Mulling Over Mill
Mill, Reliquary Tower, and the Elusive “Extra Card”
Disclaimer: This is an article I’ve had planned since the conception of this substack but it hasn’t felt like I’ve had enough to say to make it ‘compleat’ until now. I have a lot of back-burner articles like this, but this one comes now.
Back to the Daily Mill
Many people online seem to bemoan the idea of their cards being milled and, to be honest, this is a new thing to me. I’ve been playing this game for more than a decade and have only ever seen someone tilt at being milled once (and they were a fairly new player). I’ve also taught several people to play the game, and they’ve never become the type to get tilted at the old mill game.
Recently, I’ve seen some arguments and youtube videos about Reliquary Tower being bad, especially on Twitter since Prolific EDHREC Author and Podcast Host Dana Roach has made a comment about it. Many experienced players tend to describe Reliquary Tower as overrun, overrated, and even “bad.”
So why is it that newer players often fall into the “traps” of running Reliquary Tower (in the wrong decks) or being frustrated at seeing their cards milled and what can we do to help combat this phenomenon? Well, I think that these two common trappings have the same underlying root, a concept I like to call “extra cards.”
What are your “Extra Cards”
Realistically you don’t need your entire deck to win the game. If the game ends on turn 10 and you draw 2 cards a turn on average then you will have seen 7 (your opening hand) + (10*2) + 1 (commander) cards… or 28 cards. That’s just over ¼ of your deck. Most decks, in my experience, can win after seeing ¼ of the deck. I’d even venture to say that many decks can win with less than that amount. But let’s be generous and say that by the time an average game ends, you will have seen 33 cards - or ⅓ of your deck. This means that you’ll win the game with ⅔ of your cards still in your library unused.
If you need about 20 cards (including some ramp and draw) plus some number of lands to achieve critical mass and push for a win, then it reiterates, for any given game just about ⅔ of the cards in your deck will go unused. I like to call that unused ⅔ of my deck “extra cards,” they may be useful in other games, but I’m not going to use them to win the game in this game. Literally anything could happen to them… they could get milled, exiled, discarded, buried out back… and (save for a tutor) nothing about my game would change. So if I don’t need ⅔ of my cards, I’m free to do whatever I want with them.
When resolving a Fact or Fiction, discarding down at the end of turn, or otherwise playing control the concept of “extra cards” or the act of figuring out which cards are “extra” in that game is an important skill. It’s an exercise in prioritizing and assessing the value of your assets… and, also importantly, it’s a reminder to let go. You don’t have to hold on to every card like it’s your last dying breath.
The most classic solution for “extra cards” is to discard them to your humble (or not-so-humble) looter. With a little practice, drawing and discarding will help you get rid of cards that are not so useful in that game, and draw into the select cards that will actually carry you to your win.
Is Reliquary Tower a Bad Card?
Reliquary Tower is a land card that taps for a colorless and also says “You have no maximum hand size.” It’s a unique effect that basically allows you to avoid discarding down to 7 cards at the end of your turn. It doesn’t matter if you have 7, 9, or 20 cards in hand… you can simply hold onto them.
When we view this through the lens of “extra cards” I think it’s obvious to see why this can be a trap. Of course, having 20 cards in hand is better than having 7… but if ⅔ of your cards are going to be “extra cards” anyway, keeping 7 is more than enough. I’m sure many of us have heard the argument that if you draw 20 cards and keep all 20, it’s not that much better than drawing 20 and discarding down to the best 7. Sure it’s better, but not by much.
In other words: if you draw 20 and discard down to 7, you’re probably still winning because you have your best 7 cards in hand. Reliquary Tower doesn’t actually improve your standing in this scenario, it just saves you from having to be decisive about which cards you actually need.
And when we consider the number of other utility or fixing lands out there, it’s easy to imagine a Rogue’s Passage, War Room, Triome, or even a basic land could affect the game more often by being in that slot.
If you are skeptical about how you’re using Reliquary Tower and are interested in cutting it I propose you do a simple experiment (well, sort of simple… it requires recording over multiple games). For the next several games, keep a running note when you enter games where you get Reliquary Tower and mark its effects like a diary entry. Firstly, when Reliquary Tower prevents you from discarding down to 7, separate your hand into “the 7 you would’ve kept” had you not had Reliquary Tower and “the rest.” Mark the games into 3 categories:
I got Reliquary Tower but never had more than 7 cards in hand.
I got Reliquary Tower but only needed the cards I “would’ve kept” had I discarded down to 7 anyway.
I got Reliquary Tower and one of the cards I would’ve discarded had I discarded down to 7 made a difference.
Only the games marked as the third category are games where Reliquary Tower “was good.” This exercise requires a little legwork, but the beauty of it is that when you are practicing choosing your 7 and then reviewing how it turned out will make you better at playing when you have to loot or discard anyway. There’s secretly a 4th category:
I got Reliquary Tower and one of the cards I would’ve discarded had I discarded down to 7 made a difference, but one of the cards I would’ve kept turned out to be an “extra card.”
Recognizing this category will make you better at predicting what you’ll need in the future. Not every card can make a difference every game, and sometimes a card you think is important ends up being “extra.”
Alright, alright, enough of asking you to do tedious work. Ultimately, is Reliquary Tower a “bad” card? My take is that, yes, in 90% of the situations it’s played in it really shouldn’t be. You should aim to be more decisive about what cards you do and don’t need, and practice that important skill. You should stop using the tower as “training wheels” that enable your indecision. The other 10% of situations are really juicy, however, as there are some fun ways to make use of extra cards. I won’t go into too much detail but cards like Mind over Matter and Nahiri’s Wrath can turn “extra cards” into an advantage and cards like Body of Knowledge, Psychosis Crawler, and Alrund can turn your hand size into a threatening body. So it’s not really a “bad” card so much as a “niche” card, but you have to be honest with yourself… are you really using it to fuel some powerful synergy? Or are you just using it as an excuse to be indecisive?
Fear Not the Mill Player
It should be easy to surmise how, under the concept of “extra cards,” mill affects the game. It doesn’t. Mill doesn’t actually hurt you until it mills your last card and you lose. If ⅔ of your deck is unused anyway, you can mill more than 60 cards before you actually start digging into the ⅓ of your deck that you actually need. Sure, you might feel a twinge of sadness seeing your shiny new Mother of Machines go right into your graveyard, but your deck should be full of good cards you can still win with… and is having Norn directly in your graveyard really any worse than having it sit in your deck, unseen and unused, like ⅔ of your cards already are?
Well no, it’s not worse than having it sit unused in your deck… it’s actually better! Graveyard synergies have been a thing since before I started playing, and will be a thing way after… but nowadays, you don’t have to be a graveyard deck to take advantage of this quirky flaw in the mill player’s plan, it’s perfectly reasonable to run a few recursion cards in any deck. In that situation, you’ve taken a card you had a ¹⁄₉₉ chance of drawing and put it right in the graveyard, where one of several spells can get it back, increasing your odds of getting it!
In essence, change your mindset. Don’t focus on what you’ve lost, focus on what you still have. Most of the stuff is “extra” anyway, and if the deck is well shuffled the chance of that card having sat entirely unused in the bottom ⅔ of your deck is generally the same chance as having milled it. Generally speaking, if you have some redundancy, you’re not trying to pull off some jank that requires a specific card, and your deck isn’t full of completely unusable cards… then your likelihood of assembling your game plan hasn’t changed much (I’ll go into some math on that later)… and most game plans are significantly faster than mill.
Fear Not the Mill Player Part 2
Mill is incredibly slow. A mill player has an incredibly hard time closing out a game (sans an infinite combo, but at that rate, they could be playing a damage-based combo and have the same effect). It’s not 100% accurate to say that a regular player has to deal 120 life where as a mill player has to mill 300 cards, but it might as well be. People will have drawn cards, so the amount you have to mill might be closer to 210… but it’s uncommon for several mill players to be at the table or for non-mill decks to run mill incidentally, so no one is going to “help” the mill player damage that 210 cards worth of library they have to dig through. Meanwhile, the damage player may have to deal 120 damage, but not only will people damage themselves from shocks or whatever, there are usually 3 other people at the table all trying to win via damage… meaning other people are going to “help” you by attacking or otherwise damaging your common enemy.
Alright. Math time. I’ll be using a Hypergeometric Distribution Calculator (something I wrote about here in my 3rd-ever-substack-article). The short of it is that it lets us see the probability of drawing certain cards:
Let’s say it is turn 5, you drew 7 cards to start plus 1 each turn, for a total of 12 cards. Your deck has 99 cards, so you have 87 cards left. let’s say you’re running 10 removal spells that could remove Anowon or their board and you haven’t drawn any yet.
Population size 87, sample size 1, successes in population 10, successes in sample 1: 0.11 - In layman’s terms, you have an 11% chance of drawing an answer.
Now let’s say they milled 12 cards and one was a removal spell.
So let’s set population size to 76 and successes in population to 9: 0.12 - now you have a 12% chance of drawing that removal spell, they’ve milled a removal spell, but they’ve counterintuitively made it more likely for you to draw one by also milling other stuff.
A 12-to-1 ratio may seem to be in your favor, but… the situation is that milling 1 card is the same probability of drawing 1 card, so the math is self-correcting. You have 10% in your hypothetical deck, so the further you are away from 10%, the more likely each mill or draw is to pull you back towards 10%.
When you’re at 5% and mill, you’re more likely to mill more non-removal which increases your chances of hitting it next time (back towards 10%).
When you’re at 15% and mill, you’re more likely to mill more removal and decrease your chances of hitting it next time (back towards 10%) .
In other words, the numbers may fluctate over a game, but your overall chances of having drawn removal with or without the mill will be about the same. The more you play around with this the more you’ll realize that the % chance of you pulling off your game plan (or drawing one of X types of pieces) tends to stay the same whether they mill you or not, so as long as you build your deck with some redundancy (like you should already), your game plan will play out whether they mill you or not.
If outracing the mill player or just committing to your gameplan anyway isn’t enough, there are still more options for someone player who is trying to deal with mill:
Flashback Spells - Flashback is a mechanic that lets you re-cast spells from the graveyard. So is Aftermath. If you can find a few effects like this that fit your strategy, then the mill deck player is virtually putting cards right into your hand.
Regrowth - Cards like Animate Dead and one of my favorite MDFC lands Bala Ged Recovery do have to be in your hand to get their mill-countering effects, but they offer some redundancy. If you need Massacre Girl for your 12-step-janky-combo, well… you might draw into Massacre Girl… or you might mill it and draw into Skullwinder instead. It gives you extra chances of getting it into your hand. Not to mention some of these cards like Living Death can win you the game off of getting milled.
Shuffle Eldrazi - There are a few effects like this, but nothing shuts down a mill deck like OG Kozilek and OG Ulamog. Most strategies require you to get the card that counters them on the field, but these insidious extra-worldly creatures counter mill just by sitting in your deck. Still, instant speed grave hate will shut them down, but that requires mill players to do a lot of extra work and makes it way harder for them to win without combos, especially if more than one deck in the meta is running them. Many instant speed exile effects only hit the Eldrazi themselves, letting the rest of the yard shuffle in and making them restart their work as if you got a fresh reset and put your life total at 40 again. If you’re running a deck that can reliably live to late game and cast them, they’re essentially free includes (I used to run OG Kozilek and Newlamog in every deck as ways to deal with mill and problem permanents my colors can’t remove - plus they’re big late game threats). These are so effective at stopping a casual mill deck from killing you with mill that I don’t really run them anymore, as they can make the game in-fun for them.
Good old removal. Mill threats are often like other threats. They can be countered or removed. Altar of Dementia is not that different to Goblin Bombardment. Both suffer to Negate or Nature’s Claim. A mill deck, like any other deck, won’t do its thing if it can’t stick its key pieces.
Conclusion
Ok, we’ve gone on a trip. We’ve covered the idea of “extra cards,” how it applies to discarding cards at the end of the turn (and the controversial topic of Reliquary Tower), and how it applies to mill. We’ve also discussed the topics of the tower and milling individually. Like usual, this is just one concept that can help you understand what happens during a game of EDH - and it isn’t an end-all-be-all for every scenario (I’m sure many of us have had games with no “extra cards” where every card felt like it mattered, as little as that happens in EDH - and I’m sure many of us are building decks with enough tutors that some of these concepts feel like they apply less).
Still, with enough concepts and angles with which to approach the game, and learning some of the strengths and weaknesses of those concepts, hopefully we can learn to navigate our game space better!