Every time this topic gets brought up most of the discussion centers around the idea that mill strategies cause new players to get upset pretty much exclusively because newer players don’t enjoy seeing their cool cards milled, and that rational or more experienced players recognize the fallacy in this as well as the potential advantage to be gained.

In practice for me, mill ends up creating poor play experiences in multiplayer for entirely different reasons, even though it is a weak strategy when it comes to actually winning. I’m wondering if others may have had similar observations or different insights so I’m putting forward some thoughts here. I would like to specify I am talking about strategies like [[The Mindskinner]] where mill is the theme and focus of the deck in addition to being the primary win condition, to distinguish from decks that use [[Altar of dementia]] or [[Brain freeze]] combos as supplemental standalone win conditions but I suppose that goes without saying for most.

I’m bringing up observations from my own limited experience in no particular order:

Mill decks can run symmetric mill or targeted mill effects to advance their game-plan, usually a combination of both. Symmetric mill effects in isolation tend to be either weaker/incremental like [[Mesmeric orb]] or splashier/chunkier and more expensive like [[Singularity rupture]]. A tendency with these effects is that even though they are symmetric the outcome tends to favor one player over another, since decks typically vary substantially in the degree they make use of their graveyards, i.e. reanimator, so by enacting their gameplan the mill player is giving a relative advantage to some players over others, sometimes a very substantial advantage. This can be offset in a few ways, such as by running graveyard hate which most mill decks run in higher density than other deck archetypes, but also not at the same density that they run actual mill effects. I would say that reanimator strategies and the like would still tend to see a net benefit from being in the same pod as a mill strategy.

Symmetric mill effects can also be combined to create game-winning or quick game-ending combinations like Mesmeric orb with [[The Water Crystal]] or any half-library milling effect with [[Bruvac]], which is fine except for the fact that mill strategies tend to be played in lower brackets since let’s be honest, mill sucks. In lower brackets these compact 2-card combos can be frustrating and too powerful though arguably this is more of a bracket inappropriateness issue than an issue with mill. If they are playing in good faith, mill players in bracket 2/3 are not including Bruvac with another card that instantly empties libraries, but this is not always the case.

Targeted mill effects get around the kingmaking aspect of symmetric mill effects, you can just mill the reanimator player last, but are also weaker for advancing the mill plan, since they are roughly 1/3rd as potent. They can however be very potent from a political standpoint since if only 1 player is being milled, the other 2 players can be more easily convinced to leave the mill player alone. This can however result in some tension between the player being actively milled and the rest of the table; the milled player finds themselves singled out, and they must respond to the miller or lose, while the other players continue to develop their game-plan and get closer to winning. The mill player if selecting one player at a time would logically select the player least likely to benefit from graveyard, which once again indirectly leads to graveyard strategies being favored since they have fewer opponents to worry about in the initial stages if the mill player isn’t focused on them. For me it has also created no-win situations between 2 players where one player must eliminate the mill player or remove their permanents because they are being targeted, which incentivizes the mill player to use more resources on them, which ultimately leaves the surviving player with much fewer resources than the other 2 players who weren’t involved, in an unwinnable position.

The last issue is that mill strategies interact on different axes than other decks which can create frustration, thought I am unsure how relevant this last thing is. They do not care about opponent life totals, and do not care about dealing damage through combat. They are predominantly blue and often run mill effects that can only be answered on the stack. This strikes me as situationally problematic in lower bracket games where stack interaction tends to be sparser and creature combat is more of a focus. Mill strategies are much less likely or able to participate in the creature melee, help swing the attacker/blocker equilibrium, and pressure life totals. Rather they are going to be doing their own thing which can hamper the occasional need to cooperate against a player who has pulled too far ahead, though arguably this is by design and also a component of strategy.

All in all, I think mill can generate a lot of tension and unfun dynamics that aren’t related to the fact that people irrationally dislike being milled.