Discussion Forum

During 2019, mill was slowly rising until julie, where its numbers crashed to an all time low.
Then it picked up speed during august and exploded on October. It then had okay numbers during October and by december had lost its fanbase.

In 2020, January the fans of mill return.
Then from February to august the fanbase is very stable with high numbers, not as high as the 2019 January to may period, but much more solid.

At the end of this month, mill has access to a solid number of many new directions it has never had before.

Rogue mill, is the first of these directions, with thieves' guild enforcer being the cornerstone.
Faeries, vampires and merfolk will all receive a bunch of mill-related rogues when zendikar rising is legal for play.

Not many remember it, but the foundation for merfolk mill was laid back as far as at the release of the llorwyn cycle.
A couple of mill-folk decks were actually played back then. My own builds housed the evil combo of moth dust changeling and grimoire thief.

Now the rogue mill theme may lead to the revival of mill-folk as well as the fragile beginning of faerie-mill and vampire-mill.
As a whole, it should be possible to build a decent rogue mill, that kills either by critters or by mill.

Aggro mill was explored as far back as the printing of jace's phantasm, where eight of precinct six and consuming aberration quickly joined it. The decktype went out of favor though. Not even the printing of vantress gargoyle brought it back but a few smart people did redesign that deck. It used to be the favorite milldeck on mtgvault many years ago, but never won enough tournaments to break free from the rabble. Now it will gain relic golem and nighthawk scavenger which together with vantress gargoyle will give it access to aggression like mill has never had it before. A few of the rogue mill cards may add to this, and some rogues seem designed for aggro-mill gaining aggressive abilities when the opponent has 8 cards in the graveyard.

Then there is ruin crab, which allows millers to have 8 milling crabs. While I've moved away from hedron crab myself for years because 4 crabs were to easy to destroy, the mill fanbase have built up their decks primarily around hedron crab.
Since the printing of "uro" hedron crab has been used in a few uro-based decks where selfmill is the purpose.

The first of these is crabvine that exploits vengewine with other selfmill cards.
A single player has built a hybrid of dredge with uro, glimpse the unthinkable and hedron crab. If the dredge plan fails, the player can fall back to being a mill deck with large defensive creatures.

Several builds are being made around uro and the 8 crabs at the moment, and crabvine might merge with some of those new builds, while few might try out dredge hybrids.

Traumatize + fraying sanity was quite the hype this year but as a whole it never managed to produce efficient results. I've frequently told people how fraying sanity belonged in a slow mill brew, but people went on trying it out with traumatize. The combo mills the entire deck, and with maddening cacophony described by many as half glimpse, half traumatize the concept might actually start winning some more.

In classical ub mill (so far the most dominant mill in recent years), glimpse the unthinkable has always been a two edged sword. It's been the best 2 cost mill there is for a long time, but it does stress the manabase and makes mill lose to problems with the manabase.
With maddening cacophony there is suddenly less stress on the manabase, and the card really mills a lot when you reach 6 mana.

My favorite mill type of all time was the esper version that somehow fell into disgrace after the printing of field of ruin. While it did wonders with archive trap, mill lost its primary defence, path to exile. One player kept resurfacing on the top 8 with esper mill, but noone tried to copy his success back when esper mill was strongest. He also exploited trapmakers snare quite well.

These days a few have explored a new way to fish out their archive traps, by using xxx symmetry (black card that costs 1. Can't remember the full name) the few people taking that route, I've reminded that they can use mesmeric orb to rob the opponent of their draw, while they can get their own draw with relic of progenitus.

Then there is lantern mill. Originally an extremely efficient deck, but it's overall weakness was in being made up of two many artifacts. Well, eye collector and merfolk windrobber to the rescue. Lantern mill often relied a lot on putting down ensnaring bridge, but this became a problem with the ban of mox opal. in my own grixis mill I've dealt with getting down the bridge fast enough with oona's prowler, which is a strategy that might be adapted by lantern mill. Since it can access two cheap flyers and gain aggression/stall via those, it can be developed in new directions. Fraying sanity seems like an obvious addition to the deck. You would have to dig in designs older than whir-lantern to find builds less vulnerable to artifact hatred. Assassin's Trophy might even allow the deck to adapt archive trap. I also recommend stream of thought for lantern players. In my own build I get to replay 1 card for every 5 stream cast on average.

Speaking of assassin's Trophy I've spent a while on building a landdestruction mill focussed on geomancer's gambit with archive trap.
I did include the trophy to start with, but the design turned towards grixis instead. They have now printed cleansing wildfire, a geomancer's gambit that costs 1 less. It might sound weird, but if you think about it, archive trap and mind funeral are the best landdestruction out there. Supported by these two cards that may trigger archive trap and then add more landdestruction like pillage, fulminator mage and a few others, you have a deck.
Imagine rg ponza with archive trap and mesmeric orb, and it might make some sense.

With mill having an enormous fanbase in places like mtgvault I've sort of just scraped the top of the iceberg.

Mill winter is coming...