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May 14, 2012 -- 6:50AM, Mown wrote:

Mill doesn't have to be totally uninteractive. Jace is a pretty good example of interactive mill. Now, you can't print a ton of Planeswalkers to make the deck viable, but there are other options out there. The easiest one is creatures that mill in various way, as they are vulnerable to removal, and possibly other effects depending on how they do it.

You can also have a mill deck that either uses mill to gain something else (Easiest example would be reanimating, but then you rarely mill your opponent), or needs something else to mill effectively. I'd give some examples, but this isn't ymtc, so I won't.

Mill, the ability, is uninteractive. You can stick a mill ability on legs, but it doesn't make the mill ability itself more interactive. The only noninteractive version of mill I can think of is "Whenever an opponent plays a spell, they mill X".

Jace, as it happens, is not interactive mill.

EDIT: I should clarify - I don't think there's anything wrong with the Mill mechanic, and I like when it's a real Limited deck for Draft and Sealed; it's just impossible to make it Constructed powerful. 

May 15, 2012 -- 4:21AM, Mown wrote:

May 15, 2012 -- 1:05AM, MrIndigo wrote:

Mill, the ability, is uninteractive. You can stick a mill ability on legs, but it doesn't make the mill ability itself more interactive. The only noninteractive version of mill I can think of is "Whenever an opponent plays a spell, they mill X".

Jace, as it happens, is not interactive mill.

EDIT: I should clarify - I don't think there's anything wrong with the Mill mechanic, and I like when it's a real Limited deck for Draft and Sealed; it's just impossible to make it Constructed powerful. 

Mill, as a standalone ability, is more interactive than damage, as long as the graveyard is relevant. I don't quite see the argument. If some of the ideal cards in the deck require to enter the red zone, then isn't it as interactive as a normal aggro deck? While I'm not saying it's a good idea from a design choice, having a Infect spin on milling would be just like traditional swing dudes and block gameplay.

That's true, to some extent - my focus is more on mill as a kill-condition (cf: mill in Innistrad block, where it was used as an enabler for yourself rather than pointing it at the opponent, for example). Milling as a kill condition is exactly the same as only-burn-to-the-face, in that sense; it doesn't play any differently if your opponent is a goldfish. All you're doing is trying to reach an arbitrary number of cards milled, regardless of what your opponent is doing.

There's a small amount of variation in that your opponent can have cards that do things from their graveyard, like Bloodghasts or flashback spells, but if mill is your kill-mechanism then those variances are basically irrelevant because it's not going to change the way you play your mill cards, it just reduces the amount of time you have to reach that abitrary number. (Burn has a similar level of variance, in that each time you reduce the opponents life total with a Lava Spike you're removing the ability for them to play Dismember using Phyrexian mana or reducing the amount of mana they can make with Channel).

You're correct that tacking mill onto an attack (e.g. Undead Alchemist, Szadek) makes them more interactive, because combat is inherently interactive - but it's also no coincidence it also makes them worse (because in essence, you go from attacking a 20 point life total to attacking a 60 point life total). It's another example of interactive mill that I should have thought of above.

With Jace, I meant Memory Adept, I'm not sure how you can call the card uninteractive. If you don't swing at him, or possibly commit more threats to kill him faster, he's going to take 10 cards from your library every turn. If that isn't interaction, I might need your definition of it so we're not talking about two entirely different things.

The fact that a card that has mechanic X can be destroyed doesn't make the mechanic itself less interactive. JMA can be interacted with (so it is, as a card, more interactive than, say, an indestructible hexproof land), but his abilities themselves are not. 

Interactivity is not really a term of art - it simply refers to that players/cards interacting with one another. As a rule of thumb, if the card would play identically regardless of whether or not your had a human opponent sitting opposite you, it is not very interactive.
Imagine, for comparison, a Cunning Sparkmage that could only target players. That card would not be very interactive, even though an opponent could destroy it - because it wouldn't actually change the way the card plays, it would just change how long it stayed on the field on average.

Interactivity also not a binary thing; the nature of magic means that there will always be a way to force interaction with a card. The level of interactivity of a card/mechanic is on a continuum. (Craw Wurm is more interactive than Sigarda, for instance, because it doesn't have evasion, it can be targeted, and it can be forced to be sacrificed).

So as I mentioned, JMA has some level of interactivity due to it's vulnerability to combat (so if your opponent was a goldfish, you could slap him down and mill for 4 turns, whereas against an actual human you need to navigate to a situation where you can actually keep him alive), but it's not an example of 'interactive mill' because the mill aspect of the card doesn't do anything interactive.