With the recent banning of Lost in Thought, let’s look at the past year of competitive play since its release with Mercurial Heart in May 2024 and the introduction of one of the most prolific competitive archetypes in Grand Archive: Water Mill.

Commonly referred to as Water Pile, these decks generate incredible card advantage by playing a high density of cards with Floating Memory, milling that float to the graveyard, and then converting that float into raw value. While this self-mill theme for water has existed since the game’s release, the original cards in Dawn of Ashes like Avalon, Cursed Isle and Sink into Oblivion simply weren’t good enough to support the archetype. It wasn’t until Set 4, Mercurial Heart, that WotS introduced 3 key powerhouse cards that took water mill from Caban’s pet meme deck (examples one and two of many) to the tournament winning terror it’s known as today: Icebound Slam, Lost in Thought, and Fractal of Rain.

It speaks volumes that 2 of these 3 cards are now banned, and GA doesn’t exactly have a lengthy banlist. And when I say “tournament winning terror,” I’m not exaggerating. Thanks to Fractal of Insight’s statistics pages, we can see that water mill has won nearly twice as many events as the next highest winning archetype, Shadowstrike Tristan, and is the 5th most played archetype in the game’s history:

“But Noel, Mill isn’t on that list? Where’s your data coming from?” Good question! On Fractal of Insight, water mill is broken up into 3 separate archetypes: Ravishing Mill, Penguin Mill, and Genbu. Personally, I think this distinction is unnecessary; while those 3 are different decks, each is an evolution of the archetype, just as Swarm Allies and Robot Allies both fall under the archetype of Wind Allies. If we scroll down just a bit further, we can see all 3 listed here:

Adding together their stats, we get the true representation of Water Mill: 2,068 Appearances, Overall Winrate 54.9%, [current season winrate that I’m not taking the time to calculate], and 65 Event Wins. 

These stats are incredible for a few reasons. First, while it’s the 5th most played archetype overall, 3 of the 4 above it (Wind Allies, Crux, and Fire Aggro) have been meta relevant on and off since the game’s release. Second, despite being the 5th most played archetype, it has 167% as many event wins as the second “most winningest” archetype, Wind Tristan (Shadowstrike on Fractal). Third, its overall winrate is 54.9%, falling just behind the “most winningest” archetype Water Allies at 55.3%.

Now, you might be asking where Fractal of Insight’s data is coming from, and that’s a great question! (If you weren’t wondering this, teaching moment, always ask where data comes from). Fractal of Insight pulls data directly from Omnidex, Grand Archive’s Tournament Software, by using API calls. The developer of Fractal then uses that data to create these statistics pages for us to publicly view. All Regional events and higher are included, as well as the weekly Yeti Webcam events and many Store Championships.

Let’s say though that we are only interested in the statistics for Major Events, which are Ascents, Nationals, and Worlds. What does the data look like then? Unfortunately, Fractal doesn’t have a way to view this directly, so I put together the following: 

Winning 25% of the major events since its release is pretty incredible, but we can see that there’s a major jump in performance starting at Ascent Santa Clara. Let’s dive into why.

Mercurial Heart released the key cards for water mill overall, and the first version of the deck was Water Nico (called Ravishing Mill on Fractal). Nico was a strong deck, but in a meta that was really not suited for it. Slimes was at its most powerful as Stonescale Band hadn’t been errata’d yet, and Slimes was Nico’s worst matchup by far. Being able to set up multiple large taunt allies rapidly meant that it was nearly impossible to connect with Ravishing Finale nor control the board, so the Slimes player would just overrun them. 

There was also a key problem with Water Mill in MRC; its lack of board presence made it too reliant on Ravishing Finale to actually win the game. You would need to get about 12 points of dmg onto your opponent, then hit them with Ravishing Finale, bringing them to 20+ dmg and milling out their deck. Icebound Slam was the best way to get most of the chip, which could then be finished with some Scepter of Lumina (pre-errata) damage or a hit with Frostsworn Paladin. But without Slam, you had to hit with Paladin 1-2 times and with Scepter of Lumina’s effect 1-2 times. Furthermore, if the deck didn’t open with Slam or Rain, it didn’t have any way to generate meaningful card advantage and would fall too far behind. 

Mortal Ambition was released in October 2024, just before Ascent Toronto, which added 4 incredibly important cards to the archetype: Tidestone Bovine, Rippleback Terrapin, Fractal of Polar Depths, and Strategem of Myriad Ice. 

While MRC put the deck on the map, AMB put it into the history books. These 4 cards addressed its 2 key problems and provided secondary and tertiary wincons; Water Mill went from playing 4 meaningful allies to 16 (as it could now justify playing Seaside Ringleader, also from MRC), giving it excellent board control, and Strategem and Polar Depths both provided alternate win conditions than just Ravishing Finale. Furthermore, the number of good self-mill cards increased, greatly increasing the deck’s consistency to enact its primary gameplan. 

Mortal Amibition - Rise of the King

The first immediate adaptation of water pile in AMB format was to switch from going from Tonoris into Nico to instead going Silvie into Nico. Called either ‘Tamer-Nico’ or ‘Silvie-Nico’, the tamer class bonus allowed the deck to make full use of the new mill cards from AMB, while still keeping the option of leveling up into Nico to activate a Ravishing Finale for game. There was another crucial role Nico still played in this variant at the start of AMB season, and that was enabling Vaporjet Shield and Magebane Lash. See, the first few weeks of AMB were dominated by a deck known as Vanitas Razorgale (or VaniGale). Now, while you might have played against Razorgale decks since then, particularly the Kongming variants, they are far less potent than on release. See, Three Visits as originally printed did not rest your champion as a cost. Instead, it was just part of the effect, and still necessary to recover and glimpse. But this meant that you could activate Three Visits as many times in one turn as you wanted, each activation triggering Razorgale Calling’s effect to deal damage. VaniGale had incredibly fast lethal lines because of this, but if you could stall just long enough to materialize Vaporjet Shield and Magebane Lash, the Vani deck had almost no way to win. This is how 1 lonely Tamer Nico snuck in to day 2 of Ascent Toronto. After the event, Three Visits was errata’d to require you to rest your champion as a cost to activate the card, and the tier 0 problem went away. 

The next event was Ascent Christchurch, and we can see that 4 water pile made it to day 2, 1 of which top 8’d. The top 8 list, piloted by Quarax from Apex Player’s Guild, and one of the top 32 lists were similar Tamer Nico decks, but the other 2 were the first public appearances of Ari Mill, a combo deck that sought to focus on winning the game through Fractal of Polar Depths and Strategem of Myriad Ice. It could either mill the opponent out, or if they self-milled enough float simply resolving a Strategem would win the game as well. TCG also posted a version of this deck on their Patreon prior to the event, and the only reason they didn’t bring it was cause they were worried about any lingering Phantasia-hate cards from the Vanitas meta just a few weeks prior. Worked out well for them, since TeamTrueIsaac won the Ascent with Slimes. 

Now we get to Ascent Santa Clara, where water pile really started to dominate. The event was won by Maindeck Mitch (Ztrgod) with Ari Mill, and TeamTrueCaban and Quarax also top 8’d on Ari Mill and Tamer Nico respectively. Then another 8 water pile decks in the rest of top 32. While Ari Mill had day 2’d at Christchurch, Santa Clara really showed that it wasn’t a high-rolly “gotcha” deck, but a real meta contender. I can distinctly remember testing extensively vs Ari Mill after Santa Clara, and oh boy, finding a deck that could reliably beat it was pretty challenging. 

For the next event, we go overseas to Europe for their first ever Ascent, held in Utrecht, Netherlands. 16 (!!!!) of top 32 was water pile decks, and 5 of the top 8, including the winner, Quarax, piloting Tamer Nico (seeing a theme here yet?). The other 3 decks in top 8 were two Merlin (1 fire and 1 water) lists and 1 Astra Arisanna; Merlin had a very good Nico matchup by being able to stabilize behind The Majestic Spirit, blocking Ravishing Finales and Strategem of Myriad Ice, and the water build was also able to Fracturize their Nullifying Lantern to shut off the Polar Depths mill wincon (thanks to layers). Astra Arisanna had just gotten a powerful new tool, Horticounter, from Alchemical Revolution Alter Edition, and had a good enough matchup into the Water Pile decks to break into top 8. 

Following this event, Icebound Slam and Baby Gray Slime were both banned. While Baby Gray is a topic for another article, Icebound Slam had proven to be too ubiquitously powerful in water decks; the potential to hit your opponent for 8 dmg on turn 1 while setting up your graveyard with Floating Memory was absolutely format warping now that the Water Pile decks had sufficient support. Decks had to play numerous answers to Slam, such as Frostbinds and Song of Frosts, as a t1 slam would very often mean winning the game. 

And for the last event we’ll talk about specifically, Ascent Melbourne, won by ProAnn of Apex Player’s Guild on Water Nico, with Quarax (surprise!) and Zetdevix (also from Apex) also on Water Nico. A 4th water pile deck, Water Vanitas piloted by Skysama, rounded out the top 8, and another 6 water piles in the rest of top 32. Despite Icebound Slam’s ban, these decks were still incredibly powerful, but we can see a pretty distinctive shift back towards the Nico lists. While Vani Mill operates similar to Ari Mill, it has the extra dmg from Scepter of Lumina to make up for losing Slam; Nico, on the other hand, wasn’t as reliant on Slam to close out games as Ari Mill was, and was still able to perform well. 

Abyssal Heaven - Down with the King

Following Melbourne, 2 things happened. First, Scepter of Lumina received an errata, removing it’s ability to be freely activated from the material deck if your opponent had a water champion, restricting it’s banish ability to lvl 3+, and limiting that ability to only drawing 1 card instead of 2. Water Pile would consistently materialize scepter early, get 4 dmg in, and then convert it into a +2 (since their float was freely milled to the graveyard), giving the deck incredible card advantage to maintain control of the game. The second change was the release of Abyssal Heaven, which saw the introduction of, among other things, Fractals. While fractal cards have existed for most of the game’s history, HVN came with a bunch of additional Fractal focused synergy, primarily for Diao Chan, and it was immediately the new best deck in the game. Among those other things, Abyssal Heaven also released two targeted hate cards for the deck, Censer of Restful Peace and Brackish Lutist.

While HVN also released Genbu, an incredibly potent tool for Water Pile, the back to back ban and errata + the targeted hate were too much for the archetype to continue dominating as the best deck in the format as it had in Mortal Ambition. That being said, it did still see strong success for much of HVN, making it into the top 8 of every single major event in the format. Having a guaranteed Fractal of Rain every game is absolutely incredible, and Genbu + Resonating Fugue replaced the need for Nico and Ravishing Finale. Jofacha won the North American National Championships with Genbu, and the Worlds Gauntlet and was dominated by the deck after Dissonant Fractal’s ban, with quite a number of Genbu in the World Championships as well (including, you guessed it, Quarax from Apex Player’s Guild). 

Combined with the dominance of Fractals, this led to the banning of Lost in Thought, potentially bringing an end to the era of Water Pile after a year of meta relevance. However, whether or not the archetype is truly dead remains to be seen; a self-mill Water Diana has been popping up in these early DTR events, so we’ll just need to see what happens at Ascent Boston this weekend. One thing’s for sure though, water pile has changed drastically since its release, and nothing will quite compare to Slamming your opponent and milling 5 floating memory in the Ascent finals. Shoutout to Quarax, the goat of Water Pile.