After having fun playing around with Vintage Dredge, I’ve spent much of the past week nonproductively attempting to revive (ahem) Dredge in the current Extended.
Unfortunately, the loss of Odyssey block has severely impinged on the power of Dredge, as you lose easy access to cards meant to ditch stuff into your graveyard and operate easily out of your graveyard. The loss of Cabal Therapy, for example, is pretty nasty.
After significant tinkering, I came up with a list that is, at the very least, fun to goldfish with. It’s still not solid enough that I’d want to take it out for a tournament spin, but I have nonetheless decided it’s worth posting.
Click through to the extended entry for the deck list and some brief remarks.
Dredge Street
26 Creatures: |
3× Bloodghast |
Flame-kin Zealot |
4× Golgari Grave-troll |
Golgari Thug |
4× Narcomoeba |
4× Stinkweed Imp |
4× Street Wraith |
4× Monstrous Carabid |
Iona, Shield Of Emeria |
19 Spells: |
4× Bridge From Below |
4× Funeral Charm |
4× Burning Inquiry |
4× Goblin Lore |
3× Dread Return |
15 Land: |
4× Verdant Catacombs |
4× Marsh Flats |
4× Blood Crypt |
Swamp |
2× Dakmor Salvage |
This deck powers its dredging via discard enablers and cycling cards.
Getting stuff into the bin
There are twelve cards tasked to getting your dredge cards into the Graveyard, coming in quartets of Funeral Charm, Burning Inquiry, and Goblin Lore. Lore is remarkably explosive if you already have at least one dredge card available with its four tries at dredging, and Inquiry is okay, too. I still wish you had things more like Breakthrough, but we work with what we have.
Dredge enablers
Dredging only your draws is severely underpowered, and in no way works as the basis for a deck. To deal with this, the deck packs eight cycling cards. I’m especially happy with Street Wraith, as an opening-hand Street Wraith lets you follow up a binning card (say, a first-turn Burning Inquiry) with immediate dredging.
I do still think this deck is underpowered, and it points toward dredge as an archetype to be avoided, for now. Still, I think if we just had a few more good, cheap draw and discard spells, we’d be in business – so we’ll have to see what Worldwake and its follow-up set bring along.
After all, I just generated nine Zombies and an Iona on turn two, and that’s not bad.