The Lich's Lair Games, Inc.

There is an archetype that exists in the game of Magic which every player has played and which ever player hates to play against. The strategy is to eliminate all the cards from your opponent’s deck by causing them to discard them from the deck. This strategy is referred to as Milling, named for the card Millstone, the great grandfather of all Mill mechanic cards. Every time a new set comes out several cards are printed to support this mechanic to remind players that Magic is a game which allows you to play the game any way you want. However, the truth is that the people who develop Magic the Gathering could never actually allow these cards to be relevant. In this article I will prove why.

Let’s start with the most basic thing we know about the Mill mechanic, it is the most powerful ability in the game of Magic. Please keep reading before sending angry Facebook comments. The mechanics of Mill are so powerful that players have even Milled themselves. The reason Mill is so powerful is that it essentially does so many things. Mill kills creatures, counters spells, destroys enchantments, destroys artifacts, and kills your opponent all at the same time. This concept is what makes Mill so powerful. Because Mill does so many things it is very hard to balance the mechanic. We have seen combos that seem very effective at times, Traumatize & Haunting Echoes and Grindstone & Painter’s Servant, but these are usually simply examples of untested after-thought card interactions.

Consider even the weakest part of the Mill strategy; the fact that you are trying to attack your opponent’s 60 card “life total” instead of his 20 Life. This seems like a bad race, but keep in mind that like burn spells you are evading the need to attack your opponent directly. You can instead throw spells and abilities at him which will “deal damage” to his “life total,” at the same time, however, you are killing creatures, lands, and spells. This is exactly what about Mill makes it seems so intriguing to new players and always makes it appear so broken, which is because the reality of Mill is that it is broken. It is a mechanic which does all the things we just examined.

So if it’s so powerful, why can’t it work? Essentially, there are two defining reasons that Mill won’t work. The most obvious one is the same thing anyone who has tried to pilot a deck designed only to burn out your opponent knows, paying a little man for damage over time is more powerful than paying mana for damage up front (something to be discussed in an article some other time). The reason this is, though, is the real reason Mill can never work. Mill cards are never as powerful as their creature or even burn counterparts. They aren’t allowed to be.

That’s a really outrageous claim. Traumatize & Haunting Echoes was a card combination mentioned earlier and they were printed on top of each other. That’s right; and for those people who played during that time it was never really a game breaker. Traumatize operates on the assumption that you when you play it you will hit a fairly approximate number of cards. Assuming you play it on turn 5 you will hit at most 48 cards and Mill away 24 of them. Five mana for 24 sounds fairly good, but let’s compare that to a burn spell. Assuming your opponent’s life total is 20 and their deck is 60. That means that all Mill spells deal rough 1/3 the cards they mill in “damage”. So in the instance of a full powered Traumatize you hit your opponent for 8 damage for 5 mana. Still seems fairly impressive. However, on that casting of Traumatize your opponent can now safely play a 5/5 for their 5 mana. Putting you on a 4 turn clock. Now we assume the next turn you play Haunting Echoes. If we figure that 1/3 of their deck is also lands and that you hit 50% unique cards you (the average for haunting echoes), you will get to remove another 15 cards, so another 5 damage. Sounds really good right now. Your opponent is at 3 and after next turn you will still be at 15. You only need to survive for a few more turns to win the game. This is the best case scenario for this pairing and it still wasn’t the most played deck during it’s day. However mathematically it was probably the best chance Mill ever had in the standard environment.

Fast forward to today’s standard environment. We’ve been given cards like Jace, Memory Adept, Jace’s Erasure, and Increasing Confusion. All of these cards grant you a more than once benefit and yet still there aren’t mill decks running amok. Even with Nihil Spellbomb to try to stop the graveyard abuse that these cards inadvertently create, we still don’t see an abundance of Mill. The reason is that Mill can’t defend itself. It is doing all these things that really hurt your opponent, but unlike creatures and burn, Mill doesn’t do anything about the threats on the table and to deal with them you must utilize slots which our counter-intuitive to the success of your deck. Traumatize & Haunting Echoes were great because it two cards you could optimally get your opponent for 39 cards, but usually you got them for 30 and suddenly every additional copy of Traumatize and Haunting Echoes became dead cards. In Standard that is the same case. When staring down a field of creatures right after you just used your Day of Judgment, Jace, Memory Adept doesn’t exactly keep you in the game.

These cards can be printed with the knowledge that the mechanic will never be an overwhelming success and yet still intrigue the player into feeling like Mill could still be relevant. Sometimes the cards are just right and Mill can even appear to be victorious more than many would expect, but at the end of the day Wizards of the Coast knows that the Mill mechanic is a bane to most of it’s players and that there is little way to empower the mechanic without making it broken. There is no reason for them to ever make Mill a relevant enough strategy and there appears to be little reason that needs to change.