Mill Saga

Thanks, I will check them out. This was made to teach the concept of mill while staying within a strict $15 budget. It is pretty bad, really, but hard to make better without more $. I think I updated the actual deck by splashing black for Breaking//Entering and Perplex to transmute for Sphinx's Tutelage.

Search for my two decktags:
Wdm Mill winter
Wdm mill guide

You really do like mill, don't you?
So I updated the deck to include things I have changed over the years. As an expert on mill, what do you think about the use of Mirari Conjecture here?

I think conjecture is slow, and it will cost you mana throughout it's existence. It also encourages you to play slow.
Also a ground rule of mill, the less mill spells you have, the more time you need to mill, and the more time you need to mill, the more you need other cards to stay alive.

That is kinda what I had found, but not until after I had already bought the cards. Mill seems to be a hard playstyle for budget, but I needed a deck to teach the concept of alternative wincons.

Why not use proxies ?
That way you can test before buying :)

It is something I have considered, but since the vast majority of my decks are designed to teach a deck type or mechanic I wanted students to see the card exactly like the originals. I even tried printing out card faces and laminating them on to lands, but you could tell the difference and it ruined it. I try to remember to tag my decks as Educational, but I forget and it can be hard to explain sometimes.

Oh, shiny new card. I think I will add both.

Thanks, I added it in place of Psychic Corrosion, which I don't have and can't afford anyways.

Why did you add breaking/entering and perplex? Some good mono blue replacements are mind sculpt and didn't say please

Or maddening cacophony.

Better card yes, but I tried to keep my recommendations budget

Back when I made the deck cards like Mind Sculpt were too expensive, so I had to find alternatives. I had a bad run of games where I couldn't draw a Sphinx's Tutelage, got angry, and added Perplex to transmute. I made the deck the way I would want it now but increased the budget. Dropped Mirari, added the crab and Windfall, which has some fun synergy with the deck, I think.

Windfall isn't legal in a lot of decks.

I don't think this is meant for any one format

Yeah, I don't concern myself much with formats. If I can I will stay legal, but it is a secondary concern coming well after the deck's purpose and cost. Anyways, cost provides a better control for powercreep in print than formats do, I think. I mean, what is the goal of formats except to sell more cards? I won't play into their greedy money grabbing "Standard"s ;)

Heh, all of the entertainment industry is designed to grab your wallet and squeeze it dry.
When it comes down to the real basics, most of what's constructed by humans is designed to exploit our presence.

Before we even get to be conceived the very possibility of our existence is being an economy of it's own.
One side of the industry tries to bring our parents together and create us, the other side of the industry is trying to prevent us from being born.

When a child is on it's way the parents will have to face a lot of forced economies that sort of cannot be avoided, from clothing, manuals, diapers, suplements, toys, medicals and the whole shebang.

Then there are other stuff like education, a larger living space.

Once the child is grown enough it will generate a forced economy of it's own. It will demand phones, computers, games, fashion items.

All of this continues to our death and beyond. Even when we leave this world there are economies that exploit our passing.

When all of these economies are accounted for, we can get into the sub economies created to thrive on all these other economies. Layer upon layer of exploitation is just building up upon past economies.

Sure, you may fear the evils of mtg, but you simply cannot escape the evils of economy...

We are the slaves of our own greed.

It's really just my go-to excuse for ignoring formats, but you aren't wrong. My view on it, as a biologist, is that greed is the most original and natural motivation from which most other motivations are derived. Rule #1 of Being an Organism: Be greedy or die. (For reference Rule #2 is: Make the most babies, but thankfully most of us ignore that one.) That is also why I find spirituality so compelling and at the same time difficult; it generally asks you to deny that which is most natural and intrinsic to us as living things. I have always found the most difficult things to be the most worthwhile, and what could be more difficult then to be at war with your very nature?

It's not our nature that we war against, it's the nature of everyone else.
Just like other giraffes are the closest competition driver for evolving a longer neck, other people are our own closest competition, and because we become ever more, we become greedy in really complex ways.
Try telling people that you don't believe in ghosts, and they will practically compete to tell you ghost stories.
The drive is at the point where competition is so fierce in reality that we have begun to compete at what is unreal.
It's interesting though.

I think that biology's number 1 is still make more babies.
Be more greedy is sort of a cultural evolution. We are smart enough to know that we are in trouble, but we are not smart enough to break free from our real problem, which is being "structure users"

You can negotiate with most animals, but humans try to negotiate with as few beings as possible in general.

You can't make more babies if you don't have the resources, and you get resources by being greedy. With finite resources anytime you take some it hurts everyone else. The very act of living, for all life, requires taking life (or that which sustains it) from others. So only take what you need, right?

Many people like to think that nature is fair, balanced, and intrinsically good, but that we (humans) are broken in our greed. The science on populations and ecology does not support this view, however. Organisms never choose the success of others over themselves, altruism always has ulterior motives. Populations do not willingly control their own numbers, they expand until some outside limiting factor reigns them in. Species do not engage in some sort of natural conservatism, they take what they want until it is gone...

Most of them simply lack the capacity to take more than they need. What makes us different is not the presence of greed, but merely the ability to act on it. Being "structure users" like you say allows us to capture more resources and store them, manipulate environments to our advantage, and control all other life to furnish our desires well beyond our needs.

In other words, take any single organism and give them the "special" capacities of a human, our minds, imagination, dexterity, etc., and they will exhibit the same ecosystem-breaking hording behaviors for which we are so well known.

I don't have any idea what any of this has to do with mtg, but I am convinced that mill players must be the philosophers of the community.

He's an outlier

Pockets:
Number two is babies then :)
Part of structure use, is the use of stories to create a narrative which makes the structure more easy to be accepted by other humans because it creates context where they themselves can adapt a role and play the part.

The myth of the gaia earth sneaks in upon me from time to time.
I sometimes forget how cruel the world really is :)

It's probably why we invented the "way of the hero"
First the hero suffer, then the hero learns how to endure and becomes victorious.

It must be a great time being a biologist, with the many discoveries we are having. Lab, field or both ?

I think you are right about narratives. Most children when they see the truth of human impact on ecosystems are deeply troubled, because they recognize it as unnatural (natural greed taken to extreme is unnatural). I have seen kids balling on fieldtrips to the landfill. Were it not for the narratives and traditions telling them it's OK they would flip out when they recognize their own trash. They would come back angry and ready to challenge our way of life, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

Sometimes I forget how Warhammer grimdark I can get when I go full-on biological inevitability. Don't worry; it's all gonna be OK (it isn't).

Biology is awesome, except for the wide-spread rejection of scientific thought overall here in the U.S. I used to be lab, but now I teach. When I'm lucky I get to teach mtg, which is what brings my cheap/ridiculous decks here.

I've been schooled with the "humanity is great and will reach the stars" teachings of Europe, and it took me some time to reach my current beliefs of inevitable doom.

I'm trying to crack the problem of humanity all by myself, by believing most organisms on earth are able to construct or imitate mental structures. The cause of our problem is that almost all mental structures are sort of selfish, and our capacity for storing more and more mental structures (aka social behaviours) both in our minds but also on paper/and computers.

We have been building layer upon layer of structures meant to forward our own goals and to hinder anyone else.
It's gone out of control and a lot of our structures that were originally of a more symbiotic nature is now more or less advanced forms of prisons.

I have had a lifetime of creating narrative structures myself through roleplaying games like d&d and call of cthulhu, and I started building evolution simulators at an early age. I've been using evolution on magic cards for years, building up so many different ways to simulate games.

In the end it turned out that because noone have built an efficient magic playing AI, the easiest way for me to evolve decks have become to use paperstrips as a statistical tool.

I'm currently fine tuning my system in an attempt to reach a high enough speed to let evolution fine tune a deck from noob level to competitive.

I must have written hundreds of decks by now, with the many details involved.

Having the tools to analyse and fine tune systems I hope to somehow break the 4th wall of our prisons.

Richard Dawkins "the selfish gene" took me to a lot of years trying to break memes (mental viruses) his book suggests memes arrived by random and have since evolved to control our mindscapes, but I'm pretty certain that 99% of memes are constructed by the smartest among humans, and then they got distorted by the less clever people who could see an advantage but didn't understand the structure fully.