Why Mill is Grouphug

More Rambling About Mill

Some of you may have already read my article where I disparage the hate that mill gets, and also briefly talk about Reliquary Tower and make philosophical statement about what I call an “extra card.” If not, the article is here: Mulling Over Mill

There, I mention that I’ve virtually never met a player who got upset at being milled.

Today I’m here to take it a step further and talk about the thing that I’ve actually seen happen a million times: Players getting upset when doing the milling.

Mill is Grouphug

This is a statement that not many people have made, though I reckon that many experienced players will find it obvious and intuitive enough. Mill, like popular group-hug cards like Howling Mine or Rites of Flourishing, gives our opponents access to cards that they didn’t have before. Graveyard decks are fairly popular these days (always have been), and why wouldn’t they be? They’re resilient, provide inevitability through constantly recurring threats even after someone gets rid of them, can fight through a lot of types of removal and require silver bullet answers to deal with, and they’re tons of fun! But a deck doesn’t have to be a graveyard deck to take advantage of the graveyard. A stray Bala Ged Recovery or Animate Dead is a pretty regular occurrence these days, and most decks that are trying to create any amount of resiliency will include some way to get their most choice threats back from the graveyard.

So what does that mean?

That means that if if an opponents graveyard has 5 cards in it, and then we mill 10 of their cards, that Nature’s Spiral they’re holding onto just got a lot better. When we start to take into account Flashback, Aftermath, Jump-Start and the many other things I mentioned in the other article… Milling someone starts to look even more similar to putting cards into people’s hands.

The Experience

We’re all taught that mill is a real wincon that is taken seriously in real formats. When are we taught this? I don’t know, perhaps it was when we played limited or standard. Or perhaps it was in 2020 when Zendikar Rising Commander came out with this commanding figure at the helm of a much-anticipated deck for Rogue Tribal:

I saw several people play this deck, and I did not see a single person cry or complain about their good card being put into the graveyard. I did, however, see a new player pick it up as their first precon only to run into the terrible experience of milling someone for half their library. Why was it terrible? Because they cast Living Death next turn! I did not see that player eagerly return to play more magic.

Alright. I know it sounds like I’m complaining about an incredibly niche and specific scenario, but I swear I’ve seen it a million times. So many variations of Season’s Past or Past in Flames. So many players trying to play mill only to realize that their mill is just feeding their opponent more options, more cards, more power to win the game with.

Mill is Grouphug Part 2

Ok. So what’s the point in all this? Well the problem here is that the player playing the mill deck was hugging their opponents… but they weren’t acting like it. Group hug decks have ways to weponize, win, and interact with the fact that they’re giving opponents free value… and they try to politically leverage the fact that they’re giving it out. Mill decks that actually want to win should do the same.

Unforatuntely for the mill deck, it isn’t easy to convince an opponent that milling them is a good thing. “Hey, I’ll mill you if you don’t attack me next turn.” Is not a proposition I’d expect to hear said out loud, let alone accepted, at the average table… so we’re left with the other option… weaponizing the graveyard.

Weaponizing Opponents’ Graveyards

There are a lot of good ways to take advantage of opponents graveyards, though most of them are in black.

Suffer the Past is one of my all time favorites. Instant speed grave hate that turns hating the graveyard into life-drain.

Animate Dead and other similar effects that can target opponents creatures is always an option. Conventional wisdom dictates we should have good targets for these instead, but here they are almost a necessity to deny our opponents the value of what we’ve milled for them. Puppeteer Clique is also a favorite of mine.

I’d consider this to be a bit more of a high-powered card, but it feels like it does properly deserve a slot here. It lets us get all sorts of cards back, not just limiting the value we’re stealing to creature cards.

Finale

That’s it.

I found an interesting observation that people online complain about meeting people who complain about having their good cards milled. I never see this in real life. But I do see mill players getting screwed over by enabling people.

So I wrote about it.

Bite me.