Pointed Discussion

the card has an interesting effect - but with a mana cost of 6? no, thanks...
you can't really effectively build a deck around that.

Drowner of Secrets. half the price.

Drowner of Secrets requires Merfolk and is a creature, so they're not completely comparable. This should've been cheaper though. Maybe a {2}{U}{U} enchantment?

if this card wasnt so highly costed there's a really fun combo that can compeletly mill out your oponents library. You have a kiki-jiki out on the battlefield, you then flash out pestermite, have kiki-jiki make a copy of pestermite, the copy untaps kiki-jiki and you can continue this infinite loop of kiki-jiki making pestermites till you have enough pestermites to tap down and get rid of their library.

Only good for infinite creature combos but for 6, I'd rather use a more efficient win condition like, say, attacking.

Too expensive. At a mana cost of one it would still be borderline playable because with creatures out it's still similar to attacking with 53 times.

Who doesn't want to play a guitar that -bleeds-? It's certainly very pricey for what seems like a pretty weak effect, but it would be fun in a token deck or any other that focused on generating a waterfall of tiny monsters.
Of course nothing I say can be taken seriously. My dyslexia made me read this card as 'High-Strung Koto', view it as a Creature card, and consider that the girl didn't look all that tense considering she was holding a clearly evil instrument.

The artwork on this card makes no sense in relation to the card's effect. Why is the woman playing the koto slipping into dementia and bleeding instead of the swans?

My God people, just put this in a token deck.

Seriously, EnV has it right. I have a friend whose Saproling deck that could generate several thousand tokens a turn by turn three. This was basically the win condition, simply because with several thousand tokens by turn three, and this out by the same turn, it was an instant win.

God people. Seriously?

Well, as soon as i get a pact of the titan this will go into my EDH deck

this+pact of the titan+ djinn illuminatus?

i see myself milling everyone at the same time, (and if they want to respond to the mill, ill just tap another 1000 creatures)

"The artwork on this card makes no sense in relation to the card's effect. Why is the woman playing the koto slipping into dementia and bleeding instead of the swans? "

This Koto produces a mind-wracking sound, eliminating thought and making it impossible to concentrate. It's this effect that correlates to the milling effect.

The swans appear to be rebuked by the sound, and the woman is the one playing it. It would make sense that her prolonged exposure to the Koto is forcing her into dementia.

Additionally, anyone saying that this card is too expensive is simply insane. The {6} cost of this card could translate to "You win the game." if played right. cards like Tome Scour and Memory Sluice are cheap, but only come around 4 times in a single deck, and require four draws each. With just one draw and enough tokens, you could win the game as soon as this spell resolves.

In my opinion, this is the single most powerful mill card i've seen yet. Still not convinced? Play it in a deck with Mycoloth, then come back to me.

First there is blood in the koto elska, but anyway who says art should always reflect the essence of the card in twsted ways? why can't there be these fragile paint rebecca does?

Tokens and milling are to perfectly fine win conditions. When they intersect, however, things go horribly wrong. Suddenly you can't chump block or just win via overrun as you are either tapping or saccing your tokens to some mill engine. And tapping creatures to mill is simply far less efficient than other proper mill cards. Not to mention it reduces how many chump blockers you have.

lol myr deck w/ myr galvanizer and quest for renewal

You get to turn all your untapped creatures into milling in your opponent's end step.
Even if you don't go nuts with tokens, that's still a tidy bit of free mill every turn; if it cost less, it'd be overpowered.
Also? Hey guys! Oona, Queen of the Fae.

soooo... you wanna make a token/mill deck?.... Think your broken mycoloth will like, let's say overrun much better than this. Milling and token id not a great mix imo, do any other cards than this support token milling? In mill, keening stone is much better than this.

It's hard to sing this card's praises when I know about Altar of Dementia. The Altar is simply more efficient, and considering that it costs 4 less mana makes it pretty much strictly better. It requires sacrifice of creatures, but you can easily make that a good thing. If you're making lots of tokens, the most common form in black (a color found in nearly all mill decks) is 2/2 zombies, which means twice as much milling as the Koto, not to mention that you can attack with the Zombies and then sacrifice them later. And if you're playing with a mill deck, you're running a lot of blue, so you can take control of your opponents' creatures. Their Blightsteel Colossus has just swung at them, milled them for eleven cards, and is somewhere in their library. That's efficient problem-solving right there.

The only advantage that the Koto has is that it works well with untapping shenanigans.

Get a self untapping creature for insta deck mill

Fantastic, evocatively horrifying Rebecca Guay artwork.

Usually this card is going to be used as an alternate win condition in a deck full of critters or tokens. At least, that's how I've used it... If I can't attack or the opponent is immune to damage, then I can use this to mill them instead.

This card is really good in a mill deck with a few mill cards before it.
i use a Eater of the Dead together with this to simply purge my opponents deck using his/hers own creatures

That art is beautiful and horrifying. Not horrifying like, say, the blunt Macabre Waltz; no, the more you look at this, the more you realize what's going on, and your skin starts to crawl. This unfortunate woman has gone insane from the sound of the koto, and has been playing it until her fingers bled.
Play with token decks. You will not be disappointed.

Could be something special with Undead Alchemist!

this is soo going into my token decks

Not a bad investment in a token deck. People forget that even if you dont mill someone to death in one turn, you still just denied them a good part of their deck, milling is still obnoxious outside of dedicated mill. Not to mention you can tap out your creatures at any time for this effect and nobody can counter it. Ruin someone's scry or tutor effects or punish them whenever you block a creature. I'd put one of these in a token deck any day.

@ Kelrath I fully agree with you on the flavour. Masterfully done. As to the card's actual utility however... I am afraid I must refute you here. Creature dependent mill suffers from some problems as an archetype in general and the Koto exemplifies this issue. Mixing creature-win stratagems and mill-win stratagems is inefficient. Note I am not saying the likes of Hedron Crab or Nemesis of Reason are bad. I count them as "pure mill" cards. I.E cards (regardless of type. Artifact, creature, whatever) that exists solely to mill someone. One would not put Hedron Crab in a beatdown deck, for instance. The Koto relies on having a large amount of creatures on the field. Using it with a crab or two would be...less-than-effective. Now here's the kicker: token makers are not mill cards, such the aforementioned mycoloth. As a lover of saprolings, I can tell you Mycoloth can win the game if it sticks around a turn and it will do it without the help of a Koto. Instead it punches someone in the head REALLY HARD. Damage is simply far more effective at killing someone than milling is, as one damage is 1/20th of a win while 1 mill is 1/about 50th of a win (this is why mill cards like glimpse the unthinkable tend to work with much higher numbers. It compensates for this and, consequently, makes the cards powerful even if you only cast one. It works with the rest of your deck. Complaining about them is like saying a red burn spell that hits for roughly five damage to the face for two mana is bad because you may only draw one). You are asking me to more than half the effectiveness of the killing potential of my creatures, and that is before you account for the synergies we will be skipping by going the mill route. Mycoloth synergizes with other token-friendly cards like Thelonite Hermit and Overwhelming stampede, not with the likes of Keening stone. I suppose what I am saying here is that damage and mill do not stack. Any card (Like this one) that relies on the other (Like mycoloth) to function is simply inefficient as you must kill an opponent in more ways than one. That said, the Koto makes an ok sideboard for turbofog-type things and is certainly interesting. I would run it in a deck with the likes of undead alchemist or Oona, Queen of the Fae for a cool, mill swarm. But it would not be a mill deck. It would be an undead alchemist synergy deck.