Half your deck is relative. You need it early game for maximum effectiveness. Which means you're saving up spells for four turns early. Bad plays there. For a real game-wrecking mill, use Haunting Echoes. It's devastating with presumably about a third of their deck lost already, probably more if you're using Glimpses, Scour, and... well, honestly real mill cards are quite rare in these days.
Card draw is much more valuable in Magic, as randomisation is more important in strategy. In Pokemon (thinking recursively, haven't played for a while), the consistancy in deck strats gives you practically one singular concept. Makes it fairly linear in each gameplay, as everything's based around generally five-ten cards in the deck, and with the tutoring and card draw given, it makes things much more streamlined. I'm not sure about the variance, but compared to Magic, it's not particularly, I'd say. Magic has a much stronger level of randomization and strategising. Gives you perspective on how you need to diversify and concentrate your threats.
Nobody plays Howling Mine because it's symmetrical and you drop two cards (the mine itself, then the opponent's first extra draw) playing it second turn.
WoG (or DoJ these days) is something that you need to learn to play around. This is where learning card advantage is helpful; along with tempo and threat density. Drop as little threats as can be managed for a few turns. Each turn they don't wipe means more damage for you. If you have too many, you drop down in cards and will start slowing. Too little and they can last beyond your lack of tempo. You have to play the numbers that'll give you the edge in making them waste the one in four cards (or three these days) that can manage multiple threats.
THen there's card efficiency. You say it takes half the mana to draw cards; this hence also applies to your opponents. The efficiency of your cards means that while your opponent stocks up on cards, you're whacking his life down several notches. Even Inception-Jace falls quite easily to selection of creatures. The fact that they've spent about turn or a half to stock on resources, a properly made deck hits hard with whatever resources they have in the immediate vicinity because each card is strong enough. Control has to pump out answers as fast as the aggro can send out threats; except the threat:answer ratio is heavily skewed towards the threats, so control has to keep them off with what they can get so that their threats, which MUST be the pinnacle of efficiency, otherwise the threats are still going to outrun them.
That was amusing. Well, I'm kinda stuck on what else to do until the holiday breaks are over and articles turn back up. Let's see... How many ways can we play Proliferate in standard? Sucks how there's five 'raters, one of which isn't repeatable, and the others are damnned expensive to pop. I wonder how else they can fiddle with the idea in Sieged.
