An Aside
I would like to start out by making something clear. Last week I posted a sealed deck from an online tournament I played in, and posed some questions both in the column and in the forum thread regarding the choices I made. This column is on the free side of StarCityGames.com; I am not holding these builds up as a pinnacle of enlightened deckbuilding. I’m obviously nowhere near skilled in Limited play, and one of the reasons I post this stuff is to try to learn something from the experience with some hopefully constructive criticism from the Magic Community. Snarky swipes and random flames are a waste of everyone’s time, so if you’re good at Limited, help a brother out (and there might be some other forum readers who would like to learn a few things too). However, if you’re a jackass who gets his juvenile jollies from laughing at bad players, yuck it up on your own time and then maybe get a life outside of your parent’s house staring at the computer screen.
Okay, onward!
I, Golgari
I got an interesting post in the forums from last week that I thought I might address here. Simon said: “Bennie, please don’t take this as criticism; I’m just curious. What on earth is it about dredge that obsesses you? I’m a dredge fan myself, but it seems as though you only want to play dredge decks. Like I said, I’m not knocking you; I just want to understand the compulsion. That said, I do really like the fact that dredge has such an ardent champion. Dedicated dredge (not just Loam for card advantage) is a deserving minority interest that needs someone like you. To sum up: Hats off to you, but please can we have the reason?”
Good question, Simon! I’ve liked Dredge since Ravnica first hit the scene, and I have had some success with it in tournaments and have definitely written more than my fair share about it. However, why was I drawn so to the mechanic?
When I first started playing Magic and cracked open my very first cards, an Unlimited Starter Deck, the rare card staring back at me was Force of Nature, looking all buff and Swamp-Thing-like. I immediately found myself drawn to Green creatures from day one; the problem with loving Green creatures back then is that they were vastly overpowered by most of the other cards and colors. I can’t tell you how many times I paid six mana for my 8/8 Elemental, then paid four more Green mana during my upkeep, only to have my opponent tap one White mana and hit it with Swords to Plowshares, or tap two mana at hit it with a Terror. Or tap four mana and sweep all my critters into the graveyard with a Wrath of God.
Being a Green mage was incredibly frustrating. I can remember commiserating with Jamie Wakefield about the dilemma back in our Usenet days, and kicking around his old “Naturepotence” deck fleshed out with cantrip creatures and spells to try to fight the card advantage fight.
Testing at the local game shop, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the results. The cantrip creatures were mostly pretty lame. As I complained to my friend who owned the shop, he made a suggestion that hit me like a bolt of enlightenment straight from the heavens.
“Why don’t you add Black to your deck for something like Living Death? That way, when they kill all your creatures, you can just get ‘em back.”
What? But… Black was one of Green’s enemies! How could I merge the two together? Still, using Living Death to get ‘em all back did sound pretty good, so I made room and worked on the mana to put it together. I also just happened to be running Survival of the Fittest in my Green deck, and it didn’t take long to see how Survival and Living Death could really break things off. I also started winning more, and getting a lot more mileage out of my Green monsters.
My first love is really cool creatures, but I definitely developed lust in my heart for graveyard recursion, building decks around Oath of Ghouls, Lifeline, and Oversold Cemetery, (an enchantment that I secretly hope and pray might find its way into Tenth Edition).
D.D.T. (Dancing Dead Things)
Bennie Smith
4 Oath of Ghouls
3 Survival of the Fittest
3 Recurring Nightmare
3 Living Death
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Wall of Blossoms
3 Spike Feeder
1 Man-o’-War
1 Spike Weaver
3 Mindless Automaton
1 Fallen Angel
1 Spirit of the Night
1 Crypt Rats
1 Shard Phoenix
1 Stronghold Assassin
1 Cloudchaser Eagle
2 Uktabi Orangutan
3 City of Brass
6 Swamp
14 Forest
Sideboard
4 Emerald Charm
2 Nekrataal
2 Thrull Surgeon
1 Scragnoth
1 Uktabi Orangutan
1 Cloudchaser Eagle
2 Harbinger of Night
2 Gaea’s Blessing
This deck was a hoot to play, though I find it funny in retrospect that I only ran 3 Survival of the Fittest, arguably one of the strongest tutor effects ever printed. Harbinger of Night in the sideboard likely jumps out as weird, but at the time it seemed like a good solution to various Soltari shadow fellows and weenies in general.
B.L.T. (Badass Lifeline Tech)
Bennie Smith
4 Survival of the Fittest
3 Lifeline
3 Oath of Ghouls
1 Carrion Beetles
1 Elvish Lyricist
4 Birds of Paradise
1 Skyshroud Elves
3 Wall of Blossoms
1 Spike Feeder
1 Bottle Gnomes
1 Coffin Queen
1 Spined Fluke
1 Ghitu Slinger
1 Treasure Hunter
1 Raven Familiar
1 Viashino Heretic
1 Bone Shredder
1 Spike Weaver
1 Tradewind Rider
1 Avalanche Riders
1 Gravedigger
1 Mogg Bomber
1 Radiant Dragoons
1 Fallen Angel
1 Karn, Silver Golem
1 Deranged Hermit
3 Gaea’s Cradle
2 Phyrexian Tower
3 City of Brass
2 Thran Quarry
4 Swamp
8 Forest
Sideboard
4 Absolute Law
4 Absolute Grace
1 Oath of Ghouls
1 Wall of Blossoms
1 Monk Realist
1 Stromgald Cabal
1 Order of the Sacred Torch
1 Bone Shredder
1 Thrull Surgeon
When Urza’s block came out, I immediately latched on Lifeline as a card I wanted to work with, especially with echo creatures that could self-destruct anyway. So long as some other creature stuck around it would pop back into play, dragging a comes-into-play effect along with it. With Karn in the mix, Lifeline could even protect itself. Mogg Bombers was added as a weird little combo loop that could end the game in a hurry. This was a fun deck, but at the time degenerate combo madness pretty well ruled the metagame so I didn’t have much success with it.
The thing I loved about Oath of Ghouls (and later on Oversold Cemetery) was its ability to trump two strategies that have long been my bane: counterspells and creature removal. I remember when I first played D.D.T. at a local tournament. Round 1 was against Alex Tyler playing something akin to Buehler Blue, chock full of counterspells. As my creatures got chewed up by Force Spikes and Counterspells, I managed to finally slap down an Oath of Ghouls after leading with Survival of the Fittest (which he countered). He picked up the Oath, looked at it, shrugged. Then when I got a creature back during my next upkeep, he picked it up again and frowned. I quickly ran him out of counters and buried him in creatures.
Round 2 was against pro player Kyle Rose with Sligh. He burned my first few creatures, burned through my Spike Feeder, and then I slapped down Oath of Ghouls and kept playing Spike Feeder over and over. He saw the writing on the wall and scooped it up.
With that background, I think it’s clear that when R&D developed the theme for the Golgari guild, and the mechanic attached to it, Dredge connected straight with the elements of Magic I’ve loved for a long, long time. I have to admit that I didn’t fully appreciate the strength of the mechanic until I started playtesting for States; the deck kept beating everything else I was considering so I went ahead and ran it, making Top 8 with dedicated Dredge. What a high that was, especially when I found that apparently I was the only person in the entire country to make Top 8 with a Dredge deck! A lot of people started emailing me or posting in the forums asking me about Dredge strategies and such, and since I’m a Magic writer and the default champion of the archetype, I felt a certain responsibility to detail what I had learned about the deck.
I am a little disappointed that the deck is still very much rogue and way off the radar; the new build with Damnation and Fa’adiyah Seers I wrote about recently is really strong. There’s a “dredge” deck that’s been doing well on Magic Online, but with only 14 or so actual Dredge cards it’s not a real Dredge deck. It’s a modern-day Reanimator deck, utilizing the Dredge mechanic as a messy Entomb, flipping huge swaths of your deck into the graveyard in the hopes of randomly running across a huge fattie to Dread Return. Looking at that deck, it strikes me as a fragile thing that has to hope for a lot of things to go right, and it has lots of angles opponents can attack to slow or flat out stop the deck in its tracks. Dedicated Dredge deck is a flexible, gradual beast, utilizing Dredge as an engine of action rather than a combo enabler. When I win with Dredge, my opponents don’t feel they’ve been crushed; they typically feel the game just slipped away from them. These Reanimator Dredge decks are scary things; when everything goes right some huge monster springs out to dominate the board. It’s flashy and memorable, and I think losing to it raises alarm bells in people’s memory.
The philosophies of the two decks are vastly different, and sadly, I fear that the gaudy success of combo Reanimator Dredge will have people running to toss Tormod’s Crypts into their sideboards. Tormod’s Crypt doesn’t completely shut down dedicated Dredge, but it is certainly a huge pain in the ass; the deck performs much better if it does not have to work around graveyard hate. Up until recently, I had strongly considered playing my Dredge deck at Regionals, tweaked with Future Sight goodies. As Jay pointed out to me, “Dredge has been nothing but good to you.” Well, if you don’t count the ass-whupping online with Battle Royale and PDC, but in real-life Magic tournaments I’ve got an incredible winning record with the deck over the past year and a half. I suppose I’ll have to keep an eye out to see how the metagame shapes up over the next few months. I had originally taken heart that, with such a diverse metagame, narrow / one-deck sideboard cards were just not practical. Hopefully the online crew will gang up on the faux-dredge Reanimators and hate them off the metagame in time for Tormod’s Crypt stay away from Regionals sideboards!
Speaking of the metagame – Ugh, the MTGO standard metagame (which typically drives the IRL metagame) currently looks like this at the top:
1. Izzetron 15%
2. Dragonstorm 15%
3. Dralnu du Louvre 7%
4. U/G PickleTron 6%
5. U/R/B Tron 6%
6. G/B Dredge/Reanimate 6%
So, for the Top 5 decks we’ve got control, combo, control, control / combo, and control. Weeee, looks like fun! [/sarcasm]
Wasn’t it just a week or two back when I was rejoicing at a metagame that seemed to embrace two pet cards of mine, Saffi Eriksdotter and Deadwood Treefolk? Where did things go so wrong? I prefer battles in the red zone, not battles on the stack. And I definitely don’t like the Solitaire Magic of Dragonstorm… I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out to see if things “improve” a bit, but I’m worried. Adding another Magic set to the mix tends to strengthen control and combo as opposed to beatdown strategies.
Don’t Give Up!
Before I wrap things up, I wanted to address something I ran across in a column last week:
“… last Sunday, I decided to sell all my Magic cards.” – Jeroen Remie
Coming from a pro player, celebrity, and Magic writer, this declaration alarmed me. I’ve played Magic since the beginning, and there have been so many times when I’ve known a Magic player who threw in the towel and sold his collection. Nine times out of ten that player has inevitably come to regret it. Magic is an insidious game; it gets under your skin and lives in your bones. Even when you get burned out by the game and walk away, it’s still there, lurking, and waiting for you to come back. Like an addict, I don’t think you ever stop being a Magic player, not if you really embraced the game for any length of time. Magic is an expensive hobby though, and it takes a while to build up your collection; luckily, your collection grows as your play skills grow, so with both being a gradual process it’s a natural, organic thing.
The problem is when you return to the game starting from scratch collection-wise… but this time you’re a player who’s used to having enough cards to build the kind of decks you want to play. It can be frustrating, even painful, and it can often lead to a final real walk-away from the game. Almost to a person, I’ve heard the regret in their voice. “I wish I had never sold off my collection.”
Now, I know Jeroen isn’t giving up Magic; he’s switching over to digital cards. But I worry a bit that his declaration might inspire others who feel they’re getting a lot more mileage off mouse clicks than they are actual cardboard. If you were kicking around the idea, I would strongly urge you to reconsider. Sell off some old rares for cash if you want, but at least keep a good portion of your favorite cards. If you enjoy casual Magic, make sure you hang onto a multiplayer deck or two in case a casual group coalesces in your area. You never know when your gaming situation may change – someone might open a kick-ass gaming center just down the road from you tomorrow, with Friday Night Magic and regular Magic tournaments. Another thing that I’ve recently come to realize – Magic is a game you’re going to want to pass along to your kids. While many of you may still be kids yourselves, with children far, far away from your mind, one day you’ll marry and have at least one rugrat of your own. As a gamer, you’ll want to share the joy, excitement, and social interaction that gaming brings with your children. Put yourself in their shoes – can you imagine your dad or mom sitting down with you one day, pulling out cards that are older than you are, and introducing you to a game that has an international following? Even if you never intend to have kids, you may very well run across a youngster at a future game store who’s just getting into Magic, and if you still have your collection, you’ll be able to jump-start their collection with older Magic cards they may have never seen or even heard of before.
Whether it’s your own child or some new kid at the gaming shop, watching someone discover the joys of Magic for the first time taps into your own experiences getting into the game.
So, I urge you – don’t divest yourself of your entire Magic collection. It may be tempting for a whole host of reasons; you’re burned out, you can get some quick cash; you mostly play online now anyway. But in the long run, you’ll likely regret it.
Until next time,
Bennie