Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #664: Milling

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about the history of Magic's oldest alternate-win condition.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is all about milling. Okay, so for those that might not know what milling is, milling is when you take the top, some number of cards off a library and put it into its owner's library. Milling is slang. It comes from Millstone, but we millstone, but we'll, we'll get to that. I'll explain where the, where the slang came from and all that. Okay. So, um, milling was not in alpha. There was no card in alpha that made people put the top card of the library into their graveyard. But the, the source behind it actually does go all the way back to Alpha, which is Richard Garfield

was making the game. And what he realized was, is there was a win condition in the game. You need to do 20 damage. But Richard realized that there was potential that something could happen. A board stall could happen or all the creatures get wiped out or there could be a situation that could come up where nobody could do 20 damage to the other player. And the question was, okay, what do I do about that? What happens when we wrath away all the creatures or whatever?

For whatever reason, neither player can do 20 damage to the other player. And Richard's like, okay, I need an answer to that because if that happens, I don't want it to be, and the game never ends, and, you know, so he came up with the idea of, well, what if the deck, when it got completed, meaning when, so the actual rule was, when you draw a card, every turn you have to draw a card, if you ever have to draw a card and are unable to draw a card, you lose the game. And that was added in mostly as

a backup. Mostly as a, you know, we need to make sure the game ends. And so it was put in as a thing to just be kind of a safety valve. That's how it started. It's just, well, if somehow things go horribly wrong, at least this thing will make the game end. That's how it started. It's just, well, if somehow things go horribly wrong, at least this thing will make the game end. That's how that started. And like I said, nothing in Alpha... Well, okay, there were cards in Alpha that made you draw cards.

Ancestral Recall was in Alpha. One blue mana, draw three cards. Braingeyser was in Alpha. X and a blue, draw X cards. And both of those, I believe, were targeted, meaning you could use them on your opponent as well as you could use them on yourself. And so what happened was, in the early days, when people were first building sort of control decks,, for example, the classic control deck, the first build would be The Deck.

Brian Weissman, the first deck that really got a name and got copied online was called The Deck. Obviously, deck names got a little more exciting after that. But it was a control deck. And one of the things about it is there weren't a lot of win conditions in the deck. I think, like, the original deck had one Serra Angel in it.

But one of the things that the early control decks found out was that if I stall out the game, if things go along, that one of the win conditions could be if you have a small enough number of cards that I can make you draw one more than

the number of cards you have. So if you have two or less cards in your library and I cast Uncensored Recall on you, or if you have, you know, X minus one or less and I cast Braingeyser on you, I can make you lose the game because I can make you draw, and if you can't draw a card, you'll lose. Now, one of the reasons that was very valuable was that card drawing is just a good tool in a control deck. A control deck wants to make sure that I'm outlasting my opponent, and so card advantage is a big deal.

So drawing cards is a big deal. So the control deck already was blue, usually blue-white, and it was going to need to draw cards. Those cards were going to be in the deck anyway. So the idea that these cards could double late game as a win condition became very valuable. And so in the earliest days, there wasn't really milling per se,

but there was the equivalent, which is I kind of forced you to take cards off the top of your library to the point where you're going to lose the game, given they were draw spells. But once again, if you're low enough in cards, if when I make you draw some number of cards, you can't draw them all, you have lost the game. Okay, so that was going on. That was a thing.

And then we get to Antiquities. So Antiquities was the second expansion. So what had happened real quickly, for those who don't know your Magic history, Magic comes out in August of 1993. They print enough cards that they think will last six months and they sell out of it very quickly. And that's what they call Alpha. So then they make another supply of cards where they think will again be a six-month supply. Now, a much larger supply,

but what they really think realistically will be a six-month supply. That's beta. That gets sold out in a week. So they realized very fast that the game, there was a lot of demand for the game. That alpha and beta just sold almost instantaneously. So what happens was,

they hadn't planned to make expansions right away. They had long-term plans. There were people working on stuff. But they quickly had a scramble. So Richard did the first expansion, which was Arabian Nights. He was inspired by a Sandman comic he had read. And so he based the first expansion on,

it was top-down, based on a real, I mean, in public domain, but a real literary source. So then, for the second set, they went to the East Coast playtesters. So that is Scaffa Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. Also, I think for this particular one, for Antiquities, Joel Mick, who was one of the Bridge Club group, the people that made Mirage and Visions. I think Joel also helped out in Antiquities. So anyway, they had to quickly make something. And so the idea they had was,

what if it had a mechanical theme? You know, Raven Knights had had a flavor theme. What if it had a mechanical theme? So the mechanical theme was artifacts. Players that really seemed to take into artifacts. You ever listen before, I talked about how Clockwork Beast and the Hive were like the thing that everybody needed to have.

So artifacts out of the gate were quite popular. And, you know, in the Power Nine, Black Lotus, and Moxus, there was a lot of attention toward artifacts. Never Roll Disk.

There were a lot of exciting artifacts to people. So they decided to make a set with an artifact theme. And the way it worked is every card in the set either was an artifact, mentioned artifacts in its rules text, or was a land that tapped for colorless that you could use to play artifacts with.

That had usually other utility beyond just tapping for colorless. That was it. Every single card was one of those three things in the set. And so one of the things they in the set. And so, one of the things they were looking for in the artifacts is just making artifacts that did new and different things. So one of the artifacts they made was called Millstone. And Millstone costs two. For two and a tap, target player put the top two

cards of their library into their graveyard. Now, the interesting thing about this was, um, while there were control decks that occasionally as a plan B were decking people, um, that, that wasn't really a primary deck strategy. It was kind of a backup in a very near, you know, like in, in, in control, it was a backup when you got in trouble, when your one or two routes for victory somehow didn't happen or got destroyed or whatever. If the deck had played its Ser Angel and then the Ser Angel got destroyed,

it's like, okay, well, what's my backup if my source of damage gets destroyed? But no one really had made... No one had concentrated on the idea that I'm going to run you out of cards as the main thing the deck did. So Millstone right away found an audience.

Like I said, when I lived down in LA, we had a player, Thierry was his name, he was French, who was known for being the Millstone guy that loved playing this Millstone deck. There was definitely a, it became something that players started to do, the existence of the card said, okay, here's a thing you can do

and since millstone was the first card that specifically did this, that said okay, you're putting cards directly from library into graveyard, it was called milling, because the card that did it was a millstone now be aware, by the way the reason they went with millstone,

and this is me guessing a little bit, the flavor, at least on the card, according to the flavor text, was we've defined your hand and library. Your library is kind of your memory, and your hand is kind of your conscious thought. And so the idea is, if you're going after the library, you're kind of driving somebody insane. And the flavor text on the millstone said that

the noise of the millstone drove people crazy. Now, a millstone, for those who don't know, is basically a stone wheel, or at least the original ones I think were stone wheels, that you use to crush grain, like for wheat and barley and things like that, so that you could mill it, I guess. So you could break it down so that you could start processing it to make dough and stuff out of.

So anyway, a millstone is a device to do that. And milling, or to mill in vernacular English, is the process of breaking things down using usually a stone wheel, but I guess it doesn't have to be made of stone. The old ones were made of stone. The original ones were made of stone. So anyway, the effect called milling. And the interesting thing about it is, originally it was just on this one artifact, and that was the only card that really did it. But when people started building, sorry, started building mill decks, they tended to be blue. The idea, essentially, in a mill deck is what you did is, it would usually have some sort of control aspect to it. I would counter threats and things. And then sometimes it would also have some bounce, control aspect to it. I would counter threats and things. And then sometimes it would also have some bounce,

put things back in your hand. And the idea was, I'm just going to stall, but my win condition is I'm milling up a library. Now remember, when Magic first started, deck constraints were 40 cards, and then when the DCI started up, it changed over to 60 cards. So one of the things that's also interesting, by the way, about Millstone, well, I guess

I'm getting ahead of myself. It varies differently in Limited and Construction. We'll get there. Actually, I'm jumping ahead. Back in history, when it was made, Limited wasn't a thing yet. So that wasn't, my point will come up, but it's not relevant yet. So early on, milling wasn't something that happened a lot. In fact,

I think the second effect that milled things was in Homelands, with a card called Reef Pirates. So it was one blue blue, so three mana total, two of which were blue. It's a 2-2, it was a ship. Summon ship, I mean, back when we had summons.

And whenever it did damage to the opponent, they milled two. Now, it turns out it wasn't a particularly well-designed card because I'm going to have to mill you more times than I'm going to have to damage you. So every time I damage you, I'm doing two damage, and I mill you two cards. So usually I'm going to beat you on damage before I beat you on milling. So the card wasn't super efficient. And because I had to get through with the creature and it had no evasion to it, it's like, well, maybe I hit you once or twice, but I'm not hitting you enough that I'm milling you enough to matter.

And so not a particularly effective card. you enough to matter. And so, not a particularly effective card. Other early cards that did milling were, tended to be very small effects. So for example, in Ice Age, we have Ray of Erasure. So that is the instant that costs a single blue mana, and then you milled one card and then you had, it was a cantrip, Ice Age had the delayed cantrips. So you drew a card at the beginning of the next turn.

Eventually we just made cantrips draw a card now. But they were worried about it then. So it used to be draw at the beginning of the next turn. So but the idea there is like it's a little tiny mini effect. I'm not like milling one card. It's just not the kind of card you're going to win with. It's not enough.

Then Visions, you can see a little bit of messing around. So Foreshadow was one blue, so two mana, one of which is blue. It's an instant. You named a card, and then you milled one card of anybody, a target player. And then if you milled the named card, you got to draw a card. And then there was a delayed cantrip that you got a card off. So it was kind of like Ray a target player. And then if you milled the named card, you got to draw a card. And then there was a delayed cantrip that you got a card off it. So it was kind of like rave erasure,

but if you guessed correctly, you got an extra card out of it. But the interesting one was Vision Charm. So Vision Charm was instant for one blue mana. It allowed you to do one of three things. So the charm toys that you do, you could phase out an artifact, all lands become the basic land type of your choice until end of turn.

Or, you could mill four cards. So this is the first card that straight up is a spell that's a one-shot mill spell. The reason they put it on a charm was I think the belief of the time was well, why would you want to do that?

Why would, like, you know, millstone's repeatable. And, you know, millstone's repeatable and, you know, it's on an artifact so it's a little harder to destroy. The idea is, you know, over time, maybe I can mill them out, plus you can afford your deck. The problem with the spell is look, this spell's only going to mill

so many in a vacuum which is not, you know, the chance of milling somebody out is hard with a one-shot spell. Now later, what you would see is, it's funny, because in Visions, it's you mill five. Later on, in Magic 2010, we'd make Tome Scour, which is a sorcery blue mill five, right? So later on, we realized some value of it. The other thing, by the way, that we eventually realized was that players with a little less experience really like milling

because they see it as being a destruction spell. So, for example, if I mill five cards and one of them is a Shivan Dragon, well, I've gotten rid of the Shivan Dragon. Now, as you get more advanced you realize that while you kept them from drawing that Shivan Dragon, for all intents and purposes it's a randomized deck. The Shivan Dragon could have been on the bottom. You're not really stopping them from drawing cards. So while there might be a little bit of like, oh I'm excited that one of the cards I milled, I'm glad you don't draw, it's not quite as effective as it feels. Like, it feels a lot more potent than it actually is, because you're kind of just, in some level, you're reshuffling their deck.

You know, if you reshuffle their deck and the card that would have been on the top now is on the bottom, they're not going to draw it. But I don't think people would be nearly as excited over, you know, shuffled target player stack. That feels much more meaningless. And the reality is milling cards when you're not trying to mill them out is kind of similar to shuffling their library. Just you happen to know what cards were going on the bottom, essentially. Um, anyway, um, Weatherlight, uh, does some milling, but it does self-milling. Her Tides from Millers, uh, uh, one, one and a blue, so two mana, one blue, two, two illusion. It has phasing, and every time it leaves play, so phasing is, uh, if it's out of play, it gets exiled, and if it's exiled, it comes back and plays, so it's there every other turn. And whenever it leaves play, it mills you for three. But you can spend a blue mana so it doesn't mill.

And the idea was, at the time, a 2-2 flying creature for two mana was just not something that you normally got. Actually, I'm not even sure. Does it have flying? It might not even have flying. Anyway, it's a bad card. And then there's Tolarian Serpent, which was a seven mana, seven, seven. And its upkeep, it mill a bad card. And then there's Tolarian Serpent, which was a 7-mana 7-7, and its upkeep, it mills you 7. So what you learn here is, A, creatures were way, way worse

back during Weatherlight, but you can see milling is a cost, you know what I'm saying? So they're playing around there. So the interesting thing is, then we get to Tempest. So the important thing of Tempest is I entered the picture. I mean, I started working at Wizards as of Alliances,

but Tempest was the first set that I led the design for. And in it, I make the card Altar of Dementia. So Altar of Dementia says that you can sacrifice a creature and if you do, so Altar of Dementia, what's it cost? Altar of Dementia costs two. Sack a creature and then you do, so Altar of Dementia, what's it cost? Altar of Dementia costs two, sac a creature, and then you milled equal to the power of the creature, and, and, uh, Altar of Dementia itself costs two. So the reason I made Altar of Dementia is I had friends that had millstone decks. I recognized the fun of millstone, uh, and so I said, hey, I want to make a new millstone. And so, um, but, um, the millstone that I had always seen had always been played in a control deck, really.

And it, it tended to not have any creatures. So I said, you know what? I want to give you a cool millstone, but I'm going to build in restriction that says, hey, you can't build a miller deck like you have before to use this card. This card, I'm milling based on creature power, right? So it just was a very different animal. It lets you mill somebody, but it had to be in a creature-based deck, and that was not how mill decks worked. And I was just very excited to do that.

So then in Urza's Saga, is that right? Urza's McKinney Mass next. Urza's Saga was next, sorry. In Urza's Saga, I made Whetstone. Whetstone is an artifact that costs three, and for three colon, each player mills two.

And so the idea there is, okay, well what if I have something where you can do more repeatable milling, a little more expensive, but you can do repeatable milling, but it's milling you. Now, maybe that's a positive, maybe that's a negative. Either I gotta get ahead of them on cards, or I have to somehow care about the fact that I'm milling

my own cards. In Mercadine Masks, I made Worry Bead, which was an artifact that costs three. At the beginning of each player's turn, they mill two. So it's something they just milled somebody every turn. So the trend you're seeing here is that I really liked, I thought milling was fun. And so I started putting every large every large set at least, or, you know, about once a year, I tried to make sure there was a new variant to, um, to millstone. Okay. And then in Odyssey, so Odyssey was, uh, Tempest was the first set I led. Then I did Urza's Destiny. Then I did Unglued, and then I did Odyssey as my fourth set, I

guess. I decided that I wanted to make a milling spell, and we had messed around with small incremental milling, but I wanted to make a milling spell that was a spell that, like said, because one of the problems with all the milling spells we had done was there wasn't any sense that really you were going to mill somebody out with it. And I wanted a spell that milled people and said, hey, this is serious. You want to make a milling deck? You could put spells in your deck that mill, not just repeatable artifacts. So I made a card called Traumatize. So Traumatize costs three blue blue, so five mana total. It was a sorcery

and you milled half the library. Now the idea behind it was it couldn't really, it'd be hard to win just with it. Milling half is really good early on, and then it gets repeatedly worse as the library gets smaller and smaller. But one of the things that I really wanted to introduce was the idea that, look, milling was a viable thing.

Now, the interesting thing is, as I started making more milling cards, there's an interesting thing we found from the audience. Milling was quite popular. People really liked milling. I'm not saying everybody. I'm saying that it was something that we recognized was exciting to a subset of players. was exciting to a subset of players.

And so let me talk a little bit about why I really liked... I like milling and why I think milling appealed to other players. So I was a very Johnny builder, right? I was... I loved building a deck where I would play somebody and they would start the game going, what is he doing? And how is he going to win? And I loved coming up with weird ways to win. I really loved not doing, you know, a lot of people

were like, I'm going to get creatures and attack you, or I'm going to, you know, very straightforward sort of things. I'm like, I'm going to be a little more circums... I'm going to try to do things that are a little different. And one of the things in the early days that I loved is just sort of making my own win condition sense of, like one of the classic decks I talk about was, I said to myself, okay, here's what I want to have happen. I want to make a deck where the way I win the game is by casting the card Tunnel. So Tunnel, for those who don't know, is a red,

I think it's a sorcery destroy target wall might be an instant destroy target wall okay so how exactly do you win the game by casting a card that says destroy target wall and the answer was I play a wall and I beef it up and I make it a very very tough wall

and then I give it to my opponent and I put creature bond on it and when the creature dies it does damage equal to the toughness of the creature. And then I tunnel it. I kill it. And then they lose. Yeah, yeah, that was a long... I mean, you get a sense of my deck building where I'm like, I'm going to win with tunnel. And I had a lot of different ways, a lot of fun.

So one of the things I liked early on was I loved alternate win conditions because it just played the sensibility where oh, this is a different way you can win. And I remember when I first saw Millstone, I don't think I really thought about milling people out, even though it was the backup plan B for some control decks.

I didn't really think about it until I saw Millstone. And once I saw Millstone, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a route to victory. And so I built a bunch of various decks. My biggest problem, and the reason I made things like Altar of Dimension and other things, is the Millstone deck early on was really straightforward. It just was a control deck with Millstone. There wasn't a lot of variance to it.

And so one of the things you can tell I did as I had been introduced is try to mix it up a little bit try to definitely make it so there was more ways to do milling and that there was more ways to build a deck around it also by the way I equally was fascinated by Poison

which showed up in Legends that's another alt win condition that I really latched onto so one of the things about Legends. That's another alt win condition that I really latched onto. So one of the things about me is I like the alt win conditions. And so, but what I found was, as I started putting more millstones in the set, they were pretty popular. That there was an audience that really enjoyed that. And as I more pushed the milling agenda, there was just an audience that enjoyed that.

And the other thing that happened, now I can talk about this part, is at some point, starting around Mirage, so real quickly, the history of Limited. When Richard first made the game of Magic, he had the idea of Limited in mind. And it was something that he, I think that the Alpha playtesters occasionally did limited. But when Magic first came out, there was such a the problem Magic had was there was such demand that Wizards for a while

couldn't keep up with demand. So it wasn't until Fallen Empires that there were the set came out and the set didn't disappear overnight. Like up until Fallen Empires that there were, the set came out and the set didn't disappear overnight. Like up until Fallen Empire, remember Fallen Empires came out in the fall of 94. So, I mean, we're talking over a year into Magic's life. You know, I remember, for example, going to the store when Arabian Nights came out, when Antiquities came out, when Legends came out, when The Dark came out. And the problem always had been that if you didn't buy cards right then, right there, they were going to be gone soon.

I bought boxes of Legends because I knew that if I didn't, it would just disappear overnight. if I didn't, it would just disappear overnight. And so one of the things that happened was, while Richard had the idea of doing limited, limited made no sense when you couldn't get your hands on cards. Now, eventually they got printing figured out, meaning they were able to print at the demand because, you know, a lot of the problems were, having never really done this before, understanding what's the audience, what's the appetite, how many cards they need to produce, how do they produce that many cards. It took them about a year to get to the point where they were able to make as many cards as people wanted.

And then, once that happened, they started to introduce limited. I think the first set that Wizards had all pushed limited with was Ice Age, which was the summer of 95. And I know at Nationals of 95 and Worlds of 95, Wizards insisted on having a limited element, you know, a sealed portion of the tournament. And at the time, that was radical thoughts. Like, people were, the players were very against it

because the idea at the time was limited was just pure luck. You know, absolute luck. And draft wasn't a thing yet. Although, interestingly, they did draft during original playtesting. They just hadn't... It took time to get there. So what happened was, it wasn't really till Mirage that we were developing in any...

Like, we were definitely thinking about Limited as a thing when we were balancing sets. I mean, Ice Age... Ice Age, for example, I did play Limited with Ice Age. For those that have never had the experience, it is a painful experience. And the reason was, the set wasn't

really balanced for Limited. There aren't enough creatures, the removal is a little wonky in places. It's just not... I mean, it works fine in Constructed, but it definitely has issues in Limited. And one of the things that would happen in Ice Age Limited is you sometimes would play three or four colors

just to get enough creatures that you had a chance to win. And it did warpy, weird things. So anyway, when we made Mirage, we were very conscious of being... of definitely thinking more in lines of Limited. Now, the reason I bring Limited up is it's not until Limited becomes a thing that it starts making a lot of sense to making milling spells. it starts making a lot of sense to making milling spells. Mostly our milling early on, most of it was... Sorry. I'm puffing. Let me take a drink.

Most of the milling early on was made for constructed, and that required repeatable milling. But once limited came along, so here's the important thing about limited. Limited, you don't have 60 cards, you have 40 cards. And limited tends to be just a little bit slower. In constructed, you're optimizing what you're doing. The gameplay just can go a little bit faster.

So in constructed, you can win by turn four, by five, by six, sometimes earlier. But normally, we like to make Constructed so you don't normally win before the fourth turn. But in Limited, it is almost unheard of to win by the fourth turn. Limited takes a lot more turns. So the combination of the smaller deck size with the fact that it goes later started making milling an attractive thing because in limited it starts becoming something that has you know there's more it could make some more sense to use um and then as we started building for limited we then started getting into drafting so drafting happened the very first Pro Tour, which happened

in, well, I'm sorry, the first Pro Tour was in February of 96. The second Pro Tour, I think, was in March of 96. The second Pro Tour in Los Angeles was the first Pro Tour that had limited in it. The first Pro Tour in New York was just constructed. The second one, though, was a limited Pro Tour. Back in the day, by the way, when the Pro Tour first started, they alternated between a constructed pro tour and a limited pro tour. We introduced drafting. I think the first thing we did was Rochester. Rochester draft was, we originally had two draft formats when we started the pro tour. One was booster draft, which I'm sure you're familiar with. The other was Rochester, where you would open up a pack, lay out all

15 cards, and then take turns picking cards. And that you would go one direction, the person who picked eighth would pick the ninth card and then you'd go back. So you'd sort of go clockwise and counterclockwise. And then you'd rotate, and now the next person opens up the next pack. And so that way everybody got a chance at every position. a chance at every position. Um, so, um, as we started doing draft, so Mirage, um, Mirage, we were thinking about limited to a certain extent. Um, and I, I think we were starting,

I guess with Mirage, we were starting to think about drafts. So, yeah, that is true. I'm sorry. Drafting. So if we started drafting in March of... Oh, right. Alliances was coming out around then. So I think that probably, I mean, Alliances, I guess Mirage. Mirage was supposed to be the first thing. We were thinking about draft, though, because at the time we were doing that, draft was happening. So, yeah, okay. So Mirage was the first thing we thought about limited, and we were thinking about draft, though, because at the time we were doing that, draft was happening. So, yeah, okay. So Mirage was the first thing we thought about limited, and we were thinking about draft.

One of the things that we started thinking about draft is it did start saying to us that milling could be a thing in, not just in constructed, but in limited, because if you made something, if you put something that's repeatable that did milling, you could, in fact, make it a strategy in draft. And once again, what I'm saying is because limited is slower and because limited is less cards, you know, if you gave somebody milling. So we started thinking about milling as being something that was not just a constructed thing and not just a casual sort of thing, but also a limited thing, especially for draft.

So essentially what that meant was we had to find colors for it. So originally, like I said, the earliest was on artifacts, but then as we started putting into color, once again, the flavor we liked of milling is the idea of making you forget stuff. That the reason that you're losing stuff out of your library is you're losing memories. And so what we did was Blue was doing sort of the mill, and then with Black we were doing what I call lobotomy effects.

And lobotomy effects, the first one, lobotomy was in Tempest, where I go into your library. In fact, the original lobotomy spell was blue and black. And I go into your library, and I literally take cards out of it. And so for a while, we were doing milling in blue, where blue was making you forget by just generally forgetting, and black was making you specifically forget things because it was going inside and taking things out of your brain.

making you specifically forget things because going inside and taking things out of your brain um and eventually what we realized was that we needed a secondary milling code so one of the problems in general is um we need overlap between colors blue and black although they're ally colors is probably the color combination with the least overlap. So we were always looking for ways to overlap blue and black. And blue and black tended to overlap in library. If you look at like Demir, one of Demir's themes was the idea that blue and black are library focused. So already blue had milling effects and black had lobotomy style effects. So we said, okay. We started letting black just do milling as well. Black had done some

self-milling as cost and had done some through lobotomy style effects done loose milling type stuff. And obviously it already has card denial where it goes into your hand and makes you lose stuff. So we realized because of the functionality of milling

we started adding it to black so that milling now is primary blue, secondary black, and then also shows up in artifacts. One of the things that we tend to do now is we are very conscious of often having milling as either a direct supportable draft type. If you ever look at Dimir, when we make Dimir, we always make drafting like, the thing we like to do for guild sets is have a primary and secondary way to play. And milling usually is the secondary way

to play in Dimir. Although, interesting thing was, in Gatecrash, we actually, the mechanic for a while what did we call it? We called it grind. And the way it worked is it had a number and then you milled cards until you milled that many lands.

And the idea behind Grind was we liked the idea that it was milling but had a little bit of an unknown to it which made it just a little more suspenseful. Because if I say mill two, well, you know, I know exactly what I'm milling, but if I say grind two, oh, is that two cards? Because it's two lands, then it'll be two cards. But it's probably more than two cards. It's unlikely

the top two cards are exactly two lands. But how long before I get to two lands? You know, with, and you can do math and figure out the averages and stuff. But anyway, we ended up not using grind as the mechanic because it didn't play well with the other mechanics around it. Um, and so we, we grind is in the set. It's not keyworded, but there are some individual cards that grind.

Um, it's not keyworded though. And then, um, although in guilds of Ravnica, when we came back with the mirror, um, we did play around a little more like,

um, uh, although interestingly, the mechanic in Guild of Ravnica was self-milling, not milling the opponent. But, you know, we, one of the things in general that we like is, one of the things we tend to do is, sometimes there'll be a mill theme, sometimes there'll be a graveyard theme where self-milling is valuable to the graveyard theme. Like in Innistrad, the zombies tended to build things out of creature parts, so it wanted to have creature parts in the graveyards, so it had self-milling. Normally we do self-milling, sometimes we'll just make it targeted, and that way if someone wants to opt into doing a mill strategy, they can. Another real common thing that we'll just make it targeted and that way if someone wants to opt into doing a mill strategy

they can. Another real common thing that we'll do when designing is we like making uncommon build arounds for draft and usually in blue uncommon we tend to make a repeatable milling card. There's a couple different ways we do it. One is it's activated but another fun way to do it is to play into whatever the themes of the set are. So like, we're on Zendikar, oh, it's landfall milling, like the crab, which was very popular. Or, you know, whatever it is

we're doing, we like to say, okay, here's the trigger condition that's playing to the themes the set's already doing, but hey, if you get this card early, now you have a strategy where milling can be a thing. And then, we always put some milling cards in now. A, we found out because there's milling strategies. And B, players really like milling cards.

Even though you shouldn't be playing one Tome Scour in most decks, there are still players that really enjoy that and play it. enjoy that and play it. And one of the things about making cards is if you make cards that players enjoy, even if it's not optimal for winning, but they're enjoying it, those are fine cards to make. One of the things that's good about the game of Magic is that as you get better, you learn and you grow. And so one of the ways that we like to do that is put cards in that we know people have fun playing, that they enjoy playing, that they learn over time that there's better cards to play. And the Millie is kind of nice because it both is

a discriminator card, as we call them, in that you kind of don't want to play one Tome Scour most of the time, but A, there's times you can combine things where you do want Tome Scour, so there's strategies where you do want that card. And it's also this card that, you know, early on, like, early players who don't know better have fun with it. And like I said, they tend to treat it like destruction. Like, what did I get? What did I get?

Ooh, I got these cards, you know. And that's fine. It's fun. They enjoy themselves. One of the things that's important is it is not crucial that everybody optimize their play. That the thing that we try to optimize is that they're enjoying themselves and that if they want to play suboptimal cards and have fun doing so, that's fine.

Like I said, it just gives them opportunity later on as they get better to learn maybe that this card isn't as good as I think it is or this card is better than I think it is. And we like having that. We like having a learning curve built into the game. And so effects like milling are nice in that regard and that they, they, they definitely make people happy, um, early on. Okay. So, um, milling has now become a staple. I mean, I, I don't think we mix that anymore with zero milling. Um, oh, the other reason we like milling, by the way, is one of the problems we have in blue

is we don't have a lot of scalable effects in blue. And what I mean by that is oftentimes we have mechanics or cycles and things where you want to pick something and then care about something. You know, look at the top card of your library and you care about the converted mana cost, or I'm somehow doing something to a creature

and I care about its power, cost or I'm somehow doing something to a creature and I care about his power or I'm something in which, or it's X it's got X in it, like there's something in which I'm caring about some unknown variable that's going to change and that one of the problems is some colors, like red does direct damage direct damage is very scalable

blue does not have a lot of scalable effects one of the few ones it has is milling and so often sometimes you also will see us use milling because we're trying to cycle things out and then milling allows us to do that in blue on a scalable effect like I said other places we might use milling is

that sometimes we use milling is that sometimes we use milling as a means to care if we want some randomness built into something you can mill and then care about what gets milled that's a common way so the

so when I say milling is blue and black blue and black have the ability to make target opponent or make another player put cards on top of the library into the graveyard. Green and red do allow you to mill yourself. Like mulch, for example, is a very green card, where I take the top four cards in my library, I look at them, all the lands go in my hand,

all the rest go to the graveyard, for example. And red will also do effects for like a milsome number of cards, and then you get a boost based on something that shows up. White, by the way, is the one card that we make that it's not that easy to get things into your graveyard. It's one of white's, I mean,

every card has major weaknesses. It's one of the minor weaknesses of white, but we make it not as easy for white to get stuff into the graveyard as just one of the things that white is a little trickier having time to do. So we don't do a lot of self-milling in white. We might do a little tiny bit. We don't do much. Like green and red is much more to do more. Oh, the other thing that blue does that is milling-related is

blue can blue will do this thing where it will look at some number of cards and then discard some number of cards as a means to sort of filtering, I think is what we call it where you're sort of optimizing, trying to get what you want to get and as part of doing that

like looting is, I draw a card, discard a card so looting is another way draw a card, discard a card. So looting is another way to sort of self-mill. And then filtering is another way to self-mill, where I draw some number of cards, then I discard some number of cards. So sometimes we also will combine

that. Like if, for example, we're trying to do a mill strategy, one of the nice things is not only will milling cards help you, but filtering cards will help you. Looting a lot of times will make targets so you can make the opponent loot themselves in card drawing. So one of the things that's interesting that if you're playing blue, there's a bunch of different things you might want to put on those decks that you won't always use on your opponent. Like once again, you're not going to make them draw cards early in the game,

but it's a tool that if you're trying to mill them out late in the game can double as it means to help deck them. And so blue has a bunch of different tools that we use, and so there's a lot of synergies there. So when I say we put milling in a lot of stats, there's a combination of different... Some of it is mill the opponent, some is self-mill. We make things targeted where we can. Usually if

there's a mill strategy that is something that's a big enough thing to worry about, we will make stuff like card drawing targeted and other stuff targeted so that you can use it. Card drawing by default is not targeted. But if we're, for example, making Demi or something in which milling is a legit strategy in the environment, that's when we'll talk about doing targeted draw and stuff. Anyway, I'm now at work. I hope today gave you a good insight of sort of a lot of the different things we think about in doing milling. Like I said,

milling started as kind of this one quirky one-off card, and then over time became something that really became an ongoing thing and a regular part of Magic. And so for those out there... Oh, the one last thing before I leave. Something that comes up all the time is, why don't we name it? Why don't we call it something?

We have tried many times. Shadows Over Innistrad had a milling theme in it. We went through a whole bunch of words there. I do believe I think one day one day we'll probably get there on a set that cares. I don't know. We keep trying and it's something people keep asking

for. It's a matter of finding the right word. Anyway, that's why it hasn't been keyword yet. We haven't found quite the right mix yet. But if you ask me if I was a gambling man, I bet one day we keyworded, but I don't know. I don't know when or where,

but it is something that comes up from time to time. Anyway, I'm now at work, and oh, I had some traffic, so you guys got a little extra talk on milling today. But it's time for me to go. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to go. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.