This is my first time on this board, so can you tell me if mill decks are considered cheap? I love mill decks myself...

Straight mill is nearly impossible to make work right. You can mill a player to death using some weird combo that puts X cards into opponents graveyard where X represents something useful that you'd work towards anyway, but straight mill isn't fun to play with or against, it's actually beneficial to dredge decks and graveyard manipulation decks (SO many cards interect with the graveyard that mill is stupidly easy to combat) and 99% of mill cards aren't costed like they should be: with mill being worse burn. Lightning bolt is 1 mana to put your opponent 15% closer to death from starting life. The closest equivalent I could find is tome scour, which mills for 5. That translates to 8% of the opponent's starting card pool size in a 60 card deck (not all formats or decks use 60, some use far more), so from the offset that's just over half as efficient.
Then we have the fact that creatures do HP damage, not library damage. Creatures can defend you with blocking, if you want to mill you usually need expensive artifacts that mill 2 for 2 or your regional equivalent, meaning 3% of max for 2 mana, on your standard repeatable mill. If the only reliable way to do direct damage to your opponent was to do 0.6 damage for 2 mana once a turn per 3 mana artifact, do you think fucking anyone would do that?
The only option left for mill is big explosive mill. A dredge deck + Psychic Spiral, say, where the mill is just an optional win condition you can pull if you're getting to a bad place, and it also does something you want if you can't win with it (elixir of immortality).
But would you really call that a mill deck? It's a dredge deck with mill as an alternative win condition. But that's the only way you can play it, as a finisher, because mill is not repeatable enough to work efficiently over an entire match, and it's too linear a mechanic to let you really interact with the rest of the game. If you're able to waste time on mill, you've already won.

I don't mean to imply that I only play with mill. I just really like playing it because I think it's fun and I'm always trying to make my mill deck better because I enjoy playing it so much. I do typically play casually, so hearing that it's not good in competitive doesn't really bother me. I was just wondering if mill decks could be competitive if they were really good. Here's my deck, so feel free to tell me what I'm doing wrong or right in making a mill deck that is as good as a mill deck can be.

No. They can't cast cards from the library anyway. Good decks have such a high amount of redundancy (loads of 4-drops) that you have to be extremely lucky to actually hit cards that you want to hit.

Hey, here, have a decklist of a decent competitive Modern format mill deck. Did a little digging, this is probably about as good as it gets.

tappedout.net/mtg-decks/competitive-modern-mill-2/

wiping out cards from the library means losing cards you may never have had access to.

in a deck of X cards remaining, it was just as likely for the card you needed to be at the top of your library as it is to be at the bottom. So while you might be sad to mill your planeswalker or whatever sometimes, statistically you were never guaranteed to draw it anyway; while milling forces you to "lose" cards, it is not affecting what you have to work with during the turn. (Keep in mind many competitive decks actually want some of their cards to be in the graveyard, and this has only gotten more true as time goes on). Of course, if you happen to mill the specific cards someone needs to win away from them, that is great, but it is also likely that you mill cards that are preventing them from drawing those specific cards to win.

And usually, if you dedicate yourself to mill, you don't have a board presence so you end up either having to kill a creature / enchantment / combopiece that landed on the board or continue milling every turn. Bad/slow casual decks might get wrecked by mill, but decks that are relatively tuned can win before you mill their last card. YMMV

Meanwhile you can do mill-ish things competitively, like Unmask -> Surgical Extraction which can get rid of up to 4 of the best (and perhaps required) cards in a deck

user, I'm in your boat, I got started in RtR and loved dimir. But mill just has too many problems with it, as I explained in , but the most fundemental problem is that for your opponent, cards being in the graveyard is usually BETTER than them being in the library, because there are probably 100 times more cards that interact with the graveyard with the library. Good reanimate cards let you cast cards from the graveyard for free, and great ones let you cast multiple. If you're playing against delve than the second you matched with them you've lost, your deck is actively HELPING them. Putting cards in graveyards is only helping your opponent, so you have to kill them as quickly as possible, but mill isn't costed efficiently enough to make it worthwhile. As I explained above, you're using tome scour in your deck, would you use R for 1.5 damage to face only? Of course not, it's terrible, but tome scour is even worse, because as mentioned, those cards are better where you put them than where they were.
Kitchen sink? Perfect. Gimmick kitchen sink commander? Sure, go ahead. Games where you want to be taken seriously? Try something else. It's just not a supported archetype, despite WOTC pretending it is. 99% of mill cards only have whatever value they have from delve decks using it on themselves.

PS if you really want to Mill as "cheaply" (read: unfairly) as possible, it depends on what format you're in

Example combos:
Painter + Grindstone
Rest In Piece + Helm of Obedience

These are combo mill wincons that win on the spot, but they are far different decks than anything just casting mind sculpt over and over or the pic in OP

I appreciate this. Thanks.

If mill sucks so bad, what do you think they could do to fix it? Just make it so they straight up exile cards instead? Maybe give them secondary effects that give you a bonus based on the opponent's graveyard size? Some anti-black perks, maybe?

Why anti black when the best mill cards are black? Glimpse and Breaking. Black also has good support to buffer your life total when milling.
At most make the ratio of cards milled for mana better. U for 5 is pretty bad, and UB for 10 is still barely fine.

Turbo fog depending on the format is at least viable, people don't like playing against it though

You'd think it does, but you are thinking of the cards in the enemy library as being in their hand. Its not.

Consider that, in a normal game of magic, your enemy might draw... lets say its 15 cards as an arbitrary number. Thats their starting hand, and all of the other cards they draw that particular game due to turns or extra draw.

They have 60 cards in their deck total. So they are not normally going to draw everything in their deck anyway. They can't. They don't have enough time.

Spending mana to drop the size of their deck from 60 cards to 30 cards does nothing to win you the game. It has no affect on the state of the board, because they are still going to draw and play roughly the same number of cards. Sure, you have ensured they will draw DIFFERENT cards than if you didn't cast Traumatize, but you have no control over whether the cards they will draw instead are better or worse. Just different.

So any mill spell that doesn't drop their deck size below what they will draw that game is essentially just the same as making them shuffle their deck. No more or less harmful. Except that's not true, because if they have anything that plays off of the graveyard in any way putting half their library into their graveyard might actually have BENEFITED them.

Combine this with the fact that most mill cards are individually really lame, and only a few of them have ever been even good at doing mill. The only time I have seen Mill work is in EDH, and that's because you can do gimmicky shit like Phenax Walls, where you just play big dumb blocks are on your enemy's end step mill them for the combined toughness of your side of the board. Its not a great deck, but it does the job. But it does the job because the mill involves you having a board state instead of just casting spells at the player, and that board state also happens to be one that naturally buys you time against combat.

>If mill sucks so bad, what do you think they could do to fix it?
Print more powerful effects. Another few cards like Glimpse the Unthinkable would be good. Something like Mill Bolt: U for mill 8-9 or so would be better, if not amazing. You need about three cards like this for mill to be acceptable, just so you have a volume of the cards and can actually race successfully.

I just suggested it because, as you guys have pointed out, the obvious counter to a mill deck is any deck that plays on the graveyard, which typically describes black decks. I also don't wanna say that blue should suddenly hate black altogether, just that it's okay for there to be a little back-and-forth.

Standard doesn't have the good mill cards/land destruction cards.

Making mill exile instead of send to the graveyard is the bare minimum, because without it you might actually be helping your opponent.

On top of that, Mill needs more clocks. Mill instants and sorceries are a waste of time, what it needs is stuff that you put on their field and drains your opponent over time. At least that way, if you have ways to prolong the game, you can get your mana's worth.

Ideally, those same permanents would offer you some other benefit as well. Like, a blue enchantment that prevents enchanted creature from untapping, and mills that creatures controller for 2 on their upkeep? Thats the bare minimum of what I would consider a playable 'decent' mill card, because a playset of those can get annoying fast and it protects you/fucks with your opponent's ability to use abilities.

No dude the mill decks that have made it work for modern splash black for better mill cards, along with a sideboard card that exiles creatures from the person you milled graveyard, granting you 3 life per creature.
I mean there's also stuff like Grafdigger's Cage that works well against reanimation iirc, so any improvements would have to be what I and said, more bang for the buck because the ratio of damage mill does compared to burn is pitiful.

When you put it that way, maybe a cool mill card would be one that mills more the fewer cards there are in the opponent's library.

Mill cards should get Interrupt /Split Second modifier

Exiling is the bare minimum? Wow. Maybe I haven't played in a while, but has power creep gotten worse?

Yeah because the dev team is full of people who don't know what they're doing, and they barely now have old pros to playtest and see what's wrong with cards, if they're broken in some way or another.

Eternal formats are still the most powerful, creatures are generally getting better and better though

Not an issue of power creep at all. Its just that sending a chunk of your opponents library to the graveyard is already generally not worth the mana you spent on it. You are just going to feel really stupid if your opponent then casts a reanimation spell for and picks a 10 cost creature out of their graveyard and puts it on the battlefield, which was only there because you put it there. Or casts a spell from their graveyard for its flashback cost. Or willingly exiles 8 cards out of their graveyard to cast Treasure Cruise and draw 3 cards.

There are way, waaaay too many cards that treat the graveyard as a second hand for your default strategy to be stocking their graveyard for them. If you want mill to be good, the first step is exile.

In my experience.only trolls like mill decks. It's clear milling is foolish gamewise so when people have fun with it it's because they enjoy getting reactions out of people. Milling is a way to FEEL like you destroyed something or make them FEEL as though they lost something.
My coworker stopped playing his mill deck because I didn't spaz out when he milled me, I know one never draws every card anyway as has been pointed out. It really bothered him that it didn't bother me.

Why do community ratings and discussions on gatherer seem to have ceased altogether? I ask because the lack of feedback makes it harder to judge cards.

I honestly have no idea, maybe it has something to do with accounts needed or something? No fucking clue.

Well apparently Miss Cleo has come back from the dead to post on my thread because you basically just read my mind and posted the exact reason why I'm so fond of mill decks. The whole reason I got into them in the first place was because a friend kicked my ass as a kid with his mill deck and I became fascinated with how to recreate that feeling because, at the time, a hadn't realized you could even win that way, that you could build a deck for such an unconventional strategy. I was young and unsocial, so I was used to just playing with my dad who taught me how to play, so that mill deck was my first exposure to a different way of approaching the game.

They're very cost efficient, money-wise. Mana-wise, it's like playing Burn for 60 instead of 20, unless you're playing commander or something.

Mill can work in Magical Christmas Land Scenarios. Once in a lifetime events that are fantastic and work perfectly.

>Use to run traps in OG Zendikar
>Had four archive traps in hand at turn 1
>Opponent pops a fetch
>Wait for him to finish and drop all four for free milling him for 52
>He cracks up laughing and loses game 1
>Get absolutely destroyed the other games
>My face

99.9% mill by itself doesn't work. But god damn is it really funny at .1%.

They won't fix it while draft and constructed have different min deck size.

Mill has never been good, it's always needed some thing like that to make it viable. That said, yes, the power creep is steadily getting worse. Never forget the crazy cat lady infinite combo that appeared in standard.

lol

I love when people talk about mainboarding this. CoCo just couldn't give less of a shit.

I imagine it's more for the lucky start against storm decks. Oh, your only wincon is a 1-of Grapeshot?

I run a standard legal mill deck that works well, it’s a bit of a combo deck really. People comparing mill to burn are kinda right but you can’t say that burn is better because 20 life total v 52 because burn spells generally knock off 2-4 life at a time where I can combo mill an entire deck in one turn, 30-50 cards easy, or in some scenarios just the whole deck. It does rely on fraying sanity to work, so if there is a ixalans binding or some such card it can be more difficult to win, but I’ve still done it. At the kitchen table it works 75% at FNM it’s 50/50 or worse because the format is quite fast right now. Beats the shit out of approach decks or anything control though.

Same poster, if you like mill, take a look at this deck list, I prefer running this to mill, it has way more win conditions and plays “traditionally” enough that people don’t hate it right out the gate.

deckstats.net/decks/78222/813854-ub-revel-in-riches/en

If you’re cheap AF you can replace bontu’s and treasure map, tezzeret is too important imo

Because Mill is pretty much a burn deck that treats your opponent's library as their health. Burn has dozens of lightning bolts, imagine if mill decks had dozens of 1 mana cards slightly weaker than glimpse the unthinkable and 1 mana creatures with haste able to make them lose 6 cards per attack. Then it'd be strong but pretty much just a different burn.

WotC shut down their forums long ago.

>first time here
>mill deck
HA.

Don't worry OP, when i was just starting MtG i was under impression that mill is good too. I think every rookie MtG player does this mistake.

>mill decks are considered cheap?
You know some of our favorite decks are mill decks ;^)
mtgtop8.com/archetype?a=21&meta=39&f=LE
mtggoldfish.com/articles/instant-deck-tech-oops-all-spells-legacy

I feel as though this deck should maindeck Surgical Extraction and Snapcaster (even some number of Extirpate perhaps). The potential for removing win conditions seems both synergistic and vital to beating any kind of combo deck in Modern.

Mill is a million times better when you're using it on yourself. U/B/G master race.

The only times I've seen milling decks win is if it was combined with a lockdown strategy. For instance, back in the day in Oddyssey Block I played against a lockdown deck that used mostly cards from 7th Edition. He had Grafted Skullcap + Ensnaring bridge to keep all the enemy creatures off his ass and used Millstone to run you out of cards and eventually win. If you tried to destroy his artifacts, had had counterspells with Flashback and shit (this was odyssey Block), discard spells (it was a blue/black deck) and had, like, 4 copies of all these artifacts. Most annoying part was that they forgot to print Shatterstorm in 7th Edition, so the only way to blow up all his artifacts at once was with Purify, and White was kinda bad back then, nobody seriously played white decks for most of Odyssey Block. And back then, the only green card that could destroy artifacts was fucking Creeping Mold, which, I don't know if it's considered good now, but everyone thought it was shit back then (It kinda was). The other alternative was Pernicious Deed, but that was both Black AND Green, and it cost, like, 20 bucks back then, a bit much for most people.