Glimpse of Sanity

hey thanks for the comment. I mainboard 2 surgicals and 2 extirpates with more on the sideboard alongside nihil spellbomb, and crypt incursion. So all in all, i have 12 graveyard hate spells post side boarding to help deal with that

You might be surprised how little that can do.
Optimally you fire off the symmetry at turn 1 to kickstart any traps in the opening hand, this means you only have 2 surgical available at that opening and since 4 copies of a card are drawn less than 41 percent of the time the odds of having 1 out of 2 cards will be extremely small.

I've faced decks with more than 15 graveyard cards and gotten beaten because the hatred was not able to be cast at an early start. (Turn 1-2)

I suggest you test against instant reanimator with goryo to test out your defences.

My own best results have been with surgical, leyline of the Void and faery macabre with at least 6 of these in main deck.

I can also tell you that as long as eldrazi is played there will be hatred against eldrazi lands, which will disrupt your shell docks and fraying sanity is a card that doesn't work against aggro and is best when facing slow decks. During tournaments the meta mainly consists of aggro.

you are correct yes, and after game 1 which i presumably lose, i sideboard out symmetry all together.
So do you think i should run 4 copies of leyline in sb in place of nihil? maybe drop snap for fae mac?
To help with earlier turns, i could run 4 main surgicals and run 2 copies of extirpate in the sb.
As far as shelldock goes, are you recommending I dont run it at all? Im not sold on them to begin with as is, so if its not worth the risk i dont care if i dropped them. Just seemed like a popular choice in similar decks.
Aggro decks scare me honestly, im not sure if i can hope to race them or not with the help of crypt incursion keeping me alive, or if i need to have a sideboard board wipe.. which im not really running enough lands atm to use consistently. Thoughts?

When I was at my best at milling I favoured two strategies, one was walls draw and Phoenix, the other was to mill faster than any other mill to deal with aggro.

In my speed mill I ran 3 chancellor of the spires with 4 extirpate because at that time there was a lot of aggro with counterspell, so extirpate was my main pick to disrupt aggro via chancellor's.

I used 3 main board leyline of the void to deal both with control and graveyards.

I used 3 traps and only 2 hedron because most decks are too apt at getting it killed, so it was mostly a dead card.

I played augur of bolas more than snappy. Because I'd discovered that decks with snappy only won at local tournaments while bolas were in decks that won in journeys with hundreds of people.

Crypt incursion I had two in main and took it out against aggro.

Your goal will be to mill large enough chunks that everything falls apart but aggro, and aggro must be stalled with creatures that somehow avoids removal and also adds to the mill.

That sort of thinking brought me to build a wall deck with phenax, god of deception.

Then I discovered that I wanted to play old school to test some theories on how to get evolution to build decks for me.

Symmetry is a forced search, and so far only three cards do that in magic, which makes symmetry and traps very powerful.

I'd try out 4 symmetry 4 archive, 4 glimpse and 4 mind funeral out with 4 noxious revival to see how they will interact.
Extirpate and surgical will go into it as well, but focus on the traps and how symmetry and noxious revival will work.

One of my favourite mill cards have always been shriekhorn. You could use symmetry to put a trap on top, then mill yourself and then draw the trap with a noxious and cast it for free.

In my eyes symmetry is too good to pass by

The second card to force a search is a recently printed land that seems like a bad wasteland, replace shelldock with that. Most decks have it to fight torn. But it's sweet with the traps too.