ITT: The biggest MTG noobs

ITT: The biggest MTG noobs.

lifegain and mill decks are the ultimate noob traps

Self-mill is where it's at.

Mill is totally viable in every limited format that has designed around it

Lifegain is more common than mill and not always viable but often viable

The best is people who just put in random mill cards in non-mill decks.

That's when you have to stop the game, sit them down, and explain to them that milling doesn't do what they think it does.

multi-color without proper manabase

Lifegain and Mill suffer from the same problem - they don't change the board state.

They CAN be viable, but they need to be either:

1) to such a high amount in a single go they win the game
2) as a constantly-repeatable effect with low cost
3) As an additional effect of something else

BUT DON'T YOU SEE

HE MILLED 5 OF YOUR CARDS.

FIVE OF THEM.

THAT'S AS MANY AS FIVE ONES.

YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW OR CARE WHAT THEY WERE, BUT IT'S AN ENTIRE 5 OF THEM.

...

This was actually a decent sideboard card for monored burn decks when going into mirror matches.

You stood to gain 10+ life for 2 colorless.

Here's a good example of 3 and partially 2 for the newbies out there.

as someone who plays Burn, i'd never bother with this. The gain is so minimal compared to the damage you'll be taking, and frankly getting into the mirror as Burn is unlikely anyway.

>found out my roommate freshman year of college also liked Magic
>his playgroup was way more casual than mine
>had a 200+ card Aurochs deck that apparently did moderately well
>helped him trim that bad boy to 60 cards even though it was like pulling teeth with him
>friend ends up liking how smooth and consistent his deck is
>goes back home for break and wrecks his group

Feels good to be bad by being good.

>teaching filthy casuls how to play magic
is there a better feeling? showing little timmy a combo setup, then watch his eyes light up as he figures it out and a bit of johnny lights up in his eyes.

Why do people do this?

That's why you gotta run grave love. Ink eyes is your best friend

>"Aha! I milled your big dragons! That's like destroying them!"

>he doesn't run traumatize and keening stone in otherwise unrelated blue tron decks
top kek

in part, this They hear "put cards in graveyard" and think "I'm killing things!".
People new to card games like magic don't really understand things like card advantage and how a random deck works. It's not until you draw into something bigger and even nastier than those dragons, and explain to them that you wouldn't have reached that as soon as you had if you hadn't been milled first, that they finally understand.

They also assume that every card must have a purpose, and that the game wouldn't have cards that did essentially nothing. It's people ripping open booster packs, seeing cool looking cards, and thinking "wow, this MUST be good! It looks so cool!"

I distinctly remember an FNM where I encountered a blue aggro deck with a Jace's Erasure in it. Look at this card. Cool name, cool art, has the guy who was the face of Magic on it, and it does something every turn just for two mana. How could it not be a great card?

It's that wonderful, childish innocence, that bizarre trust that a company would not just print shitty common cards that don't do anything outside of niche decks.

>mill is good in the format with the smallest possible deck size

Hmmmmmm, however did you figure that one out?

>tfw the noob who put a random Thought Scour in their limited decks hits all of your bombs with it, or 5 lands and you get screwed
Next leveled

I run Altar of the Brood in Krenko, because when I'm making making 80+ goblins in a good percentage of my games, it's a viable win condition. I have learned to be careful, though, as one guy in my playgroup plays Mimeoplasm.

>5 lands
You mean Tome Scour? Even without going hard-mill, those win you stalled games.

Sup' boyo

>playing Iconic Masters draft
>x4 Wrench Mind
>x4 Balustrade Spy
>x1 Trepanation Blade
>a bunch of other nonimportant bullshit
>wind up winning 2 games by milling people out
>someone also milled me out
>a great but slow time was had by all
Fuck you mill is the best. I run Oona in EDH, that's my jam bitch.

...

Someone posted this in a facebook group I'm in a few months ago. See if you can translate it.

"Looking for nasty commander or Commander packs that include Armageddon alright over bed or lack of God violent type of card the card that turns all lands into swamps in addition to whatever lands card they are they don't all have to be nasty but I want nasty fun as I am trying to build a fun / nasty Commander and modern deck or something along those lines any help would be greatly appreciated"

>I want to run Bane of Bala Ged, and Wrath of God type cards.
>Also Urborg, that shit is tight. When every land becomes a swamp, my contamination fetish boner is huge.
>Can someone recommend me something that just fucks everyone's day right up? I just want everyone to have nothing.

I dunno man, I've draft mill in Iconic Masters, and seen two others do it. Every time it's awful.

Tbh I had an idea for a stealth-mill Nivl deck and this would work well in it.

Mill isn't great, but I'll be damned if it isn't fun to pilot a surprise mill deck at a tournament and watch seasoned players get more and more annoyed as you mill their decks away. A (very) occasional win is icing on the troll cake.

Lifegain is dumb, though. It's not even a win condition.

> 23476102 (you)
I once had a over 200 hundred Zombie deck. It was my first personally made deck. I had a huge selection of Zombie cards, so put all the decent to good cards into the deck. It wasnt "terrible" or at least not as terrible as you might expect. Decent field control with decent creature out put.

My seccond deck with a white deck of 100 cards with something retarded like 50% enchantments. I was thinking, If i got a any creature on the field. I could make him a god!! That deck sucked so much cock i caught the gay.

I'm just saying, that's better than a lot of mechanics out there

Some decks aren't good even in their own limited formats

Giant 200 card decks can be playable if you just fill them with shit that is good without relying on anything else.

>
Every time I play GPG in standard there's a scrub who thinks I'm going to target them with Minister of Inquiries, and I'm personally offended by the implication that I'm running dedicated mill.

'Competitive' mill is the only fair thing you can use against friends who don't spend a fortune on decks. That said, they should print more cards to make it competitive.

Yeah and I'm saying it's pretty darn obvious why that is, Mr. Obvious. Mill is only "good" in this situation since it's Limited, that's it. You're going to be seeing some deck outs anyways because of how inherently weak and inconsistent most people's decks are. The second you try it in a real format you get your ass beat.

It's like if you had a format where everyone starts at 10 life and said Burn is the best deck because you can play it in a format where you only need to cast Lightning Bolt 4 times instead of 7. You're not proving anything. Mill is still the noob deck of choice almost anywhere.

>tfw you are that friend who spent a fortune on his deck and it was on manaless dredge

COME AT ME, MILL.

>Lifegain
>often viable
I think the only viable decks I've ever seen are Life (extended), CephaLife (extended), and Martyr Life (modern). The only one of those to do notably well is CephaLife, which placed 2nd at a GP.

That's hardly often.

The only way I can see life gain as viable amongst experience players is to run it in a very small number of edh decks. I ran Karlov life gain/D&T. It's slow but extremely safe

The only way life gain is useful is if it's on a creature that recurs itself (kitchen finks) or provides insane value (thragtusk).

Careful boy, I'll fill you with my white mana.

lifelink isn't an irrelevant ability either. not something to bend over backwards for but it's nothing to sneeze at.

In limited lifelink has been more of a bitch to me compared to constructed, but lifegain is easily overvalued, same with mill, and I'm for new players learning that, but sometimes they need to have bad experiences to learn such things, and need to see examples of what's a good card that has life gain in addition to what it does, and what a bad one is.

I was thinking in limited, for instance the black white lifegain deck in Iconic masters is one of the best decks. Also there has been some decent lifegain based decks in lots of formats, I remember some core set formats

You're retarded if you can't see that turning a Lightning Bolt into a Shock made a difference over the course of a game.

No, he's largely right.

Burn is a tight race and the deck needs to be streamlined even more than most decks. Dragon Claw did see some very modest tournament play, but there's better answers to Red Burn, and the best one Red Burn has in the mirror match is just to be that one step faster.

Dragon Claw may look appealing in your opening hand, but as a late draw it's a dead card. And, in the fast pace of a Red Burn mirror match, anything past turn 3 is a late draw.

Did someone say lifegain?

Why couldn't this thread be "the biggest MTG boobs" instead.

You forgot the worst part
>and I want to get these cards by opening packs instead of buying them single

You don't understand. It was for when you're racing the opponent with the same deck as you. You gained life for each of your spells and each of theirs. It made it impossible for them to outpace you.

>Innistrad drafting

>get 2 copies of spider spawning, 2 runic repetition, 1 memory's journey

>power it out with stuff like like armored skaab, forbidden alchemy, dream twist, gnaw to the bone and mulch

>go infinite

I'm not that person but yeah, it fuckin works.

t. Aryan nazi who wants to gas the metagame

If you dont play infinite turns you are a massive fag

I was in an Ixalan draft the other day.

The dude I played against dealt 12 damage to himself to keep his vanguard alive against my shitty 1 or 2 power chump blockers.

It's fucking draft, I should be so lucky as to have my terrible fucking commons and uncommons turn into lightning helixes. Block, prevent 3 damage, deal 4 damage.

to be fair that's an easy card to misplay with. I've had a bunch of games where I should have paid the life and didn't, or did and shouldn't have.

It feels like a card that is only decent in draft, where it might be must stronger and more valuable in dedicated deck. You really need to build toward it, and have that incidental life gain to compensate.

It also seems like it shines most against control decks, of which draft generally does not have...considering the format has no field sweeps, I believe.

It's a card that would be a lot better if vampires had some half decent lords to make that 4 life spent more valuable.

That would be a so much better thread.

Step 1: Play Ashiok
Step 2: Proceed to win by milling

>players at our local place
>playing vampires in casual
>not even using the best vampire

Lifegain has a lot more synergy than mill.

Why are so many posts in this thread deleted?

A mod tossed around a couple of blanket deletions over something dumb. There's posts missing all over the place.

So, I was right when I bitched about abuse of power by the mod. Little faggot.

Mill is for people that want to be Kaiba.

I like lifegain and mill when it's done right.
What follows is an example of doing it wrong.

I once knew a filthy casual literal fedoralord who played UB mill and he was convinced his milling opponents was a good strategy.
He also ran a bunch of shitty random generic poorfag UB control stuff mixed in so it was probably the worst deck I'd ever seen with the most thought put into it.
This was years ago and by now UR has usurped UB as the tryhard combination.

>tfw made a lifegain deck with shit like elixir of immortality while i was still relatively new
>tfw got focused down every multiplayer game we had because 'look at all the life he has guys!!!'
>tfw every time some form of black/whatever player won because of that, having been building and building

Yeah it fuckin works, in Limited, like all of us were saying it does.

Wait what happened?