I have a problem. On the one hand, I cannot help but predict that a deck with four Force of Will in its maindeck will win Grand Prix: Chicago this weekend. On the other hand, I cannot see myself playing anything but Dredge. I genuinely think it’s the best choice, but I can’t help but imagine – I don’t have a concrete reason, just color me a believer when it comes to Blue-bordered cards in Magic – that a Force of Will deck will win the tournament. How’s that for cognitive dissonance?
The problem is that I see a golden opportunity and I can’t help myself. I want to grab for it. It’s quite simple, really: I think everyone is misbuilding Dredge, I think I’ve got a better build, and given how few Dredgers are to be expected at Chicago and how many decks there are to fight at once, I don’t think anyone can justify the sideboard space necessary to keep the beast down.
I should state up front that I think the Legacy metagame is seriously warped. As far as I can tell, a correctly-built Legacy Dredge list (not that I’ve ever seen one posted) is powerful enough to warrant around half a sideboard worth of dedicated hate. Instead, almost no one is playing such a deck, and so people board the way you see them board in the Top 8 of the recent Roanoke GPT: somewhere between zero and four Tormod’s Crypts and/or Yixlid Jailers, and certainly no more than four total cards for the Dredge matchup.
It also seems to follow that if I think I can beat pretty much anyone with Dredge unless they have half their board dedicated to hating me, and if I expect most opponents to either run the Half-Ass It strategy and play only three-ish copies of hate cards or go the Game Theory route and play zero hate cards (I mean, if you only expect to pair against Dredge once or twice at the GP, what are the odds you’re going to draw one of those three Crypts in your opening hand in both game 2 and game 3? Or were you planning on winning game one somehow?), I can’t really not play Dredge, can I? You see where I’m coming from on this.
Okay, so if I’m so sure everyone else is missing the memo on Dredge, why am I spilling my guts before the tournament?
One, so that I can run a lifetime first: the double-or-nothing. See, I think very few people will take this deck as seriously as they should. I suspect most will think “this list looks much worse than regular Dredge,” and will write it off. This means I can expect that most likely no one I play against at the GP will have taken the plunge and dedicated half their board to Dredge hate because they read this article.
It’s a double-or-nothing because now if I (or someone else who picks it up because I wrote about it) subsequently post a strong finish with the deck, I get to bellow out a mighty booyah! of vindication, one of life’s simple pleasures. If the deck fails to produce, on the other hand, then I’ve walked through the flames of the forums for naught – but I have pretty thick skin, so I’m down with that risk.
The other reason I’m writing this is, of course, the usual one: I like to give my readers the technology before the tournament when I can. If you can pilot this thing right, I think your chances of doing well at GP: Chicago are strong as well.
Onward to the list.
Creatures (26)
- 4 Tireless Tribe
- 4 Putrid Imp
- 1 Ichorid
- 1 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 3 Golgari Thug
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 4 Narcomoeba
- 1 Empyrial Archangel
Lands (16)
Spells (18)
Sideboard
This weekend, I will register my decklist according to the naming convention most often used (of late) by Adrian Sullivan. The Chevy moniker, as Adrian once explained, is a bold claim. By calling my list Chevy Dredge, I am acknowledging that I am running a nonstandard build of an established archetype, but at the same time, I am saying that everyone else’s build is wrong.
I’m not usually one for such brash claims, but in this case I have no qualms about making it. Furthermore, I think the fact that a lot of people have been testing against bad Dredge lists has led them to underestimate what I think is easily the most powerful archetype in Legacy. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I see this Legacy environment and all I can think of is the broken Extended season where Dredge knocked over PTQ after PTQ despite having a big, fat bullseye on his head as The Best Deck. I feel like we’re in that environment all over again, except, somehow, no one knows how strong Dredge is.
I think the two cards most squarely to blame for this are Ichorid and Lion’s Eye Diamond.
First the 3/1. I have no explanation for why such a brazenly fair card gets so much love in these decks. It’s really embarrassing. I have come to understand that, in Legacy parlance, the deck is known as Ichorid rather than Dredge, as though the dumpy 3/1 were the real power in the universe.
Dredge aspires to have the win locked up on turn 2, every game. Major barriers to achieving this goal include having discard outlets and draw spells countered (or shut down by cards like Trinisphere and Chalice of the Void), or having your graveyard whacked by Tormod’s Crypt or Yixlid Jailer. If any of these events happen in quantities sufficient to cripple you, then you will not have access to sufficient Ichorid food to make the card good enough to actually win you the game. If they do not happen in such quantities, then you will almost always handily win without access to Ichorid.
In other words, if you are dredging enough cards to feed multiple Ichorids, you damn well do not need the Ichorids to win that game. You might now be imagining one of those freak scenarios where the opponent has the four-card combo of Force of Will to slow you down followed by an immediate Counterbalance and Top with a four-drop floating on top to stop Dread Return despite your Therapies. In that situation, okay, yeah, I want some Ichorids. But here’s a news flash: you’re going to lose five times as many games because your Putrid Imp was Forced and you were stuck holding an Ichorid instead of a Tireless Tribe to replace it.
Then there’s the artifact. I don’t know how else to put this, but… has anyone tested against Dredge without Lion’s Eye Diamond? It’s the sickest! When you can’t just Force one spell and win because the Dredge player’s hand is gone? So much harder to beat them!
Don’t get me wrong, I was excited to play it as well. “That must be the craziest ever!” I said as I sat down to playtest. Very soon my excitement was gone. The problem was that I had spent an embarrassing amount of time testing Dredge when it was at the peak of its power in Extended, and all I could think of when I was playing LED-powered Dredge was how much more consistent the 2007 deck was. After one episode too many of losing after having to go all-in with LED, when a land would have yielded victory without breaking a sweat, I kicked it back to late 2007 and haven’t looked back.
When I was playing Old Extended Dredge, I found that about 95% of the time (possibly more), flashing Dread Return would win the game. Sometimes it was ugly – often you were reanimating a 10/10 Grave-Troll with some Zombie backup – but no matter how ugly, it just got there, over and over and over. As it turns out, the Dread Return And Win mantra still holds true in Legacy, so the thing that interests me above all else is resolving an early Dread Return. The earlier the better, yeah, but the most important thing is resolving it in the first place.
Games with Dredge, then, break down into two categories: races (as in, the games where they can’t really disrupt you in any significant way and have to try to kill you first) and attrition wars (where you try to exhaust their disruption reserves and push through a Dread return).
Obviously you want to engage in races whenever possible. I’m trying to think of a metaphor for Old Extended Dredge’s ability to win races against the Legacy gauntlet and all I can think of is a pissed-off Darth Vader storming through an Ewok camp with lightsaber drawn, leaving what looks like an arsonist’s work at a Build-a-Bear Workshop in his wake. It’s like you’re playing Vintage against Lorwyn Block Constructed. When you lose a race with Dredge, it is almost always a Basic Magic Loss – like you couldn’t mulligan into a proper ratio of lands and spells or somesuch, the inconsistencies inherent in the game, if you will – and not because you couldn’t find a mix of combo pieces sufficient to win.
The other games – the ones where they Force your Putrid Imp or resolve a Tormods’ Crypt on turn 1 – those are the ones you have to grind out. Realistically, these are the games where nearly all of your losses will come from.
So let’s recap. Even without LED, every race you enter is a piss-your-pants-laughing joke, and almost every one of your losses will be due to failed attrition fights. From that position, I hope it is quite evident that adding LED over a land is almost entirely counterproductive: you are sacrificing resources that are good in an attrition war in order to make yourself better at racing, the thing you are already amazing at! Why would you want to make that trade-off? It’s shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes, you can’t win on turn 1 without LED, but there is nothing dishonorable about winning on turn 2 instead. Winning is winning; there are no bonus points in Magic.
As to playing the deck, I direct you to a primer Zac wrote back in that Extended season, which incorporates most of my thoughts on the subject (not to mention a Dredge maindeck that is two cards off from this one; I favor 3 Therapy and 2 Dread Return instead of the reverse, and we had Akroma because Empyrial Archangel was not in print back then).
I view Flame-Kin Zealot as a necessary tool against combo, and Archangel is the best way to win races that cannot be won by Grave-Trolls or Zealots alone. This comes up mostly against Threshold/Counterbalance, which can disrupt you enough to make your Dread Return target relevant, and she is also generally the best target against beatdown as well.
As for the board, I was really excited to use Ascendant Evincar as a reanimation target for the Elves matchup, but then the matchup turned out to be easy enough that I decided against it. I changed the ratio of hosers around from the list Zac posted because Relic of Progenitus and Tormod’s Crypt seem comparably popular, so I am not willing to devote slots to Chalice, which was a dedicated anti-Crypt solution. The Null Rod is just the fifth Pithing Needle, and Crippling Fatigue is not necessary in a world where Gaddock Teeg and Meddling Mage are so uncommon.
To address some other cards that are commonly played in Legacy, I have not found the loss of life from Tarnished Citadel relevant enough to justify cutting any for Undiscovered Paradise, and I don’t favor Unmask because I like more discard outlets (Careful Study or Tireless Tribe) better in that slot. Most of the time, if I am Unmasking my opponent in an attrition situation I expect to be doing it in order to force through an enabler. (If it’s a race situation, I expect to be winning, so who cares?) So what’s the difference between Unmasking a Force of Will to protect my Putrid Imp and just letting them Force my backup enabler on turn 1, then playing the Imp turn 2?
There are some differences, naturally, and they carry with them some arguments in favor of LED, so I’ll address them both here. The big one is the significance of turn 1. If I can kill you on turn 1, you cannot play that Tormod’s Crypt in your hand. If I have a one-lander and Unmask your Force, you can’t use that Daze against me because you have not played a land yet. You get the idea.
My response to these various situations is the same: they don’t come up enough to change my mind. How many games will I win specifically because I had LED and the rest of the cards needed for a turn 1 win, and my opponent had Tormod’s Crypt, and he was on the draw, and I would have lost if I had not won on turn 1, but I won because I did? That’s an extremely improbably sequence of occurrences, so it doesn’t do much to convince me.
Likewise, there are situations where Unmask is superior to another enabler; say they draw Daze and Force, (or two Daze if they are on the play), and I have only one land and don’t draw another for a very long time. Or maybe I’m on the play, against one of the three White Stax players in the room, and I get their Chalice, which they would have played turn one to stop my turn-two Breakthrough. Yes, yes, then I prefer Unmask, but when I’m mulliganing my hand because it didn’t have an enabler, the remaining seven eighths of the time, I want the Tribe or the Study.
…
So there you have it: the 2007 Dredge, gloriously and bizarrely ready for 2009. I hope I’ve convinced at least some of you to pick it up (look for those dirty wins in playtesting; it doesn’t matter how run-down your Golgari Grave-Troll victory is, a win is a win!), and that I haven’t convinced too many of you to up the graveyard hate in your board.
Either way, best of luck in Chicago!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
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