“Bottom of the deck” is really just a poor way of saying “cards you wouldn’t see during an average game”. Depending on deck speed you may never see the bottom half of your deck, and for the purposes of winning/losing that particular game those cards may as well not even exist. Noise has the potential to mill a valuable card but he also has the exact same potential to bring that card to the top of your deck.
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Noise is really a shit example because, as @anon34370798 said, the main benefit is that he puts agendas in Archives, forcing the corp to defend another server. Even if the corp manages to Jackson back all milled agendas, that DOES effect the expected composition of R&D, because the cards that got shuffled back in were agendas, whereas the nonagenda cards that were milled are no longer padding R&D, making medium digging that much more potent.
Really, to illustrate the example, we should consider a runner who never runs out of cards in their deck, can’t recur any cards, and can’t tutor any cards, and can’t see milled cards (which would provide a benefit, not a disadvantage). In this case, milling does actual nothing. Of course, this case doesn’t exist, but the point is that if your problem with milling DOES seem to effect this sort of case, (i.e. the argument for increased variance because of milled card composition), then you’re not standing on solid ground.
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Right, once we get beyond the whole “milling is denial, good thing I milled your Hedge Fund!” stage then it gets more complex as we deal with Archives being another vector for the runner to attack and agenda density being relevant.
But for basic purposes of trying to explain that milling != denial it kinda works
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So, let’s make up an imaginary friend, Alice, who in our imagination is the Netrunner world champion. Alice has a deck she’s quite proud of! She has yet to lose a game after having played 100 games with her deck, and she’s pretty confident that the deck is perfect because of this.
I often hear about v. high winrates and always conclude that their opponents must suck.
That reminds me a 2 day recent game (I lost but the theory was good).
I was playing a TWIY* 49, usual NBN distribution. I was leading 5-0 with 3 agenda, very quickly in the game.
I had a breaking news in hand and was playing vs a R&D lock (MaxX).
I did not iced R&D, on purpose.
They were 3 scored agendas, one in my hand. I expected MaxX to find 1-2 so agenda left would be 6-5 for 30 cards, not much asset.
The two first part of the game worked well, MaxX larlaed. Unfortunually I start protecting R&D with poor ices and too late, MaxX put medium and there you go.
But the move was good I think. She was using 1-2-3 clicks for nothing for at least 15 turns which is, with MaxX, some kind of a problem. She drew 15+(30) cards out of her deck and could use them only with around 30 clics not countings including runs on HQ / remotes etc.
That was fun. My opponent said it was close, I was not even close, she dominated the board for half of the game. But as a testing experiment, I think I found something I never used before. 
The bottom deck point of view works though, but to my mind only when Noise just installed a virus, or the corp just PS the runner. The next clic the corp have, that’s over (she could draw).
(or the next Jackson she can activate).
This is working the same with the heap, the runner can draw (aka Data Hound is very bad, yes, but not very very bad : on R4G it’s not a card that have the oh-so-bad reputation it have here, because the bottom-deck way of thinking is not as common than here).
That’s because frenchs suck at math and don’t understand how probabilities works.
:<
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Yeah, Fermat obviously sucked at math and Poisson clearly didn’t understand probability.
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I see no difference in Agenda density between:
- your R&D not milled
- your R&D milled
- your R&D milled + archives as a whole
- your R&D milled + archives as a whole + x Jacksons (well, rounded to the Jackson ooged).
Agendas have to be somewhere you know.
The only agenda density question you have is when comparing only R&D alone before and after a Jackson that reloaded at least an agenda.
Btw this is one of many reasons a majority of Anarchs use medium over nerve agent.
But, with no additional cards, in Archive you multiacces, in R&D, you only topdeck.
Milling = put cards under the deck seems to have made a lot of damage here 
In one of my games at the Manchester regional, a noise milled right through my excess ice and money to give me my scorches, agendas and Lizzies (to trash his pawnshops). Was glorious.
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Something I do, but not sure if it’s a fallacy or not: Whenever the corp is rich, I tend to ignore his economy assets even if I’m rich myself, as I think to myself what’s the point? he would still be loaded even if I trash those.
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But is he going to be loaded after rezzing a tollbooth and scoring an agenda ? -11 credits at least (if no fast advance).
Sometime the runner consider a rich corp when he has 15-20 creds. For example HB with that creds is not rich. Trash his assets and he cannot score while being able to protect his remote (or fast advance) + avoid RnD lock.
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Corps get through far more money than you’d expect during a game and without econ drips can very easily run out. 20 might seem a lot, but a few ICE later that money won’t last. It’s not quite the same as what I was alluding to in the article, but it’s generally good advice that money tends to run out. The more money they have, the worse it is for you, regardless of what number they’re currently on.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and like all things, it’s situational, but just because you’re both rich doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trash them!
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Also, if they can’t spend the money, it might not matter. A runner with a million credits is a problem, they can just pump it into breakers and get accesses. A corp with more cash than it has ice costs doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot barring ash, scorch trace, etc.
Install costs on ice also eat up a surprising amount of cash.
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If the corp can have useless money, that’s a case for not trashing their econ assets.
The thing is that a corp is unlikely to have more money than they could possibly need, since if they did they would just stop clicking for credits. You’re unlikely to meet a corp player with $40 which is the real time his assets are meaningless to you unless you’re in a meat damage race? Or if it’s getting near the end of the game (like the agenda score is 6-6) but in that case you have a different reason for not worrying about econ assets which is that they’d be unlikely to tick down for their full value anyway.
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Again, true, but the qualitative value difference between an even spread and clustered cards is likely to be significant in most games of chance. Consider Omaha High-Low, for example – the fact that over an infinite series of hands, all the single pair hands average out to A-2-3-4-5 doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be betting heavily when you actually hit the wheel. As a grossly oversimplified parallel, you can think about the huge qualitative difference between an even spread of certain combo cards (AD-PS-JH, e.g.) and clusters of them appearing whether through draws or mills.
An actual game of Netrunner is an incredibly complex and dynamic system – particularly given that intelligent actors can both mitigate those randomly uneven distributions through fixed actions (click to draw, click for cred, etc.) and also use the asymmetrical access to odds information of all sorts (what’s in the deck in total, what was milled (until the runner checks), what’s already in HQ or in play, etc.) to manipulate the other player’s perceptions. So, just to be clear, I’m not actually suggesting that the fact that we can expect uneven distributions in any particular instance of random milling is some incredibly effective disruption play or even that you can put it to generalized use. All I’m saying is that assuming that any given string of mills hit an even distribution falls victim to the same fallacy that assumes that any given string of cards in the deck should represent an even distribution (i.e. “2 Kati Jones in a row! I didn’t shuffle well!”) – indeed, this should be obvious if one thinks through the “bottom of the deck” analogy to its end.
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Jackson Howard is an insanely good card that is pretty much auto include on any corp deck.
Noise plays against a corp and mills 10 cards, 3 were Jacksons. The corp now is effectively playing android Netrunner without Jackson Howard.
We can analyze R&D density and all that stuff all we want, the thing is Noise’s ability can impact the game, the whole argument that “those 3 Jacksons might as well had been at the bottom of the deck” while true is not the same as playing a game where you know Jackson is gone. You 're not gonna draw him. Period. You can say at least now the corp knows this and can play around it, sure, but the point still stands that milling has an impact.
Its just not the same thing people. Removing cards from a deck leaves us with a different deck with difference draw % and distribution.
Noise was a special case I covered, because of the way agendas work, his milling is a good thing! However, the point I was making was that Noise doesn’t make the deck any worse in terms of ICE, economy, or any other card.
Other than the agenda argument (which is, to be clear, the reason Noise’s ability is good), the only real impact is that the Corp knows they won’t draw the card, which is actually beneficial.
I’ll put it this way: milling has as much of an affect on drawing the cards you want as shuffling your deck does. That is, not at all if your deck’s shuffled. Milling, however, has the upside of knowing what cards you won’t see, which is analogous to being able to look at the bottom 5 cards of your deck and playing accordingly.
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Noise also has the upside of decking the corp if the game does long. But an individual mill confers no benefit unless its an agenda.
I aggree (well everyone does) that the good side of milling is knowing what you lost.
But then If I come and tell you before a match “hey Xenasis, for this game I will allow you to remove your 3 copies of Jackson from your deck, its a good deal! Take it, you will have more information about your deck”
Would you do it? Would the information trade be woth losing such a good card? (The same argument can be used for any card that is key to a deck, im just using Jackson).
Also You have a deck with 10 econ cards. Is it the same to play a game having lost 5 of them to milling? Of course not. You now have only 5 econ cards left in your deck. Your chance to draw economy is worse, and it does matter because lets say your economy could produce 40 credits in this game, you are now definately sure the best you will see if you draw them all is 20. That again has had an impact.