Hello everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG. Today, I want to cover a type of deck that I usually don’t write much about but it is already time to do so: Mill. Strategies like that have been existing in the game for ages with varying degrees of success. In fact, I remember one of the first “decent” decks I was able to build on my own was Black & White Durant Mill back in 2011. Even if it was a rogue deck, to say at least, was a ton of fun watching as your opponent was not able to take 6 prizes before an army of ants devoured his entire deck. And now, 9 years after, we find ourselves looking at Mill as one of the most important strategies of the meta. How does mill works in Sword and Shield era and why is it so lethal?

Before going into that, I want to point that “Mill” is a term that comes from the world of Magic the Gathering and refers to those strategies that focusses on leaving the opponent without cards to draw, therefore making him loose the game. While this might look good on paper, the reality is that mill strategies have never been a top tier deck in Pokemon because they are usually very slow and rely too much on hitting good pairings

With the release of the last sets, however, we have seen how a very unusual style of mill appeared, one whose main danger is its speed and consistency: Cinccino Mill. The main difference of this deck -if we compare it to Durant Mill or other past versions- is that it relies around a supporter (Bellelba & Brycen-Man) to mill cards, rather than an attack. The deck is focused on playing Bellelba turn after turn without needing to care much about the rest. With infinite PokeDolls that give no prizes and the drawing power of Cinccino and Zacian V, the deck always finds what it needs, whether that is energy removal, catchers or any other sort of disruption. On the top of everything, it can abuse LT Surge in order to repeat the supporter twice every turn and, yes, milling 6 cards per turn is as deadly as it sounds.

Mill is so powerful in the current meta that it can easily win against many top tier decks, including Blacephalon, Malamar, Magcargo… The only bad pairing mill decks have right now is ADP Zacian just because ADP has outs to everything. After an Altered Creation, the GX move, ADP only needs to take down three Pokémon to win the game. In addition to this, let’s not forget that ADP builds run 4 copies of Switch, making it really difficult to block a Pokémon in the active position. And lastly, ADP consistency allows to always hit custom catchers at any moment of the game, making Dolls kind of useless.

All in all, Mill is one of the top strategies of the moment and a deck you should totally prepare for (or even tech against) if you are going to play during this format. Try to disrupt their game or just play ADP. Thanks for reading!