Originally Posted by
Hollywood
I really don't think the 'Bauble' route is the way to go here. When you look at several builds people are using, by cutting the Bloodghasts, Nether Shadows, and Dakmor Salvages, you're taking out a huge chunk of aggressiveness and replacing it with a faster, riskier variation that seems to be more reliant than the previous incarnations on its opening seven as you'll obviously never want to purposely draw a card through the draw step outside of being on the forced draw turn one.
The list you've quoted includes twenty cards that are not creatures, with an extra Flame-Kin Zealot added in the mix. That just doesn't seem correct when you consider Zealot's most effective situation in this deck is when you have Nether Shadows and Bloodghasts that get pumped up with Haste and allow you to put a significant amount of pressure on an opponent. The Baubles, in my opinion, dilute this variation of Dredge a bit more as it is more focused on its threat-density and grinding out victories using the attack step.
By trading a more threat-dense creature base for Baubles, you're lessening the effectiveness of your Dredges by potentially 'milling' cards like Probe and Baubles which are completely useless. Dredging cards like Nether Shadow, Gigapede, and Bloodghast opens the deck up with a different angle of attack and doesn't force you to take more aggressive mulligans or fear a well-timed Mental Misstep on Probe which could be disastrous. I think people are trying fill a void where a void never existed; Rausch's deck was perfectly suited to ravage Control-based strategies (Aggro Control and mid-range Combo), which continue to perform well (albeit struggling a tad). Look at how much Manaless Dredge has popped up on the Open Circuit since Rausch won; negligible.
The addition of Baubles also opens the deck up to Null Rod hate, which is seeing more play. This could also inherently force players to play first and take advantage of an early Null Rod or similar strategy. Baubles outside of the opening seven really become moot as by that time you're looking to fill your graveyard up and not worry about drawing cards through the draw step, so this could again dilute the deck's effectiveness outside of speed and consistency. We already have enough to worry about with graveyard hate, so opening ourselves up to that extra hate, however narrow, can still be a problem. We need to alleviate the pressure put on us after winning the first game, and although Baubles do allow us to slow-cantrip into Dredge, we still have to wait in order to attack. I really am not sold on the idea of dropping my pants during an opponent's upkeep and opening myself up to hate I cannot stop.
The Bauble lists work in theory, but I don't like taking the deck's primary source of recursion and pressure and shifting it to the sideboard when it should be the core of what the creator purposely tried. The sideboard obviously needs fixing, which is what I feel we should be focusing more on as it seems people are divided around several main-deck ideas and sticking to them. I don't think the lists are 'bad,' I just think they're a bit riskier and dilute consistency a bit more.
