CML
Contributor
who's your favorite poet? john mill-ton!
favorite philosopher? john stuart mill!
favorite nba hero? reggie miller!
favorite bit of chaucer? the miller's tale!
favorite sitcom antihero? andy millman!
favorite george eliot novel? the mill on the floss!
favorite eschatological cult? the mill-enarians!
favorite fictional spaceship? the mill-ennium falcon!
(millikin' these for all they're worth)
welcome to the mill thread. here we will discuss killing your opponent by forcing them to draw a card with an empty library, building your cube in such a way to support it, how much i hate fucking jace, memory adept, etc.
a brief history of mill: back in the day there was this card called millstone, which was thought to produce 'card advantage' before people knew what that term actually meant. always popular amongst novices and therefore viewed with virulent contempt by those who were marginally better, milling has been a part of the game ever since. though it flies in the face of the typical mtg strategy of makin some dudes and turnin em sideways, people have been makin others mad with millin since the milliners were goin mad with mercury:
-in UZ standard(?) the tolarian academy deck (which i guess should have tipped me off to the idea that school is stupid) generated a ton of mana to sink into a stroke of genius, and because 'a ton' was not 20 but 200, this was better than somehow makin a red and doin a fireball or whatever.
-in SHM mill got a big boost when they printed painter's servant, a card so flavorful and pointless they musta missed that you can use it to one-shot someone with a grindstone. this combo is so sweet and difficult to assemble that it's been banned in EDH.
-the penultimate SCG legacy open in seattle was won by one feline longmore, whose exquisite mastery of the high tide deck (the spiritual successor to goddamn academy) enabled her to mill people with either brain freeze or blue sun's zenith so quickly that they couldn't even concede in response.
-jace, the mind sculptor acts as a win-con by exiling an opponent's library (though i guess at that point they're dead anyway.)
-sands of delirium was a terrific win-con in m13 limited, breaking open games that had been battles of subtle and incremental advantage.
-nephalia drownyard has at various points in ISD-RTR standard been a popular win-con for hardcore control decks like esper and the descriptively named "bant with drownyards." this standard has actually been a cornucopia of mill hilarity, as anyone who was at this tournament (http://starcitygames.com/events/coverage/semifinals_matt_nass_vs_ben_wi.html) can attest. jace, memory adept!!!
-once, there was a modo ptq in modern, so i put together martyr of sands and was cruisin along at 4-1 until i hit UWR (a great matchup!) and started getting hit for like 20 a turn. who cares!
who's the beatdown? ...
... not i!
(this kind of victory is known as 'hard-decking' - even if sphinx's for 6 did end up being sextuple time walk, that mighta been ok for him given the clock situaish!)
yadda yadda yadda and so on. i musta missed some. put your favorites here!
the whole point is that milling is to be distinguished from 'self-mill' strategies. self-mill is when you dump stuff into your own yard for value or what have you. this term encompasses the innistrad-block-limited spider spawning, the modish modern and legacy laboratory maniac decks (feat. faith's reward and enter the infinite respectively), and the eternal bogeyman DREDGE, which is a mechanic so interesting, so full of choices, so well-designed that they forgot to balance it. oops. however! the most flexible 'mill you' cards will also be 'self-mill' cards or vice versa, in accordance with the cube design principle that 'cards should go into multiple archetypes (or if they can't then should indirectly support a healthy meta).'
anyway, as many self-millers discovered in ISD block when 'some scrub' enchanted them with curse of the bloody tome and made their armored skaabs look awfully stupid, mill is intrinsically easier to pull off in limited because your deck is 40 cards and not 60 -- kinda like if you were starting at 12.5 life or something. given that graveyard themes are fun in cube and mill has been 'a thing' in various formats for a long time, maybe cube deserves a mill strategy. i'll be looking for this strategy to satisfy the following parameters:
-not huge (~6-10 cards) -- basically, i want it to create more design space than it takes away, which is part of making your cube more than the sum of its parts. for comparison “strong” themes like reanimator are roughly as big; jason wrote a post somewhere else on here that pointed out wizards puts themes / keywords on only a very small number of cards per set, far fewer than i would have guessed, and this is a design lesson worth taking to heart
-neither too powerful nor too weak
-neither too flexible nor too narrow
-goes into multiple decks, but not all of them
that's about it. i'm pretty picky. there's not room for everything...
now is when i start making gatherer searches, or, as i call them, 'magiccards.info searches.' (magiccards.info is like gatherer with a more functional interface.) like we were discussing in the graveyard hate thread, some card functionalities translate poorly to search terms, making them difficult to find (in the absence of a mtgsalvation thread, of all things, which was our salvation for that search). fortunately, mill isn't one of those functionalities: the cards all share in common the oracle text, 'puts the.' (well, not all of them -- we'll miss a few -- but we'll come back later for them.) here's the URL for the search: http://magiccards.info/query?q=o:"puts the"&v=card&s=cname
next, i make a list of all the cards that interest me. typically i'll use my document 'saviors,' which contains all kinds of cube lore that's so poorly organized that, like my collection, trying to find what i'm looking for is like trying to find a black lotus in a complete set of homelands. the list!
ambassador laquatus
archive trap
brain freeze
breaking // entering
chancellor of the spires
chronic flooding (self-mill)
geralf’s mindcrusher
geth, lord of the vault
glimpse the unthinkable
hedron crab
increasing confusion
jace beleren
jace, memory adept
lich lord of unx
memory erosion
nemesis of reason
nephalia drownyard
riddlekeeper
sands of delirium
sanity grinding
sewer nemesis
thought scour
traumatize
whetstone
whetwheel
searching for just “puts” uncovers several stragglers (http://magiccards.info/query?q=o:"puts"&s=cname&v=card):
altar of dementia
consuming aberration
helm of obedience
mesmeric orb
mind funeral
mind grind
mirko vosk, mind drinker
oath of druids (self-mill)
psychic spiral
telemin performance
tombstone stairwell (lol wut)
finally, some cards “exile the top” cards of a player’s library instead of binning them (http://magiccards.info/query?q=o:"exile the top"&v=card&s=cname and http://magiccards.info/query?q=o:"exiles the top"&v=card&s=cname):
oona, queen of the fae
raven guild master
scalpelexis
this entire process should take roughly half an hour. the searches came up with some 400+ cards, but most of them were easily dismissed.
now we can begin to cull the lists even further. for this next round, i’ll reject cards that don’t meet all our above criteria:
ambassador laquatus — too weak
brain freeze — lol storm
chancellor of the spires — costs 7
chronic flooding — nah
geralf’s mindcrusher — too expensive for its effect
jace, memory adept — WAY too powerful (if you get one thing out of this article, let it be that memory adept is too much.)
lich lord of unx — too weak and mana-intensive, as well as too tribal
memory erosion — too situational because it only says ‘opponent,’ if this was a ‘may’ and got both players i’d be all over it (and if you like making custom cards you can make it so!)
thought scour — too marginal, constructed decks love this card (it’s marginally legacy-playable) but cube doesn’t have much space for these thin-value cantrips. they remind me of jason’s utility lands — good enough to include, not good enough to waste a pick or slot on — so maybe some sort of alternative draft could be developed around them? i’ll let someone else make that thread!
traumatize — nah
whetstone — nah
whetwheel — nah
helm of obedience — too weak / not really what we're tryna do here
mind grind — too weak
mirko vosk, mind drinker — i’ve always hated mill-as-combat-damage and i hate this asshole from taking up the slot of real rares in my DGM packs
psychic spiral — too bad
telemin performance — too bad and too narrow
tombstone stairwell — too weird (though maybe not? mirage cube experts?)
oona, queen of the fae — not up to my tastes (remember that this is your cube and cards you dislike, like people you dislike, can be excluded by fiat!)
raven guild master — well now that we’ve murdered whetwheel and spoken ill of morph in cube in another thread (someone else find it), this one falls off as a matter of course
scalpelexis — ahahaha old creatures. oh gosh
breaking // entering, hedron crab, nephalia drownyard, and sewer nemesis are already in my cube, so i factored them into my target ‘theme size.’ it looks like i’ll be trying to add around five cards, probably not more, maybe fewer. (again, the size of the theme is very important, as the more cards there are to support it, the better they all get — and if there aren’t enough of them, then nobody will pick them. basically, i want to bear in mind the lessons of ‘storm’ viz. the cards must fit elsewhere and the lessons of ‘black aggro’ viz. they must work alone too. or cohesion / adhesion or what have you.) the candidates are:
archive trap
geth, lord of the vault
glimpse the unthinkable
increasing confusion
nemesis of reason
riddlekeeper
sands of delirium
sanity grinding
altar of dementia
consuming aberration
mesmeric orb
mind funeral
nemesis of reason, though far more interactive than big jace (and a turn slower due to summoning sickness), is still too reminiscent of that guy and therefore gets the axe. riddlekeeper is perhaps too situational, but i might want to try him later (who doesn’t love a homunculus? that word reminds me of a college english class where we read some dh lawrence criticism of the trippy american authors of the 1830s.) sanity grinding isn’t really what a multi-color cube is trying to do (not even with the bonus points from being from eventide.) we then have
archive trap
geth, lord of the vault
glimpse the unthinkable
increasing confusion
sands of delirium
altar of dementia
consuming aberration
mesmeric orb
mind funeral
since there’s more than enough applicants for the slots, like my life and friends or a prestigious university and rich kids, i can afford to be picky: the question is now not ‘which cards do i hate the least?’ but ‘which cards do i like the most?’
archive trap only targets opponents, and though this is the definition of ‘mill you’ the lack of ‘self-mill’ (or ‘fits in different archetypes’) is a deal-breaker. (it’s a cool card, but again, we can afford to be picky — cube, like life, is more about rejecting the terrible things than accepting the awesome ones — and if we later decide trap is sweet enough to try, it’s not like it’s gonna hold a grudge against us.)
geth, lord of the vault does a bunch of different things at once: he reanimates; he mills; and, though he’s powerful, he’s a dude, so he’s easy to interact with. i think this cube wants a geth.
glimpse the unthinkable targets players, so it has a flexibility that archive trap doesn’t. however, breaking // entering is functionally analogous and still more flexible, so i’m not all that into glimpse.
increasing confusion is exactly the kind of card i’m looking for. not only does it offer a better rate than mind grind, it also fits well with the self-mill theme. next wednesday, my cube is gonna have an increasing confusion.
sands of delirium is a sweet card, but geth is a cooler variant of its effect. i can pass.
altar of dementia complements sacrifice themes as well (helm of possession loves it, as do the other threaten / steal effects.) i must have one.
consuming aberration is sweet, but it is a gold card that’s pretty similar to sewer nemesis. we’ll see how many we have at the end.
mesmeric orb is too absurd not to try. the cheap casting cost and symmetrical effect in particular make me giggle.
mind funeral is just another glimpse the unthinkable variant. pass.
at the end of this process, i decided that the existing cards being powerful enough to occasionally mill someone out made me want the extra support to be weaker, so i cut consuming aberration and was left with these four cards:
complementing
the final part of considering this theme within the context of the entire cube is to think about counter-strategies: do i then have to support them? in this case, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble — cards like elixir of immortality or ulamog, the infinite gyre that recycle graveyards are far too narrow, and mill, given that it attacks the game from an oblique angle (ignoring as it does board position, life total, etc.), should be ‘uncounterable’ as its final trump.
as for concerns as to the power level, size, design, development, integration into the rest of the cube’s themes, and so on, heuristics can only go so far — there are some things only playtesting can reveal. fortunately, it’s a rich and beautiful game we play.
prosecute millosevic, cut millitary spending, and better luck than slumdog millionaire,
CML
