Lost Lands: Deck Archetypes in Shadow Era

[BlanketEffect]

I do get the idea that milling is tantamount to dealing with threats. However, you are just as likely to mill away an ally that you no longer have to deal with as you are likely to mill away a Tidal Wave that was going to be useless against you, and therefore a dead draw for your opponent. Now they have an ally on top of their deck to play, and it's something you have to deal with.

My point is, either way you go, you aren't impacting the flow of the game in terms of cards in your hand that can do things and cards in their hand that can do things. For purposes of what you must draw and deal with it, you may as well just be shuffling their deck every turn, thereby changing what was already random in the first place.

Bottom line, is that you're not getting any extra cards to deal with the potential random threats that your opponent is going to draw, milling them or otherwise. So the cards that you draw are just as likely to be useful or useless against the cards that they draw. Like I said, you can just as easily make them discard what would have been a dead draw for them thereby freeing up their opportunity to play a bigger threat against you as you are to mill away that threat and therefore not have to deal with it.

Yes, on turn 7 PLEASE mill away my Puwen, thereby making me draw my Aeon next turn! Or, maybe you mill away my Aeon, and leave me to draw Puwen. Either way you spin it, what I draw is still 50/50 good/bad for one of us.

Your NYM/DFA/CP analogy makes sense on the surface, until you also factor in that you can still only have 7 cards in hand, and because of situation, you'll likely have less, and do you really want to hold a bunch of nothing but ally control cards in your hand all game?

Meh

TL;DR
Milling gets rid of potential threats as often as it gets rid of dead draws. It doesn't impact the on-board game at all, unless the discard effect itself did something to impact the on-board state (e.g., Brimstone Devourer)

Edit: But, TBH, any further depth for this discussion should be in its own thread, so as to not derail the point of the OP. The initial post I made was just to distinguish that "Mill" in its *traditional* form, is not what WE call Mill in Shadow Era.

[Airact]

Your NYM/DFA/CP analogy makes sense on the surface, until you also factor in that you can still only have 7 cards in hand, and because of situation, you'll likely have less, and do you really want to hold a bunch of nothing but ally control cards in your hand all game?

You actually kind of do. If you cannot play the ally control cards, you usually have nothing to worry about and you don't need to do anything which is pretty much where you want to be.

[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:

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.

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.

[Airact]

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.

Blah

[BlanketEffect]

I agree, Airact. If it isn't/doesn't become your win condition, it had no real impact in the game, as turn to turn events are concerned.

However, as soon as you've run your opponent out of cards, everything Gondo said is accurate. But not UNTIL the cards are all gone.

[Gondorian]

I agree, Airact. If it isn't/doesn't become your win condition, it had no real impact in the game, as turn to turn events are concerned.

However, as soon as you've run your opponent out of cards, everything Gondo said is accurate. But not UNTIL the cards are all gone.

Yeah, I should have been clearer. They can run out of steam in two ways: out of cards in hand and on board, compared to you, the Control player; or actually out of deck. I figure, as a Control player, you have to plan for case where they get through their whole deck because sometimes the flow of threats just keeps coming and you're even til the close. A few cards milled (whether threat or answer) could mean they're completely out sooner.

There's also the side benefit of mill that you can see what opponent is losing and potentially gain confidence as you see more of their key cards going in the bin. e.g. if they mill a Mind Control or Tidal Wave then that's one less you have to worry about. As the card pool grows and we get a bit more redundancy, that may not be so important, but generally people are running limited numbers of certain tech cards and, if you have seen 2 Rapacious Vermin go in the bin, for example, then maybe there are no more and you can load up on your attachments and artifacts, etc.

But you are right that, most of the time, you hope they have run out of steam before they run out of cards in deck, with them top-decking and you with a nice full hand!

[BlanketEffect]

I totally agree with the confidence gained when you see their limited tech cards go into the grave

(Especially if it's a Voidwalker's Gauntlet!)

[Martin JF]

Exciting stuff!


But Feasterling is totally Bakasura from Smite :P

[maskee]

I agree that Mill is not that effective in Shadow Era, but it still can be an archetype, bcs it´s possible to make semi-competitive deck with mill as only wining condition.

And also agree that mill cards from deck has chance to make oponent deck more inconsistent, bcs many decks has important late game winning cards or tech cards only 2x (like King´s Pride,...).

[BlanketEffect]

I agree that Mill is not that effective in Shadow Era, but it still can be an archetype, bcs it´s possible to make semi-competitive deck with mill as only wining condition.

And also agree that mill cards from deck has chance to make oponent deck more inconsistent, bcs many decks has important late game winning cards or tech cards only 2x (like King´s Pride,...).

It is an archetype in Shadow Era, for sure. My main point was to differentiate it from "stall/control" which is what is normally called "Mill" in SE.

To your second point, remember, it is as statistically likely to bring your opponent closer to drawing his King's Pride as it is to putting it into the graveyard.

I guess I just don't understand all the dissent about this observation. This isn't my opinion; it's simply mathematical fact.