What would it take to make mill a competitively viable strategy in any constructed format?
Some kind of card or something that could lower your opponents deck size
You're artificially increasing your opponents health to 60 when you play mill, granted your "direct damage" is more potent but it's still 3x as much health
>>44881432
Restoring the control/combo/aggro metagame instead of midrange/midrange/midrange
>>44881432
I have a glimpse deck that did really well in standard and does pretty damn good as a modern deck.
Just put in damnations, counters, Extirpates and Sudden Death to deal with anything until you can mill to victory
>>44881769
Did someone call for a meme rhino?
>>44881768
So what if there were some cheap card (say, a 2-3 drop Legend) that doubled the effect of milling? Would that make mill more viable, or would it make mill TOO viable?
>>44881432
aren't there a couple mill combo decks that get seen in legacy/vintage?
Mill works best against a certain type of deck. Namely, it can beat very linear combo decks that rely on a linchpin card. Using Extirpate or Surgical Extraction then allows the mill deck to run its gameplan unopposed. It's basically slower burn which has a better matchup against a certain narrow subset of decks.
>>44882541
There are three ways to win with mill. They're the three major deck archetypes: aggro, combo, and control.
Combo mill uses stuff like Brain Freeze or Painter's Servant / Grindstone or Rest in Peace / Helm of Obedience.
Control mill is just a regular control deck with a mill-based win condition, such as Nephalia Drownyard (this was a deck in standard at one point)
Aggro mill is jamming all the different Tome Scours and Mind Sculpts and Glimpse the Unthinkables into a deck as possible.
>>44882363
It wouldn't do fuck-all because it's not retroactive, it's too late to begin applying pressure and not game-winning enough to be a win condition by itself if played even later, and it's even easier to remove than just about any other tool in MtG because it's a creature.
Basically if you think your idea is in any way not the dumbest shit ever, just play mill because you probably play with people so bad it doesn't matter your deck sucks.
>>44882363
That would be a two-card kill combo with Traumatize. Just saying, probably wouldn't see Modern play anyway.
>>44881768
what is the point of that comparison if you yourself admit that it isn't comparable?
>>44882677
>all legends are creature
-t. angry assumption man trying to look cool
The problem is that Mill doesn't affect the boardstate. It can potentially affect that options might be open to your opponent in the future, but it could also hand them the options they need right now, so it's impact evens out there.
Burn usually also functions as threat removal to a point and life points are also more often used as a resource to pay for shit than library cards.
Mill on the other hand feeds certain decks their ressources. Against some decks, milling them actually kills you faster.
To make matters even worse, Mill is also the only archetype that is completely wrecked by a card you just need to have in your library. You don't even have to fucking play an Eldrazi, you just need to side them and it's GG. If the Milldeck is using cards to remove them from the library, it's not using them to actually remove the Winconditions, so they still fuck Mill up.
The only way to make Mill viable would be to drastically increase it's effectiveness, I guess.
>>44881432
No Eldrazi.
No Emrakul floating around.
>Reshuffle Reshuffle Reshuffle
>Mill is not viable
>>44881432
Getting rid of all the other viable strategies.
>>44881432
Mill is competitive in modern as Lantern Control.
>>44883768
Have them just fuck up reshuffle in some way.
>>44881432
Include lots of cards that can exile from their graveyard, making the"advantage" granted by mill into an actual advantage.
Mill is like lifegain it does almost nothing by itself but if you staple onto another effect it can be great.
>>44881432
Do it really fast.
>>44881432
Just printing enough high mill cards. If you nearly triple the life total (it's actually closer to 2.5) then you need the equivalent of a bolt to be roughly around glimpse in terms of numbers to be comparable. Mill can be slightly worse on average since the opponent's "life" naturally decreases by 1 each turn and most will choose to draw extra cards on their own but currently most mill cards are still underperforming.
Also keywording the "shuffle entire graveyard into deck when this enters" effect and printing cards that specifically exile things with it so that mill isn't so easy to hard counter with a single card slot.
>>44886670
Also it's worth noting that Maro and friends probably don't actually want mill to be good. It's a "trap" archetype for casual players in the same vein of the "trap" filler garbage cards they print in every single set. Balancing games is hard work so they'd much prefer to keep selling jank and calling it a feature.
>>44881432
The new style of eldrazi (eg: Oblivion Sower, Newlamog) could theoretically do it, which is ironic since the original titans shit on it so hard.
>>44885933
Do it really slow.
>>44881432
It doesn't really work even with fixes. You have to mill 53 cards before they kill you and to have cards to deal with anything that the opponent plays, you have to sacrifice slots for what could have been mill cards. Even with glimpse, tome scour, and the 3 CMC mill till you hit some lands card, your opponent will still have like half their deck and a damn good board state since you've done nothing but milled them and probably are running low on steam since that's 6 cards you've used to get there. It's flawed because the other player is functioning in a vacuum unless it's legacy mill which is really a combo deck that happens to do it with milling and packs a ton of cards to get the combo online. Mill would have to be stupidly fast to be competitive or have some good constant mill cards that could go in a control shell. Also, new players hate mill so you probably won't see any support with the current design style of magic
>>44887822
Do it to yourself.
>>44881768
If you're thinking of library as life, then glimpse get's rid of 1/6th of it, boros charm get's rid of 1/5th of their life for the same cost. Bolt gets rid of 1/6.66 of their life for 1 mana, where as that 1 mana mill 5 card gets rid of 1/12th of their library. If you factor in the fact that your opponent will draw at least 10 cards a game, glimpse gets to boros charm level, but it's still the only good spell. Burns spells are more efficient.
The thing with damage is you can damage creatures and players, so anything that deals damage (bolt, goblin guide) can play a double role
>>44881432
a maximum deck size restriction
>>44881432
Just let it go family, it'll never happen.
>>44881432
a 2-card combo that instantly mills your opponent's deck down to 0.
>>44891328
Oh no, you've tagged me for like six damage and now I'm at 14 health. Luckily for me, you're playing a mill deck and I don't care because my real health is my deck and I just restored that back to 60.
Anyways, the real answer to why mill isn't viable is because there's too much going on and it's too easy to stop. There's not enough reliable, repeatable mill (read: creatures), it's too easy to shuffle cards from your graveyard into your deck, some decks have reanimation or otherwise actually want cards in their graveyard, it can't remove other creatures or stop their win condition, or really do anything. It'd be like asking "why can't I win with burn spells that only target players," and then insisting that player-only damage is a viable deck archetype, or that it should be because look, here's ten cards that do exactly that.
Mill was fairly effect in a control shell during some standard between M12 and innistrad IIRC. Pretty fun deck tb,h.
How about an artifact or enchantment with "whenever a card is sent from a players library to the graveyard, that player takes 1 damage for each card"
>>44881432
all you have to do is mill your own library and then play this
>>44886715
mills is there to counter tutor/scry effects that put the card on the top of library, and mill is more common than hand disruption because lots of abilities and effects put shit on the top "that you want" rather than just put them on your hand.
>>44881432
something along the lines of
>Forgotten Memories 5U
Instant
Target player exiles up to five cards from their graveyard. For each card exiled this way, reduce the cost of Forgotten Memories by 1
Counter Target Spell
as well as
>Forgotten Chains 4BB
Instant
Target player exiles up to four cards from their graveyard. For each card exiled this way, reduce the cost of Forgotten Chains by 1
Exile target creature
My wording is a bit janky, but you control how many they exile, and it doesn't fizzle if they don't have enough cards in their yard.
>>>44881768 You're artificially increasing your opponents health to 60 when you play mill, granted your "direct damage" is more potent but it's still 3x as much health
Mulligans aside, your opponent starts at 53/60 w/ -1/turn.
>>44894775
Reminds me of decks that ramp and dig into that, but can do absolutely nothing else.
>What would it take to make mill a competitively viable strategy in any constructed format?
About one in three Standards has a viable mill deck, otherwise mill is viable in everything but Modern.
It's not viable in Modern because the format is too high-power for Standard mill combos to even get a chance to go off and it doesn't have access to the critical cards that power Legacy mill combos.
>>44894775
Actually, looking back at primers of >>44896946, milling with shared fate seems like a waste of time.
Just don't run any ways of damaging players or removing it.
>>44893793
Dimir Guildmage
Would you consider Lantern Control a mill deck? The entire strategy revolves around milling your opponent's good cards.
>>44897206
My mistake, Duskmantle Guildmage
>>44884107
>puts one card on the bottom of library
>you decide the order
What the fuck am I reading
>>44894775
>if you would draw instead exile the top card
Try reading the card
>>44896822
>spell has an effect that retroactively reduces it's cost
Literally what the fuck
>>44897208
No, it's a psudeo-fateseal deck; you're doing impromptu draw control on your opponent.
Most lantern decks run things like Pyrite Spellbomb, though mill is a semi-common win condition for lantern.
>>44897309
I think he was saying you'd lock them by not letting them draw anything?
>>44881432
Any format that lets you play hedron crab, fastbond and meloku
>>44897335
Think of it as like, Enemy Delve
>>44894775
Does this actually trigger a game loss with an empty library though?
Old cards with 'ante' have the rule "If you are not playing for ante, remove this card from your library before starting play" (adlib). Does this allow me to make a 60 card deck, then remove all the ante cards from it or would it still have to have 60 cards after they were removed to be valid?
>>44898977
Before starting play presumably means that your deck would become non-legal once it was removed.
>>44899041
Curses. Would have been a neat trick to win with Lab Maniac. ;)
