission deck instead of a fog deck. R/B is also the most popular deck, so some number of cards for that matchup is probably a good idea. Synctopate can prolly come in to give us a few more options for Chandra and Hazoret.