Dime a Dozen #32: Doctor Pauper Presents— How to Kill with Mill

Hi everyone!

I’ve never been in love with Mill. Playing against it can be tedious, and downright frustrating at times. When losing to Mill, there’s no “quick death,” no way to alleviate our misery. Death is always slow. So. Incredibly. Slow.

Against something hyper-aggressive, it’s not all that bad. They just happened to have three copies of Nettle Sentinel by Turn 2, followed, of course, by multiple Groundswells, and before we know it the game’s over, and what could we really do?

This is not the case against Mill. Against Mill we usually can win, or rather we can win if we actually draw one of our answers to the mill plan. But we don’t draw one of our answers. We instead watch helplessly as said answers are forcibly dumped into the yard with virtually no chance of recovery. Oh well. This will all be over in about 16 turns or so.

As far as the mill-inducing side of things go, honestly I’m a bit of a novice. In fact, the only times I’ve really focused on milling an opponent out was when I played Mono-Blue Control against Dimir and Izzet Cloudpost (and even then it was only after sideboarding). This was a while ago if you couldn’t tell already.

In those days, my principal game plan hinged (just about entirely) on a little card brought to us by Innistrad Block…

The Tome may’ve been bloody, but games where it came into play featured pretty much no bloodshed whatsoever. The goal was simple: resolve one or more curses, make sure they stay on the board, and (most importantly) make sure we didn’t lose before the opponent runs out of cards.

So why was this strategy considered (somewhat) viable against Post? Well, it did a pretty good job of avoiding Post’s strengths and attacking its weaknesses. Allow me to elaborate.

With heaps of creature removal and incidental life gain, controlling Cloudpost lists were considerably resilient to creature-based beats. What’s worse is that Mono-Blue Control played just a handful of creatures to win the game with, so overloading Post’s creature kill was barely within the realm of possibility.

By adopting a mill plan, we punished Post players’ slow development and limited number of win conditions. Even their card draw worked against them somewhat since it depleted their library faster than normal. While not a perfect win condition, mill was likely a better win condition in that scenario than combat damage.

I’ve said all this to try and illustrate the strengths and applications of mill. The primary strengths of mill (in my eyes) are: The strategy attacks opponents from an axis they are likely not prepared for, it punishes slow decks in the format, and it mitigates the effectiveness of creature removal, life gain, and (to an extent) card draw.

This means, of course, that adopting a mill strategy will naturally be some trouble against faster strategies because mill is inherently slow (at least as far as Pauper is concerned).

A player’s library is a resource consisting of 60 cards (sometimes more), while that player’s starting life total is 20, and a “losing” poison total is 10, with no exceptions. Attacking creatures offer up repeatable sources of damage, often equating to 10% or more of these respective numbers each combat.

Conversely, there is no persistent source of library depletion in Pauper that even comes close to that kind of a rate (at least as far as I know).

In formats such as Standard, Mill has become a more viable option thanks to repeatable effects like Jace, Memory Adept and Nephalia Drownyard, and even these cards were printed somewhat recently. Therefore a mill deck in Classic Pauper will need to forcibly slow the game down if it wants to realistically mill the opponent out.

And that brings us to today’s objective: learning how to kill with mill! I said at the beginning that I’ve never been in love with Mill, but all that may change during this investigative Doctor Pauper session. To bring you all up to speed, let’s look at Bing’s Pauper Mill list that was introduced in our last article.

Here is a quick explanation from Bing regarding his thoughts and goals for the deck:

“It’s a casual deck – but really I just wanted a decent way to mill my friends in Pauper. I initially started the deck as a way to test out the Hawk/Brainstorm combo.” – Bing

So the number-one thing to keep in mind is that this deck is intended for casual purposes, namely smashing some of our buddies and having fun! Can’t go wrong there.

I want to preface our further exploration of mill with some of the great comments left by readers regarding this very deck. Thank you all for commenting, and please keep it up!

Pauper Mill: Your Thoughts

“Pauper Mill should not play creatures, but fogs and Words of Wisdom and the Ravnica ‘all players draw two cards.’” – Reinaldo (Writer’s Note: I believe the commenter is referring to Vision Skeins)

“Good creatures to include are also Drowner Initiate and Sage’s Row Denizen instead of the white creatures and go for a Mono U deck.” – Philipp

“The reason I went Squadron Hawks…is primarily due to Whirlpool Rider shuffle into deck ability. This allows me to draw the Hawks…then recycle them with Whirl – Curfewing or Snapping allows you to replay the Hawk again and reset the hand – also Brainstorm and Hawks rock.” – Bing

All three comments bring up really interesting points. While Reinaldo may be right about phasing out creatures in exchange for Fog-effects, I think the bigger-picture objective is to accomplish three tasks: the first of these tasks is stay alive! This is traditionally accomplished with blockers, removal, countermagic, Fog-effects, etc. The second of these tasks is to locate our win conditions. We do this by incorporating card draw and card selection. The third of these tasks is resolving and protecting our win conditions.

Rather than asking, “Should I be playing Fog-effects over creatures,” I think we should be asking ourselves, “What cards can I play to help accomplish as many of these tasks as possible?” While generally the more overlap we have, the better, it doesn’t hurt to have cards that accomplish only one task but do so extremely well.

Let’s look at Mulldrifter, a phenomenal card in general, but particularly useful in our style of deck. Now it’s fairly obvious of me to say, “Mulldrifter is good,” but don’t let that be what you take away from this example. By looking at how Mulldrifter supports our three key tasks, we will subsequently be able to value less obvious cards based on their latent capability to do the same.

Does Mulldrifter help accomplish the first task of keeping us alive? Yes it does, both by blocking and by digging us that much deeper towards our key answers. Does Mulldrifter also accomplish our second task of locating win conditions? Yes, indeed. Does it accomplish the third task of resolving or protecting our win conditions? Not really, but it does bolster and accelerate our win condition by synergizing well with Jace’s Erasure and milling the opponent even faster.

These multi-purpose types of cards are what we can and perhaps should be striving to incorporate into all of our decks.

Moving onto Philipp’s suggestion, going mono-blue and adding Drowner Initiate and Sage’s Row Denizen to the roster could go a long way in streamlining the mill plan and focusing our deck towards generating a cohesive mill “clock.” At the same time we’d have the added benefit of developing our board, which is not unappealing.

I definitely feel like this kind of redundant, focused mill strategy is worth trying out at some point, but I don’t see it currently being effective enough to beat most game plans. This goes back to my original criticism of mill: it is really really slow. Even if we play some kind of mill creature on Turn 1 and start the decking on Turn 2, we simply aren’t providing a fast enough rate to win any reasonable sort of race.

For the reasons stated above, I feel like we need to take an approach like this: “We’re building a control deck that just so happens to win with mill.” By the time we’ve either stabilized or locked our opponent out of the game, we’ll have given ourselves plenty of time to deck them!

Now that we’ve considered the comments and come to a few conclusions, let’s go over some possible adjustments for Bing’s Pauper Mill.

Lands in Hand

I really like starting the optimization process of just about any deck with the mana base.

With Bing‘s deck, I find the fact that we’re playing Azorius Chancery over Azorius Guildgate quite odd. We have no way to take advantage of the bounce effect, since we have no ways of synergizing with lands in our hand. This would be different if we were playing Compulsive Research or any spells with retrace, but we aren’t. Snap is good friends with Chancery (as most of us know all too well by now), but we’re not really going to combo off with any of that extra mana (except maybe with a Whirlpool Rider?).

Moreover, we have 12 legitimate Turn 2 plays (not including Whirlpool Rider, since he really isn’t an option on Turn 2), and Chancery delays those by a full turn. Guildgate comes down a full turn earlier, giving us more “plays” on Turn 1. Since we’re playing Brainstorm, we should also consider playing some number of fetch lands to shuffle away cards we don‘t like.

The color distribution looks good overall. We have 15 sources of our primary color, and 10 sources of our splash color. As far as land count goes, I think testing will go a long way in sorting that all out. Having Brainstorms to hit land drops is good, and our only high-ish drop is Mulldrifter, so 21 lands may end up being just fine.

Lastly, Gush stands out here as another card that bounces lands to our hand, but has no powerful synergies (outside of Jace’s Erasure). While it’s an inherently powerful card, I have to wonder if there’s a better option. With only 11 Islands in the deck, we may be more well-suited with something that has more applications early on.

Spell Tweaks

For tweaking spells, we definitely want to keep our three key tasks in mind. To quickly recap, the tasks are:

1. Stay alive (long enough to deck them)!

2. Find our mill conditions!

3. Mill the opponent (by resolving and protecting the mill cons)!

The first card that probably doesn’t accomplish any of these tasks well enough is Gitaxian Probe. It’s true that seeing our opponent’s hand will let us know if our mill condition is going to resolve or not, but that information doesn’t actually help us that much (since we aren’t playing countermagic or anything to force an Erasure through).

Seeing just one card doesn’t do much to accelerate Erasure’s milling, and usually won’t dig deep enough to get us out of sticky situations. I’d play just about anything in its place, from Preordain to additional kill cards (Curse of the Bloody Tome) to even just a pinch of countermagic. Currently I’m leaning towards additional kill cards because I have a feeling that four copies is not going to cut it.

Another spell I think we should keep an eye on is Snap. It definitely has a number of applications in this deck, but are they all strong enough? Maybe a card like Repeal could be incorporated as a split with Snap. I say this because Repeal cantrips, and can protect an Erasure on top of keeping us alive or replaying a utility creature.

This may come as a surprise, but I actually like Reinforcements in this deck. That is, at least in theory. It helps us accomplish multiple tasks, but costs us a card without immediately impacting the board or netting us card advantage. Obviously it has the potential to net cards with something like Mulldfrifter, and that might be enough to keep it in the deck.

Enchanted

I can picture this whole milling strat going in a slightly different direction, namely one focused on enchantments. Curse of the Bloody Tome and Jace’s Erasure could be the victory conditions, and Rhystic Study could help accomplish a lot of our tasks by slowing down opponents, digging for answers and powering up Erasures.

We could also play Journey to Nowhere for removal alongside Auramancer and/or Tragic Poet to bring virtually anything back from the grave.

Anyway it’s just a thought, nothing concrete. If there is some kind of prison-ish, taxation-y pillow fort-esque version of the deck using namely enchantments I’m sure someone will find it.

The Deck That Decks

I think our initial tweaks should go something like this:

-4 Azorius Chancery
-4 Gitaxian Probe
-2 Gush
-2 Snap

+4 Azorius Guildgate
+2 Curse of the Bloody Tome
+2 Preordain
+2 Repeal
+2 Words of Wisdom

However, I’m not 100% sold on these changes. I think getting this deck on camera will be the best course of action from here. Once we get a decent idea of the post-ban “gauntlet,” I’d be happy to run this deck up against it.

Alternatively, we can also just sleeve up some version of this and go right into a Daily Event. If you have an opinion one way or the other, feel free to let me know!

In terms of sideboard options, I feel like we should take a page out of Mono-Blue’s book and incorporate staples like Curfew and Hydroblast, all the while supplementing them with white’s Disenchant effects and superior creature removal. This will all hinge upon what we expect to face in the early October weeks.

End Step

Can mill make it as a legitimate strategy in Pauper? I think the recent bans and potential slowing down of the format will be our best chance to find out! Unfortunately, the sluggish Cloudpsot control decks will no longer be around to target, but it’s likely that other decks inherently vulnerable to mill will appear.

Bing recently informed me in an e-mail that he has since moved away from Mill. He’s now working on a pure control version of Azorius that is working quite well for him. We, on the other hand, can delve deeper into the archetype if we like!

For the next installment of Doctor Pauper, I’m thinking we should incorporate a section of mill videos with analysis of a new deck. If you have any suggestions or objections, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

If you’d like to submit a decklist for future installments of Doctor Pauper, please send the list to JasonMoore228[at]gmail.com (don’t forget to include whatever primary goal for the deck you have in mind, and whether or not you’d like to remain anonymous).

As always, thanks for reading, and please comment!

You can find Jason
on MTGO as BambooRush
on Twitter @dimecollectorsc
and on Youtube at youtube.com/dimecollectorsc