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Main » Articles » DREDGE

DREDGE

Ben Friedman
Posted on April 7, 2017
 Reddit

Golgari Thug
What a weekend! San Antonio had its ups and downs, from my teammates arriving late Friday night, to the classic Saturday morning struggle to find all our cards, to the elation of a 6-1 record midway through Day 1, to the disappointment of falling to 6-3, to the 3-0 to start Day 2 and the heartbreaking loss in Round 13 to end my hopes of locking Gold at the GP. Through it all, we had a great team dynamic, no one got angry at each other, and we chuckled our way to a 30th place finish (good for exactly zero dollars and one unusable Pro Point for me!) More important for you all than our team’s specific result, though, is our decklist configuration. While Joe Demestrio sat in the A seat with the powerful Abzan Death's Shadow, Josh McClain sat in the middle with stinky Grixis Control, and I anchored our squad with a deck I had never played before, good old Dredge. How did we manage to play three Black decks, which ordinarily would seem completely incompatible? Well, Abzan Death's Shadow played the Path to Exiles and Abrupt Decays, Grixis Control got the Fatal Pushes and a Smoldering Marsh, and Dredge got the Blood Crypt, the Collective Brutalities, and the sideboard Duresses and Maelstrom Pulses. Genius!

In retrospect, it made a lot of sense to pair Dredge and Abzan Shadow, but Grixis Control was not only underpowered but also conflicted with our other two decks to some degree. I wanted to play a G/W or Eldrazi Tron deck rather than Grixis, but alas, I did not push my teammates enough to fully sell them on it. That one will sting, because Josh struggled to win most of his matches, and even the great Owen Turtenwald confided that their team’s Grixis Control deck went about 5-9 over the course of the Swiss rounds. I would have personally been thrilled to pilot Tron and give Josh Dredge, as the Dredge deck is both powerful, forgiving to mulligans and misplays, and fairly straightforward to play on top of that. I played against a large swath of the metagame, losing to Affinity, Abzan Company, G/W Hatebears, and Burn once, while beating a menagerie of Death's Shadow, Tron, Abzan Midrange, and Burn two other times. I got to beat a Scavenging Ooze and two Surgical Extractions against one unfortunate Abzan opponent, showing that the deck can fight through massive amounts of hate without a ton of trouble. Then, in the very last game of the whole tournament, I beat Infect piloted by Tyler Hill through a Rest in Peace by attacking with a Golgari Thug, a Stinkweed Imp, a Haunted Dead, and the 1/1 Spirit Token, with the life-drain from Collective Brutality providing the final points. Not bad at all, but there is certainly room to work on the deck even more. Fortunately, there are some really excellent options for us to tweak and tune the deck, and I look forward to breaking down where the deck excels and where it needs help going forward.

Life from the Loam
In my study of the deck leading up to the Grand Prix, I took a few valuable lessons to heart, leading me to a few unconventional choices going forward for others planning on piloting the Zombie hordes. The first of these should come as no surprise to those who saw my tweaks on Four-Color Saheeli in Standard.

21 lands? Too many!

Let’s talk this out. The deck only ever needs to get to two lands (including one Green-producing one) in order to have all the lands it will ever need. Life from the Loam is just that darn good! The deck has Dakmor Salvage, so a large portion of one-land hands with the deck are eminently keepable, especially if they include a Faithless Looting or two. 19 or 20 lands are more than enough, and if you do go up to 21, you most likely even have room for a specialty land or three. (Did someone say Cycling Lands? I thought I heard someone say Cycling Lands! I wouldn’t know anything about that, though!)

In the spots where we were playing those extra lands, there is room to add copies of Collective Brutality to the maindeck. Brutality in Modern Dredge is almost as busted as Cabal Therapy in Legacy Dredge. The card simply does it all. If your opponent is playing Burn, it’s frequently a one-card win. If your opponent is playing a Collected Company deck, there’s no better feeling than eating a Noble Hierarch, a Collected Company, and getting a free two point drain in. Well, aside from the slam-dunk play of killing a Scavenging Ooze and ripping the Company out of their hand. Against Ad Nauseam or Scapeshift, this is a maindeckable source of much-needed disruption. Against Affinity or Infect, the card ranges from playable to excellent, and it’s even serviceable against control decks. This in addition to the fact that it’s a discard outlet! The fact that more people aren’t maindecking Collective Brutality is laughable.

Clearly, at this point it’s obvious that for this tournament, I cut two lands for two maindeck Brutalities, but over the course of the tournament I was doing some even more unconventional things. You want to know the absolute worst card in the entire deck? The card that always got cut to two copies and frequently got cut to zero copies in post-board games? You guessed it, stupid Insolent Neonate was about as useful as a brick counter, and way, way worse without Golgari Grave-Troll to consistently turn it into a one-mana mill-six card. I know that everyone loves to beast about the need for one-mana plays in the deck, but I’m just not seeing it. Collective Brutality maindeck is a similarly powerful discard outlet, actually interacts with the opponent, and opens up sideboard space for some underappreciated gems. With all this new sideboard space, what can we use it for?

Well, the nice thing about a more interactive version of Dredge is that you can actually transform into a semi-normal deck in games two and three, with a plethora of reasonable spells and a game plan that doesn’t fold to a single Nihil Spellbomb or Grafdigger's Cage. What am I talking about? Let’s look at “Fair” Dredge, post-Amonkhet.

?Fair? Dredge ? Modern | Ben Friedman

Collective Brutality
Possible adjustments include adding a basic Forest to enable resilience to Blood Moon, Archfiend of Ifnir to help with the fair gameplan, and replacing Bojuka Bog with Ravenous Trap in the sideboard, but the concept is basically the same. We can become Aggro-Loam post-sideboard against a wide swath of the format, while maintaining upwards of 90% of our explosive potential. You are free to sideboard out up to two lands, two Bloodghasts, a Conflagrate, the Haunted Dead, a Narcomoeba, two Golgari Thugs, and the four Collective Brutalities (though generally not more than nine or ten at the same time!) You can radically reduce your vulnerability to graveyard hate while only affecting your explosive potential a small amount, and most opponents will be sitting ducks for the gameplan none of them were expecting. You even get to board in four Abrupt Decays to handle Rest in Peace, and if you chose you could sideboard some number of Maelstrom Pulse to handle Leyline of the Void. Hell, even Liliana of the Veil appeals to me, although that double-Black mana cost can be tricky. Engineered Explosives is another great option that covers Rest in Peace while being flexible against basically any deck that floods the board with creatures. I’d strongly consider two of those in the sideboard, as well. This is a deck where you have a real late-game draw engine, a healthy mix of disruption, and the classic explosive draws that make Dredge a headache for every fair deck in the format. I predict a lot of frustrated opponents with a Grafdigger's Cage and a Relic of Progenitus with little hope of beating the cycle-land + Life from the Loam + Seismic Assault engine. Really, without Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void, the hate is just not going to be enough.

Do I think that we will eventually see another banning to nerf the Dredge deck even more? Yes. Do I think that the cycling lands will lead to the rise of a fair-ish Aggro-Loam deck that plays a mean fair gameplan while being fairly resilient to graveyard hate? Also yes. Can we expect our good friend Living End to rise up again with Archfiend and potential other cycling gems? Undoubtedly. So how does one prepare for the rise of the graveyard decks? One answer is W/G Tron.

My teammate for the SCG Team Open a few months back in Baltimore has been at it again, battling on MTGO with Tron to some success. The White splash affords the deck Path to Exile, Blessed Alliance, Condemn, Timely Reinforcements, and (of course) Rest in Peace, all of which contribute to patching up traditionally-rough matchups against Burn and Dredge. Here’s vanderwll’s list from before the Grand Prix, which serves as a great starting point for future excursions into big-mana decks:

W/G Tron ? Modern | Ben Friedman

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Though I’m no Tron master myself, I know a deck designed to prey on Dredge when I see it. This beast is packing six graveyard hate spells between the maindeck and the sideboard, as well as three copies of Ugin, the Spirit Dragon to sweep the board of errant Amalgams, Narcomoebas and Bloodghasts. There’s a reason I had two Ghost Quarters in my “fair” Dredge build! How else are you supposed to fight the Tron menace?

Now, let’s say that you don’t want to fight over Dredge, but you wouldn’t mind going underneath it. Affinity might be in your wheelhouse, and nothing appeals to me more when I’m looking for an Affinity list than the latest Alex Majlaton concoction. Alex went an incredible 13-1 in matches played at the Grand Prix last weekend, losing only one mirror match en route to a sixth place finish for his team. Interestingly enough, Alex and Jon Stern were left scrambling Friday afternoon to find a third teammate, as their original third, Dan Lanthier, got into a huge travel mess and couldn’t make the GP. Fortunately, after seeking out help via Twitter, Willy Edel came to the rescue and nominated Vitor Grassato, a heretofore unknown Brazilian player, to substitute in. According to Alex, the unique experience of playing with a teammate who he’d never met before didn’t slow them down, and they wound up with a very impressive finish for their troubles. Pretty good for a weekend that started off looking like Alex might not even bother boarding the plane to Texas!

Here’s Alex’s Affinity list, which could certainly stand to include another Rest in Peace or two to help the Dredge matchup, but otherwise looks like a great starting point for artifact aficionados in Modern:

Affinity ? Modern| Alex Majlaton

Keep in mind that there were significant restrictions on everyone’s cards due to the unique nature of Team Unified Modern, but the weekend brought surprisingly high amounts of innovation to a theoretically stable format. As the Death's Shadow decks coalesce as public enemy number one, decks like Dredge rise to take advantage of a great Death's Shadow matchup, and the metagame cycle begins anew. I expect great things in Modern in the coming weeks, especially with new previews on the horizon. Everything from Krark-Clan Ironworks to Living End is playable, and no innovation is too extreme to try. This is a rare brewer’s paradise, and I urge all of you to tinker with the decks that excite you. Who knows? You may very well break the format!

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TAGS articles, strategy, metagame, constructed, analysis, modern, decklist, ben friedman, team unified modern

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