I know somebody who used to have a Sanity
Grinding deck. It felt a lot more like an
old-school combo deck, where not much happens
for a while and then all of a sudden you put
your entire library in your graveyard, as
compared to some of the more recent milling
decks that play defensively in the manner of a
control deck and deplete your library gradually.
While the Sanity Grinding method is not as
consistent or reliable, it does have the
advantage of being in blue, which tends to be
strong as a mono-colored deck in most older
formats and has access to any number of ways to
manipulate the order of its library.
Today's card of the day is Sanity Grinding
which is a three mana Blue sorcery that mills
cards from an opponent equal to the Blue mana
symbols in the casting costs of the ten top
cards of your library. This is best in a
mono-Blue deck which eliminates many Blue/Black
cards often seen in milling builds, though it
still leaves hybrid mana as an option.
Overall this is a very specialized card that in
the right deck and potentially supported by
library stacking effects can be a huge source of
destruction in one play and is a viable
alternative to the more common Dimir design.
At first glance, mill players get giddy looking
at this card. Then really, at average, you'd
probably wind up milling about 5 cards in
mono-blue. Not terrible, but then you realize
tome scour does a much more consistent job for
much cheaper. In a competitive game of magic,
you don't want to leave victory up to chance, so
go for a sure thing, rather than something like
this, which is best left to casual. Not terrible
for EDH, though.
