Noise’s mills tax Jackson because he mills agendas with his ability. Jackson also has additional uses beyond dealing with agendas that have been milled, because he can sculpt a good hand and dig you to what you need.
To use an example from another game, MtG doesn’t have any cards that give the other side points, and because of this this card is unplayable garbage.
With regards to your econ argument that’s a fallacy. Mills may cause you to draw more econ instead of less if they hit your non econ cards. You don’t draw every card in your deck during the average game anyway.
Exactly, that again has an impact (this time its probably something good for the corp).
But the argument here is that milling doesnt matter really. Well it does. How do you prove a theory works? You take every case possible and if your theory holds then it must be true. If you find even one scenario where it doesnt well science says you can kiss your theory goodbye.
If I can find 1 case where milling will have a serious impact on the game, then you can’t make an argument that milling has no impact. I can go as far as saying in a game with Noise he mills all 10 economy cards you had. You are now playing with no econ. Can that happen? Yes. You could also go an entire game without drawing econ without playing against Noise of course, but again theres a different chance of that happening without Noise milling you and a different chance of it happening when Noise is milling you. Different = impact.
Other than that its a very good article, and its good that it points out that milling is not as bad as it seems (because it isnt). I just disaggree with people that go as far as saying “its the same as those cards being in the bottom of your deck”, its not.
This is absolutely not the same. In any game where Noise mills X cards, it’s just as likely that all of the cards milled are the bottom X (or top X) of your deck. Jacksons being milled is just as likely as essentially never drawing them anyway, except the upside here is that you can Interns him or whatever, something you can’t do if you just got an unlucky draw.
What’s the difference here to having all of your economy on the bottom of your deck? There isn’t any. What’s to stop your deck being milled to a perfect blend of economy etc? There isn’t any. If you play a game with all of your econ removed, it’ll play out just the same as if all of your econ was on the bottom of your deck, and choose to believe it or not, that’s got the same probability.
If you’re being milled half of your economy, either you’ve been milled for half of your deck or you just had bad luck against his milling. The luck for milling is, I should be very clear, exactly the same as the luck for drawing cards, and having been milled 5 econ cards is just as likely as those 5 econ cards being unreachable anyway.
Milling doesn’t have an impact other than (the essentially obsolete concern of decking and) the fact agendas exist. It’s the same as just not drawing the cards to begin with.
To preempt the argument of “but isn’t this giving you an extra chance at a bad draw”? The answer is no, it’s just the same. Let’s pretend Noise starts the game with the ability “remove the top 5 cards of the Corp’s deck from the game”. Note that, to a well shuffled deck, this is exactly the same as removing the bottom 5 cards of the Corp’s deck from the game. The probability of the cards on the bottom of your deck being on the top of your deck is exactly the same. You would not have drawn those cards if they were at the bottom of your deck.
Noise can mill you into the things you want as well as away from the things you want, just as you can draw exactly the cards you want, or cards you don’t want.
The nice thing about maths is that it’s not something you can disagree with.
But this is not how having 3 Jacksons milled vs on the bottom of your deck works. Instead, you should be considering the case where the player only AFTER he or she has shuffled, (and presumably mulliganed), is informed, “You have shuffled all 3 Jacksons to the bottom of your deck. I am going to remove them”. Having someone do this for you IS an advantage vs if no one told you this and you had just unknowingly shuffled 3 Jacksons to the bottom. Now you can play a game where you know you’re going to have to deal with every agenda you draw rather than just waiting for Jackson to show up.
Of course it’s terrible to not draw Jackson, but the chance that Noise mills all your Jacksons exists only in conjunction with the chance that he mills you a bunch of cards closer to your Jacksons.
Doing an extra riffle shuffle obviously has a huge impact on how a game of Netrunner will turn out but that doesn’t mean that riffle shuffling one more time is a good or a bad thing.
I certainly cant disaggree with math, but you assume its a purely mathematical question, when it simply isnt.
I dont really have to add anything more that than. All the replies I 've seen are entirely correct as far as the probability/math aspect is concerned.
Thats why I decided to use an example. You can say it extreme sure, but it makes the discussion easier. I dont understand how you dont see that the game has permanently been changed if all 3 of your Jacksons got milled.
Yes, you might have never drawn them anyway, but you are just ignoring this scenario by using what ifs. There is no what if in a specific example. You started a game of Netrunner, Noise milled 3 Jacksons. They are not in the bottom of your stack, they are in your Archives. This has an impact. Good or bad, big or small, im not argueing that, I am saying that something has changed. If I am still missing something in this scenario feel free to tell me what it is.
Let’s say that I have a 49 card deck with 1 Biotic Labor. I draw my opening hand and my mandatory draw and the Labor is not there. I expect that by the end of the game I will have drawn 20 cards - by then one of us should have 7 points and the game is over.
So, out of the 43 cards left in my deck, I have 20 chances to draw Biotic Labor. If it’s in cards 1 to 20, I’ll get it. If it’s in cards 21 to 43, I won’t get it.
Now let’s say Noise installs four viruses on his first turn, milling me for four. I’ve now lost 4 chances to draw Biotic Labor, since if it was in cards 1 to 4 I can’t get it any more. However, I’m still going to draw 20 cards by the end of the game, meaning that now, I will end up drawing to my 24th card. I’ve now gained 4 chances to draw Biotic Labor since I get to see cards 21 to 24 that I wouldn’t have seen previously.
Since I lost 4 chances and gained 4 chances, Noise milling me didn’t change my chance of drawing Biotic Labor at all.
What we’re saying is that it’s pointless to consider edge cases where Noise mills good or Noise mills bad because there is literally no sway one way or the other whether he will help or hurt. Sure, sometimes he helps by milling needed Jacksons or Biotics that would have been drawn otherwise, but YOU SHOULD NOT CONSIDER THESE CASES AS A BENEFIT OF MILLING because there are equally as many cases where the mill is hurting you. YOU JUST DON’T SEE IT IN THOSE CASES BECAUSE THE CORP IS THE ONE DRAWING THEIR CARDS.
Imagine if the magical god of variance came to you during a game of Netrunner when you were playing corp and they told you that you could choose to mill a non agenda card, and promised you that the game would not go to time whichever option you picked. That choice would barely matter at all.
Excuse me, did you just say " you should accept my theory about milling except for the cases in which it doesnt apply" ?
I think everyone argueing against your point is very careful not to say wether its beneficial or not. They say it can make a difference, and you have failed to point out the error in that logic in the examples that have been given (the 3 Jackson Howards or the the Biotic Labor one).
I seriously cannot find a simpler way to say it. Milling is a force that interacts with your deck. If you had the exact same deck with the exact same card order, you would have a hugely different game if that deck was getting milled. If your theory is to be accepted the burden of proof falls to you to show us how in an example like the one with Jackon or Biotic Labor the impact of milling was insignificant.
We might be getting mixed up here. Is your argument ‘milling a card has an impact on the game’? Because that is obviously true. What Xenasis’s article claimed was that being milled wasn’t bad in and of itself, even if it feels that way.
“The fallacy players often believe is that milling cards negatively impacts the quality of a players deck”
Your deck may be in a certain order, but since you don’t know what that order is before you get milled, you have no way of predicting whether getting milled will be good or bad for you. You can only talk about it in hindsight, at which point it’s too late for your opponent to change their mind about milling you.
So if we are talking about the action, we have to talk about how it looks in advance, not in hindsight. You can’t get a refund on a losing lottery ticket after the lottery has been drawn.
Well I hope we didnt get things mixed up I was under the impression that the comments following the article supported that milling has no impact at all.
Lttlefoot you dont know what the order is before you get milled, but you do know that for example the Biotic Labor you just lost was your only one. I really dislike generalizations, when you run a remote you dont know if you re gonna run into an agenda or a trap, you can only talk about it in hindsight, same as milling, so I dont see the strength in that argument.
Ooph. I’m starting to regret my contributions to this thread, for fear they’re being misread. My point was limited to the fact that you should not expect mills to hit an even distribution of cards (indeed, this is nearly an impossibility until you mill a substantial portion of the deck, and even at that point it is highly unlikely for most corp decks, as they may include single- and doubletons). That’s a much different claim than a question of how mills impact actual gameplay.
For the record, Xenasis et al are absolutely right that the only immediate practical impact of blind milling --outside of the AP factor, which is a huge factor-- is that the corp now has more knowledge about the probability of drawing any given card (or combination of cards). Likewise, after the runner accesses Archives, they have increased knowledge about the probable makeup of the remainder of R&D. But a difference in knowledge about odds is much different than actually changing the odds themselves.
Milling agenda, again, negatively impacts the quality of the corp’s deck.
Noise will mill agendas in his game or it’s not really a Noise deck… Either you ice archives or you use for this. That’s cred / tempo you would use for something else.
It’s not quite true, though, is it? If it’s not an agenda, you’ve just increased the agenda density in the deck.
If the variance god came and said “I’ll remove 20 random cards from your deck, they’re not agendas, and the game won’t go to time” that’s not a deal you should take (and would be a deeply amusing Anarch ID). People run 49 card corp decks for good reason. So while the thrust of the argument is right, the nuances make me wary of using this particular argument. Once we start messing with agenda densities you start having to consider agenda floods, issues with Jackson being overworked, and so on.
That does change a game considerably. But yes, a blind mill is still best considered to be from the bottom of the deck.
I agree with you but on the bottom of the deck part. That milled card could come from top, bottom, middle or anywhere, this is totally unrelated.
It comes from the top, and it’s something you should remember when milled with Medium
Let’s not forget this. Should you Medium dig for 4, you can play a Cache (or whatever), and access two additional card as opposed to the one if you were milling the bottom of the deck.
