Pointed Discussion

This is a common? For U? Um...

I tell my opponent that their genius just got fu*cked when i use this.

pre-release for m11
opponent used scry. i use tome scour. i lol
another opponent uses vess' tutor ability. i use tome scour. i lol

this card is amazing in limited. just need multiple copies.

i realize this was brought up on the m10 edition but the search took me to the m11 and i'm lazy so..anyway, the reason why glimpse the unthinkable is rare and this is a mere common is the simple fact that..with 1 card (glimpse), you take out 10 cards. with 1 card (scour) you take out 5 cards. and believe me, when playing a mill strategy, every extra card off the top of an opponent's deck counts. but imo and from experience, both cards are pretty good :)

Too broken with Lord of Extinction because Tome Scour mills 5 cards from the top of your opponent's Library for just 1 Island each, making this card get an easy 20 Power and 20 Toughness boost.

I don't care for this card too much. If this only had a cantrip or some other extra ability like flashback, I'd like it. Even if the flashback cost was something huge like 5U, I'd enjoy running it. I also wouldn't mind it costing 2U and letting you draw a card... or even scry 1 or something. This just doesn't do it for me. Especially since it's at sorcery speed.

I've never played this in limited, but it might be decent.

the ruling is funny,
"i dont 5 cards"P1
"so,you still have to put in the graveyard"P2

Combine with something like Lost Hours, and this could be interesting...

@RareCardHunter- What? Tome Scour isn't broken with anything. If you think this is "too good" because of a Lord of Extinction combination - what the hell do you thinking about Mind Funeral? Or Traumatize? Sure, they cost more but that isn't a big deal if you're running green. Especially if you know your mana base is going to be , and you can just use the appropriate lands...

Um, 1 card for 5 of yours? Sure, i'll take that deal anyday.....Wait, and it only cost me 1 mana? What a trade-off. People don't realize the strength of this card still. At ANY point when it's played, it can turn the tide on your opponent's gameplay. First few turns....you could mill away their land draw, middle and late game.....there goes their combo or win condition, or Planeswalker, Baneslayer or Titan! Card advantage in MTG is everything people!

This has won me games in Limited, it's always a good insurance policy to have as a one drop, you never know. Especially useful against Timmies in Limited: I remember milling my opponent's Grave Titan for instance.

It's like blue's Shock. It needs to mill 8 or 9 to be proportional in power to Lightning Bolt. Maybe 8 so it's not too close to Glimpse the Unthinkable. Yeah... that would be a nice new 1-cost mill spell!

It's nice that such a simple card has so many applications...And is so damn fun to use for some reason!

i fail to see how this is card advantage (many people seem to think it is). card advantage only refers to the cards in your hand, otherwise draw would not be considered card advantage (as it only moves the cards, not gives you more). However, i love mill, its become rather hard to do with the 3 legendary eldrazi, and i've seen people run one or two of them just for that reason, making milling completely obsolete without some way to exile.

This card is powerful in low deck size formats like limited, and quite useful in mill decks that run Leyline of the Void. However, outside of that, we have cards like Vengevine running around in Standard and Extended, and we have tons of creatures with Unearth or some other kind of recursion in Extended now. While I agree that 1/12 of your opponent's library for 1/7 of your hand isn't too bad, you just might end up helping your opponent more than hurting them.

Mill isn't so much functional these days as it is annoying. My aggro deck is just as functional with whatever I was able to play even after staring down the barrel of 2 Thrummingbirds, 4 Tome Scours, Traumatize, and a Grindclock with 5 charge counters on it.

@guitargamer79:...or you could end up going straight through all of the trash in their deck and put any of the cards you just mentioned directly on top of their library. Mill isn't card advantage, card advantage is only based off of what's in your hand or your opponent's hand. Draw is card advantage because it puts stuff in your hand, and discard is card advantage because it takes things out of your opponents. Remember, no matter what you end up milling out of your opponent's library doesn't stop him from playing what's already in his hand.

Don't get me wrong, in a dedicated mill strategy this card is extremely efficient, and in limited it's excellent because decks are smaller and games are slower, meaning you've got more of a chance of milling out your opponent. But when you Tome Scour your opponent you're using up 1 card in your own hand to get rid of 5 in their deck, which is ultimately going to be a disadvantage a lot of the time unless you're planning on killing them that way. If I mill them for 5 I could end up hitting a giant land pocket when they already have plenty of mana, which could be especially bad if it turns out that Baneslayer was card #6. This card is efficient, but never forget that mill is only efficient if you're trying to use it to kill them, or if you somehow know exactly what you're getting rid of.

Essentially a Lava Spike, and just like Lava Spike this is always a 0-for-1 card disadvantage. The aim is not to gain cards, but to kill them as quickly as possible. Though five cards milled for one card in hand usually isn't enough... when I win a game via mill, I usually did it on the back of an unchecked Hedron Crab (who easily mills for 15-20 cards).

Surgical Extraction.

The moment this card had a chance for constructed standard, it cycled out.

This is a decent card with a few different uses. As for the debate about milling as a way to win goes: I think it's a very valid way to win in a different way in a casual format. I play an all-out mill deck sometimes (blue/black) based around traumatize/haunting echoes/mind funeral/tome scour/vision charm/memory sluice/hedron crabs/hymn to tourach, with a few blue counterspells and black removal cards and it wins a lot of the time. It has a bit of trouble against certain deck types, but against a lot of others, it is almost untouchable.

Can you win easier using more traditional decks? Maybe. But it's certainly more enjoyable to win with a mill deck over winning with "yet another goblin burn deck" or a lot of other deck types that everyone has seen played a million times.

I'm kind of surprised that this card wasn't reprinted in Magic 2012 to interact with Innistrad's graveyard mechanics.

Really wish they had reprinted this or a version that can only target opponents for Innistrad. Offensive mill isn't what it used to be!

This is one of the best cards that is not a counterspell in one of the kooky formats I bet many of us have thought up at one point or another: Legacy Mental Magic where any card has any CMC and when you play a card as a rainbow land, it has all of the basic land types (so, just play with sleeves and no cards for the least confusion). (Chancellors/Leylines are obviously banned, btw.)

In this format, Tome Scour is a one card combo (well, two if you count the land to play it, since the format's so fast). When the five cards go into the graveyard, declare that three of them are Narcomoebas (putting them into play), one is a Dread Return, and the last is a Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur. Flashback the Dread Return and you get a Jin on the field, which will give you insane card advantage.

Unfortunately though, this combo can be stopped with a Noxious Revival in response to the Dread Return. But still, unless there's some combo we've yet to discover, it's the most efficient one, definitely better than what should be the insta win Simian Spirit Guide x2 plus Surging Flame, declaring that the rest of the cards in your deck are all Surging Flames (since for some reason our playgroup decided that the 4-of rule didn't apply). That combo is worse because it dies to Mindbreak Trap. Hard.

I see a lot of players use these in dedicated mill decks and I believe that's a mistake. In a typical game, you're going to need to mill 40-45 cards in order to win (Unless you're facing a dredge deck or some other type of deck that feature heavy self milling or drawing). A Tome Scour mills for 5 of the 45 cards necessary to win. 5/45 = 1/9. 1/9 of an opponent's starting life is 2.22. If you were to put Tome Scour in terms of a red burn spell, it would be roughly equivalent to a sorcery speed Shock that's unable to eliminate creature threats. Shock is already considered a mediocre card. Now imagine taking away the instant speed and ability to target creatures. That is why I believe that Tome Scour just doesn't cut it. I would probably use it if it milled 7, because then it would be roughly as efficient as Lava Spike / Bump in the Night.

It might be worth it to use it on yourself in a graveyard based deck, but I haven't seen it so I can't be sure.

@elmikko

Your an idiot. Do you realize the chances of milling those exact 5 cards with tome scour on turn 1? Its about the chances of opening with 4 dark rituals a swamp phage and lightning grieves. In a 60 card deck thats harder odds then getting a royal flush in poker without exchanging. Then you QQ about how it can be stopped by something your never going to face. Pure idiocy. Rather talk about how this card is used realistically, or mention that this combo will never happen somewhere in your post rather then going on about it like its consistent as a dragonstorm deck.

Anyways, I would definitely use it in a deck with stuff like Haunting Echoes or Gruesome Encore. Something to feed off enemy mill, but not in a pure mill deck. I would also use this any day in a self mill deck.

@iUseBreakOpen
Its pretty nice for self milling decks. A deck with nothing but I mill you stuff the numbers speak for themselves. Mill is not the same as damage tho, theirs allot of fun things you can do with it.

I think people are trying to get pretty "know-it-all" about milling strategies. Right, we get it, milling is a game of chance and so unless you commit to finishing them with it, it's useless. Wrong. Scion of Darkness, anyone? Magic is an incredibly diverse game with a million different ways to win, battle, press advantage and take advantage. Try not assuming that because you don't have the imagination to make a card work means it's useless in ANY game format. All it will take is one champ to decide they can use tome scour effectively and you'll all be lining up to give it a 5.

This, in my opinion, is the best card for library depletion ever no questions asked

Exactly, Chosen of the Dark Sun. A lot of players just don't think of the game correctly, they think that this is good because you have a chance to mill a bomb. It is absolutely useless in that regard because your chances of milling the bomb equal your chances of milling them into drawing their bomb, or closer to it. Your library is a valuable resource in that you need it, but unless you are actively putting their library in jeopardy it doesn't matter whether they have twenty cards in it or thirty.
On the effectiveness of this card, brutally efficient. Sure, card disadvantage, but gets a good mill deck off to a running start. 4/5

I have to agree quite strongly with JamosDeYamos, and others who have posted similar comments. To put an element of mill into a deck does not necessarily mean that that deck has to eliminate the opponent's library as a sole (or even primary) win condition. Jamos specifically referred to the combination of milling and Scion of Darkness. That's a great example of how milling can be a part of a deck's strategy without being the sole or primary win condition. Black also works with mill through stuff like Rise from the Grave, Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, and Necromancy, which benefit from and work with mill much like Scion does, though the cards mentioned here are easier to come by and are cheaper to cast.

Years ago, when I was relatively new in Magic, a good friend played an excellent Black and Blue deck with 4 Vision Charm cards. They were probably the only mill function he had in the deck (though he probably was also playing some nasty discard like Coercion and Hymn to Tourach), but they were a horror to play against, literally. If a deck were to combine Vision Charm, Tome Scour, and the new Curse of the Bloody Tome, the opposing deck would be seeing a lot of its useful cards sent beyond the reach of draw and tutor. While it's true that milling through a library may leave a prime card within draw reach (and while it's also true that milling is not a direct form of hand/table advantage), if you're playing Blue (and, particularly, Blue-Black), you either will find a way to deal with that card, you don't deserve to be playing the Blue-Black spectrum of Magic, or you suck at constructing Blue/Black decks that work with mill - 'cause as others have stated, milling doesn't need to be a win condition for it to horribly cripple an opponent and/or aid your own path to victory.

If you don't believe what I'm saying (and what others are also saying), construct a Blue or Blue-Black deck that has a strong dose of mill (like this, Vision Charm, Bloody Tome, Hedron Crab, etc.), and other cards that synergize with an opponent's rich graveyard, and either play it against yourself or ask a friend to play it against you. You will then shake your head or curse as you watch your valuable resources drop into your graveyard.

This card is freaking powerful. At least a 4 in the right decks. Out of them? Sure: no more than 3. I'm not sure you can demand much more from a common sorcery for 1.

Really it just pales in comparison to good ol' Vision Charm. At best this mills one more card, but the charm is an instant... and has two other useful abilities!

I was wondering why this was rated 3/5 at some point. "Insanity!" I thought! It's the Llanowar Elves of Milling! This is an insult to all millers in the game! (Hedron Crab really takes that medal, but we'll never see the crab again, while Scouring through Tomes will appear in at least another few sets)

with tamiyo's ultimate, you can turn this into a drawing engine.

yeah, it can mill pretty fine, but turning it into card advantage? silly. XD

Is that Kordel the Cryptic? (Otherworld atlas)