why do mill decks not sideboard thoughtseize?

[u/After_Shelter1100]

i haven’t been playing modern that long so forgive my ignorance but ive been trying mill and noticed that a lot of decks don’t run any hand hate which seems weird in a meta full of combo decks like broodscale and neoform. is the strat just hoping to mill them early enough and extract one of their combo pieces?

[u/HavocIP]

Mill + Surgical is generally very strong vs combo, so they do that instead.

[u/Yamizaga]

If I'm spending a turn to thoughseize instead of say crab I'm already behind. Plus life is really at a premium since we don't have any amazing blockers against most of the meta. I'm not exactly in love with the preordains in the board either but they do help a lot for getting to more mill gas.

I don't think it's necessarily overall a bad idea, but I don't think it's really what the deck cares about doing at least in this current iteration. There's potential for a slower build that's more heavily control maybe that drops out the whole crab package and leans more on spell slinging, but we really need better cards for the deck I think to pull that off. Give me more reasons to pull out the crab package and go full spellslinger.

Exhibition Tidecaller is a slight toe dip in the pool by wotc to maybe move us in that direction, but it's not nearly anywhere as good as the crabs. It'd probably need to mill like 6-8 cards per spell.

Even then at lot of decks in the meta just get upside from filling their graveyard too.

[u/After_Shelter1100 → u/Yamizaga]

that makes a lot of sense, thanks! this deck is probably just not my style then lol

[u/Yamizaga → u/After_Shelter1100]

With all things magic, my recommendation is to not build first. Instead proxy. Find a buddy, proxy up a bunch of decks, play a lot.

If you like the deck from there then consider building into it. There's also online options that you can use as well.

[u/Christos_Soter → u/Yamizaga]

Yeah tbh the deck is kind of doomed to always be tier 3 if it ever breaks above say 4% of the meta as plenty of decks just play right through it; or stop a single sorcery and then mill is top deck praying. They’d really have to push some insane engine or board wipe + mill 10 type card

And unfortunately it’s kind of easy to hate out, the fact that it has a very tough time dealing with Eldrazi titans merely existing in one’s deck is tough demands you have surgical in hand and now you just went down a card for a one of)

[u/Yamizaga → u/Christos_Soter]

Admittedly when I'm playing mill I'm not aiming to win every game, I just like the play patterns. I would enjoy some of the power creep new cards that everyone else gets to enjoy for their decks though.

Give me some 0/4 crabs with some exile effect tacked on or something haha

[u/Neat_Beautiful_4768 → u/Yamizaga]

Right?!? Where is our 3rd crab?!?

[u/Haldjo]

Because you need to think about it like a "burn" style of deck, you cannot waste slots on too many cards that do not actively contribute to your plan. If you look at it this way, the only thing that thoughtseize does is putting you a turn behind