So, report on
Ye Olde Test Build vs. LED Dredge.
It's horrible. Insanely, godawfully horrible. Probably worse than Reanimator. I'd rather play against Miracles all day.
The evening really hammered down what the problem is. It is card logistics. Elves is fundamentally a set up T1, do stuff T2/T3 deck with a 7 card hand that draws 1 card per turn. LED Dredge is fundamentally a T1-T2 go nuts deck with a hand size of 30 that draws 5-6 cards a turn. Our hate is delayed or massively expensive spot discard, basically. Which does jack against 30 card hands.
Observations:
Cabal Therapy from us is a boss. Therapy on LED T1 is huge, huge, huge and flashback can attack Bridge easily while stripping them of Breakthrough and LEDs.
Breakthrough is so disgustingly broken I want to punch people.
Dryad Militant would be good, but Dredge usually already has something in the yard we need to deal with already.
T2 DRS is too slow.
T1 DRS, T2 GSZ(Dryad) is entirely too slow.
T2 Ooze with a mana or two up is kinda good.
T2 GSZ for Ooze leaves us with no mana to do things with barring some nutdraw.
LED Dredge casts a surprising number of spells. A quick Ruric would probably be great if you can get it.
Flayer is scary, but only super scary if they can get a big troll afterwards.
Attacking Bridge+Narcomoebas is surprisingly profitable and essentially blanks their other stuff.
T1 Dryad => T1 Firestorm is horrible for us. Grab your cards if that happens, you're not winning it unless the Dredge player's draw is plain godawful.
On GSZ:
GSZ is a horrible card. This matchup is defined by a complete and utter lack of time, and cards need to have impact and be efficient as hell. GSZ is just way, way too slow to do anything meaningful here. It retards doing stuff with Therapy while progressing a board, it retards use of T1 Deathrites or T2 Oozes, and it just doesn't remotely threaten a kill. Usually Visionary gets sided out in combo matchups and GSZ stays in, in this case I'd suggest the reverse. GSZ out, Therapy in. T2 Visionary, grab a card, feed the drawn Elf or Visionary itself to Therapy is solid. GSZ is not.
Conclusion: I'm going back to Surgical Extraction for graveyard hate. Dryad could and probably does good work against ANT and Manaless, but against LED Dredge it just doesn't work out due to our card and mana logistics. The GSZ-ability just isn't a factor. Whatever hate we bring in either needs to be free (Surgical, Faerie Macabre, Tormod's Crypt) so we can have that precious setup turn and do what little we're able to disruption-wise or to prep a combo kill, or it needs to be so crushingly strong they're crying for mommy (RIP, Ruric Thar). Tormod's Crypt would probably be better than Surgical but Dredge is such a small player in the meta it's just not worth it, and Surgical does more work in matchups like Miracles, Delver and Storm which are prevalent atm.
The Surgicals will be on Bridge duty, probably. Fuck Bridge.
New Sideboard, roughly
4
Cabal Therapy1
Thoughtseize1
Progenitus2
Surgical Extraction2
Null Rod2
Bitterblossom3
Abrupt Decay
Thoughtseize could maybe even just be another Surgical, or a Needle, or something. Maybe the discard split should be 3/2, dunno. If you want game against LED Dredge, you need 4 Therapy.
Rough SB plan vs. LED Dredge, codename Fuckthisshit:
-4 GSZ
-1 Packmaster
-1 Reclamation Sage
(-1 Dryad Arbor)
+4 Therapy
+2 Surgical
(+1 Thoughtseize)