Ox Of Agonas Will Reinvigorate Modern Dredge

Dredge has a long history in Modern, full of twists and turns. When it first emerged, fully powered with Faithless Looting and Golgari Grave-Troll, it was clearly too powerful for the format, leading to the latter card taking a second stint on the Banned List.

Losing Golgari Grave-Troll was a major blow to the deck’s explosiveness, but with Gitaxian Probe also leaving the format and the rise of Death’s Shadow decks, the metagame was favorable enough for Dredge to stick around in its neutered form. But over time, it faded away as more powerful decks took over. 

Creeping Chill would ratchet up the deck’s power level once again, putting it on the level with the rest of the metagame. Dredge was one of the major competitors in the Izzet Phoenix era of Modern last year. But then came Modern Horizons, and with it Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis. Hogaak essentially supplanted Dredge as the graveyard deck du jour and was powerful enough that Faithless Looting met a ban.

Since then, I’ve largely given up on Dredge being a great deck in Modern, though it does pop up from time to time. Faithless Looting did so much for the deck that even with the fundamentally broken engine intact, the deck didn’t feel powerful enough to compete, especially with the large infusion of powerful cards during 2019.

But given that the broken engine is intact, it was less like Dredge was dead and more as though it was dormant, waiting for another piece to replace some of the functionality of Faithless Looting and/or increase the deck’s power level in another way. That piece has come in the form of Ox of Agonas.

Ox of Agonas fits both criteria above, in some ways filling the same role as Faithless Looting, while offering a few extras that make it particularly exciting. Let’s look at a few of the key aspects of the card and why they are so important.

Ox Keeps the Engine Running

This is the most important aspect of Ox of Agonas, and where it most closely approximates Faithless Looting. Looting was the ideal Turn 1 play for Dredge, setting up your graveyard and your hand as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s this function that we most remember of the card, but its flashback was very important to the deck’s success.

The most common misconception about Modern Dredge is that it wins primarily on speed. Yes, the deck has explosive draws, especially post-Creeping Chill, but Dredge has always traded on its resilience. Your Bloodghasts and Prized Amalgams keep coming back for more, making the deck difficult to interact with outside of targeted graveyard hate. Between that and the late-game engine of Life from the Loam and Conflagrate, Modern Dredge is just as able to win on Turn 10 as Turn 4 and this versatility is key to its success.

However, you do need to get to that end-game faster than dredging once per turn after your initial hand is played out. Faithless Looting was invaluable there, keeping the engine running and often getting down to ten or fewer cards in your library. Without Faithless Looting, it was easy to run out of steam because you often never draw an extra card after your opening hand and only start with one or two enablers.

Ox’s escape mode is similarly accessible from the graveyard, once again giving the deck a way to dredge into a way to keep going – a self-sustaining engine. Even better, Ox represents a five-power body when escaped and draws three cards, leading to very explosive turns. It’s not difficult to chain the first Ox into a second, at which point you’ve seen the vast majority of your deck.

In this way, Ox of Agonas is better than Faithless Looting in this role of keeping the gas flowing, which is exciting to say the least. Where Ox falls short in replacing Looting is the early consistency, and that aspect is less important in the age of the London Mulligan. The rule change happened right around the time Modern Horizons was released and Hogaak supplanted Dredge, so we haven’t seen much of the deck with a rule that helps it more than any other archetype.

We do also miss out on the explosive capability of multiple Faithless Looting draws, but as I noted earlier, Dredge doesn’t need to be the fastest deck out there to be competitive. As long as it has the baseline speed to be competitive, the deck’s strong late-game will push it over the top in a lot of matchups.

Now, I’m not saying that Ox of Agonas is better than Faithless Looting was. Looting functioning as an early enabler means you can easily max out on them and hit the flashback more reliably. But regaining a significant margin of the power lost from the Faithless Looting ban is a huge gain for Dredge.

Ox Returns Prized Amalgam

On the surface, having another card that can be used to trigger Prized Amalgam is a small increase in the deck’s consistency. That’s a small plus in Ox’s column, but there’s a critical implication here that I want to note: It makes you more resilient to Surgical Extraction.

Surgical Extraction can be a scary card for Dredge, especially in conjunction with Snapcaster Mage, because two copies of the card can exile Narcomoeba and Bloodghast, leaving Prized Amalgam stranded in the graveyard. You used to see Haunted Dead as an occasional singleton to both discard your graveyard payoffs and add a third recursive creature for Prized Amalgam, but with Creeping Chill, space in the deck is too tight.

Ox of Agonas is a significant threat in its own right, so it plus an Amalgam or two can take over a game when backed up by Creeping Chill. That makes the plan of overloading on Surgical Extraction to run the Dredge deck out of threats much harder to execute. Outside of that plan, Surgical Extraction isn’t scary, because no single piece of the deck is absolutely essential. Sometimes you have draws that are dependent on a single dredger, but that’s a risky play for the opponent to make.

As I noted above, Dredge trades on its resilience. Graveyard hate is obviously effective, but the permanents can be answered and the one-shot effects recovered from. Any additional resilience to graveyard hate – and Surgical Extraction is a popular piece because it plays well with Snapcaster Mage and Death’s Shadow – is a welcome addition to the deck.

Ox Empties Your Hand

Dredge is great at putting cards from its library into its graveyard. But when you have Bloodghasts and Prized Amalgams in your hand, you need to have ways to discard them. Historically, that role has been played by Conflagrate. In fact, the innovation of Life from the Loam and Conflagrate was critical in Dredge becoming the dominant deck it was in 2016.

But these days Conflagrate is not the powerhouse it once was. The Modern metagame doesn’t have a lot of creature decks like Humans and Conflagrate is often awkward against creature combo decks like Infect that can protect their creatures against a sorcery they can see coming or Heliod Company, where it can’t answer the namesake card.

There are also significant diminishing returns with Conflagrate since you will need to cast Life from the Loam several times to rebuild a hand that will flashback Conflagrate for a high number. This leads to a situation where playing a split of the two cards makes sense. You’d much rather have one of each than two of either to maximize your options, and the first copy of each is quite valuable.

Fitting Ox in the Deck

The final question is exactly how Ox of Agonas fits into the deck. Space is tight and Dredge lists need to maintain a tight balance between the various elements of the deck: enablers, dredgers, payoffs, and lands.

Fortunately, resident Dredge expert Sodeq has done the dirty work for us, taking the deck to a first-place finish in a recent Modern Challenge:

Looking over this list, every number made complete sense to me, starting with how space was found for Ox of Agonas.

The most natural card to cut for Ox is Conflagrate, since they often are cast around the same time in the unorthodox curve, around Turn 3 or 4. The split here makes sense in a metagame that isn’t particularly creature heavy, but the importance of Conflagrate in creature matchups is noted with the sideboard copy, letting you swap the split when you need extra removal.

Beyond its functionality as a discard outlet, Ox of Agonas is primarily a threat, so trimming one of the other twelve makes sense. And even though Prized Amalgam is helped by the addition of Ox, it’s still the least reliable of the threats, and thus the easiest one to trim. I’ve seen some lists trim a Narcomoeba, which is the most frustrating to draw naturally, but it’s more important to get your threats from your library to the battlefield, and Narcomoeba is the easiest to get onto the battlefield.

The other small concession to Ox of Agonas is the reintroduction of Dakmor Salvage. I didn’t see a lot of copies of this card in Dredge lists last year, but with Faithless Looting and now with Ox of Agonas, it’s a solid singleton to have so you can cast your explosive card and make a land drop to trigger Bloodghasts immediately. You shouldn’t think of this as a land in the traditional sense, since the black mana isn’t particularly helpful, but it’s an important last dredger.

Comply in the sideboard is the last new addition, meant to fight the wave of Primeval Titans. Stalling that card for a turn or two can let you close the game before they establish anything relevant on the battlefield, and the fact that you can access it from the graveyard makes the splash worthwhile.

Splash Damage from Underworld Breach

Dredge has always waxed and waned with the prevalence of graveyard hate. Modern being such a wide format does prevent people from overloading too much, but every extra Rest in Peace or Tormod’s Crypt you have to fight through is significant.

So as someone who wants to pick up Dredge again, I’m worried about the hype surrounding Underworld Breach in Modern. Emma Handy certainly thinks the deck is for real and her track record when it comes to predicting the metagame over the last year is impeccable. If the deck proves powerful, then more graveyard hate certainly is coming, but it doesn’t spell doom for Dredge.

Underworld Breach Is About To Blow The Doors Off Modern

Underworld Breach has proven resilient to one-shot graveyard removal like Tormod’s Crypt, and that pattern should stay true in Modern since the key pieces for establishing a loop – Grinding Station and Emry, Lurker of the Loch – stay on the battlefield. Surgical Extraction could help here, especially if you’re able to nab Underworld Breach itself, but for the most part players will be looking toward Leyline of the Void and Rest in Peace.

These are the most powerful graveyard hate spells, but all hate is easier to beat when you can see it coming. So, in a weird sense, you gain something from Underworld Breach narrowing the range of effective hate.

Also, there’s a much larger range of hate available to target Underworld Breach. Cards like Phyrexian Revoker and Pithing Needle can shut down Emry and Grinding Station entirely, and traditional forms of disruption like removal and discard will be much more effective there than against Dredge.

So while Breach decks do utilize their graveyards, they aren’t setting up via the graveyard, and thus aren’t as vulnerable to graveyard hate as decks like Dredge. Their resilience is our gain, since the increase in graveyard hate should be manageable.

Lastly, I expect Grafdigger’s Cage to increase in numbers, since it stops Underworld Breach as well as Collected Company. This is good news because historically, Cage is among the easiest hate cards for Dredge to beat. You’re still forced to answer it, but once you do, your graveyard is completely intact and you should be able to generate a sizable battlefield that turn, or at least by the next one.

Dredge always thrives when it’s underrated and sneaks in under the radar. With all the eyes on Underworld Breach and Primeval Titan, Stinkweed Imp and friends are in prime position to do just that.