Originally Posted by
BlanketEffect
Okay, this way of saying it just clicked in my head.
Milling, as a way of "dealing" with a threat, is only such IF your opponent DOES run out of cards. Reason is this:
Yes, Milling is a win condition. Nothing more, nothing less.
Let us, for the sake of discussion, say say 50% of their deck is a threat to you, and 50% isn't. If you never milled a single card from them, then half their draws will be good against you, and half will not be. It's completely 50/50 random. If you DO mill away a card, their next draw is STILL 50/50 good or bad against you.
Gondorian said, to paraphrase, "the avg deck has 18-20 allies, and if some of them can be milled, then that's that many fewer you have to have answers for."
The problem with this idea is that, assuming you both have equally effective draw engines (i.e., you both draw the same amount of cards per turn), your opponent is always going to have the same amount of 50/50 good/bad cards in hand whether half their deck gets milled or not, because the milling got rid of 50% good possible draws as well as 50% bad possible draws.
So, it is not until the endgame, when their deck is EMPTY, and you're still drawing cards, that keeping those extra ally control cards in hand makes a mathematical difference.
Like Gondorian stated in the OP, Control starts to get ahead when the opponent is having difficulties representing threats. If they are drawing cards on pace with you, they won't have difficulties representing threats. If they don't have difficulties representing threats, you are very hard pressed to get ahead and you often lose because you run out of answers. Letting your opponent draw as many cards as you often leads to you losing if the cards they draw turn into threats.
Milling them out can help but it has to be your win condition. If it isn't your win condition, you either need a way to prevent them from drawing cards or you need something to render their draws useless.
It wasn't until I reread our discussion and I reconsidered what Gondorian was saying in that quote above that it clicked with me.
TL;DR
Unless the deck being milled has been completely run out of cards, the impact of the threats it draws every turn is statistically equal to if it had never been milled.
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