Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are talking about Phenax, God of Deception!

Phenax is a five mana 4/7 with indestructible with as long as your devotion to blue and black is less than seven Phenax isn’t a creature and creatures you control have tap and mill a player X times where X is the toughness of the creature.

While blue and black are the mill colors, having it be less actively played and more of having your creatures do the work is an interesting challenge, especially if it is better to have creatures with high toughness.

It also just so happens that the creature that has the highest toughness that is legal in Commander is also a creature in our colors.

Charix is a creature with a neat gimmick involving power and toughness switching which while fine and dandy, isn’t why we are considering them in the deck.

Charix has the highest toughness out of all Commander legal creatures and is our best way to quickly mill out our opponents, and at the floor of no additional turns or additional draws, then we can mill a player out with just Charix in five turns.

This is not the most efficient way, but it sets us on the right path. Of course we will have a suite of creatures with defender, many of which happen to be blue, and mill our opponents bit by bit and just wreck them that way.

We should also have a way to accrue value in having our opponents milling a bunch of cards.

With this deck you should be milling your opponents a lot, which means that anything that cares about the number of cards in all graveyards or even just your opponents graveyards are high up on the list.

Drown in the Loch can effectively be a Counterspell if your opponent have enough cards in the graveyard, as well a flexible removal spell.

Consuming Aberration is a massive beat stick that has power and toughness equal to the cards in your opponents’ graveyards and when you cast a spell it mills your opponents even more.

There are also the suite of Lhurgoyf or Lhurgoyf-like creatures that gain benefits from card types in either all graveyards or your graveyard if you don’t mind a bit of self milling.

Then comes to how we win games.

Mill generally has a hard time winning games, and Phenax does make that a bit easier, but we still need a way to guarantee that we can mill an opponent to win.

While Eldritch Pact can be used to help you draw what you need, if an opponent is on the last few cards in their deck, this can be used as a way to help close out the game.

Another thing to note that I didn’t mention earlier is that Persistent Petitioners is a viable option for a Phenax mill deck. Since you can have any number of Petitioners in the deck, you can circumvent the need for having to pay a mana to mill one card to freely mill three cards.

This can get pricey since a lot of times the cards with the “any number” stipulation can run a high price, even though as of writing this Persistent Petitioners is running under a dollar, you never know when that price can spike.

Mill in Commander is one of the harder win conditions to achieve, especially since as the game goes on your opponents can and most likely will have cards in their deck that have graveyard benefits or can recur themselves from the graveyard.

You can pack some graveyard hate, but you’ll need to strategically use them since your deck also relies on having cards in your opponents graveyard.

It’s a tough deck to pilot that people will probably not like you for, but it does have potential.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual