Psychic Corrosion: Standard Dimir Mindskinner

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Before We Start

For Magic players, milling the opponent’s library dry is a cool and challenging way to win, so The Mindskinner, released in Duskmourn: House of Horror, is especially tempting. But how to build a reasonable deck in Standard is a vexing problem. This time, let’s take on the challenge of a Standard mill deck using The Mindskinner!

Card Analysis

Legendary Enchantment Creature - Nightmare
The Mindskinner can’t be blocked.
If a source you control would deal damage to an opponent, prevent that damage and each opponent mills that many cards.

At first glance, The Mindskinner is a creature that makes the opponent mill ten cards when it connects. An outrageous three-mana 10/1 that can’t be blocked lets it reliably mill the opponent’s library… That view is broadly correct, but there are two things to note:

1. It’s an enchantment.
2. All damage you deal to the opponent is turned into milling.

The biggest significance of the enchantment type in Standard is that it can interact with Duskmourn’s eerie ability. Turning damage into milling is a double-edged effect: on one hand, it can mill the opponent without attacking, and on the other, it blocks your triggered abilities that trigger on dealing damage, hindering your other creatures from working. And the opponent only needs a single removal spell to deal with it and stop you from attacking the library, which means your attack target is very easily disrupted, and if you’re not careful it may end up like you have to hit two life totals, life plus library. So when building a The Mindskinner deck, we need to consider the eerie triggers and the conditions for avoiding interference with Mindskinner’s static ability. The decklist is as follows:

Decklist

Strictly speaking, this deck is less an eerie deck than a crime deck. The core combo is Scrabbling Skullcrab and Intimidation Campaign. When Intimidation Campaign enters, it drains the opponent for one life and draws a card, and at the same time it triggers Scrabbling Skullcrab to make the target player mill two cards. Because the crime condition is met, Intimidation Campaign goes straight back to your hand. As long as you have mana, you can keep draining, drawing cards, and milling the opponent’s library.

To pair with Scrabbling Skullcrab’s eerie trigger, we need to add more enchantments. Besides the theme card The Mindskinner and the card-draw engine Intimidation Campaign, we also add Hopeless Nightmare, Nowhere to Run, Fear of Impostors, and Sugar Coat to replace traditional removal or counterspells, plus two Fear of Isolation to reclaim permanents for reuse.

Of course, relying only on enchantment removal is certainly not strong enough for Dimir, so we still need some normal instant and sorcery removal. Here I chose Go for the Throat, Anoint with Affliction, and Deadly Cover-Up. The first two are common instant-speed removal, while the latter is the strongest black sweeper in current Standard, and after collecting evidence it can also Surgically Extract a card from the opponent’s graveyard, pulling out the opponent’s winning piece and milling a few more cards along the way.

Since this is a mill deck, Jace, the Perfected Mind is certainly an indispensable partner, especially since every one of his abilities triggers a crime, so when Scrabbling Skullcrab is absent you can still happily run Intimidation Campaign.

Finally we add one five-mana black Praetor, Sheoldred, the True Scriptures. On entering she can remove one of the opponent’s nontoken creatures or planeswalkers, helping us survive, and her transform condition is very easy to meet in a mill deck. The transformed The True Scriptures is quite powerful, with removal, discard, mill, and reanimating every creature in the graveyards, so it would be a pity not to play it.

For utility lands, as usual I put in Valgavoth’s Lair, which can trigger eerie, plus the manland Restless Reef, which triggers crimes and compresses the opponent’s library, and the land-destruction land Demolition Field.

Gameplay Demo

The two games this time are a short game against aggro and a long game against Domain. Simply put, the deck’s strategy is to attack the opponent’s library on four fronts with Scrabbling Skullcrab, The Mindskinner, Jace, the Perfected Mind, and Restless Reef, while the other spells actively drain the opponent’s resources like a control deck, so that we and our key cards survive and keep dealing output. Basically only The Mindskinner and Restless Reef are used to attack, so there’s no need to worry about its static ability hindering other creatures. In long games, we use Intimidation Campaign to farm resources repeatedly and grind the opponent out step by step with the resource advantage.

Note: The Nashi, Searcher in the Dark drawn in the Domain game was later replaced by Fear of Isolation. When it was time to re-record, I happened to hit the MTGA ladder reset and kept running into aggro, so I couldn’t record a long game, hence I used the pre-modification version as the example.

Conclusion

Besides the four lines of attack mentioned above, this deck also has a fifth way to win, shooting the opponent directly. As in the picture above, by repeatedly hitting the opponent’s face with Hopeless Nightmare and Intimidation Campaign, I quietly blew the opponent up. Since both cards cause life loss directly, they don’t interfere with The Mindskinner, adding an extra layer of fun. Readers who like milling are welcome to take a look.