Quote Originally Posted by Izor View Post
Congratz, Jares! Nice finish.

I like your list, it's something new for me to play the 16th land, but if it worked I guess it's viable. Generally I think 15 are enough, but if you have the room anyway, why not 16. My LEDless list is pretty similar to yours. I just play one less Land and I also split the set of Lootings into some Lootings and Tribes. Should play out pretty much the same though.


And see? Told you guys LEDless isn't out of the race yet. It's still perfectly playable and to be honest, it still has a lot of advantages over LED Dredge. It's just not strictly better any more.


@ Darvus: Yeah, I also usually Therapy for GSZ first, not only because they mostly have to GSZ to find Ooze anyway, but also because they can fetch KotR with it as well. If you hit you kind ofm dealt with the two most potent threats at the same time.
I strongly considered cutting the 16th land (the 4th Tarnished Citadel) in favor of a 13th Dredger (Darkblast). In the end, I realized that I really wanted to look at the 4th Tarnished Citadel as the 12th Gold Land rather than being the 16th land. Because my build is built on maximizing the consistency of the opening hand, I trusted the math, as the numbers showed that I would get better probabilities by adding the 12th Gold Land rather than adding the 13th Dredger. In retrospect, I just realized that I never had to mulligan to 5, and only needed to mulligan to 6 four times in 17 games (and only once on a Game 1) - which is right around the probabilities that I've been playing with.

Running the full set of Careful Study and Faithless Looting was crucial to how I built the deck, as this also allowed me to look into the probabilities of drawing into cards after playing Careful Study/Faithless Looting on the first turn. This also allowed me to decide on choosing Faerie Macabre over Leyline of the Void, as drawing into Faerie Macabre would be incomparably better. My chances of drawing into the other SB cards I need have also increased because of the availability 8x Careful Study effects in the deck.

Honestly, I wouldn't say that LED Dredge doesn't have the advantage over LEDless Dredge as of the moment. As much as I didn't really miss LED, I couldn't help but wonder if I could still increase the speed and consistency of the deck by using LED. I'm glad, though, that I was successful even if I wasn't using LED. Moving forward, I'll be trying to improve on the build and test it with LED to see if any clear advantages could be established between the two versions.

Kind Regards,
jares