One of the unfortunate side-effects of moving out to the desert is that when you lose matches it feels like someone shoved your rating through a woodchipper. When I first arrived in New Mexico, I figured I could coast into Nationals on rating, but as soon as I punted a PTQ I dug myself a hole that will likely be impossible to climb out of. The result? I’m playing in Regionals.
So the question, then, is what will I play at Regionals? I figured that there was a decent chance that a large portion of StarCityGames.com readers were wondering the same thing, so it seemed to me that the question made for a good article series. The plan is to pick a deck for each week and talk about what makes it a good choice and what makes it a bad choice for a large tournament like Regionals. I’ll be starting off with my favorite deck from Planar Chaos Standard, the Dredge Deck.
Future Sight includes a large number of cards that could easily fit into the frame of the current incarnation of the Dredge deck. However, when you are thinking about new cards to add to the deck, you need to think about how the deck plays out. You usually get to see about seven to ten cards off of the top of your deck, and then you start Dredging at every opportunity. This means that the cards that you’re looking for in a new set fall into the following categories.
Graveyard-Active Cards:
Bridge from Below – This card is there to be Dredged away. After it’s in the graveyard, it can combo with Dread Return or simply soften your opponent’s removal. Decks such as Red/Green Aggro can remove this card from your graveyard by sacrificing a creature to Scorched Rusalka, or even casting a Rift Bolt at their own man in desperation.
Dakmor Salvage – Dredge 2. This is the only non-Ravnica card so far to have Dredge, so it’s automatically up for consideration. Unfortunately, it has a number of strikes against it. It taps for Black mana, which isn’t too necessary. It comes into play tapped, which means that it’s no better at getting you to the double-Black you need to hard-cast Dread Return than Life from the Loam. Finally, the Dredge number isn’t high enough to make it worth including simply as part of the engine.
Dryad Arbor – When you think about this card in the Dredge deck, you need to think of it as a spell. Obviously you can’t simply replace Forests with Dryad Arbors, because the opening-hand combination of Forest + Greenseeker + Golgari Grave-Troll is a great reason to keep nearly any hand, while Dryad Arbor + Greenseeker + Golgari Grave-Troll is a whole turn slower and allows your opponent to manascrew you with a Seal of Fire. However, Dryad Arbor is a creature that you can return to your hand with Life from the Loam, which seems to me like a good way to power up Dread Returns when you don’t have a ton of spare mana.
Narcomoeba – Like the Bridge, this card exists to be Dredged past. The idea is that, while you are going wild Dredging cards like Golgari Grave-Troll and Stinkweed Imp, you will also be popping tiny guys into play as Dread Return fodder. This plan combos well with the Bridge from Below plan, since the Narcomoebas are free non-token creatures that exist only to die.
Early Plays / Engine Cards:
Llanowar Mentor – This guy is likely the best card in Future Sight for the Dredge deck. Greenseeker was always extremely powerful because it let you start Dredging on turn two, and because it let you continue to hit your land drops so that you could cast Grave-Trolls and run someone over. The Mentor also lets you start Dredging on turn 2, but instead of making land drops for you it provides Llanowar Elf tokens. This is good because it means that you can start casting Grave-Trolls on turn 4, it is good because it means you can create chump-blockers against aggro decks, and it is good because it means you won’t have a hard time finding three creatures to sacrifice to Dread Return.
Tarmogoyf – My Planar Chaos Standard build of the Dredge deck included Instants, Sorceries, Lands, and Creatures. That would make the Tarmogoyf a 4/5 for two mana that you could actually cast. When you throw Bridge from Below into the mix, you’re on your way to a 5/6 for two mana, which could easily be good enough to make the cut. Unfortunately, he’ll usually be a 0/1 or 1/2 when you actually play him, which makes him very vulnerable to all the removal that this format is packing.
Street Wraith – Many people have sung the praises of Street Wraith for allowing you to run a 56-card deck instead of a 60-card deck. Obviously this is desirable because it means that you will draw your best cards more often, but there is more to the Wraith than the fact that it cycles “for free”. In this deck, the fact that you actually go through the process of drawing a card means that you can get a manaless Dredge out of it. It is also a Black creature, which means it will add to the size of Grave-Troll and Svogthos when it’s in the graveyard, and can actually be cast if the need arises when it’s in your hand. However, two life is a lot when you’re facing a 2/3 on turn 1 and a 3/3 trampler on turn 2. Similarly, the deck-thinning aspect of the card comes at the price of less information in terms of mulligan decisions.
Dread Return Targets:
Baru, Fist of Krosa – It is unlikely that you would run more than one Baru in this deck, so the Grandeur ability is essentially not included on the card. However, it combos well with Life from the Loam to get you through a stream of chump-blockers. Chances are good that you only need one or two Trolls and / or Svogthoses when you’re giving your 15/15 creatures +1/+1 and trample. He also benefits from the fact that you can hard-cast him reasonably easily.
Scourge of Kher Ridges – Bogardan Hellkite is usually a more attractive Dread Return target than Akroma, Angel of Wrath due to the fact that it kills creatures in addition to giving you a massive flying threat. The Scourge would take the addition of a handful of Mountains to truly work well, but no amount of Skarrgan Pit-Skulks are safe from the Scourge’s Rough/Tumble ability.
Tombstalker – With one Dredge on Golgari Grave-Troll, this is a 5/5 flyer for just two Black mana, which is fairly impressive. Unfortunately, Akroma hasn’t been impressing me too much due to the fact that it is just one creature, and one creature isn’t impossible to beat. The question, then, is whether or not the ability to hard-cast the Tombstalker will make him worth including.
In my estimation, the cards listed above are the ones that deserve the most attention. There are a few other cards that weren’t quite good enough to deserve their own section that are still worth keeping in mind (such as Death Rattle as a cheap answer to something like Skeletal Vampire, Yixlid Jailer, or Withered Wretch), but any major changes to the deck will be based around one of the above cards.
Before Future Sight was in the mix, the big divide in Dredge decks was around the colors that you played. Most players opted for the consistency provided by playing a straight Black/Green deck, but many people thought that the power level of Magus of the Bazaar was worth the trouble it took to make a three-color manabase. I came down on the side of the two-color Dredge deck, due mostly to the fact that Magus of the Bazaar was great at flipping your deck but not so great at actually providing action you could use to win games. This is not Extended or Vintage; you need cards in your hand to win games in Standard and the Magus is very good at emptying your hand. As such, the deck that I played in Magic Online Premiere Events and Constructed Queues was:
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Greenseeker
4 Fa’adiyah Seer
2 Darkblast
3 Life from the Loam
4 Stinkweed Imp
1 Nightmare Void
4 Golgari Grave-Troll
4 Delirium Skeins
4 Dread Return
3 Bogardan Hellkite
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Angel of Despair
6 Forest
3 Swamp
4 Overgrown Tomb
2 Llanowar Wastes
3 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
3 Ghost Quarter
Sideboard
4 Shadow of Doubt
4 Firemane Angel
3 Blazing Archon
2 Indrik Stomphowler/Krosan Grip
1 Nightmare Void
1 Ghost Quarter
However, the advent of Future Sight brings a new question to the minds of people who are interested in Dredging their way to victory come the day of Regionals: would you rather kill people with a team of giant Grave-Trolls or would you rather kill people with a mass of hasty Zombies?
Three-Color Dredge in Future Sight Standard
The “hasty zombies” plan of action is based around the interaction between Bridge from Below, Dread Return, and Flame-Kin Zealot. The general idea here is that you sacrifice three creatures to Dread Return with at least two Bridge from Belows in your graveyard. The Bridges give you six 2/2 zombie tokens, and the Dread Return gives you a Flame-Kin Zealot. Suddenly you have seven 3/3 creatures with haste, and your opponent takes lethal damage out of nowhere. The deck has a backup combo kill, one that has already been showcased on this site, involving recurring Bogardan Hellkites with Dread Returns and Bridge from Below.
This plan lends itself much better to the three-color plan, because you no longer need cards in your hand to win the game. Your only concern is how many of your Bridges, Dread Returns, and Zealots/Hellkites you can flip, and how fast you can flip them. You don’t need to make land drops until you can play a massive Troll every turn, you just need to kill people now. The question then becomes how you achieve these goals.
To flip your deck, you want the best discard outlets and the best repeated Dredgers. The list of these cards includes Greenseeker, Llanowar Mentor, Fa’adiyah Seer, Sindbad, and Magus of the Bazaar. Chances are good that you don’t want to run the full twenty, just due to deck-space concerns, but the one-drop Spellshapers and Magus of the Bazaar are auto-includes.
The combo requires the full complement of both Bridge from Below and Dread Return. Any less than four of either of those cards will just make it harder to assemble the combo. You’ll also want Narcomoebas to make flashing back Dread Return easier, since you can no longer Dredge and cast Stinkweed Imps to feed the flashback cost.
Your Dread Return targets are only going to be combo finishes; you have no need for an Akroma, since three turns to deal eighteen damage is two turns too many. It is unclear right off the bat how many Flame-Kin Zealots and Bogardan Hellkites you’ll want, but you will want at least two of both so that you don’t have to dig too far to find them.
You will also need the best Dredgers you can get your hands on. This means that you’ll stick with Golgari Grave-Troll and Stinkweed Imp, but you will likely play Golgari Thug before you run Nightmare Void or Life from the Loam. This deck is not interested in casting its Dredgers, only in flipping everything into the graveyard.
Keeping these considerations in mind, the starting point for such a deck is:
Creatures (34)
- 3 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Golgari Thug
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 3 Bogardan Hellkite
- 4 Greenseeker
- 4 Magus of the Bazaar
- 4 Llanowar Mentor
- 4 Narcomoeba
Lands (18)
Spells (8)
Goldfishing shows that it can easily “go for it” on turn 4, and sometimes as early as turn 3. “Going for it” involves sacrificing your Mentors, Greenseekers, Narcomoebas, or even Bazaars to Dread Return, trying to either loop Hellkites for twenty damage to the face or to make an army of hasty Zombies with the Zealot. It’s true that Remands and Mana Leaks are running rampant these days, but really, how bad is it when they Remand your Dread Return and you “only” get nine Zombie tokens? On the other hand, you’re certainly much worse off than usual if your opponent has some way of dealing with your Bridges, since your entire game-plan revolves around that one card.
I do not yet have a sideboard in mind for the deck, since there are so few cards that you could sideboard out in any given matchup. Cutting engine pieces slows you down, cutting Dredgers means that you might fizzle, and cutting Dread Return targets means that you can’t do anything at all. Perhaps this fact alone is reason enough to work more on the two-color version.
Two-Color Dredge in Future Sight Standard
The two-color plan is not too different from the old style of Dredge deck. You have a great fast game against aggro decks with your Stinkweed Imps and Bogardan Hellkites, and you have a great long game against control decks with your Life from the Loams, Svogthoses, and Golgari Grave-Trolls. Your weakness is against combo decks, where your disruption is relatively easy to avoid when they know it is coming.
The new additions to the tried-and-true decklist I presented above are Llanowar Mentor, Bridge from Below, and Dryad Arbor. In this deck, the Bridge isn’t the single-minded plan that it was in the other list, it is simply a strong card that you will sometimes use to win the game.
Creatures (25)
- 1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 1 Angel of Despair
- 3 Bogardan Hellkite
- 4 Greenseeker
- 4 Fa'adiyah Seer
- 4 Llanowar Mentor
Lands (21)
Spells (14)
As above, the Stomphowlers could be Krosan Grips should your metagame dictate.
The Mentors simply replaced Birds of Paradise. Birds allowed you to accelerate into a second-turn Delirium Skeins, but that was never a strong play unless you needed it simply to get your Trolls and Imps into the graveyard. Skeins is at its best on turns 4 and 5, where you can use it as a three-mana Mind Twist that happens to restock your yard.
The Nightmare Voids were cut from the deck because they were usually too slow to have a real effect on the game; Dragonstorm could Remand once and go off. They were very good against Dralnu du Louvre, but your whole deck was very good against Dralnu du Louvre, so losing one card against them in exchange for another good one isn’t a bad deal. The extra Loam in the sideboard is also good against U/x Tron, where going up to four Loams and four Ghost Quarters lets you Strip Mine them out a large percentage of the time.
The Dryad Arbors are, at this point, still somewhat experimental. They do what they do very well, but they also open you up to a greater chance of manascrew. For the record, “what they do” is interact with many different facets of the deck. Svogthos and Grave-Troll count them as creatures when they’re in the graveyard, while Life from the Loam counts them as lands. They feed Dread Return for free in combination with Life from the Loam, and they provide Zombie tokens when you hit your Bridge from Below. Whether or not that’s worth losing one first-turn Green source will simply be discovered over time.
The call between Indrik Stomphowler and Krosan Grip is one that comes down to personal preference. The Grip is there if you want your Naturalize to be an answer. It’s better against Crypt and Leyline because it kills them dead and it does it on turn three. The Stomphowler is good when you want your Naturalize to be a threat, and when you want to be able to Dread Return it. It basically comes down to whether or not you’re expecting that sideboard slot to trump hate or to simply kill artifacts and enchantments. If it’s the former that you want, run Krosan Grip, and if it’s the latter, run Indrik Stomphowler
I believe that the two-color version of the deck will remain the stronger of the two. One of the biggest strengths of the Dredge deck is how it can play two different gameplans against various strategies. Red/Green Aggro has to find creatures that can get through Darkblast and Stinkweed Imp, it has to find a way to deal with a reanimated Hellkite or Akroma, and it has to worry about getting the crucial pieces of burn knocked out by a slowrolled Delirium Skeins. Meanwhile, U/x Tron has to deal with a constant stream of threats, whether the threat is a Life from the Loam getting back two Ghost Quarters and a Svogthos, a Hellkite that threatens to win the game in three turns, or a gigantic Grave-Troll turn after turn. Three-Color Dredge has only one way to win the game, and while the plan is resistant to countermagic, it folds completely to something like Yixlid Jailer.
The Hate
The Dredge deck suffers from one unfortunate fact: it is only good when people don’t want to use up sideboard space answering it. One Extirpate is not going to cause the deck to fold over and die, but four of them fetched up by Mystical Teachings will. The hate cards that are good against the Dredge deck are very numerous, and if you aren’t ready for them then they will beat you.
Leyline of the Void – This is the biggest and the baddest hate card out there. Any deck can run it, and when Red/Green Aggro plops this down on turn 0 and then follows up with a king-size Kird Ape on turn 1, you’re probably not winning. On the other hand, when an opponent keeps a no-lander and puts two of these into play on turn 0, you actually do have ways to beat it. First of all, you can simply kill it with Indrik Stomphowler or Krosan Grip. You can also try to use Birds of Paradise to cast Angel of Despair or Bogardan Hellkite. Still, these are desperation measures, and an unanswered Leyline will beat you 99% of the time.
Tormod’s Crypt – The Crypt is the other card that can be run by any deck. If you choose to run Krosan Grip instead of Indrik Stomphowler, you might be able to catch someone off-guard when they drop this and try to wait for the optimal moment to use it. Unlike the Leyline, though, the Crypt is one-shot, and so you can often bait the use of it with a Dread Return or Life from the Loam. If you can sandbag a Dredger in your hand, then you can use Greenseeker or Llanowar Mentor to kickstart the engine back up after your opponent pops the Crypt on turn five.
Yixlid Jailer – The Mono-Black Rack decks were nearly a bye before this card existed. They actively helped you get your engine online with cards like Cry of Contrition and Ravenous Rats, and their win condition had to fight against the hand-padding effects of Life from the Loam. The Jailer, however, means that their discard actually does something. Fortunately for you, the Jailer also only has one toughness, so if you can slow-roll your Darkblasts then you can pick the Jailer off in your upkeep and return the Darkblast before they have a chance to stop you.
Withered Wretch – The Wretch was already included in many of the Rack decks, but it was usually only good when you had a slow start. If you were relying on a turn 3 Delirium Skeins to solve all of your troubles, then a Wretch could stop you from ever getting your engine going. Usually, though, you could overload it if you were starting the game off with a Greenseeker, and now you have twice as many Spellshapers to get things started. The Wretch will make a Dread Return kill nearly impossible, though, so plan accordingly.
Extirpate – This card is usually only found in the sideboard of Dralnu du Louvre, and usually only as a one-of. If they have to Mystical Teachings for it, then their best bet is to go for your Life from the Loams. This will stop you from being able to threaten them with Trolls while holding the fort against Damnation with Svogthos. However, when they happen to have it in their opening hand, they will often snag whatever Dredger they see first. If you think that an Extirpate is waiting in your opponent’s sideboard, relying on that one Grave-Troll to do everything you need might not be such a good idea.
Stonecloaker – At this point we’re getting into the hate that you really don’t expect to see. Stonecloaker might be a ubiquitous Block Constructed inclusion, but Boros Deck Wins is on the decline in Standard and Zoo has better guys to mess with. Still, if either of those decks were looking for a hate card that came with three power, then this is it.
Jotun Grunt – Why settle for a hate card with three power when you can get one with four? The Grunt doesn’t do anything immediately, so it can’t stop you from Dread Returning a Blazing Archon, but it does do a lot if it has time. After the first couple of turns, you probably won’t have much to Dredge left in your graveyard, and a few turns later you won’t have anything at all. Still, it takes time and it’s easy to plan around, so the Grunt is more annoying than unbeatable.
Blood Moon – If you don’t think about this one, there are games where you will lose to it. Of course, you have a decent number of basic lands and you have Greenseekers and Mentors to give you more mana, but I would be lying if I said that I have beaten Blood Moon every time. The fact that there is now Magus of the Moon out there might mean that you’ll play against this card much more than you used to, due to the fact that the man-moon will likely be in many people’s maindeck.
There is more hate than this out there, but I honestly don’t expect to run into someone packing four Shred Memorys in their boards. Something to keep in mind is that all of the hate, with the exception of Extirpate, is vulnerable to either Krosan Grip or Death Rattle. It may be that the sideboard slots currently spent on Firemane Angels are better spent on an extra copy of Stomphowler/Grip and a few copies of Death Rattle. While both of those are cards that you need to draw into, needing to draw into a Death Rattle is better than simply drawing dead against a Yixlid Jailer.
So, Regionals?
Where I play, Regionals is usually a nine-round tournament. This means that the level of hate doesn’t need to be too high to run into it two times over the course of the day. Still, the hate needs to be there or else Dredge is always a threat to run rampant over the Tron, Gruul, and Dralnu decks so many people know and love.
If Regionals were tomorrow, I would be playing Two-Color Dredge. Regionals isn’t tomorrow, though, so I’m hoping that I can find something where I don’t need to worry every round about whether or not my opponent is bringing in four Leylines and four Crypts to simply blow me out. Of course, just because they have the silver bullet doesn’t mean that they’ll draw it. A day filled with bullet-dodging and 15/15 Trolls doesn’t sound too bad to me, so we’ll see what happens.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the forums, via email, or on AIM.
Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
ben at mundy dot net
SlickPeebles on AIM