How To Mill Yourself
For me, one of the most defining features of Weiss Schwarz is the importance of being able to mill your own deck. It plays directly into one of the game’s most unique qualities when compared to other TCGs: when you deck out, you shuffle up your discard pile and call it your new, second deck. No longer is throwing mountains of cards away from the top of your deck a terrifying scenario, but a regular and expected part of usual play. Anyone who’s played the game more than a handful of times knows that this is a major part of what constitutes strong deck manipulation. At this point, that’s become a bit of a community catch-all term for tools that allow players to command their gamestate, but today I’d like to focus in on self-mill. And mostly how I think a lot of people do it wrong.
“Up to”
This little preposition appears on countless Weiss cards, and more often than not, it has to do with mill. For just two words, the modifier holds a lot of power; it allows you to look at cards in sequence, stopping between each and deciding if you’d like to continue, unlike a Brainstorm that instantly mills an exact number of cards. The implications of this are obvious, but to name a few standouts:
Race to the bottom of a deck to escape poor deckstates
Stop milling prematurely to maintain strong deckstates
Mill an exact amount so that a post-refresh deck has optimal compression, post-combo
…and countless other contextual scenarios
So why then, for the love of God, are these two tiny words the most ignored thing in the entire game of Weiss Schwarz?
I’ve seen it all. Flipping all 4 cards over at once. Grabbing 4 face down cards off the top, then flipping and looking at them. Milling one after another so fast that no possible decision could have been made between them. On their first deck, sure, maybe they’re just trying to get their first refresh as quickly as possible, but this behavior nearly always continues into their second and third decks. It’s one of the most baffling things I’ve continued to experience, with players of all skill levels. No one acknowledges the “up to”, and instead treats these effects the same as Brainstorms.
When I question these players, I almost always get the same inane response: “It doesn’t matter.” I don’t mean to lay into anyone, but come on, how in the hell could it not? Weiss is a game about statistics, and your fight against those cruel, unforgiving numbers with compression and deck manipulation. How could a modular mill, being willingly reduced to a static mill, not have an impact on the outcome of the game? Since the application of modular self-mill is so ubiquitous, yet heavily contextual, I’d like to recommend a pattern of play that will naturally exemplify its importance. This will hopefully be more meaningful than attempting to dispel ludicrous counterarguments to it “not mattering”. After all, self-revelations are the best teachers.
How to Mill Yourself
Firstly, always do your “up to” mills to the table. Do not mill the cards into your hands, above the table. Do not mill them into your waiting room, even if the cards will be milled directly to that zone. If the cards eventually become public in any way, or must reveal the chosen card to your opponent to confirm its type, mill them to the table face up. If the cards are public, mill them to the table face down. Do all “up to” mills one at a time. Do not pick up multiple cards from your deck and flip them all at once, unless you are Brainstorming.
That’s it.
“What the fuck why that sounds like such a waste of ti-”
Every card that exits your deck has weight, both physically and metaphorically. By moving that card during your mill to the table, rather than simply lifting it to your hand or similar, you highlight and exemplify the importance of that game action. By milling multiple cards all at once or milling too quickly, you are effectively minimizing the importance of that action, and limiting your opportunities to make a meaningful decision without even realizing it. Every card that comes off the top creates a decision point. Do I keep looking? Is this card good enough? Is the minimal selection of the top 4 of my deck worth risking my current deckstate? Do I need to keep milling even though this card is good enough to ensure a future, better deckstate? These are all examples of questions you should ask yourself with each card you mill in succession.
By moving each card to the table, one by one, you will find yourself considering these types of questions more often. With the cards on the table, you are free to reference other zones more quickly to inform your decisions. There are also some other fringe benefits to this method, like having a clarified, more readily understandable gamestate at all times for you and your opponent, but the main use of it is purely to aid in your decision making, and the gravity of those decisions. I know it sounds like some contrived, stupid, psychological mumbo-jumbo, but it’s the most effective method I’ve found of highlighting when those decisions can be game-changing.
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Quick one this time, but thankfully not a super difficult concept to get across concisely. Many others have covered things about mill before, but I wanted to quickly highlight this “macro” part of self-mills. I’ll probably do more of these shorter, more focused posts in the future, since we recently discussed a noted lack of recent written content for Weiss Schwarz on a Burn One podcast. If you’re looking for some more specific content that’s relevant/tangential to self-mill, check out Dean’s video about how to use Torch. Also, if you’re just looking for more written Weiss Schwarz content while I spin my wheels to come up with more, please check out Pattywagon’s WSAlmanac. The best articles our community has ever written are in there.
- Carmen (@Beanwolf)
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