Holy cow. I recently "remade" this on accident in Anydria: Crumple.

I don't really play discard spells, so I don't know whether discard players would like this. I can't imagine wanting it particularly much in a mill deck, because it doesn't look like it does enough; maybe it's a workhorse "mill and do something else" card like Induce Paranoia?

But I'm wondering whether this will be a regular 15th pick due to nobody wanting it. And therefore whether we might want to change it. (Or not; I guess each set needs a few 15th picks.)

It's quite possible that this card could end up pulling the Tome Scour trick, where nobody takes it, and then someone realizes that nobody is taking the card and begins to draft a deck that consists of 10 Deny Knowledges...

Though, that one fewer card, and one more cost may make it not as consistent. The only two colors would make it more likely that other people won't accidentally pick it up, though.

It's tough. I like this card because it's an enigma. But being an enigma doesn't make it good. Do we need more good cards in the gold slot? Is it okay to have an enigma on the common sheet?

That's definitely the situation. I guess the questions are:

• Is it OK to support "tome scour" cards which are useless in sealed, but provide an occasional limited strategy in 8-man drafts, even if it means that when we playtest this is always a dead card?
  • Pro: It's good design to support multiple niche strategies
  • Con: Why optimise for a sort of game we're unlikely to play?
• Would it be OK to split mill between UB and U?
  • Pro: Niche strategies don't have to fit the main colour division in the set
  • Con: If anyone notices, it undermines the "mono and multi are completely different" idea.

Oh, that's right. Eroding Current is in set. Oddly, this might be too good when combined. That Current is rather strong.

Really, I have no idea how powerful cards like these are until I draft them, but I've suddenly flipped and think this might be a secret bomb... how weird. Two Eroding Currents and three Deny Knowledges should put your opponent down 26 cards, and deny them 6 draws, too. Hmm...

Almost a pity that there's no real reason to play this card on yourself in this set. Seems like an interesting card to play in Odyessey block, though. Madness trigger + one card from threshold. Heh.

Heh. Since the discussion has raged this far, I reckon it's probably fine to leave this as it is :) Maybe this could go up to milling 5 to solidify it in the Tome Scour slot, but it sounds like it's controversial, which is good, right?

I keep seeing people mention that we don't want to confuse our themes by having something like mill appear in both Multicolor and Blue, but to me, it's a good thing for support to appear for certain strategies within multiple factions. We want them to work well together, after all. I can't recall where, but I do remember reading something by Mark Rosewater on the design of RtR and Gatecrash that talked about how there were cards within the guilds meant to work well with other guilds, and cards within the monocolored slots specifically made to work well with one guild, another guild, or both guilds in which that card had a color. We don't have unaligned cards, but we can still make sure our factions play well together. We can't let too much focus on the story lead to poor gameplay.

Good point. I guess, there should be mechanical overlap (eg. aggressive creatures) and there shouldn't be flavour overlap (eg. we shouldn't use the same keyword). But mill lies somewhere between those two, it suggests a thematic connection, but only a small amount.

On balance, I think it's ok, so I agree, let's leave this in for now.