[Deck] Dredge

[K1w1]

I like Angel of Despair (Flayer doesn't help against Platinum Angel/Colossus). But Reanimator runs counters, and Faerie Macabre and Leyline are very successful. I'm not liking the DRs that much anymore...

Flayer doesn't what?
Flayer comes into play = Platinum Angel dead.
I think you mean Platin Emperion, so how about, Flayer comes into play => Emperion 4 dmg -> Therapy/Dread Return with Flayer -> Emperion dead. Afterwards just kill with DR into GGT.

I think i give it a try again to play the Flayer at sunday. With some changes, due to some cards which could be great. I'll reveal the cards, if i have good results.

K1w1

[Felidae]

This should definitely be the reason to run Flayer of the Hatebound and/or an Angel of Despair and Chain of Vapors in the board.

I tend to disagree with you here, at least when I look at the current meta game in NRW ( mostly with an eye on the "big" tournaments in Iserlohn and Dülmen), where reanimator is allmost no meta factor anymore.
Chain wouldn't have helped in the above mentioned scenario anyway, as my hole hand was dumped in the yard thanks to good old Breakthrough.

As far as Flayer / any other DRs go:
Usually I'm not a fan of DR targets, however I understand why people run Flayer, as he's not just winmore but an actuall thread and able to win trough stuff like Archon, Elephent Grass ,etc.
Yet I don't want to waste sideboard place for him / 3 DRs, as long as reanimator and enchantress don't take over the meta.

For reference I'm currently running this board:
1 Tarnish Citadell
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Natures Claim
1 Ray of Revelation
1 Ancient Grudge
2 Ingot Chewer
2 Coffin Purge / Memory's Journey

[HokusSchmokus]

I am not playing this deck atm as I appear to have slept with lady luck's daughter and she punishes me everytime I use the deck.
Anybody else having huge trouble with variance?

[badjuju]

I am not playing this deck atm as I appear to have slept with lady luck's daughter and she punishes me everytime I use the deck.
Anybody else having huge trouble with variance?

Comes and goes. Like I've said before, a lot of people are turned off by this deck cause it has a tendency to lose to itself off of poor dredges.

If you're talking about mulligans, upping my land count helps immensely.

[HokusSchmokus]

Comes and goes. Like I've said before, a lot of people are turned off by this deck cause it has a tendency to lose to itself off of poor dredges.

If you're talking about mulligans, upping my land count helps immensely.

Not the land count. 12 lands are fine with me, I play 14 atm just because Coliseum only tapping for U. 12 lands worked out quite good though.

The thing is, of all decks I know, Dredge draws the most cards each turn, by quite a bit. So in my world, if you draw 6-12 a turn and you don't see useful cards, there is something inheritly wrong with the deck OR it's statistic holocaust. Every time.

[Izor]

Not the land count. 12 lands are fine with me, I play 14 atm just because Coliseum only tapping for U. 12 lands worked out quite good though.

The thing is, of all decks I know, Dredge draws the most cards each turn, by quite a bit. So in my world, if you draw 6-12 a turn and you don't see useful cards, there is something inheritly wrong with the deck OR it's statistic holocaust. Every time.

Well, you can't just say that Dredge virtually draws X whenever it Dredges for X. Over half of the cards in your deck are literally dead in the graveyard (32 in my list). And after you have enough Dredgers in the bin, each additional Dredger is yet another dead card. The only real business you want to find is 4 Narcs, 3 Ichys, 4 Bridge, 4 Therapy (maybe some DR). In the 6 cards you Dredge with a Troll, you only get 1.5 of those on average. Drawing 1.5 cards per draw is still awesome, though.


As of your consistency issues. Do you mean with the quad list? Doesn't surprise me then. One day after the quad list was first posted on MTGForum I said that 12 lands won't ever be enough in this deck and that people will at some point notice that 14 is the minimum number. In the German forums, of course I got flamed for that. But I'm still holding my point and I would strongly advise everyone to run more than 12 lands in this deck as well.

Remember when I said I still prefer LED Dredge because I couldn't find a LED list I liked. Basically, I wasn't able to add lands. Now I've found the right cuts and I'm playing LED since then. Adding those two lands makes the deck twice as consistent. Try cutting PImps. Never thought I'd ever do that myself, but it's the right call.

[Mindlash]

Not the land count. 12 lands are fine with me, I play 14 atm just because Coliseum only tapping for U. 12 lands worked out quite good though.

The thing is, of all decks I know, Dredge draws the most cards each turn, by quite a bit. So in my world, if you draw 6-12 a turn and you don't see useful cards, there is something inheritly wrong with the deck OR it's statistic holocaust. Every time.

It lies in the nature of the deck itself.
In the Example of Quadlaser we have 12 Lands, 12 Drawspells, 4 LED, 4 Pimps = 32 essential cards for our first 7. You cannot make great cuts here without lowering the chance of drawing them.

After Turn 1 or 2 we turn from "normal" Magic into our Dredge Mode. Now the rest of these 32 cards is useless to us.

Our Deck now relies on the other half of our cards: 12 Dredger, 4 Ichorids, 4 Moebas, 4 Cabal, 4 Bridge from Below.

The 4 Thugs are crappy in terms of dredging but serve as Ichorid fodder and can be hardcast/sacced to reload Moebas.

Ichrorid, Moeba, Bridge are not good in our first 7 but essential dredges. Cabal serves both sides of the deck.

The 12 Dredgers are also only all needed while in grindy games. While Comboing out you only need 4 because you discard them after all of our Drawspells although you need to get them in chains. We dredge for 5 in average. In a sixty cards deck it should be best to have 60/5=12 Dredgers.

Manaless Dredge on the other hand has less explosive starts but better dredges. You replace your Lands by more Threats and Dredgers. To start with Manaless you need only a Dredger and can go into Dredge-Mode. I played 16 Dredgers...so we have more stable (but most of the time slower) hands here.

You also have 4 Dread Return, 4 Nether Shadow and some Targets (maybe 3 Sphinx and 1 Finisher) now.

This maybe the reason why Manaless felt more consistent to me and the reason why LED/LEDless Dredge feels like dredging shit in the Yard half of the time. But i cannot reasonably see a way to fix this.

TLDR: Taken from Kiwis Sig: At good days, you destroy everything. At bad days,
you draw Narcomoebas.

Edit: Izor was faster here :-)

I also have days dredging all but 15 Cards...hitting one Bridge and getting totally destroyed...and on other days I crush people Turn1/Turn2 all day long. Murphys Law says: You will mostly remember the first kind of days :-P

[K1w1]

TLDR: Taken from Kiwis Sig: At good days, you destroy everything. At bad days,
you draw Narcomoebas.

Edit: Izor was faster here :-)

I also have days dredging all but 15 Cards...hitting one Bridge and getting totally destroyed...and on other days I crush people Turn1/Turn2 all day long. Murphys Law says: You will mostly remember the first kind of days :-P

It's really disappointing to have these days. Your day is f***ed up after a tourney you lost due to your own deck.
I also could have the option to play Reanimator, but i said to myself: NO! Be with your deck and destroy Reanimator!
As i said in the post above i wanna try some other (new) cards in the deck, but i think it was a mistake. Goldfished so many times last week and my final decision ( or not, because i change it again at sunday morning ) is to play the
Quadlazer -1 Pimp, -1 Breakthough, -1 Thug, -1 Ichorid +3 DR, +1 Flayer like i did the last tourneys.

Or is there anyone who wants me to test a list for someone?

K1w1

Cool signature, eh?

[Michael Keller]

I am not playing this deck atm as I appear to have slept with lady luck's daughter and she punishes me everytime I use the deck.
Anybody else having huge trouble with variance?

None. Not sure if you're doing something wrong or playing in a meta infested with bad match-ups for the deck, but really if you're not mulliganing properly or sideboarding correctly, you're going to falter.

[HokusSchmokus]

I normally take notes on how my starting hands are in tournaments.
Now in my last tournaments playing dredge I drew the ludicrous amount of 17 Narcomoebas in my starting hand, not counting mulligans, in 12 rounds(30 games).
I just give the deck a pause I think, this has to be variance. I mean, I don't play the deck without making mistakes, as I am sure nobody does, but I am fairly certain that I am at least competent with the deck.
Maybe though, post AVR meta will draw me back. If people are right and Blue decks are on the rise, Ichorid seems like the deck to go to.

[Felidae]

Or is there anyone who wants me to test a list for someone?

Go and test Manaless ( with 4 LED / Looting as you suggested last time) for me in Bochum, as I won't bring Canadian to this Meta ever again ( when your best matchup the entire day is loampox then something seriously went wrong...).

[Calado]

Manaless Dredge on the other hand has less explosive starts but better dredges. You replace your Lands by more Threats and Dredgers. To start with Manaless you need only a Dredger and can go into Dredge-Mode. I played 16 Dredgers...so we have more stable (but most of the time slower) hands here.

That's what I'm feeling right now, changing from Manaless to LEDless. Manaless looks so consistent (and is nice with Street Wraith) that I'm not convinced yet that we don't need the 12th dredger.
4 ichorids, 12 dredgers and 14 lands looks more consistent, but trading one of each for 2 DR's+target is so versatile (like Iona on 2nd or 3rd turn)...

[jares]

Based on the flow of your conversations, I was thinking that maybe the Hybrid variant would be worth exploring as a compromise between the strengths/weaknesses of the Manaless and Mainstream variants.

Cheers,
jares

[jares]

Comes and goes. Like I've said before, a lot of people are turned off by this deck cause it has a tendency to lose to itself off of poor dredges.

If you're talking about mulligans, upping my land count helps immensely.

It surely sounds like I'm in the minority here, but I've rarely had the experience of having the deck "lose to itself" - in fact, I don't remember if this has ever happen to me, at least competitively.

One factor might be because I usually choose to play a somewhat unconventional LEDless build, though it's really not too different from the mainstream configurations being used recently. It might also be the play style and game plan when using that particular build, as I'm more used to grinding-out games and winning via a well-aimed Cabal Therapy rather than by combo-finishing the opponent. I guess that the possibility of "losing to one's self" comes with the territory of being a combo deck, which might also explain why I have recently been leaning towards the non-combo oriented game plan.

Kind Regards,
jares

[Mindlash]

It surely sounds like I'm in the minority here, but I've rarely had the experience of having the deck "lose to itself" - in fact, I don't remember if this has ever happen to me, at least competitively.

One factor might be because I usually choose to play a somewhat unconventional LEDless build, though it's really not too different from the mainstream configurations being used recently. It might also be the play style and game plan when using that particular build, as I'm more used to grinding-out games and winning via a well-aimed Cabal Therapy rather than by combo-finishing the opponent. I guess that the possibility of "losing to one's self" comes with the territory of being a combo deck, which might also explain why I have recently been leaning towards the non-combo oriented game plan.

Kind Regards,
jares

I don't think it's entirely based on the combo / non-combo oriented game plan.
After one tournament I even considered learning other (better?) shuffle techniques because some of the losses came due to bad hands.

Going from no dredger and 3 Moeba starting 7 to a 3 Ichorid 6 into a 4 Bridges (hell what?) 5 just sucks. That was the first weekend of Looting with Quadlaser and I played Burn the next 3 weeks because I wanted some consistent hands :-)

This was my worst experience with Dredge and thank God it never got this bad again for a while now...but it doesn't have anything to do with combolist or grindlist, because this hands can be drawn by both versions :-/

At the moment I'm playing Dredge on Magic Workstation, Cockatrice and our weekly torunaments and it works fine. Still using either Quadlaser or Flayerlists. Maybe I was just extremly unlucky at this one tournament (though I also have to mull at least 1-2 times a match).

My greatest Problems now are some matchups though. I seem to be unable to beat Painter. Any tips here? Cabaling Painter and he comes back with Welder. I just cannot get enough Cabals due to his Ele-Blasts countering most of my drawspells. His Deck also features limitless Tormod's...

The other Matchups are Belcher and Sneak and Show which favors the one who won the dice roll it seems.

Most other Matchups are ok for me. Despite this one friend of mine who plays Maverick and consistently can go into Mull 4 with Land, Fetchland, Zenith and Ooze -_- (he should be playing Spanish Inquisition with his mull skills I think :-P)

[jares]

I don't think it's entirely based on the combo / non-combo oriented game plan.
After one tournament I even considered learning other (better?) shuffle techniques because some of the losses came due to bad hands.

Going from no dredger and 3 Moeba starting 7 to a 3 Ichorid 6 into a 4 Bridges (hell what?) 5 just sucks. That was the first weekend of Looting with Quadlaser and I played Burn the next 3 weeks because I wanted some consistent hands :-)

This was my worst experience with Dredge and thank God it never got this bad again for a while now...but it doesn't have anything to do with combolist or grindlist, because this hands can be drawn by both versions :-/

At the moment I'm playing Dredge on Magic Workstation, Cockatrice and our weekly torunaments and it works fine. Still using either Quadlaser or Flayerlists. Maybe I was just extremly unlucky at this one tournament (though I also have to mull at least 1-2 times a match).

Shuffling well really helps! I really put a lot of effort into shuffling my deck as well as I can after every match (and even after every mulligan) so that I can be sure that my draws are as random as possible. If we're not careful, we could potentially draw into a deck that still has "clumps" of cards that are still influenced by the way the previous match played out (e.g. lands clumped together, Narcomoebas and Ichorids having a party, etc.).

This is how I generally do my shuffling sequence:

• [2x] Pile Shuffle (15 piles, with varying placements of cards after every 15 cards)
• [4x] Riffle Shuffle

Regarding the combo/non-combo game plan, I mentioned this observation because of the following premises (and I believe that these considerations were meant to relate to both the Opening Hand and In-game Dredging):

• The combo game plan, by definition, requires a definite set of cards to pull-off the combo (e.g. [2x] Dread Return and Flayer of the Hatebound to pull off the Flayer Kill, etc.). Anything less than the defined minimum requirements would prompt the player to adjust using an alternate game plan, which may or may not be available (it's worth noting that Dredge is one of the few, if not the only combo deck that can also seamlessly shift to being an aggro deck).
• The non-combo game plan is much less dependent on specific cards being accessible, and instead works with the available lines of play presented by the cards that a player has access to.

As was mentioned, the possibility of "losing to one's self" (i.e. not "drawing" into the combo, if I understood it correctly) is inherent to the nature of all combo decks - Dredge is just such a versatile deck that we usually have the option to shift gears whenever necessary.

This may not be the case for all the experiences that have been noted here, but I just thought that this might help with some of the considerations being presented, and may explain why I have rarely encountered the scenario of "losing to one's self". It might just be a matter of shuffling though.

Cheers,
jares

[Claymore-One]

Hey fellow sourcers, finally got a little r&r, still on dpeloyment though, but I at least got some time to relax. I haven't been in a tournament environment since December, but I have been trying to keep up with reading the forums whenever I can.

I see that Dredge is on the DTB, but this usually fluctuates anyways. There's actually a small group of people on the aircraft carrier that plays magic as well, while most of them are casual there's actually several people who's fairly competitive. I tend to face grave hate, but that doesn't discourage me at all, as I like facing grave hate anyways. I feel like I learn better facing them and learning to play against them than simply retiring the deck until hate disappears, and not wanting to get some experience playing against them.

But at the moment, since I've been out of the environment for a while, what decks, or cards are giving the deck a problem? Oh I also play the 15 land build, with tireless, and 1 MD DR target.

Anyways, good to speak with you all again. I don't know if I can respond to any posts but I can definitely see them while I am out to see. Anyways, take care everyone, and happy gaming.

[jares]

I tend to face grave hate, but that doesn't discourage me at all, as I like facing grave hate anyways. I feel like I learn better facing them and learning to play against them than simply retiring the deck until hate disappears, and not wanting to get some experience playing against them.

That's the spirit!

But at the moment, since I've been out of the environment for a while, what decks, or cards are giving the deck a problem?

I personally find the following decks/cards to be the ones that I'm usually concerned about (may not be a complete list):

• Reanimator: Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
• Maverick: Scavenging Ooze, particularly when it has the capacity to be online by Turn-2. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben has also been mildly irritating
• Stoneblade: Surgical Extraction, particularly when it gets reused by a Snapcaster Mage
• Decks that randomly use Tormod's Crypt and Relic of Progenitus
• Decks that randomly use Leyline of the Void and Grafdigger's Cage
• I also worry about the mirror, given that I'm also running LEDless.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
jares

[K1w1]

What a day...went 3-3 in a tourney...i won't write a report, due to this matchups:
2:0 NicFit
1:2 NicFit
0:2 Affinity
2:0 Affinity
2:1 RedDeath?
1:2 NicFit

Srsly?
Played Griselbrand btw..
He was really nice to have!! Maybe not to draw, but to get 7 life due to flayer!


K1w1

Edit: The 3rd round, we got our pairings and i knew against what im playing: NicFit
And what happens? New Pairings

[esqulax]

I am a pretty big noob at dredge so pardon me if this question seems rather stupid, but could somebody please explain to me the benefits of running flayer over flamekin zealot? I really have trouble understanding it.