A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Part 20: What if I didn't cast any spells?
Last time, I explored the history of three powerful cards from Kamigawa block.
We've reached probably the strangest part of this history, and the most perverse deck archetype of all time.
Dredge
Dredge is a mechanic from Ravnica block, released in late 2005 following Kamigawa block. What it does: Whenever you would draw a card, instead you may return a card with Dredge from the graveyard to your hand. If you do, you mill some cards; that is, you put them from the top of your library directly into your graveyard. Each dredge card says how many, ranging from Dredge 1 through Dredge 6.
Essentially, you forgo a normal draw to recover a card from your graveyard, with the added bonus of dumping more cards into your graveyard. This is a fairly powerful ability, so dredge cards are usually balanced around that by being fairly weak; the original 12 Dredge cards in Ravnica are all pretty below curve for the expected power level of a card.
This pretty much made dredge cards non-starters in any kind of normal deck. If you browse the decklists of Worlds 2005, or Pro Tour Honolulu in 2006, you will only find Dredge cards hanging out in sideboards – Darkblast, specifically, had a role in fighting some very specific strategies. In Extended, a few people tried Golgari Grave-Troll in Psychatog lists, using the troll both to fuel Psychatog, and as an annoying recurring threat in itself.
But Dredge would not reach its full potential until Time Spiral block printed three cards that worked perfectly with it.
Time Spiral Breaks Magic
Time Spiral is the wildest block in Magic's history. Considered by many to be the apex of the game's design, it was widely regarded as a mistake by Wizards due to its high complexity and unapproachable theme. Established players loved it; newcomers were bewildered.
Time Spiral's theme was nostalgia – nostalgia, specifically, for Magic's own past. Its three sets were themed after the past, present, and future:
- Time Spiral was full of popular mechanics from old sets returning – including Flashback, notably – as well as riffs on old cards, mashups of old mechanics that never existed together in the same set before, and numerous references to the early days of Magic. It has a 'timeshited' bonus sheet of cards from the game's past, reprinted in the old border.
- Planar Chaos was about an alternate present. It featured 'planeshifted' cards that were exact reprints of existing cards, but shifted to a different color.
- Future Sight's gimmick were the 'futureshifted' cards – cards printed with a new 'futuristic' card border (only ever used in this set), which represented Magic's possible futures; each one had an unusual mechanic that had never been done before.
Between Time Spiral and Future Sight, Wizards printed three cards that made Dredge a real, menacing deck:
- Dread Return plays on the idea of alternate flashback costs, previously seen in Cabal Therapy (itself a staple of Dredge decks in formats where it is legal). It gave Dredge a big payoff.
- Narcomoeba cheats itself into play when it is milled, giving Dredge the toehold of value that it needs to justify itself. Sacrificing three Narcomoeba to Dread Return is a classic play.
- Bridge from Below is one of the strangest cards from Future Sight; an enchantment that does absolutely nothing in play, but which has a very powerful effect when in the graveyard. By milling multiple Bridges from Below, dredge decks are able to multiply their creatures, creating either a huge board presence or the necessary fodder to flash back Dread Return.
Dredge, perhaps for the best, never really got time in the sun in Standard. For the deck to exist at all, it needs both the actual dredgers in Ravnica and the enablers in Future Sight; in Standard, this only happened for a four-month window in the summer of 2007; not enough time for a deck archetype as weird as Dredge to really find its footing in the metagame. Out of all the decklists that did well at US Nationals in 2007, for example, you will only find four copies of Golgari Grave-Troll.
As far as I can surmise from surviving records of old tournaments, the best result anyone ever had with Dredge in Standard was this list from Stuart Wright, who came in second at UK Nationals:
This list still resembles a normal Magic deck a lot more than anything that's to come in this chapter, but it's already (like various graveyard decks before it) turning the idea of card advantage on its head. The deck plays 13 discard outlets of various kinds, which it uses to put an initial dredger in the graveyard. Once it does, it starts dredging, looking for Narcomoebas, Dread Returns, and Bridges from Below.
Once there's enough of that in play, it brings back Flame-Kin Zealot. Bridge from Below, usually multiple copies of it, creates an instant army that the Zealot gives haste to, allowing for an immediate attack for lethal. Drowned Rusalka ties the room together by both sacrificing creatures to trigger Bridge and by being another 'looting' effect that draws and discards cards.
Dredging is a replacement effect – you can replace any normal card draw with a dredge. So effects that draw cards are very powerful in dredge decks, and the dredge player doesn't really care about where those cards go. It's fun to see this early dredge deck use Magus of the Bazaar as its best 'looter.' The magi were a mega-cycle of creatures that all had abilities taken from old cards from Magic's past; Magus of the Bazaar, of course, references Bazaar of Baghdad, which itself would become the most important card in Vintage Dredge.
Eternal Dredge
Where Dredge really became a factor was in Legacy and other larger formats, where it would have both the time to carve a niche in the metagame and access to even more graveyard cards.
Dredge really thrives in a deeper card pool, because 99% of cards are simply not relevant to its absurdist gameplan. Dredge isn't interested in normal card advantage or in normal efficient cards that other decks play. None of its cards matter for the normal reasons that make Magic cards matter.
As a case in point, the quality of a card with the Dredge mechanic is, to the Dredge deck, simply correlated to the number after the Dredge keyword. Golgari Grave-Troll is the best dredger because it has Dredge 6. Stinkweed Imp is second place because it has Dredge 5. The other properties of the card matter basically not at all; actually casting those cards is a plan C at best, and many Dredge lists don't actually run the mana needed to do so.
In all its other cards, Dredge cares purely about text that does things out of the graveyard. When you play Dredge, the graveyard is your hand and your hand doesn't really matter. The entire premise of the deck, the whole point of playing it, is to make "Dredge 6" as close as it can get to "draw 6 cards".
While Dredge would become a staple of Constructed tournaments to this day, it has had ups and downs in high-level play. It is the most polarizing deck archetype of all time, in more ways than one.
Part of the appeal of Dredge is that its game plan is just totally orthogonal to what a typical opponent is doing. Dredge doesn't care about most removal spells. Counterspells can stop Dread Return from resolving, but they can't stop Bridge from Below triggers. Targeting Thoughtseize at a Dredge opponent can if anything actively help them. Dredge is simply not playing the same game as a normal deck; it's as close as "not Magic" as any competitive archetype has ever gotten.
This, of course, makes Dredge both loved and hated. But the flipside of how Dredge blanks most normal interaction is that Dredge is also punished extremely hard by graveyard hate.
"Exile target player's graveyard" is an ability that Magic simply doesn't consider to be worth much. As an example, Leyline of the Void was printed in Guildpact, right after Dredge was introduced and not even really as a response to it. It's possible to completely erase Dredge's game plan without spending any mana, with a card that anyone can put into their deck, from turn 0.
Consequently, the adage is that Dredge is good when it's not – that is, it thrives whenever people aren't afraid of it. If there aren't that many pieces of graveyard hate floating around in sideboards, Dredge becomes a good option. Any match where your opponent didn't come prepared to crush you in games 2 and 3 (that is, the games played after sideboarding) is almost a free win.
Here's an early 'eternal' Dredge list:
While this is an Extended list, it closely resembles the basic template of Legacy Dredge as it would exist for the next several years. It's not that different from the Standard list we saw before, but the deeper card pool gives it a number of upgrades.
First, instead of all the mediocre looters, most of the discard outlets here are much more powerful one-off effects like Careful Study and Breakthrough. Breakthrough is, of course, normally cast for 0 – turns out One with Nothing can be good, if only it says "draw four cards" first. Turn-1 Breakthrough for 0 is a perfectly good way to start the game for this deck – essentially, it dumps the top 9 cards of the deck into the graveyard – but the real power comes when you cast a Breakthrough with a dredger already in the graveyard, at which point the draws become dredges and it's very easy to mill 20 cards or more.
This is what makes these Eternal iterations of Dredge so powerful and consistent – they have a very easy time throwing half their library into the graveyard, which makes it very likely that they'll hit multiple times on their payoff cards.
This deck also has a higher density of payoff cards. Cabal Therapy is a crucial addition – it gives the deck another sacrifice outlet to trigger Bridge from Below. Ichorid is another card that ties the room together perfectly; not only does it very easily come back from the graveyard by itself, it can then be sacrificed to Cabal Therapy or Dread Return; and if neither of those cards are in the graveyard, it still sacrifices itself to, again, trigger Bridge from Below. Like many of the best decks throughout Magic's history, Dredge is capable of blazing fast draws that lead to very quick wins; but when those fail, it can accrue gradual advantages, slowly accumulating an army of Bridge from Below tokens and eventually overwhelming the opponent or chipping away at them by attacking with Ichorid over and over again.
What if I didn't cast any spells?
However, these versions of dredge are still relatively normal. The ultimate mutation of Dredge is, of course, Manaless Dredge:
Here's a Magic deck with no mana sources. It only ever casts spells from the graveyard, and only for alternate costs. Rather than play a discard outlet, the player simply chooses to be on the draw and discards a card to hand size.
This newer list includes some additions from more recent sets. Prized Amalgam seems tailor-made for Dredge; whenever the deck returns another creature from the graveyard, it comes along for the ride. This iteration of the deck is totally capable of winning without casting spells, simply by returning Ichorid to trigger Bridge from Below and Prized Amalgam.
Manaless Dredge really has to be seen in action to be understood, so here's some video of Andrea Mengucci executing its game plan – timestamped to one of the games he actually won; he had terrible luck in this video.
In truth, Manaless Dredge has never been a big factor in Legacy; it is simply too weird and too fragile to really survive the gauntlet of a high-level tournament. More conventional versions are slower, but more consistent, and they're the ones that do occasionally show up in a top 8.
In Vintage, it's a different story.
Some Vintage Dredge builds do run actual mana sources, but the manaless versions are very common. The difference is Bazaar of Baghdad – a card that was banned in Legacy from day one, but which was never restricted in Vintage. Bazaar is so important to this deck that it actually plays Serum Powder, a card that does nothing other than allow it to mulligan more to find Bazaar. All hands with Bazaar are keeps, and all hands without are mulligans.
This is a very modern Dredge list – Dread Return and Bridge from Below have been cut in favor of simply playing more threats that come into play for free; it plays more like an aggro deck that just puts threats into play than like a combo deck with a win-on-the-spot finish, though of course it's really neither of those things. It's just Dredge – a deck that defies categorization and that cannot be understood in the bounds of 'normal Magic'.
Elsewhere in Magic
- The 'other deck with dredge cards' that existed in Ravnica-era Standard is Assault Loam, built around the combination of Seismic Assault and Life from the Loam. The game plan here is pretty obvious – recur lands from the graveyard over and over again, using Seismic Assault to control the board and eventually kill the opponent through direct damage.
Next Time
Oh yeah, there was another card set in between Ravnica and Time Spiral. It probably didn't have any important cards in it, right?