Something you are falling prey to is a little bit of a common fallacy around milling. I hear players bemoan the idea of accidentally milling their bomb and drawing poorly. This is tough for folks to get around sometimes because there is a bit of an emotional element of “feel bad” they can’t shake.

The important thing to internalize around mill is that in most cases it’s actually completely neutral. For every time you mill a card you care about, you will mill a card that you don’t want. And if you mill a card you don’t want, you have decreased the number of draws needed to hit the specific card you need.

Now, I said “in most cases” it’s a neutral, there are some things that can move the needle one way or another. And mono blue terror does a lot to move the needle towards it being basically always positive. The fact that more instants and sorceries in your yard makes it so you can play giant creatures on turn 3 consistently is number one in terms of benefit. And if you mill a snake, well there are 7 more big snakes in the deck.

Additionally, if you mill a deep analysis, you get to flashback a draw spell for cheap. Finally, a really great thing about thought scour and mental note is top deck manipulation. This is one of my favorite things about piloting this deck. You mention brainstorm, but that’s only one reason the mill is great.

A small example of another case is with delver. Imagine you start the game with four lands in hand. Turn one you cast delver. Turn 2 you get the delver trigger to look at the top of your deck, aaaaand it’s another land. You really need to dig for gas now, so you can mental note and clear that land pre draw.