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Denial
"I'm not losing to that."
Have you heard your inner voice telling you that, probably with a disgusted, kind of sticky-brown inflection, when facing off against a Ruin Crab?
And by "a Ruin Crab" I mean one next to a Mountain (probably Snow-covered Mountain, these days) rather than some kind of Swamp? Because Rogues... Rogues was a respectable opponent. Dastardly deck exhaustion or no, Rogues was a legitimate Deck to Beat. Mill - Izzet Mill - is...
"I'm not losing to them."
That's what it really is, isn't it? Intellectually you can wrap your head around an edgy metagamer concluding that Izzet Mill is probably fantastic against real Izzet, or one of the innumerable mid-range control decks like Mono-Black, Blood Money, or Esper. You get that from that perspective it can be rational. Rolling the dice maybe, but with biased bones.
It's less that you're unwilling to lose to Mill; more that you're unwilling to lose to a Mill player.
Here's an experiment I did this week. I just Twitter-searched "mill player" to see what came up. There's lots. Some excerpted highlights:
- .... I don't like people who play Mill. Mill players deserve to be roped (not on Arena, but in the bedroom)
- Mill is looking to be a top tier deck, and as a longtime Mill player, I can't have that.
- Mill players and "I was so close!", name a more iconic duo.
The populace seems to assume this kind of weird identity politics surrounding "Mill Players". Their collective side-eye seems worse than how they feel about Burn Players or even Tron Players. I've been guilty of the same! Like there was something morally or intellectually wrong not with the deck - any more than any other deck that the nice people in Renton, WA make available to us - but the person - any person - traversing whatever intellectual hoop sequence was necessary to bend a perfectly good Stormcarved Coast not toward Goldspan Dragon or Hullbreaker Horror but to - ahem, and I kid you not - Tasha's Hideous Laughter.
Anger
The steam is palpable.
I've felt it punking out of my own ears, and now, having gone over to the dark purple (?) side, I can imagine it from across the digital divide. Red faced, they literally can't believe what is happening to them.
If there were a "How lucky" emote on Magic: The Gathering Arena, you know - you just know - they'd be spamming it.
I mean after all you had no cards in hand and then just topdecked any old land to get the rest of their library.
But!
Have you thought about this very long?
Imagine a scenario where your opponent just spent their - well - their everything. They're left with a bunch of lands and a Ruin Crab. You have lethal a dozen times over on your side. You just need an untap. They rip a Snow-covered Island, play it, and win. Effin' Ruin Crab, am I right?
Am I?
Did you think about their navigation from Point A to point sixty?
Did the opponent play Ruin Crab on the first turn, or save it for second turn only, sacrificing a mana tap but protecting the cherished crustacean from early removal? Did they maybe save it from your two-mana Vanishing Verse with a one-mana Fading Hope... and set up their tight little next turn sequence? Did you even notice?
Here's the bigger kicker:
What did you think was going to happen?
You just got milled out by a basic Island. Presumably they blew all their resources just prior. What do you think they could have drawn that wouldn't have killed you in that spot?
Because if you think they got lucky... Maybe. But it might be more likely they just didn't get a little unlucky. And until you can figure that out, Tasha isn't going to be the only one laughing.
Mill is the Burn Deck.
When I say a "burn" deck, I mean that - at least in some games - it operates according to The Philosophy of Fire. It translates cards (and mana) directly into life total. Except library, essentially, as a stand in for life total.
In The Philosophy of Fire we priced Shock - one card (and one mana) for two damage - as the baseline. Draw any ten Shocks before the opponent wins, and you win!
But most of us will be willing to pay two mana for three damage. In Modern, some folks play Skullcrack and most adore Lightning Helix. In Standard, Roil Eruption has emerged as the contemporary inheritor to Volcanic Hammer. Roil Eruption - three damage for two mana - is about 15% of an opponent's 20 starting life.
How would you consider Maddening Cacophony?
8/60 is less than 14%... So worse?
Except... You're not generally actually ever up against 60 cards to exhaust. Because after opening hands, no one actually starts out with sixty. What about 8/52 instead?
All of a sudden the translation is actually a little better than the two-mana burn equivalents. Just something to think about.
Like a good Burn, Izzet Mill can play multiple game plans. Given a "threat" dense hand, it can just start firing off Mill cards as soon as it can cast them. Crab, Cacophony, Laughter... Come on deck! Let's just see what happens?
Most opponents can't interact with these cards at all. Mill isn't the best racer against Mono-White, but it hits an undeniable overlap of being awfully difficult to contend with directly and quite a bit faster than most of the metagame on the goldfish.
That, my beloved readers, is not the idea overlap of some intellectual inferior; can it be that Mill is a mathematical assassin?
Bargaining
"All I need to do is..."
"Well, what if I just..."
Are you playing Mono-White? If you're not, the rest of those kinds of sentences probably aren't going to make a lot of sense in the actual universe. You might try one of these:
"Please God, I'll let my sister have a free mulligan next time if only You prevent..."
The reality is that - at least in the current Standard - Izzet Mill has awesome matchups against many of the top archetypes. Can it lose? Of course! It can get weirdly unlucky on Tasha's Hideous Laughter. The opponent can have a Professor Onyx and a Farewell instead of an Edgar, Charmed Groom // Edgar Markov's Coffin and a The Meathook Massacre. That can throw off math. But by and large? In many popular matchups? There is no deck you would rather have in front of you than Izzet Mill.
If you've been playing for a long time, I probably don't have to explain to you why it's so dominating against allegedly controlling decks - especially those with a lot of dedicated creature removal. Despite being essentially permission-less, it has exactly the kinds of cards that make locking down a game with Hullbreaker Horror impossible within a reasonable window. It attacks decks like Blood Money and Esper in exactly a way that they can't prevent. And the control decks these days play? What? Some Jwari Disruption // Jwari Ruins and one Saw it Coming? Even if Mill couldn't cover its own offense with a hundred Fork variants these foes wouldn't be countering much anyway.
But the deck's single greatest point of negotiation is this:
There is literally no deck you would rather be against Naya Runes.
Can you lose? Of course! Naya Runes is The Deck to Beat for a reason. The matchup isn't nearly as lopsided as, say, against Orzhov Midrange, where you will routinely beat them on 20. Many are nailbiters. But in terms of win rate? It's not a lot worse.
Mill has exactly the tool set that bedevils Runes.
Runes has two powerful advantages; both of them are essentially initiative advantages created by its two signature creatures, alone but even better together:
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Jukai Naturalist makes you faster; and in most matchups, its lifelink creates a powerful racing sub-theme. Runeforge Champion - specifically around its ability to find Rune of Speed - breaks a general limitation of Selesnya-style creature decks. It can Haste out of nowhere to create lethal, sometimes from a seemingly empty board.
Together the two cards more than double down on these initiative advantages. You can basically play every Rune you draw (and some you've already lost!) between their combined mana savings abilities. That means you can potentially keep drawing - and keep playing - more and more Runes; building your hand and battlefield in concert. Cutely, you can deploy any number of copies of Rune of Speed - including out of the graveyard - without any access to Red mana, even!
Assuming it has one or both online, Runes can go either very tall or very wide depending on how the opponent plans to defend. Rune of Might can trample over Lolth's Spider tokens; or maybe you only want to make only 1-2 big creatures to mitigate the impact of a sweeper. In any case the ability to play a single Rune of Speed so many times gives Naya Runes an almost unique immediate counterattack game plan against even stabilizing opponents.
The problems for them in this matchup are these:
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Jukai Naturalist is some kind of Sapphire Medallion once it's online... But before it starts abusing one of Magic's two fundamental symmetries, it's not much more than a Grizzly Bears - a 2/2 for two mana. You know what has ground Grizzly Bears under its merciless heel since 1993? Any one-mana removal or bounce at all. On the Naturalist front, especially very early in the game, Fading Hope and Frost Bite stop the train before it ever gets started.
The problem is even worse when you're considering Runeforge Champion. Frost Bite in particular is a nasty response. One mana versus three is a problem because, even if the opponent has Naturalist online, they didn't get any mana advantage on specifically the Champion. It's the full three every time. They don't get to start paying a discount until at least step two-point-five. As long as you have a spare mana, you can break that up.
The second and more important piece is this: Runes can completely "go off" in a single turn. Rune after Rune after Rune building power, triggers from Generous Visitor, lethal haste as we've said... But the first Rune has to land before any of the next one hundred dominoes start to fall. As long as you leave your mana up, it is extraordinarily easy to prevent a disastrous cascade of card advantage and offensive momentum. They don't even get to draw a card.
Here's the fine print:
This isn't some control deck that has to stabilize or sweep or at least stay alive after leveling the first humiliation on The Deck to Beat. Dollars to deck lists you just kill them if you get an untap. The entire Runes deck has maybe 88 total Converted Mana Cost. That means that as long as the opponent had eight or more Converted Mana Cost in their opening hand, four copies of Tasha's Uncontrollable Laughter will always kill them. At the point in the game that we're talking about doing any amount of creature / stack interplay three will probably do the job. Between eight Fork variants (twelve counting flashback) and any incidental un-kicked Cacophony nonsense, it' is really not hard to win out of nowhere with like five mana. Standard Naya didn't suddenly get Force of Will.
Depression
"Sad face emoji. I didn't even get to play."
Remember when I said that Mill is the Burn deck? It's also a combo deck. It's just this sometimes haphazard, non-linear, combo deck. Everyone understands combo when things happen in the "right" order. You cast the Deceiver Exarch and then attach a Splinter Twin to it. You cast a bunch of Red Dark Ritual variants and then Storm out an Empty the Warrens. But what do you do when you draw the combo pieces in the "wrong" order?
Comically, sometimes you're just attacking the opponent with a Nomads en-Kor wearing a Shuko. Sometimes Donate is rotting in your hand waiting for something spicy to give away. But the non-linear nature of Mill's combo is actually a feature, even if it seems disorienting (or even discrediting) from the opponent's perspective.
Three big ideas here:
- You can set up for micro-conversions. You don't need to blitz the opponent for 40+ in one turn. You can chip shot them with a second turn Maddening Cacophony with the intention of winning on turn seven after doing nothing for four of those five turns (nothing offensive anyway).
- You rarely kick Maddening Cacophony. Not never, but far less often than you'd imagine. I once copied and kicked Maddening Cacophony. Once. Because I had spare mana and overload for a presumed kill the next turn no matter what. But the second copy was actually not so impressive, just because of how Maddening Cacophony works. Each successive kicked Cacophony is less Maddening. Un-kicked Cacophony is extremely consistent, and more importantly, predictable with Fork variants. Cacophony + Galvanic Iteration is always 16 cards. Whereas sometimes Laughter is 20 and sometimes it's 8. Yikes! Planning-wise now you're the one suffering depression. Hideous.
- You have no legitimate Plan B game plan whatsoever. There is no heroic Inferno Titan sending a copy of itself into The Red Zone with double Arc Lightning triggers. There is no never-ending stream of Manic Vandals taking out every Spellskite and Batterskull in sight. It's you - with relatively little card drawing - against their whole deck. On the one side they tend to have almost no defense against your actual cards but racing and they're usually slower than you are. On the other hand, your hands are often as limited - as subject to the top of your deck - as Burn's. Plan accordingly.
Acceptance
This is what I've recently found myself playing:
Izzet Mill | NEO Standard | Michael Flores
- Creatures (4)
- 4 Ruin Crab
- Instants (20)
- 4 Discover the Impossible
- 4 Dual Strike
- 4 Fading Hope
- 4 Frost Bite
- 4 Galvanic Iteration
- Sorceries (12)
- 4 Expressive Iteration
- 4 Maddening Cacophony
- 4 Tasha's Hideous Laughter
Savagely borrowed that one off of CovertGoBlue's Best-of-One stream without changing a single card. New addition Discover the Impossible from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is by far the weakest if you're champing for a change, though. Discover the Impossible is just overcosted Impulse the vast majority of the time.
One thing that I haven't fully wrapped my head around is why the deck is so solid against the current best aggro deck, but so poor against the former one. A big part of it is obviously the presence of Thalia, Who Ruins Everything. But otherwise? I like Mill's chances.
Acceptance. Oh, right. Hold on. Grabbing my barf bag. Acceptance.
"I am a Mill player."
LOVE
MIKE
