1) Ichorid
Based on forum reactions to my last article on Dredge, I think I may have given people the impression that I think Ichorid does not belong in the archetype. That’s not the case, but I thought then, and continue to think now, that it is overall mostly just a downgraded Narcomoeba. I still think it’s pretty rare to find a game that was won with Ichorid that would not have been won with Therapy and Dread Return over the course of a few more turns. (Also, for those of you who are impressed by such things, Manuel Bucher agreed with me at the Grand Prix that Ichorid is overrated in Dredge.)
Now, does this mean I have no interest in playing more than four “Narcomoeba” in my list? Not at all – I played one last week as the “fifth” Narcomoeba, in fact – but as of last week I did not think I could find room for more than “five” ‘moebas in the list. What kinds of things did I think were more important than extra free dudes?
First, I should state that I am highly reluctant to compromise on three things in a Dredge list.
1) Maxing out on the best discard outlets, the best dredgers (the list I posted last week was supposed to have had 4 Thug and 0 Darkblast), and the best draw effects. Dredge loses when it does not get its engine going, and I am extremely unhappy to be running any less than the full set of the best tools available to get that engine going. The only time I voluntarily play with fewer than the absolute maximum of these cards is when I have sideboard cards to bring in which are, frustratingly, even more critical to victory in the post-board games.
2) Maxing out on Narcomoebas and Bridges from Below. Once the engine is going, these are the cards that lead to degenerate Dread Returns.
3) Maindecking at least two copies apiece of Cabal Therapy and Dread Return. Dread Return plus Bridge from Below is the killing blow in this deck, and it is what the combo aspires to pull off. Cabal Therapy is what protects Dread Return from Force of Will, and often helps you generate that third creature by “splitting” a creature into multiple Zombies when you have more than one Bridge in the ‘yard. You want to see a Dread Return and a Therapy in nearly every single game, and these are the minimum quantities that make that realistic.
According to these rules of mine, here is the minimum core of a Dredge deck. As far as I am concerned, every Dredge deck should be playing at least these cards, in at least these quantities.
4 Golgari Grave-Troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Golgari Thug
4 Putrid Imp
4 Tireless Tribe
4 Careful Study
4 Breakthrough
4 Bridge from Below
4 Narcomoeba
2 Dread Return
2 Cabal Therapy
You commonly see Lion’s Eye Diamond in place of Tireless Tribe, and I still think that is dead wrong. Besides the fact that Tribe does not put you all-in on your discard outlet, or require you to play garbage like Deep Analysis, you cannot sacrifice LED to Dread Return or Therapy. Also, I cannot express how awesome it was to hold off so many Tarmogoyfs and Goblins with that 1/5-slash-1/9 at the GP.
There’s also the fact that it attacks; towards the end of Day 2, I saw Chad Kastel hanging on against a Blue player who had hit him with multiple Relics and multiple Crypts over the course of an extremely long game, but the Blue player had no pressure with which to finish him off. I am pretty sure the guy was low on life, since he Forced a hardcast Stinkweed Imp, and I couldn’t help but think that if the two LEDs Chad had in play were Tireless Tribes, he might have won that game due to Tribe beats. I certainly pulled out my fair share of hate-filled post-board games at this tournament thanks to an abundance of hardcast dorks.
After the above core of “mandatory” cards, we have 16 slots left over. A bunch of those will be lands, and the remainder will be support cards.
I never thought Undiscovered Paradise was worth consideration, as it forces you to “miss land drops” when things are not going well, and that can be deadly – especially considering how important it is for Dredge to play around Daze. I couldn’t think of a single time Tarnished Citadel’s extra damage had cost me a game (though it’s possible it did happen once or twice in the hundreds of games I played and I just don’t remember), so for the tournament I stuck with the Citadel because I knew it was an extremely low-risk choice. As of my last article, I wanted 16 lands in the deck, which meant four apiece of City of Brass, Gemstone Mine, and Tarnished Citadel to finish the manabase that started with the obvious four Cephalid Coliseum.
I filled the remaining four slots with these cards:
1 Flame-Kin Zealot
1 Empyrial Archangel
1 Cabal Therapy (bringing my total count to 3)
1 Ichorid
I won’t lie, I considered taking out the Flame-Kin Zealot. It’s very narrow, as it is only necessary to win against combo, but you are far more likely to come up a turn too slow against them if you don’t play it. In all fourteen rounds of GP: Chicago I only reanimated a Flame-Kin Zealot once, and a Grave-Troll would have easily gotten the job done in that game state. I am not exaggerating when I say that if there were no combo decks in the format, I would not play Zealot in the maindeck or sideboard. I don’t know why there is this impression floating around that making a 10/10 regenerator alongside six 2/2s and maybe a free Cabal Therapy or two is insufficient to beat nearly any non-combo opponent, but… well, it is.
With this configuration, my plan against Counterbalance was simply to set up Cabal Therapy into Dread Return on Empyrial Archangel. When you have a few random Zombies and Narcomoebas around to chump and stop them from dealing you a full eight damage per turn, they really cannot deal with the Archangel. However, this plan did occasionally fall afoul of Counterbalance plus Top plus a four-drop floating on top, so there was definitely room for improvement.
Ichorid in this context is basically Narcomoeba number five. He’s slower than an actual Narcomoeba, but has the bonus effect of generating zombies repeatedly if the game goes long against Counterbalance. He was perfectly fine in this role, and I almost never used him to attack anyone to death because facilitating a Dread Return while tacking on a few extra Zombies was always sufficient.
2) Tweaking Dredge
After my last article on Dredge, I saw some good ideas in the forum. One was “I hope everyone plays that [terrible deck] at the GP,” which a lot of posters agreed with. Considering 100% of the people (to my knowledge) who both tested and played the deck made Day 2 with it, it seems likely that if everyone had played it, those of you who wrote that would have gotten knocked out by it. Good call, chums.
Another idea, which was actually good, was that I should consider cutting a land. I remembered back when Zac and I were first working on the Old Extended Dredge list, we had trimmed from 17 lands to 16, but had never tried going from 16 to 15.
I decided to sit down and do a little experiment to help me with this situation. I cut a Tarnished Citadel for a blank card, which I used to represent Some Nonland Card. Then I sat down to draw some opening hands and mulligan until I found a keeper. Whenever I drew Some Nonland Card and it forced a mulligan – that is, I would have kept the hand if Some Nonland Card had been a land instead – I made a note of it. I did this for one hundred opening hands (which only took about 15 minutes; it’s usually very easy to identify a keepable game 1 Dredge hand), and found that I only wanted the land in that slot in six of the hands.
In other words, going to fifteen lands would make me mulligan approximately 6% more. In exchange, I could add another Ichorid (Narcomoeba number “six”). Considering how well this deck mulligans, I was okay with that trade-off, figuring that although an extra 6% mulligan rate might translate into around one game loss over the course of the GP, I would probably mise more than one victory from the extra Ichorid.
Now having two Ichorids in my maindeck, I turned to two other forum comments of interest. One was “Counterbalance decks can’t handle Ichorid plus Bridge,” and the other was “I like everything about this list except Empyrial Archangel.” Up to this point I had been quite satisfied with my game plan of Therapy into Dread Return on Archangel against Counterbalance decks, but these two comments got me thinking: if I cut the Archangel and went up to three Ichorids main, could I do even better?
Certainly if I could make this plan work against Counterbalance, I would have bonus Ichorids to work with against other decks, rather than the do-nothing Angel that I almost only ever wanted to reanimate against Counterbalance. I tested it out, and sure enough, the three-Ichorid plan worked out great against Counterbalance.
Evidently when multiple Ichorids turned up in my Feature Match, some number of aforementioned “well-wishers” decided that either I had sold out and run with a more traditional Ichorid list or that last week’s list was mere misdirection. Obviously it was neither; I just found room for two more Ichorids in the main, which seemed to be a decent upgrade over my previous configuration. (Those who consider it teh biggest upgrade evar!!1 can go ahead and count that as a Get Out of Jail Free Card for predicting the deck would tank.)
As to the sideboard, I am convinced at least six of my fifteen were correct. They were:
4 Leyline of the Void
1 Ichorid
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
The Needles are for Tormod’s Crypt and Relic, and I boarded them in for almost every match I played at the GP. They easily won me more games than any other sideboard card.
The fourth Ichorid had to do with a forum post by Josh Silvestri, in which he pointed out that Goblins players could Pyrokinesis their own guys to get rid of Bridges. I hadn’t realized that was a line of play Goblins might take (it’s a three-for-one for me, after all!) but it actually seemed pretty good against me. I boarded the fourth Ichorid and Akroma to deal with this plan; if I can return a couple of Ichorids alongside a Narcomoeba or discard creature, I can bring back Akroma and probably just race them. This plan turned out to win me a match at the GP, and I was quite happy with it.
The other cards I ran:
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Darkblast
The Leylines were for the mirror, obviously, which I never faced. That makes me reluctant to say they were correct, even though they would have been hugely valuable had I paired against it.
The Spellbombs and Darkblast are, I assume, more surprising. On the way up, I was iPhoning up decklists and trying to figure out what kinds of decks would be most likely to have Leyline against me. What I found surprised me: I could find zero documented cases of anyone running Leyline in Legacy for the past couple months. Given that, it seemed like a huge waste to keep Chain of Vapor and Ray of Revelation when there were better answers to Yixlid Jailer available.
Gerry opined that “Yixlid Jailer is not a card” – in other words, no one will play it – but I had seen it in sideboards and wanted an answer. I primarily expected it from Force of Will decks, against which games tend to go long, so I had no interest in Firestorm. The fact that it is a discard outlet is somewhat worthless, as I want to do my discarding on turn one but my opponent will not play Yixlid Jailer until at least turn two. If I just wait for him to play Yixlid Jailer, I am fairly screwed if he decides to just not play Yixlid Jailer yet because my graveyard is totally nonthreatening due to my lack of discarding.
Worse, the situation that really scares me is the one where my opponent topdecks Jailer in the midgame, after disrupting me early on. If I have been saving a Darkblast or Firestorm for him and they just counter it – they will probably have topdecked one at some point, and I can’t flash Therapy when Jailer is in play – then all my sideboarding plans were for naught.
Really what I wanted was something I could just drop into play early on, while my opponent’s counters were busy trying to stop my enablers, and just leave on the table until the Jailer showed up. Mogg Fanatic triggers Bridge for me, but is vulnerable to Swords to Plowshares, so my next inclination was Seal of Fire. I quickly realized Pyrite Spellbomb was an upgrade over that, as I can sacrifice it to draw a card and dredge some more if no Jailers show up. The Darkblast was a supplemental answer that I could dredge up in the midgame if I hadn’t drawn a Spellbomb, which would at least give me a chance of turning things around if the opponent happened to have Jailer but no counter for my Darkblast.
Given that I didn’t face any Jailers at the entire tournament, I am thinking this might have been better as Unmask or something else for the Ad Nauseam matchup, as I did lose two matches to turn-one kills from that deck. If I’d had the stones to ignore Yixlid Jailer, I would have definitely gotten more value out of Unmasks.
Now, bear in mind this was GP: Chicago. At a smaller Legacy tournament, this is dangerous thinking; a far smaller proportion of the room will be playing a netdeck, and you won’t have the luxury of byes and a bazillion rounds to cull down to the players who are running more established graveyard hate choices. When I was testing in our hotel room with Adrian Sullivan, his deck featured Enlightened Tutor into Wheel of Sun and Moon. If I was on the draw, I had no outs to this, but that was fine; I knew I wouldn’t face it in the GP, and I didn’t. Not so at a smaller tournament.
3) Hating Dredge
There is a right way to hate Dredge, and there is a wrong way. Here is an example of a sideboard package that is Doing It Wrong:
The problem with this is that it folds to a single Pithing Needle. I can bring in four Needles and have the absolute maximum chance of blanking your entire post-board hate package.
Do you know what I am the most scared of, as a Dredge player? This sideboard package:
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Leyline of the Void
1 Yixlid Jailer
How the hell do I board against that?
If I bring in 4 Needles and you draw a hate card, you have a 50-50 shot of nailing me with a Jailer or Leyline that sidesteps my answer entirely. If I draw a Needle and play it, you have a 50-50 shot of hosing me anyway if I name Relic and you have Crypt, or vice versa. If I bring in countermeasures for Jailer or Leyline, I have only a one in four chance of stopping whatever hate card you drew.
It looks like a mess, but as a Dredge player, this is the most frightening mess imaginable. The only time I have seen anyone come close to this came from SCG’s own Anwar Ahmad, in the top eight of a GPT for Chicago.
Creatures (8)
Lands (20)
Spells (32)
- 4 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Daze
- 4 Snuff Out
- 4 Counterbalance
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Thoughtseize
Sideboard
He played 2 Crypt and 2 Jailer, and I was extraordinarily thankful that none of my opponents at the GP did the same.
Each of these answers is subtly more or less effective than its siblings in different situations, but by far the most important thing, the thing you must do, is to disrupt the Dredge player in some way. If they Needle your Crypts, it doesn’t matter how many you are holding. You will not disrupt them, and they will put a major hurting on you. It’s much better to have an opening-hand Jailer when the opponent starts with a turn-one Needle than a Relic he stops with Needle turn one.
If you’re not willing to take the plunge on the full-blown Jim Roy sideboard, at least do what Anwar did and split your hate cards up between different cards that cannot be answered by the same countermeasure from Dredge.
…
If I could go back and change one thing, it would be to cut the Spellbombs and Darkblast for a set of Unmasks and possibly a second Flame-Kin Zealot to make sure I could always Dread Return one against Ad Nauseam (or, I guess, a River Kelpie, since that would dig me to my other Zealot). I still think Dredge is entirely underrated and under-prepared-for in Legacy, and if I had a Legacy tournament to compete in tomorrow, this is definitely the deck I would run.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!
Until next week,
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]