Grand Prix Indianapolis and StarCityGames.com Open: Dallas/Fort Worth start tomorrow (when you read this, not now when I’m writing it obviously), and I’m excited to see how things will shake out. If you’ve been following StarCityGames.com this week, you’ll have realized we’re giving you quite the Legacy treat to make sure you’re ready to sling some Eternal cards. Personally, one of the decks I definitely am considering playing (in spite of my alleged hatred for the deck) is the graveyard boogeyman itself, Dredge.

Explaining Dredge

The conclusion many people seem to have drawn from my last article—in which I used Vintage Dredge as an example of what I consider a linear deck reaching a problematic level—is that I hate Dredge. That’s wrong. No, really, I don’t hate Dredge. Actually, like with many decks that do something unusual, I think the deck existing at all is one example of the beauty of Eternal formats. Sure, I said playing against it isn’t much fun for me—and it sure isn’t. Being the guy that dumps his hand and mills himself for insane value, though, is quite exciting and something I’d recommend trying out for anybody who takes Magic even mildly seriously. It’s an experience few other decks will come even close to replicating. It’s a bit as if, when you’re playing Dredge, you’re playing Dredge not Magic: The Gathering.

Your hand is often totally irrelevant, and sometimes you win the game without ever having cast even a single spell. In exchange, though, you get to “draw” between four and six cards every time you would just draw one card in a normal deck and cast a ton of spells for “free” from the graveyard. How couldn’t I be excited by the potential for that much card advantage?

All of that doesn’t even address Dredge’s major advantage against most of the field, though: people just aren’t ready to meaningfully interact with you. Sure, Swords to Plowshares is a relatively solid answer to Ichorid, and sometimes a Force of Will can make it hard for you to get your discard outlets online. If that’s how your opponent tries to stop you, though, they’ll generally end up looking sad. Wait, I think I’m getting ahead of myself here. Before I talk about what’s going on during the game, we should probably go over the basics (I’m sure there’s someone out there somewhere that doesn’t know what Dredge is or does).

Here’s the list that, in nearly unchanged form, delivered finals appearances in two of the last four StarCityGames.com Opens:

So how does this pile of cards that weren’t even worth picking highly in a draft work? Essentially what you’re trying to do is to get cards with the Dredge ability (dredgers) into your graveyard and from there on out replace every regular draw with dredging (hopefully hitting more dredgers). Once you mill yourself instead of drawing, you get to put some of your creatures into play for free (Narcomoeba and, with a slight delay, Ichorid) which you can use to flash back Dread Return and Cabal Therapy  while also creating a veritable army of Zombies thanks to Bridge from Below.

The Strengths

While that may seem absurd or a fun curiosity when described, it’s actually incredibly potent. The deck uses a totally linear gameplan to set up different overlapping angles of attack. Depending on situation, it can play as a disruptive aggro deck along the lines of Suicide Black or as a fast swarm deck with a combo finish or as a pure Reanimator-style combo deck. Dredge can simply grind out most decks with a seemingly never ending swarm of Zombies and Ichorids but also sports a multitude of ways to win the game as early as turn 2 or 3 (sometimes the deck can even go off on turn 1, which usually involves a Breakthrough and a Lion’s Eye Diamond). To show you the deck firing on all cylinders, here’s an example of what the latter might look like.

You win the roll and on turn 1, you play a City of Brass and a Careful Study, discarding Stinkweed Imp and Golgari Thug. Your opponent plays Mountain and Aether Vial before passing the turn, signaling he’s on Goblins.

During your turn 2 draw step, you dredge the Imp, revealing only a Golgari Grave-Troll for relevant cards. In your main phase, you drop a Cephalid Coliseum followed by casting Lion’s Eye Diamond and sac it for blue mana, discarding your Imp and a Bridge from Below among a bunch of blanks.

With the blue mana you activate the Coliseum, replacing all three draws with dredges. You start by replacing the Grave-Troll, finding another Imp in the process, than dredge both Imps (and discard them again because of Coliseum). In the sixteen cards you just put into your graveyard you have a Narcomoeba, a Bridge from Below, another Grave-Troll, a Cabal Therapy, and a Faithless Looting.

With the remaining two mana from your LED and a red from City of Brass, you flash back the Looting, dredging both Grave-Trolls again. You reveal another two Narcomoebas, a Flame-Kin Zealot, and a Dread Return.

After sacrificing the three Narcomoebas to flashback Dread Return targeting Flame-Kin Zealot, you receive six Zombies from your Bridges and the Zealot comes into play transforming your Zombies and itself into 3/3s with haste. Swing for 21 on turn 2.

While that sounds like a lot of cards coming together, between your starting hand and your dredges you just moved through over 40 cards in your deck, so it isn’t as unlikely as it might feel just by hearing how many pieces of cardboard are involved.

There’s one element I’d like you to pay particular attention to in this sequence, though. Imagine the opponent had had a Force of Will available—it would’ve done little to stop the onslaught.

Countering the turn 1 Careful Study would only have led to a one turn delay (playing and using LED on turn 2 would only have put six cards into the graveyard, one short of threshold for the Coliseum) but one turn later six cards in hand would’ve allowed for the exact same sequence to occur.

If the opponent holds back to counter LED, you still get to activate Coliseum and flash back Cabal Therapy creating Zombies. The same sequence happens, only two turns delayed if you simply dredge of off your draw step.

If the opponent preserves his Force of Will longer than that, you’ll already have a Cabal Therapy in the yard and a Narcomoeba in play while he’s likely showing blue mana. Slightly altering your play by sacrificing the first Narcomoeba to Therapy (calling Force of Will, obviously) before flashing back the Looting gives you two Zombies to work with, one of which you’ll have to sacrifice to Dread Return meaning you get to “only” swing for eighteen on turn 2 while leaving twelve power in play.

Other obstacles like Swords to Plowshares can also be played around by using the Cabal Therapy, and just about any creature an opponent might have played this early won’t cause anything but a minor bump when you roll over it.

To put it simply, when you’re playing Dredge, most cards you’re likely to see in people’s maindecks are nothing but minor roadblocks you can easily plow through because as long as you get to keep dredging, you generally have inevitability between Bridges, Therapies, Ichorids, and gigantic Dread Returned Grave-Trolls. As a result, Dredge’s game 1 win percentage is incredibly high. That is a very good reason to sleeve this deck up at the GP or StarCityGames.com Open: Dallas/Fort Worth.

The Flaws

So why doesn’t the deck break the format? Two things: mulligans and hate. As powerful as Dredge may be, the deck needs a very particular combination of cards in its starting hand to work: a dredger, a way to discard it, and the mana to cast said discard outlet.

To really be as explosive as it wants to be, it also needs some actual way to draw cards (Careful Study, Looting, Coliseum, Breakthrough) and mana to use it.

That means Dredge generally mulligans a lot more than your typical deck and while it’s exceedingly good at doing so (the power level if you find the tools is very high to compensate, after all) this leads to more games where your starting hands just don’t pan out or where you keep something that is less than perfect. Less than perfect hands have a tendency to still be quite strong, but they’re usually not winning even close to as early as the draw described above.

This ties in with the hate. Because a lot Dredge hands don’t kill you this early, most decks can either mulligan into their graveyard hate or have the time to find it. And while other cards don’t do much to interact with the deck, interacting with the graveyard definitely is a pain in the a** for the deck. As such, games 2 and 3 usually look quite different from the first game.

The postboard games are also what separate the mediocre Dredge players from the good ones. You see, Dredge has a reputation as a deck that is incredibly easy to play. In a weird way this can sometimes be true simply because it steamrolls most decks game 1 to the point that even a very weak player will regularly crush his opposition because there wasn’t anything meaningful for them to do anyway.

That fact doesn’t mean Dredge is actually easy to play, though. There are a lot of ways to eek out slight advantages newcomers to the archetype will often miss. Those just only matter in a tiny fraction of game 1s. Put more specifically, Dredge isn’t easy per se; the deck is just very forgiving in game 1s.

Once the hate comes in, though, the true masters have their chance to shine. There is no game zone targeted with as efficient hate as the graveyard. Against Dredge, Surgical Extraction and Extirpate strip out extremely important pieces of the deck’s gameplan (winning is generally very unlikely if both Ichorids and Narcomoebas aren’t options anymore), and there’s no way you can try to protect them in your hand like other decks.

Worse, Tormod’s Crypt is like a Mind Twist for zero and Relic of Progenitus is the same thing for one + one with additional upsides. An active Leyline of the Void, Wheel of Sun and Moon, or Grafdigger’s Cage even keep the deck from doing just about anything relevant that affects the gamestate at all.

When you’re confronted with this level of hate, the odds are suddenly reversed and eeking out these tiny percentage points becomes incredibly important. Sure, there isn’t much you can do with a Leyline in play, but most other hate can be beaten through careful play and knowing your deck.

There are three different kinds of hate as far as a Dredge-player is concerned:

One shot effects like Tormod’s Crypt: Devastating as they are, a tactical graveyard nuke can actually just be played through if your deck contains enough threats (one reason I think the above list should definitely have the fourth Ichorid available postboard).

Excising tools like Extirpate: These kinds of cards will only be truly effective if they hit both Ichorid and Narcomoeba, so just being fast might prevent the second copy (or the Snapcaster Mage) from showing up. They can also be beaten by starting to dredge back and cast your cheaper guys like Golgari Thug to fuel Therapies and make Zombies, possibly forcing their use on things other than your two key enablers.

Hard hate like Leyline of the Void or Grafdigger’s Cage: If not removed, these shut you down completely. They reduce you to drawing naturally and trying to win the game with Mons’ Goblin Raiders, Bog Imp, and Bird Maiden—no that generally doesn’t work out too well, though them mulling hard for the Leyline might make it possible.

That situation leaves a Dredge player with two options: board significant amounts of answers for the hard hate or do what the sample deck does: run the “Leyline gambit” to mirror other people’s Dredge gambit by ignoring that those cards exist—not all that many (Legacy) decks have these overwhelming answers, opting for more flexible hate. Not to mention that, even if they do, they also have to find it before it’s too late.

In general I think the Leyline gambit is the right choice. If you expect a ton of Leylines, why in heaven would you decide to run a totally graveyard centric deck? If you don’t expect many, why would you prepare to answer them and give up a lot of percentage every time you sideboard?

The problem with boarding in all those answers isn’t just that it takes up room in the board (and it does), it also means your deck is already significantly weaker in game 2 even if their draw doesn’t involve graveyard hate.

When you either have trouble starting to dredge or to finish them off with what you flip over (the deck doesn’t have anything but enablers and enabled cards to board out, after all), they’ll start winning all kinds of games they shouldn’t have.

Much better to just lose when the opponent was afraid enough to play and lucky enough to draw hard hate and win safely otherwise.

If you want an in-depth look at how “good” boarding in things like Nature’s Claim is, might I suggest Richard Feldman’s excellent article about Dredge? If you’re interested in Dredge, it’s something that should be required reading anyway.

Grafdigger’s Cage also locking you out of your normal gameplan would be rather bad if people actually started to play it en masse (and might necessitate actual answers, as bad as that may be,) but they don’t seem to do that somehow. Gotta profit, right?

Dredge at the GP and SCG Open

If the deck’s raw power excites you enough to feel that slugging through the hate postboard is totally worth it (or if you think people will simply be underprepared), you might want to run Dredge in Indianapolis or Dallas/Fort Worth. If that’s the case, this section is for you. 

Now I’m not an actual Dredge expert (I love my Forces to much), but remaining close to the list that has shown success lately seems like a solid plan. I really think the combination of Lion’s Eye Diamond and Faithless Looting is too powerful not to play anyway, so I wouldn’t want to go back to pre-Dark Ascension non-LED lists, either. This is what I’d probably run if I brought Dredge to a tournament right now:

The basic changes are minor in nature. In the maindeck I’ve taken a page out of Zach Tyree’s book, opting for the consistency of dredge 4 over the utility of Darkblast. My biggest concern with the list is actually that it doesn’t have the fourth Thug because having a dredger in your opening hand is essential. Sadly I simply don’t see what to cut.

In addition, I’ve moved the third Breakthrough to the board for the fourth Cabal Therapy. Cabal Therapy is one of your absolutely best cards against almost every deck at any point of the game. It serves as a discard outlet when you don’t have one, let’s you trade in lone creatures for Zombies if you’ve hit a glut of Bridges but only one Narcomoeba, and is your best way to slow down other fast decks—which, conveniently enough, are the main decks you ever lose to in the maindeck. In short, you really, really want four of these. 

Breakthrough, on the other hand, is the card that best enables you to play as a full-blown combo deck, trading one card for four dredges. Considering that older builds of Dredge comboed out quite well with only twelve draw effects (Study, Coliseum and Breakthrough) and this version actually has fourteen, it seems like the right place to cut. You’ll still be fine in the speed department—other than against T.E.S., Belcher, and Reanimator—and in those matchups hitting early Therapies is at least as important. The combo matchups are also why there are additional Breakthroughs in the board—sometimes all that counts is who can go off first, and they don’t let you run more than four Therapies.

Speaking of the sideboard, it clearly also takes the Leyline gambit as outlined above. As for why it looks like it does, let me go over the cards one by one:

The full four Ichorids between MD and SB: Against the most common form of hate—Crypt effects, though Surgical Extraction is catching up—you want to be able to grind as efficiently as possible, dredging slowly (unless they clearly don’t have the hate) and repeatedly returning Ichorids to trigger Bridges until they finally feel forced to blow their hate. The earlier you get to that point, the more likely you’re to be able to just explode afterwards because you’ve cleverly kept some way to restart your engine in hand—and that means hit Ichorid early.

Firestorm: Firestorm is an absolutely brutal card to help you recover from Tormod’s Crypt and friends that also happens to answer hate-bears like Gaddock Teeg and Scavenging Ooze. As described just above, the presence of hate forces you to move through your deck much more slowly than you usually would, allowing aggressive decks to actually race you. With Firestorm, you get to totally reverse the clock once you’ve finally managed to force them to use their hate.

Following up a Crypt-activation with a Firestorm for their board not only instantly refills your graveyard with sandbagged dredgers, it also eliminates their current clock. Essentially in one fell swoop you gain back all the tempo you lost to having faced hate and reverse the game’s momentum.

Firestorm also has the huge advantage that discarding cards is part of the cost, which means countering it won’t do anything to stop you from dredging.

Ancient Grudge: I hate to admit it, but Umezawa’s Jitte and a “flickering” Batterskull (Batterskull getting bounced and redeployed again and again through Stoneforge Mystic) both are actually quite big headaches for the deck because they so efficiently manage Bridges. Ancient Grudge is an easy solution to dredge into for both of them and also has the benefit of forcing Crypt-activations as soon as it hits the graveyard; no need to further extend into the hate.

Breakthrough: As mentioned above, these are for those matchups where everything comes down to pure speed. A turn 1 discard outlet (with a dredger) followed by a turn 2 Breakthrough generally will leave your opponent with either a shredded hand against a full board or just dead to hasty Zombies. That seems like exactly the right plan when you’re looking for “fast.” 

Iona, Shield of Emeria: Iona has a number of applications but is generally meant, once again, for those matches where you need speed. Having a straight up Dread Return target that (close to) ends the game means you’ll often be able to end the game in Reanimator fashion without also having to mill a ton of Bridges. Storm (name black—they’ll probably have bounce in their deck but while they search for it, you get to strip their hand or kill them), High Tide (please don’t name green), Reanimator (name black, their reanimation is what’s dangerous, not the counter magic), and Burn are just a few examples of decks against which Iona shines.

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite: The reasons for running Elesh Norn are exactly the same as for Iona, though the decks she’s good against are quite different. First and foremost, she simply wins the mirror and most tribal decks are equally out of options if you randomly drop a double Engineered Plague. Note that she also makes all your guys huge, which can be important at times.

Angel of Despair: This one is not like the others. Instead of winning any matches outright, the Angel is your best out to all kinds of random permanents that could end up locking you out otherwise. Moat, Ensnaring Bridge, Peacekeeper, and a host of other cards make winning impossible when in play. By having the Angel you can simply keep on dredging as hard as possible and end it all in one big turn once you’re ready.

Noxious Revival: And here is the one card I’m sure will raise some eyebrows. Revival is both your answer to Surgical Extraction and your reanimator-hate. In both cases just put the target on top of its owner’s library.

The reason I’d really want an answer to Surgical Extraction if I could come to Indy is that while I think it’s fine to take the Leyline gambit, taking the Extraction gambit just isn’t considering how much play it sees, at least not if your anti-hate is low cost.

Wait, what? Low cost? I thought running anti-hate was so costly that you don’t even want to board for cards you can’t ever beat?

That’s exactly why don’t I use something like Memory’s Journey that is active from the graveyard (and therefore a much easier to access defense in this deck). Simply put, Revival is just a much better card to have in hand if they haven’t drawn their hate.

After all, a major reason why one should take the Leyline gambit is because Chain of Vapor and Nature’s Claim might as well be blank if there’s no hate to answer. Revival is different.

It allows you to use your graveyard as a toolbox if there’s no hate. Your only discard outlet got countered? Draw it again. Reduced to dredging only once a turn? Get back a Coliseum. You see where this is going, I suspect. The beauty of this anti-hate card is that it often actually does some work as a piece of your engine.

There is also a fringe benefit of having Revival as far as hard hate is concerned. While Leyline is still game over, Grafdigger’s Cage suddenly becomes reasonable to answer if you have a Revival in your starting hand (or can draw into it with Studies/Lootings). Just dredge until you hit an Ancient Grudge and get it back to wreck that damn Cage (assuming you have two mana, that is). It isn’t a great plan but seems much better than just scooping, especially considering that isn’t the reason you play Revival in the first place. 

The Revivals have obviously taken the places of Leylines from the Open builds, and I think that’s a reasonable choice. Sure, they’re a little weaker against Reanimator because they can be countered (your speed should prevent them from setting up the Exhume trick), but they give you an actual solid way to win a few of those games in which the hate was just supposed to get you without compromising your actual gameplan. And I think you’ll actually be playing against more Extractions at the GP than Reanimates or Golgari Grave-Trolls.

Be aware that this is just some plan I’ve cooked up to fight Extraction. If you don’t buy my reasoning feel free to just go with the Leylines instead, even if you stay at three.

/random Leyline aside: Wait, do I hear the good ol’, “Leylines should be four-ofs or none-ofs!” Tell me, why wouldn’t you run fewer of them, especially in Dredge? Everything in your deck that doesn’t work from the yard should be dead after turn 1 anyway if you kept any kind of reasonable hand, so it really doesn’t matter that you can’t hard cast them. It also isn’t like you mulligan to Leyline in any particular matchup. You mulligan towards a fast combo kill or a Leyline in those matches where Leylines come in (Reanimator and the mirror, that’s pretty much it). How is it bad to have whatever number of Leylines if the whole point is to just provide a few additional reasons to keep hands?

/end aside

Playing the Deck

Now that we’re clear on why my list looks like it does, some pointers as to how to play the deck.

Mulligans

There are three things you’re looking for in your starting hand: a dredger, a discard outlet (don’t forget about Therapy in great hands that just miss designated discard outlets), and mana to cast that discard outlet. Any form of additional draw effect is a nice bonus and will speed up winning the game immensely. Note that you’d much prefer for your primary discard outlet to not be LED if you aren’t going all in on Breakthrough turn 1.

If you’re on the draw and looking at your seven-card hand, also keep in mind that you can use your discard step as an additional form of uncounterable discard outlet. No need to throw away a sweet hand if you can just get things rolling by waiting a turn.

If your hand doesn’t have all three of these elements, mulligan. While that means you mulligan a lot, the deck is built for it. There’s probably no deck in Magic that mulligans as well as Dredge. You absolutely need those three things, but any other card in your hand is likely going to be a blank anyway. So what does your actual hand size matter?

Once your hand has those three elements, you’ll almost always want to keep it, with two caveats. Number one, against fast combo you probably don’t want to keep a hand that doesn’t have any way to either speed up your dredging or cast an early Therapy. Number two, if you have too many Narcomoebas in hand you should consider mulling simply because you need the little buggers in your deck so as to start doing stuff in a reasonable time frame, especially before the extra Ichorids come in from the board.

Gameplay

The Dredge prime directive is to assure you can keep dredging. Generally speaking, dredging more is better (just take care you have enough library left to actually finish the game), though that can sometimes change postboard when you’re trying to draw out a Crypt activation and already have serious business in the yard.

As for what to do with all those milled cards, there are essentially three main lines Dredge can follow:

The Army of the Damned Combo game: There’s a significant number of hands that will allow you to dredge more than half your deck by turn 2 or 3 and flash back a couple of Therapies before Dread Returning a Flame-Kin Zealot to swing with a lethal bunch of hasty 3/3 Zombies in a single turn.

If you can’t go for a full-blown kill, it will often still be possible to create a significant board presence of Zombies, sometimes aided by a large Dread Returned Grave-Troll. Few decks can actually beat a board of six Zombies and a 10/10 on turn 3, so just setting that up is often better than waiting a turn to try for the full combo win.

Even if you don’t have a Dread Return available, Cabal Therapy alone will often allow you to just flood the board with Zombies early. Casting Army of the Damned is generally just as lethal if you also get to empty your opponent’s hand.

The Therapy game: If you don’t have the tools to apply significant pressure, that doesn’t mean you can’t take over the game. Flashing back multiple Cabal Therapies between turn 2 and 3 will leave most opponents too crippled to do much before you’ve dredged into something to actually finish them off.

The Ichorid game: If something bad happened to your Bridges or you’ve drawn most of your Narcomoebas, it’s time for Ichorid to shine. Swinging with a 3/1 every turn isn’t particularly exciting, but it also gets the job done at some point. Note that Ichorids are also excellent food to fuel your Therapy plan.

Another angle involving Ichorid that’s efficient especially against creature-heavy decks is that they allow you to build up a slowly growing Zombie army. Returning them every turn and letting them die during your end step (you really don’t want to kill your opponent’s creatures if you have any Bridges in the yard) while chump blocking with Narcomoebas will result in a reasonable sized army pretty soon if two or more Bridges get involved.

These different gameplans are Dredge’s big strength. While the deck’s inner workings are extremely linear, its actual lines of play allow you to fluidly shift between all of the above roles and plans depending on your dredges, the matchup, and what your opponent is actually doing. Your job as the pilot is to figure out which angle you need to pursue and when you need to change plans.

While a large number of game 1s are going to come down to simply going Zombie Apocalypse on your opponents, most postboard games are going to play out differently. Whenever you have the option to try to combo out against an opponent with hate, you have to carefully weigh how high the chance is that you won’t hit enough Narcomoebas or Bridges to actually finish the job this turn. Otherwise you might find yourself lethally neutered by topdecked or dug into graveyard hate once you’ve exposed yourself this seriously.

Instead you’ll generally want to approach the game a notch slower, milking every card in your graveyard for maximum profit now instead of building up to an overwhelming endgame push.

Similarly, you’ll want to hold back your draw effects and discard outlets longer, protecting important pieces of your engine in your hand once hate gets involved. Especially against Extraction, starting to just cast Thugs and Stinkweeds instead of casting spells to dredge more is a powerful way to protect yourself from getting blown out.

By always milking what’s available for maximum profit, you also put the most pressure on your opponent to finally pull the trigger on one-shot hate like Relic or Crypt. The earlier that happens, the more resources that will still be left in your library and the easier you’ll be able to recover from the first or even the first two tactical nukes thrown in your direction.

Sideboarding

Generally speaking, there are two types of boarding plans: speed and resilience. I’ll give you examples for how I’d board against major decks of both categories. That should provide you with the tools to figure out your own boarding plans against other matchups when you need them.

Speed:

There are some matchups that simply come down to racing. Storm, Reanimator, and the mirror foremost amongst them. The good news is these decks usually don’t have much along the lines of graveyard hate. The bad news is one of you is probably dead by turn 3. As such, what you board for is speed.

Storm/Belcher

-2 Ichorid
-1 Putrid Imp
+2 Breakthrough
+1 Iona, Shield of Emeria

Reanimator

Reanimator is particularly problematic because going all in and eating a Force will probably kill you, which is why I board out the LEDs. I don’t bring in Angel of Despair because Blazing Archon will only enter play if they’ve naturally drawn it (if they have Entomb they should just kold you completely with Elesh Norn).

-4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-2 Ichorid
+3 Noxious Revival
+2 Breakthrough
+1 Iona, Shield of Emeria

Dredge

Both Dread Return targets are very powerful here and maxing out on them means you’re most likely to see them early.

-4 Cabal Therapy
-2 Ichorid
-1 Putrid Imp
+3 Noxious Revival
+2 Breakthrough
+1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
+1 Elesh Norn

Resilience:

On the flipside, most “normal” decks are actually much slower than you are and will beat you largely based on how efficient their hate is. As such you remove your most comboish cards and slow down postboard to increase your ability to survive having your graveyard attacked.

What exactly you do is based on what kind of hate you see from them in game 2. The boarding plans below will list a game two configuration followed by changes based on if your opponent uses Crypt-effects or Surgical Extraction.

Canadian Thresh aka RUG Delver

Depending on how aggressive their actual list seems, I’d probably prepare to go for the draw-discard-dredge (DDD) plan and therefore choose to draw.

Game 2:
-2 Breakthrough
-3 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Flame-Kin Zealot
+2 Ichorid
+3 Firestorm
+1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

Game 3:
Crypt:
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
+2 Ancient Grudge (just to force them to blow them earlier)
Extraction:
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
-1 Dread Return
+3 Noxious Revival

U/W Stoneblade

U/W Blade is nearly never aggressive enough to force you to be on the play and they have free countermagic (which is also why Firestorms come in instead of unnecessary speed elements) so DDD it is.

Game 2:
-4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-2 Breakthrough
+2 Ichorid
+2 Ancient Grudge
+2 Firestorm

Game 3:
Crypt:
Nothing else
Extraction:
-2 Firestorm
-1 Flame-Kin Zealot
+3 Noxious Revival

Maverick

-1 Flame-Kin Zealot
-2 Breakthrough
-4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
+2 Ichorid
+3 Firestorm
+2 Ancient Grudge

Zoo/fast aggro

Game 2:
-2 Breakthrough
-3 Lion’s Eye Diamond
+2 Ichorid
+3 Firestorm

Game 3:
Crypt:
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Cabal Therapy
+2 Ancient Grudge (just to force them to blow Crypts earlier)
Extraction:
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-2 Cabal Therapy
+3 Noxious Revival

Dredging For Profit

Dredge is good because it punishes unprepared people and those decks that hope to interact with their opponents in fair ways. Generally speaking, that means midrange decks, aggressive decks, and blue aggro-control decks. Considering that I expect the field at the GP to be full of exactly these kinds of decks—most combo decks simply aren’t something you can pick up as a non-Eternal player and expect to do well with, they just work too differently—Dredge seems like a great choice this weekend.

The best thing that has happened for Dredge, though, is the rise of the multitude of different linear strategies I discussed last week. Most players simply won’t be able to justify running enough graveyard hate (or at least the hard hate) to keep you in check. Instead they’ll have some token hate that has uses in different matchups—or at least that’s what I expect.

So if you plan to make a lot of people feel miserable on your way to the top, Dredge might be exactly what you’re looking for. Be warned, though: all that power comes with a price. If you have no experience with the deck, you’ll find yourself dead in a multitude of situations you should’ve easily pulled through. Even long experience with “regular” Magic won’t help you that much—playing Dredge is really like playing a totally different game from normal Magic. Until next time, play your own game!

Carsten Kötter