Mill draftable in M11?

[Louis Mackie]

This is how it works. You pick up all the terrible 14th pick cards like:

Tome Scour
U
Sorcery
Mill for 5

and play it alongside other easily tableable cards such as:

Jace's Erasure
1U
Enchantment
Whenever you draw a card, opponent mills for 1.

You should be able to pick up lots of these and some blue card draw, some bounce and wall creatures like Wall of Frost. Might be terrible, but I'm going to try it for sure.

[Thomas David Baker]

Let's drastically oversimplify and work out how do-able this is. Feel free to correct my maths if it goes awry.

Let's say your other cards mean you can make the game go 13 turns without dying and/or you draft draw spells that get your more cards sooner.

Either way you're going to see half of your deck before you die and you're going to be drawing 13 times.

(This seems really ambitious to me but let's go with it.)

Your opponent is going to draw approximately half their deck so you need to mill around 20 to win.

An Erasure in your opening hand or first one or two draw steps (depending on if you are on the play) will mill for 11:

9 * 11 = 99

Erasures drawn later mill for correspondingly less:

(10^2 + 10) / 2 = 55

An Erasure you don't draw mills for 0:

20 * 0 = 0

154 / 40 = ~4

So each Erasure you draft is worth slightly less than 4 cards of mill.

Each Tome Scour you draft is worth 2.5 cards of mill (50% chance of seeing it, mills for 5).

So when:

4E + 2.5T = 20

the deck is viable(ish).

Both cards are commons. Let's assume no one else in the draft wants them and you can hoover them all up.

There are 240 commons in a draft and 100 commons in M11.

So there should be 2.4 of each card in a draft.

2.4E + 2.4T = ~17

So it seems ropey.

Assuming you open a booster P1P1 with two mill cards in it (1.76 more mill cards than you would expect to see) and table the second one then you are looking at ~22 "points" of mill in the draft and it becomes "possible". You could take any Sign In Bloods you see, too, although the fogs are in W and G.

Conclusion: this strategy is absolutely terrible but could just work in some drafts. You should probably mulligan looking for an Erasure.

[Dan Barrett]

Ever so often you'll end up opening boosters with the same print run and get 4-6 Tome Scour's and Burning Enquiry's (actually the best card to pair with erasure, as it will mill 6 for R).

Some of you might remember me doing this at GP Brighton side events last year:

Oli Ruel - "You are very funny man"

James Mills - "What are you doing?! There's an actually half-decent deck in your sideboard!"

[Louis Mackie]

Get lucky with a Traumatize? (Not confirmed but fits the number crunch).

[Dan Barrett]

Yea, i had a Traumatize, Diabolic Tutor, 4 Tome Scours in that deck i think.

Louis Mackie said:

Get lucky with a Traumatize? (Not confirmed but fits the number crunch).

[Thomas David Baker]

Burning Enquiry is interesting.

It mills for 3, or 6 with an Erasure out. So its value depends on that. Can we give it a value of 2 (4 / 2 for chance of seeing it)?

2.4E + 2.4T + 2.4B = ~22

Getting there!

Diabolic Tutor is a bad Erasure or a just-as-good Tome Scour but you'd only expect 0.8 of one in a draft as it is an Uncommon. Plus it puts you in a third color. There's also Sign in Blood if you are going B but that seems pretty desperate.