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Milling is called that because of the card Millstone, with flavour text:
More than one mage has been driven insane by the sound of the millstone relentlessly grinding away.
Turning the opponent terminally dumb has always been what milling is about.
I’ve been running the same deck for 12 years now with various twists and turns in the build. Imagine you’re standing in an empty warehouse and I paint a big red X under you before tediously assembling the worlds most complicated mousetrap filling every square inch of the space. For the first half you’re amused because it’s so precarious it couldn’t possibly work but then you’re confused because it just keeps going and getting weirder. Finally you attempt to parse out what thus thing actually does and before you get to the 8th moving part you die of an aneurysm as you realize I’ve just been building Inexplicable rule interactions to simulate a first person view of unmedicated ADHD.
If I have to remember how layers work I scoop on principle. Same with banding.
poor girl got her deck milled hard right in the middle of her train of thought and we never got that essay…
Another fact I love is that Magic: The Gathering’s implementation of its stack mechanic is identical to the computer science structure. Whenever I’m explaining stack vs queue to someone, it helps if they’re familiar with Magic because they’re already familiar with one concept, they just aren’t aware of it.
Wasn’t the game proved to be Turing complete
Yep. There is a combination of cards that will stimulate a Turing machine.
kiki jiki. the mirror breaker, provides several infinite combos.
Wonder what else they’re capable of stimulating, asking for a friend
The graveyard can be seen both as a literal cemetery for creatures and as a a pile of forgotten memories. I think cards that exile the opponents libraries are closer to bimbofication, as the knowledge is then forever lost, rather than becoming memories of the past.
Of course there are fewer cards that can mass exile opponent’s libraries, so it’s a bit tricky to do in a real game. In bracket 2-3, I like Maralen, Fae Ascendent as a clone deck to mill into exile the opponents, especially when playing against green decks.Modern magic is wacky sometimes, because exile means “gone for good,” except for dozens of exceptions in odd and wacky places. There are entire commander decks built on doing fucky things with cards that are “forever lost.”
This seems to be the case for most effects in MTG these days. They all mean what they say, except…
its all counters, and fast plays. i seen some recent cards on and off, alot of them seems to play on “exile x amount of cards you can play this without paying its cost”
That’s kind of been the standard for the history of the game though. One of the first things I teach a new player is that every rule is followed by a footnote that reads “unless a card says otherwise.”
Exile has always been the “don’t touch me til you do the thing” area.
Gets real wild when you have to have several separate exile zones to keep track of certain effects. "This stuff I can cast at any time due to my commander’s effect, this stuff I can cast while this card is on the field, this stuff I can cast until end of turn, this stuff is just regular old exiled, and this one is suspended. I think I have a deck that does all of that too.
