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I was just wondering if any rules lawyers could help me out, it's to do with multi blocking.

If I have something big, say a 5/5 ceature that I am attacking with, and my opponent who has lots of small creatures declares everything blocking, how is the damage worked out?

I had an opponent a little while back declare like 6 merfolk blocking, doing enough damage to destroy my attacker, but split the damage so that everything that had toughness 2 took 1 damage and nothing of his died. was this correct?

Also I was thinking of building a self milling zombie deck that works by using spells out of the graveyard, so targeting myself for mill spells to give myself a large choice of what to bring back, then using things like Disentomb, Gravedigger, spells with flashback and Rooftop Storm so i can bring back zombies to drop them straight onto the battlefield. Can this work? Any cards i might want to look out for in this type of deck?

Thanks for your help!

Altayre wrote:I had an opponent a little while back declare like 6 merfolk blocking, doing enough damage to destroy my attacker, but split the damage so that everything that had toughness 2 took 1 damage and nothing of his died. was this correct?

No, the attacker gets to assign the damage and you have to kill one thing before carrying damage to the next. So if a 5/5 is blocked by three 2/2s then the 5/5 would die and two of the 2/2s would die and the third would take 1 damage. Although the creature has survived it carries the damage until the end of the turn. If you then had some spell or ability that could deal just 1 damage to a creature you could finish it off.

Also I was thinking of building a self milling zombie deck that works by using spells out of the graveyard, so targeting myself for mill spells to give myself a large choice of what to bring back, then using things like Disentomb, Gravedigger, spells with flashback and Rooftop Storm so i can bring back zombies to drop them straight onto the battlefield. Can this work? Any cards i might want to look out for in this type of deck?

Yes there are many deck designs built around this. Many mill cards say 'target player' which can be yourself as much as the opponent. Useful cards for milling are 'Thought Scour' which lets you draw an extra card and mill two into your graveyard and complements things like 'Ponder' well when trying to draw the cards you need in the early game. 'Deranged Assistant' allows you to mill a card and add 1 mana, so gives you mana ramp in blue. Creatures like Screeching mill when they come into play so are ideal too.

Look at the various Skaab Zombies that either mill cards or require you to exile stuff from your graveyard to play, these require a mill deck to work well but are powerful well costed zombies. If you can swap or buy them, the Gravecrawler is perfect for any zombie deck as you can keep buying him back from the graveyard. Also if you are playing blue-black, the zombie Diregraf Captain makes all your zombies much more powerful. Rooftop Storm sounds great, but is rather expensive, you're not likely to actually get the chance to play it often and get any use from it IMO.

If you're really going to self mill in a big way, you could always look at Laboratory Maniac...

Thank you for all those suggestions! Laboratory maniac is my favorite thing about the deck and one of the things that pushed me towards doing the theme!

If you don't mind, there were a couple of other cards and tricks i have been thinking of, but i think i'm splitting the deck between too many things. If i give a little list, could you possibly help with what sounds more useful?

Undead Alchemist/cellar door/trepanation blade- it seems like a fun trick but would it be too much of a stretch to be self-milling and trying to take out my opponents library at the same time?

Tome scour+call to mind/Unburial rights+Runic repetition- is it too much to be trying to focus on reusing old spells? one of my main worries is the deck will mill away all useful sorceries/instants?

Howard A Treesong wrote:No, the attacker gets to assign the damage and you have to kill one thing before carrying damage to the next.

Technically, it's the creature doing the damage that gets to assign it. So, if you have one of those creatures that can block more than 1 creature (like Two-Headed Giant of Foriys), the blocking creature gets to assign the damage.


And, of course, all of this changes is some of the creatures have Banding. But, fortunately, banding hasn't appeared in ~15 years, so it shouldn't be a problem. Just know that if you see a card with Banding, prepare to be confused.

The damage assignment is only legal if his creatures had "Banding" really old mechanic that let you split your own dmg.

Otherwise the person blocking does not get a choice as to how the damage will be split.

Banding was great. I had a war elephant/moorish cavalry deck that kicked.

Undead Alchemist works well in a deck focused on milling your opponent. His effect works however you mill, so even if you mill your opponent using Thought Scour or something, you can still get zombies. I wouldn't bother with Cellar Door, the Trephanation Blade is good but probably too slow to be effective. The constructed game is very fast and there are so many ways to mill your opponent to benefit from Undead Alchemist that it's probably not worth including.

I wouldn't attempt to mill yourself and your opponent at the same time, to be honest I thin you'll struggle to mill a 60 card deck effectively. Perhaps you could look at adapting the 'fog deck' by going green-blue. Pack lots of stuff in to prevent your opponent attacking and doing damage for turn after turn whilst milling them.

Dream Twist seems a decent way to mill, it's very cheap and they have flashback. I had a game in draft where I lost nearly 20 cards in 3 turns because of these and a few other things that the person had picked up when drafting. Shriekgeist and Stern Mentor are both creatures that double up for milling as well.

I'm dabbling with a mill deck but have no idea how it will actually work, if at all. It has no creatures and has many counter spells. Jace's Erasure mills your opponent every time you draw a card, so I have a deck based on both milling and card draw. Reforge the Soul has a lot of potential with Jace's Erasure, both players draw 7 cards, but if you have one or two Jace's Erasure on the table you can mill them away for a load of cards as a result. Then there's Increasing Confusion, where you can mill for as much as you can generate mana, this is doubled with flashback. And if you can cast Increasing Vengeance the amount you can mill can become ridiculous.

My preference is for fast decks, which is why I don't usually go for expensive cards. Things like Rooftop Storm are far to slow unless you have mana ramp, and many artifacts take too long to equip and use, I'd rather drop more creatures that boost each other. I currently play red-white humans which are so fast that milling is unlikely to ever be an issue, a lot of competitive decks are similar in approach which may be why offensive milling is not something I've seen much of.

Mill decks in constructed play are VERY difficult to pull off. You're basically using a ton of cards that are totally worthless (apart from your win condition). This means you have inherent card disadvantage, and it only gets worse as the game goes on.

Cards that want to win through traditional, damage-based means, get the bonus of being able to go for the win (by damaging you) as well as stopping what you're trying to do (by killing what you're playing). They can play both an offensive and defensive roll, whereas your cards will only be able to be used offensively. If you find yourself in a bad corner, your Archive Trap can't act as a chump blocker.

You also have the serious liability that if you have a really, really solid mill deck, you'll modify the local metagame and people will throw one or two of those "shuffle graveyard into library" cards into their board that are auto-win against you.

Because of all that, you can't really have a "half" mill deck. It's all or nothing. Dedicate yourself to the mill, or stay away entirely.

So, if you want to run a serious mill deck, you have to do one of the following:

1) Be able to mill ~50 cards within 5 turns. This is obviously going to be difficult, but it's what you'll need against agro decks. If you can pull this off, you don't really need to worry about anything other than milling.
2) Run a combo life boost deck that gets you at least 40 life per turn. With some board sweepers, you should be able to keep your opponent's damage per turn below that, so keep your life total out of reach while you slowly mill them.
3) Have enough control that you can shut down a deck for 20-30 turns. You need something like Stasis or Top-Counterbalance to pull this off. Your entire deck will be focused on control, with just a bit of milling to make it so you don't need to stall too long.