Every couple of months, we see a resurgence of Dredge in Legacy. This is a deck that has become substantially less popular in the wake of Deathrite Shaman becoming a format mainstay. However, there are several different flavors of dredge, some of which are more or less resilient to Deathrite Shaman. One variant that crops up from time to time is manaless dredge. This deck plays zero mana sources and leans on the likes of Nether Shadow and Phantasmagorian to get things going. This week, we’ve got a new take on dredge that walks an interesting line between the manaless variants and the others. Let’s take a look:

Almost Manaless Dredge ? Legacy | TheSleepingEye, 5-0 Legacy League

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Flayer of the Hatebound
• 3 Ichorid
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
• 4 Golgari Thug
• 4 Narcomoeba
• 4 Phantasmagorian
• 4 River Kelpie
• 4 Stinkweed Imp
• 4 Street Wraith

• Sorceries (12)
• 4 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Dread Return
• 4 Gitaxian Probe

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Bridge from Below

• Lands (8)
• 4 Dakmor Salvage
• 4 Dryad Arbor

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Disrupting Shoal
• 4 Force of Will
• 2 Forest
• 3 Mindbreak Trap
• 3 Nature's Claim

Buy This Deck

Once you get dredging, you can use Narcomoebas and Ichorids to cast Cabal Therapy to slow your opponent down and stop them from meaningfully interacting with you or just go on the beatdown with Bridge from Below tokens. Eventually, you can do things like dredge back Dakmor Salvage to re-buy your Bloodghasts to get even more aggressive or combo kill with Flayer of the Hatebound after a Dread Return.

The most interesting piece of this deck is the inclusion of Bloodghasts and Dryad Arbors over the likes of Nether Shadow and the fourth Ichorid. It’s possible that this makes the deck slightly less consistent, but a turn or two faster than previous “manaless” variants. The inclusion of maindeck Dryad Arbor also gives you more ways to cast sideboard cards like Nature's Claim to fight against hate spells.

The most interesting piece of technology here is the inclusion of River Kelpie as a way to combo kill your opponent. Kelpie lets you generate a ton of cards off of your Bloodghasts, Ichorids, Dread Returns, and Cabal Therapys. It also gives you the very real possibility of just dredging your entire deck and comboing off with Flayer of the Hatebound if you can ever Dread Return it into play when your opponent is short on removal. Previous builds have played more situational cards like Cephalid Sage, Sphinx of Lost Truths, or Griselbrand. Griselbrand is the most appealing alternative in the current format, but can be dead if your life total is too low, which is likely given that this is a slower variant of dredge. The other options always do something, but may draw fewer cards on average than a resolved River Kelpie.

All in all, this is an interesting take on the dredge archetype, and one that I’m always excited to see show up once in a blue moon. The play patterns are wonky, you get to see some truly random cards from Magic’s long history, and it all comes together into something that can be oppressively overpowering, even for Legacy, if you’re not packing enough hate.