Black Magic - Dredging In Standard At SCG Indianapolis

It started with a draft deck. Since the Planeswalker Points announcement, I’ve been playing FNM when I can. (What can I say? As flawed as it is, the system works—I want my free flight.) So, the week before SCG Indy, at FNM at my local store, I drafted an amazing U/B graveyard deck with all the tools:

2 Walking Corpse
3 Deranged Assistant
1 Screeching Bat
1 Ghoulraiser
2 Armored Skaab
1 Skaab Ruinator
1 Abattoir Ghoul
1 Moon Heron
2 Makeshift Mauler
1 Bloodgift Demon

1 Dead Weight
1 Victim of the Night
3 Think Twice
3 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Corpse Lunge

8 Island
8 Swamp

This deck was great, but I lost one game against a U/W deck with a lot of removal that just kept killing my Skaab Ruinator, and eventually, my only way to fight back would be to flashback my Forbidden Alchemies, but then I’d just get decked.

I was inspired by the amount of action Armored Skaab and Forbidden Alchemy could give you with flashback, so I wanted to build a Constructed Skaab Ruinator deck with that engine.

The trick to building a base blue Skaab Ruinator deck is that it’s very hard to fit enough playable blue creatures into a deck, especially when you’re trying to find room for all the sweet spells that go with the plan.

My first solution came from that game I lost in Limited.

My opponent’s deck had too much removal for me to win before I decked myself. She could just kill all my threats. The solution was to add more threats. I sided in twelve extra cards, which meant I could safely flashback my Forbidden Alchemies. Two of the cards I brought in were Curse of the Bloody Tome, so I didn’t really have to worry about getting decked first. This sideboard plan worked perfectly, and the next games were very easy. Perhaps the solution to losing attrition games in Constructed when milling myself was the same—just play more cards.

This was particularly appealing because there really weren’t many cards I wanted to play four of, or at least, I couldn’t figure out how to make room for four of everything I wanted to play. Even the lands weren’t things I wanted too many of, due to the nature of M10 style duals.

There were a lot of things I wanted to do. I knew my starting point wouldn’t be optimal, but I wanted to try as many different engines as I could to see what was working well. This is where I started:

Dredge

Sam Black

Test deck on 10-09-2011

Standard

Creatures (28)

Lands (30)

Spells (26)

Sideboard

I played some games against Solar Flare and won my first couple with between four and ten cards in my library, which made me think I was on the right track.

There’s a lot more going on in this deck than there are in most decks, simply because there are more cards. Let’s go over some of it:

First, Ponder is much better in this deck than in most decks in the format because I can usually keep one or two of the cards and mill the ones I don’t like. Also, it puts a card in the graveyard for Visions of Beyond. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything special when I hit it with a mill effect, which is the tradeoff on any good spells in a deck like this. They’re awesome to draw, but drawing isn’t necessarily the way I’ll see most of my cards.

Visions of Beyond is really the incentive to playing this strategy. The idea is to build a deck that consistently turns it on, assuming that when you suddenly cast several Ancestral Recalls, that will probably win the game.

Dream Twist is the opposite of Ponder; it’s not great to draw, but it’s ideal to flip when milling yourself. Playing with the card, I was impressed by how much I didn’t mind drawing it in my opening hand. The deck is so good at being able to spend its mana going late that I was happy to have something to do on the first few turns to get the engine going. Especially opening with this and Ponder.

One Think Twice looks very odd. Basically, I felt that I was usually going to have something to spend my mana on, and I didn’t want a bunch of Think Twices clogging up my draw. On the other hand, I thought that if there’s one in my deck, I’ll probably hit it eventually, and there will be some single turn in the game where I’m not doing anything else with three mana. It just seemed like a very low cost for some value, but it didn’t seem like the best engine.

Mana Leak is really the biggest question mark and point of decision about where this deck is going. All the spells are instants, so you always leave mana up for it, so it’s an awesome Mana Leak deck, but the engine is very heavy. I need to be running through my deck and milling enough creatures for my Skaab Ruinators, and Mana Leak just doesn’t contribute to the game plan. It’s very good at giving your Snapcaster Mages real options though. There was a time when I went down to one Mana Leak, just to have the option to Snapcaster Mage it.

Dissipate has all the same issues as Mana Leak. Snapcaster Mage particularly incentivizes splitting them.

Forbidden Alchemy is really the card that pulls it all together—the card I want to build around. It’s a card that’s good enough to be powerful on its own, but it just gets so much better when you build a deck around it. It’s easy to find yourself in a position as a deckbuilder where you find yourself thinking, “Well, if I’m playing Forbidden Alchemy anyway, I should probably play this card to take advantage of it, and once I’m playing that…” and soon your deck is over 90 cards—or you have more discipline than I do, which is likely.

Dismember and Doom Blade have basically just the same issue as Mana Leak again—is this a reactive, instant-speed deck with a lot of card selection and card advantage that want to interact, or is this a powerful engine that wants to quickly and consistently do one thing? I should probably come back to that question later.

Ancient Grudge felt like one of the primary rewards for milling myself, if I could make the mana support it. I’m only playing one because it’s bad in some matchups, and in the matchups where it’s good, I feel like having four post-board and regularly seeing all of them will make up for the fact that I didn’t have enough in game one. Still, the second one was very tempting.

Sword of Feast and Famine is awesome when you have so many proactive instants to spend mana on, and having some lands that tap to do other things doesn’t hurt. The fact that I have to have all these random bodies anyway really made me feel like I should have swords so they have something to do. It was especially good with Reassembling Skeletons. Buried Ruin does a great job of taking the sting out of milling one of these instead of hitting a creature or flashback card and lets you play only a few and still plan to have it in play eventually.

Merfolk Looter is phenomenal in this deck. The first few activations are often better than tapping to draw a card because you want things like Vengeful Pharaoh and Skaab Ruinator in your graveyard (sure you can cast it from your hand just as easily, but then it isn’t powering up Visions of Beyond). Even extra lands are sometimes better in your graveyard than your hand because you won’t have time to play them all, so you’d rather they power up Visions.

Deranged Assistant does a similar job; he gives you mana and occasionally finds things to do with that mana. Probably slightly worse than Merfolk Looter, but the extra mana can be huge and makes playing Forbidden Alchemy from your graveyard much more realistic.

Splinterfright is like a Deranged Assistant that works twice as fast and serves as an alternate finisher to Skaab Ruinator. The problem is that it plays awkwardly with Skaab Ruinator, who shrinks him, but the idea is that you don’t want to bring Skaab Ruinator back too early anyway because you want to keep cards in the graveyard to turn on Visions of Beyond, and in the meantime Splinterfright is a formidable threat. Skaab Ruinator is there to give you inevitability.

Armored Skaab looks like a Limited card, but in this deck it’s kind of like a better Sea Gate Oracle. It gives you the necessary creature density you need, and the body is actually a respectable blocker, particularly against red. Unlike Merfolk Looter and Deranged Assistant, which are very vulnerable to removal, this hard-to-kill body has already given you value if they want to kill him. I was very impressed by this card all around.

Snapcaster Mage is well known to be amazing, and here he particularly over performs, since the deck gives him plenty of options and really wants the random body.

Phantasmal Image was included as kind of a catchall because it’s a cheap blue creature that I can safely play to increase my creature count without lowering my card quality. It’s nice to have an answer to Thrun, the Last Troll and Geist of Saint Traft.

Reassembling Skeleton and Vengeful Pharaoh are then kind of “free” value I just couldn’t turn down when I was already committed to milling myself.

The sideboard is pretty simple. I knew I’d be better against control than aggro because the deck is so good at grinding, so I wanted access to a lot of removal. Gnaw to the Bone is a really exciting card against Red in this strategy, and all the Ancient Grudges were mandatory.

Creeping Renaissance felt like a breaker against anything where my late game somehow wasn’t powerful enough, especially if it could regrow Laboratory Maniac, who would just win the game at that point.

This was my starting point.

I quickly accepted that once I was going through all the trouble to fill my graveyard, passing on Unburial Rites was just irrational. I’d been worried about not being able to make the mana work, and I knew Ancient Grudge was important to me, but Unburial Rites into Sun Titan would just be unbelievable if this deck could support it. I was already playing Phantasmal Image and a 5/6 flier it could return.

So I shifted the mana to minimize green and black and maximize white. I gave up on Splinterfright and added one Oblivion Ring for added utility. This also gave me a Moorland Haunt, in addition to two Unburial Rites and two Sun Titans. This also meant that I could sideboard Day of Judgment and Timely Reinforcements.

So that was the deck I intended to play at SCG Open Indy until I got an email from John Stolzmann at 1:30 am Saturday morning suggesting that, if my problem was that I was decking myself, maybe I should just turn that into an advantage and play Memory’s Journey to return Laboratory Maniac as my inevitability. If they tried to kill him, I could just play more card draw in response. That made sense, so I built a sixty-card deck that could do that. It would look something like:

Skaab Dredge

Sam Black

Test deck on 10-09-2011

Standard

Creatures (19)

Lands (22)

Spells (19)

When I woke up in the morning, I realized that it was still true that if I was milling that much, I should play Unburial Rites and Sun Titan, and they could get back Laboratory Maniac, so I didn’t need Memory’s Journey. That let me cut the green and red all together to get a reasonable mana base.

In the end, I registered:

Esper Dredge

Sam Black

Test deck on 10-09-2011

Standard

Creatures (19)

Lands (22)

Spells (19)

Sideboard

Civilized Scholar and Mindshrieker were just there to try them out. Snapcaster Mage had lost a lot of value now that all it could do was draw/mill cards. It got a lot better after sideboarding in reactive spells, which is why I had another in my board.

In the actual tournament, I lost to Mono Red because he had a good draw starting with Stromkirk Noble on the play in game three, and I had only blue mana. I lost to a Consecrated Sphinx deck because I foolishly didn’t side in my Doom Blades. I lost to another Consecrated Sphinx deck, largely because I didn’t bother to appeal a game loss for drawing a card with a summoning sick Merfolk Looter (the judge apologized later—I knew I could appeal and that it would probably get overturned, but I just didn’t care because I was already out of contention). And I lost to Tempered Steel. I definitely missed the green sideboard cards. I beat several different Thrun decks, a very badly played Puresteel deck, and some other things. The deck felt pretty good against green.

My main conclusions from the tournament were that the engine felt fundamentally sound, but there was something missing in the details. I think this gets back to the question raised when I discussed Mana Leak above—the Skaab Ruinator engine isn’t the fastest, most explosive thing you can do, and this deck tries too hard to build as if it is. It’s a great way to build inevitability, but for that plan to work, the deck needs to embrace more control elements. I’m not sure how to fit those in the deck while keeping enough creatures for Skaab Ruinator, but maybe he’s the weak link. It’s possible that the strong part of the deck is Armored Skaab milling flashback spells, and maybe combining that with Liliana, counters, and removal is a stronger approach.

Perhaps something like:

3 Ponder
2 Visions of Beyond
3 Dream Twist
2 Think Twice
3 Mana Leak
3 Forbidden Alchemy
2 Dissipate
1 Doom Blade

3 Armored Skaab
3 Snapcaster Mage
3 Liliana of the Veil
2 Unburial Rites
2 Sun Titan
1 Phantasmal Image
1 Consecrated Sphinx

This is literally where I was when I was about to start building a mana base. What do you notice about this deck? It doesn’t have a single four-of. Now, maybe some of these should be fours—I’m not sure—but I know that I want a lot of versatility with my Snapcasters, and I know there are a lot of reasons I want to draw variety rather than a lot of the same things. This start is why I think going above sixty is so realistic in this archetype, and so I’ll leave you with that.

Thanks for reading,

Sam Black
@samuelhblack on Twitter