Welcome back to Legends Legends, our weekly column where I steward us on a journey back to 1994 and Magic's infancy, to a time of heroes and monsters, when the Legends of Yore were just barely making names for themselves.
This week's Legend is the Azorius Advisor Tobias Andrion, and his council of Advisors are here to whisper in the ears of your foes and guide them down a destructive path.
Tobias's creature type and colors make him ideal for a mill deck with the famous Persistent Petitioners as the main focus. How many Petitioners should we run in our main deck? And how many other mill effects will we need to finish out the game? Let's find out!
General Thoughts
Tobias Andrion is a 4/4 Azorius Advisor that costs five mana to cast. And that's it. He doesn't do much else, but he does have a sizable chunk of flavor text. Because of the general lack of information about Tobias, we don't even know when exactly he was the military administrator of Sheoltun, or even if he participated in the Sheoltun Occupation (another conflict we know barely anything about). What we do know is he was slain in a battle with some pirates (who knows which ones?), and most sources say the death blow was dealt by magical lightning.
For our purposes, Tobias Andrion will administer an army of legislators, Advisors, viziers, and bureaucrats to defeat our opponents with a truly obscene amount of mill.
Thrumming Petition
The biggest chunk of our deck is consumed by our 26 Persistent Petitioners. Our main problem when brewing this Commander deck is determining exactly how many Petitioners we need to get an optimal number on the field. Luckily, someone's done the math with Shadowborn Apostles, and we can extrapolate the concept and apply it to our mill deck.
Shadowborn Apostle decks need six copies on the field to activate their ability and tutor up a nasty Demon. Our Petitioners only need four to start milling 12 cards at a time, but we'll realistically want to hit eight or twelve to mill each of our opponents at once. Like any good Relentless Rats lookalike deck, we'll use Thrumming Stone to sneak as many of them into play as possible.
I'll spare you the math, but my research indicates 26 should be enough to start hitting Persistent Petitioners consistently. Basically, we just need to hit one more Petitioner for each Petitioner we cast while Thrumming Stone is on the field. 26 gives us just enough chance to hit one for each Petitioner cast, and a small chance to hit multiple. Remember, if we hit multiple Petitioners off of our ripple 4 effect, each additional Petitioner we cast for free will trigger another four-card dig for Petitioners, potentially pulling all 26 out at once!
Since Thrumming Stone is so essential to our plan, we're running an outsized number of tutors to fetch it from our library. This includes Enlightened Tutor and Loyal Inventor, but also Fabricate, Inventors' Fair, and Transit Mage, which finally completes the cycle of Trinket Mage/Treasure Mage/etc.
Scheming Viziers
One of the major advantages to Persistent Petitioners is they don't require you to tap other Petitioners specifically, just other Advisors. This means that Tobias Andrion and our other creatures will always have something to do while at least one Petitioner is on the field and will contribute to our overall count of Advisors for the purposes of milling our opponents.
Of the non-Petitioner Advisors in our deck, Bruvac the Grandiloquent is by far the most important. Doubling up on the number of cards milled for each activation of our Petitioners cuts the time it'll take to sink our opponents in half.
Scholarship Sponsor is an Advisor that helps us catch up with the ramp-heavy green decks at the table, something we definitely need help with in Azorius.
Minister of Impediments and Droning Bureaucrats can shut down Voltron-style decks by tapping down our opponents' threatening attackers. Remember that you can choose to pay zero for Droning Bureaucrats's effect to pacify all of your opponents' token creatures, as well.
Ledger Shredder is our stand-in for the card advantage generation we'd normally see on spells like Ponder and Opt, and we'll use Denry Klin, Editor in Chief to grant vigilance to our Petitioners so that can attack and block before tapping to activate their mill effect.
Finally, we're running three Jace planeswalker cards: Jace, Memory Adept, Jace, the Perfected Mind, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Each of these were chosen for the explosive rate they can mill our opponents and for the excellent amount of card draw they can provide.
Protecting Our Plots
Obviously, we shouldn't just expect our opponents to lie down and accept the ever-growing council of Persistent Petitioners hitting the field. We'll have to protect ourselves and our Advisors from removal using counterspells and stax effects.
We're running Thought Collapse and Didn't Say Please in place of the more traditional Counterspell since they'll remove cards from our opponents' libraries in addition to halting their removal and board wipes. We've got Arcane Denial as well, since it cantrips another card into our hand and still removes two cards from that opponent's library.
Ghostly Prison and Propaganda are must-haves in this deck. We can't afford to waste Advisors on blocking incoming attacks, so we better make them as costly as possible for our opponents.
I've been a huge fan of Chronic Flooding ever since its release in Return to Ravnica. It's not the most exciting common in the deck, but the total mill it can accumulate over the course of a game can't be underrated, especially if we've enchanted our opponent's only source of a single color.
Altar of the Brood plays well with our deck that plans to cast a lot of creature spells over the course of the game, and we can use Altar of Dementia as a surprise finisher after we've tapped out our Petitioners, or in response to a Blasphemous Act that'd otherwise see us losing our board of Advisors without getting any extra mill. Mindcrank turns everyone else's damage and life loss into mill, speeding up our win condition.
Finally, we've got a few more extra mill effects for good measure. Court of Cunning can become very aggressive in just a few turns while also helping us dig through our deck, and Jace's Erasure and Psychic Corrosion slowly tick up the timer on our opponents.
Mana Base
Azorius decks are notoriously hard to ramp with; luckily, we only really need to hit five mana so we can cast our Thrumming Stone. To accomplish this, we're running six mana rocks and our single "play fair" white Advisor (Scholarship Sponsor) in addition to 36 lands.
Budget
This Tobias Andrion mill deck rounds out to about $195. Unfortunately, we'll be hard-pressed to lower this price due to the 26 copies of Persistent Petitioners (at ~$0.76 a pop) we need to make this deck run, in addition to the $18 Thrumming Stone. $26 Bruvac the Grandiloquent helps a lot, too, as does the consistency granted by Enlightened Tutor and Inventors' Fair.
Cutting Bruvac is probably the easiest choice, but cutting the two tutors hurts a lot more. I'd recommend replacing them all with more draw spells, like Ponder, Preordain, or Windfall, to more effectively churn through our deck to find Thrumming Stone. You could replace Jace, the Mind Sculptor with the regular Jace Beleren, too.
Tobias Andrion Decklist
Wrap Up
Mill as a win condition has been around for decades now. I remember seeing a Braingeyser win in one of my earliest Commander games back in 2010, and since then I've been enchanted with the possibility of a mill-out as an alternate win condition.
Mill decks gravitate towards Dimir colors, or even mono-blue, much more often than we see them in Azorius, so I think that makes this Tobias Andrion mill deck unique to the format.
Let me know what you think of this Persistent Petitioners deck in the comments! Am I running enough Petitioners? Is there a better card than Thrumming Stone to cheat them all into play? And how much control magic should we be running anyways?
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
