I decided to liquidate a ton of my craftable cards in order to build a House Dimir mill deck - the recently keyworded ability that lets you put cards from your opponent's library into their graveyard.
If you know very little of Magic, here's how it works:
Almost all decks win by reducing the opponent's life total to zero. However, there's a failsafe built into the game if both sides just turtle up and focus entirely on defense instead of offense. On each of your turns, you have to draw a card from your deck (the deck is referred to as the library). There's a rule to prevent games from lasting forever, which is that if you would draw a card but your library is empty, you lose.
You can think of it as going to 0 or less life is like being killed (or for friendlier duels, getting beaten into submission, I guess) while losing this way is like you've gone completely insane as your mind has been wiped out.
Point is, it ends the game.
While drawing cards is usually a good thing, some decks are built around the idea of forcing the opponent to draw tons and tons of cards - more than they can ever use - or, better yet, just tossing those cards directly into the graveyard so they don't have a chance to use them. (Note that some decks are built around doing this to themselves and then using cards that dig things out of the graveyard, which is why Dimir mill decks in the original Ravnica block were somewhat hosed by Golgari ones in the same set.)
There was a card that existed, I believe, in the very original Magic set ("Alpha") called Millstone, which let you do this to your opponent repeatedly, and since then, it's always been called "Milling," which has just this year been made an official keyword - when a player mills 1 card, they are taking 1 card from the top of their library and putting it in their graveyard.
I initially wanted to build my deck blue/black for that old school Dimir feel, but as it turns out, there's not a lot of support for interesting enemy-graveyard synergies with black cards these days (at least, not that I could put together) and so I decided to go pure blue for an easier time with mana and more of a focus on milling.
The deck is fun to play - you set up various permanents that trigger when you cast other spells, always milling the opponent for two cards, and then on top of that the spells you're casting mill the opponent as well. So once you're up and running, you're milling them for 8-10ish cards per turn. With a little luck, that means the opponent's clock is ticking down precariously. I even have this Ashiok planeswalker card (maybe the first planeswalker I've regularly used) that both mills and then exiles the enemy graveyard - so even if they do have resurrection stuff, you can wipe it out.
Yes, it's fun to play.
But is it fun to play against?
I have yet to win without the opponent conceding with what I figure must be a frustrated sigh.
The deck is pure control - there's no emphasis at all on damaging the opponent, so the only real interactions with the other player is that you're setting up roadblocks while they race to kill you before you can mill them out.
I suspect an Azorius (White/Blue) deck of this sort could work - leveraging white's life-gain to put more time on the clock - but I also think that keeping it mono-blue lets you hyper-focus on grinding down their deck.
Anyway, I also think that having slightly elevated lag while my roommates are both on a voice chat for their LARP in quarantine (which I think basically becomes a standard TTRPG) has maybe made it a little frustrating for opponents, as every time one of my triggered abilities that says "target player mills x cards" goes off, I need to manually target it, which has a maybe 1-2 second lag, and that adds up.
Anyway, it's an evil, evil deck. But also kind of fun in a mischievous way.
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