[Deck] Dredge

[Vlad Teppes]

Idk about firestorm main deck...
sure, it's a powerfull card, I run 3 in my sideboard, but the card is just dead useless against combo, and doesn't help in any of our hard matchups...

[raikenxy]

Idk about firestorm main deck...
sure, it's a powerfull card, I run 3 in my sideboard, but the card is just dead useless against combo, and doesn't help in any of our hard matchups...

Agreed 100x ... As a card I've found it underwhelming against any deck packing both counters and deathrite shaman. Decks without counters like jund and elves it is amazing, but these are matchups we either race or dominate. If shard less bug or bug tempo drops a deathrite and sits behind counterspells it's quite useless. I think it's best as a sideboard card, even though it's easily one of our best sideboard cards

[Final Fortune]

A card that makes the opponent have Deathrite Shaman, Force of Will/Daze and the coin flip is better than a card that makes the opponent just have Deathrite Shaman, vs BUG aggro-control it's frustrating when the opponent plays a Deathrite Shaman and has Force of Will or Daze back up, but you can play around Daze and even if the opponent counters Firestorm you can still discard multiple Dredgers. Compared to Lion's Eye Diamond, you're more resilent vs Daze because you can pay for your draw spell with Lion's Eye Diamond mana, which usually means they'll Daze the Lion's Eye Diamond in order to Time Walk into an active Deathrite Shaman. But the fact of the matter is a bare Firestorm is much better than a bare Lion's Eye Diamond in most situations, it allows you to keep a wider range of draws vs decks with significant clocks or disruptive elements like Goblins or Affinity where clearing the board and discarding your hand is much better than discarding your hand or taking the risk of DDDing into a Faithless Looting before you die.

The card is not useless vs combo, it clears the board of Goblin tokens vs Empty the Warrens, deals instant speed damage vs Ad Nauseam and kills Undercity Informer if they pass the turn and wait for their Chrome Mox to untap or a top deck mana source. If you play with the card long enough, you'll find a multitide of situations where you extract value by just killing a Delver of Secrets, dealing 3 damage to the opponent and discarding your Dredger, killing a Stoneforge Mystic with Batterskull in hand or fizzling an equip activation on Umezawa's Jitte etc or finishing them with up to 8 damage to the face.

It may not be overwhelming vs combo, but it's strictly better than Lion's Eye Diamond vs BUG and by itself more powerful than a free One With Nothing in a mulligan to 6 or 5 etc. and considering the card has so much innate synergy with the deck, like whiping the board of your own creatures, or all creatures for a Bridge from Below activation, I'm really hard pressed to find a reason not to play the card MD. LED is cool and all, but in a 3 round match it's important to learn how to win small as opposed to win big.

[Vlad Teppes]

A card that makes the opponent have Deathrite Shaman, Force of Will/Daze and the coin flip is better than a card that makes the opponent just have Deathrite Shaman, vs BUG aggro-control it's frustrating when the opponent plays a Deathrite Shaman and has Force of Will or Daze back up, but you can play around Daze and even if the opponent counters Firestorm you can still discard multiple Dredgers. Compared to Lion's Eye Diamond, you're more resilent vs Daze because you can pay for your draw spell with Lion's Eye Diamond mana, which usually means they'll Daze the Lion's Eye Diamond in order to Time Walk into an active Deathrite Shaman. But the fact of the matter is a bare Firestorm is much better than a bare Lion's Eye Diamond in most situations, it allows you to keep a wider range of draws vs decks with significant clocks or disruptive elements like Goblins or Affinity where clearing the board and discarding your hand is much better than discarding your hand or taking the risk of DDDing into a Faithless Looting before you die.

The card is not useless vs combo, it clears the board of Goblin tokens vs Empty the Warrens, deals instant speed damage vs Ad Nauseam and kills Undercity Informer if they pass the turn and wait for their Chrome Mox to untap or a top deck mana source. If you play with the card long enough, you'll find a multitide of situations where you extract value by just killing a Delver of Secrets, dealing 3 damage to the opponent and discarding your Dredger, killing a Stoneforge Mystic with Batterskull in hand or fizzling an equip activation on Umezawa's Jitte etc or finishing them with up to 8 damage to the face.

It may not be overwhelming vs combo, but it's strictly better than Lion's Eye Diamond vs BUG and by itself more powerful than a free One With Nothing in a mulligan to 6 or 5 etc. and considering the card has so much innate synergy with the deck, like whiping the board of your own creatures, or all creatures for a Bridge from Below activation, I'm really hard pressed to find a reason not to play the card MD. LED is cool and all, but in a 3 round match it's important to learn how to win small as opposed to win big.

Most of the decks you said run counterspells or discard.
Against belcher it can help against empty the warrens, but it fails against goblin charbelcher, against tendrills, they usually don't go off unless the cost is clear or they are trying to rush for it.
Against reanimator the card makes the matchup even harder for us, same against SnT.

I'm not dissmising the card, I just don't know if the card is what we need right now...

But let's keep the testing!

[raikenxy]

A card that makes the opponent have Deathrite Shaman, Force of Will/Daze and the coin flip is better than a card that makes the opponent just have Deathrite Shaman, vs BUG aggro-control it's frustrating when the opponent plays a Deathrite Shaman and has Force of Will or Daze back up, but you can play around Daze and even if the opponent counters Firestorm you can still discard multiple Dredgers. Compared to Lion's Eye Diamond, you're more resilent vs Daze because you can pay for your draw spell with Lion's Eye Diamond mana, which usually means they'll Daze the Lion's Eye Diamond in order to Time Walk into an active Deathrite Shaman. But the fact of the matter is a bare Firestorm is much better than a bare Lion's Eye Diamond in most situations, it allows you to keep a wider range of draws vs decks with significant clocks or disruptive elements like Goblins or Affinity where clearing the board and discarding your hand is much better than discarding your hand or taking the risk of DDDing into a Faithless Looting before you die.

The card is not useless vs combo, it clears the board of Goblin tokens vs Empty the Warrens, deals instant speed damage vs Ad Nauseam and kills Undercity Informer if they pass the turn and wait for their Chrome Mox to untap or a top deck mana source. If you play with the card long enough, you'll find a multitide of situations where you extract value by just killing a Delver of Secrets, dealing 3 damage to the opponent and discarding your Dredger, killing a Stoneforge Mystic with Batterskull in hand or fizzling an equip activation on Umezawa's Jitte etc or finishing them with up to 8 damage to the face.

It may not be overwhelming vs combo, but it's strictly better than Lion's Eye Diamond vs BUG and by itself more powerful than a free One With Nothing in a mulligan to 6 or 5 etc. and considering the card has so much innate synergy with the deck, like whiping the board of your own creatures, or all creatures for a Bridge from Below activation, I'm really hard pressed to find a reason not to play the card MD. LED is cool and all, but in a 3 round match it's important to learn how to win small as opposed to win big.

If our main attempt to race combo is going to be firestorm then were in trouble... And if your slow dredging with a deathrite shaman any adequate opponent will save their deathrites for a narcomoeba/ichorid activation. Firestorm is good, it's just not maindeck good, I'll say putrid imp is strictly better

[Final Fortune]

I don't think you guys really understand Dredge's place in the metagame, you should be doing everything you can in the MD in order to beat aggro-control and Firestorm gives you a higher win% vs aggro-control than Lion's Eye Diamond does as well as smoother mulligans overall. Even if combo is faster than us, and keep in mind Firestorm eliminates 7 of 11 of Belcher's win conditions and an entire angle of attack from TES and ANT, the archetype itself shouldn't be popular in a metagame where aggro-control is and your win% can be addressed post-board with Unmask or Leylines where our deck gets better vs theirs but their deck doesn't get better vs us.

Reanimator is a lost match up, nothing I have ever done to Dredge has managed to make it a winning match up so I'm willing to concede it as the better graveyard deck in the mirror and the worse graveyard deck in the metagame.

That leaves Show&Tell, and as weak as Firestorm appears vs Show&Tell it's important to remember that it's still an uncounterable discard outlet vs Force of Will, Daze and Spell Pierce and if the opponent understands his role in the match up he should be aggressively countering our outlets if we aren't aggressively discarding his combo pieces in order to leave the draw spells without dredge targets and turn them into tempo sinks.

Now, I'm not saying Firestorm is better than or equivalent to Lion's Eye Diamond vs combo, with the exception of Belcher where you have an overwhelmingly positive match up thanks to the distribution of their win conditions, but it still removes an angle of attack from Storm and increases our clock so it's not a dead card in that match up and the fact that it's uncounterable discard is highly relevant vs Show&Tell. That makes the card serviceable in most of the match ups I can think of, where the main EV is comming from a higher win percentage MD vs aggro-control and additional SB space that can be used vs combo if necessary in order to regain ground in the match up. So you're probably asking yourself why play Firestorm MD if all we're doing is sacrificing EV in the combo match up for EV in the aggro-control match up? Well just look at the distribution of the field and Top 16s in the metagame and you'll see that Deathrite Shaman has a much bigger presence than combo and Deathrite Shaman, go is a much faster, more consistent play than anything combo can do.

So if we go back to the drawing board, I think it's clear where we want to get our overall EV from vs the metagame and that's Firestorm because Rest in Peace is no longer a MD consideration for Miracles and Deathrite Shaman is now the ubiquitous MD hate card of the format. So it makes sense to move Lion's Eye Diamond out, Firestorm in and SB an additional anti-combo card like Leyline of the Void for Reanimator, Hermit Druid and ANT or maybe 4 Griselbrand (along with the 2 Dread Return in the SB) in order to take advantage of Show&Tell's symmetry or increase the clock overall.

There's a lot to be done to improve Dredge's match ups, and contrary to the other Dredge player's posts in this thread I think the metagame is actually improving for us because True Name Nemesis surplanted Tarmogoyf as the omni-present threat from aggro-control and Miracles can't afford to play RIP in the MD anymore with the presence of UWR in the metagame.

You guys can disagree as much as you like, but I haven't seen any of you do anything other than playing more of the same and then bitching about how the metagame is against you - it's basic Darwinism.

[Que]

You guys can disagree as much as you like, but I haven't seen any of you do anything other than playing more of the same and then bitching about how the metagame is against you - it's basic Darwinism.

I see a lot of talking. Where are the published results?


EDIT: I'll edit post to avoid being spam. :<

Went 3-2 Drop at the last Knigtware tournament ending up in 15th. There were 6 rounds. In retrospect I shouldn't have tried to beat traffic home and played the last round. My breakers were pretty good and prizes were being doled out to top 10. Oh well I've learned mah lesson.
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...lue-dual-fetch

Started 3-0 in the day dropping my last two rounds ;____;

Round 1: TES
Game 1: He empties 12 gobbos into the field and flashes back cabal therapy (misses) leaving him with 11. I Dredge setting up a nice play next turn. He attacks for 11 and passes the turn back with a couple of cards left in hand. On my turn I cast breakthrough, therapy'd away a burning wish he had, and generated 9 zombies allowing me to stabalize and take game 1.
SB - I side in 1 Dread Return, 1 Iona, 3x Mindbreak Trap - 2 ichorid, -2 Putrid Imp, -1 Golgari Thug
Game 2: I mull to 6 and open with 2 x Mindbreak prompting me to keep. I did fear Cabal Therapy, but I didn't think he would really expect the trap. Over the course of a couple of turns he casts a pair of Infernal Tutor revealing a Dark Ritual which brings his count of to 3 in hand. Eventually he attempts to combo and when casts empty I just Mindbreak. I draw a dredger on my turn crack an LED and begin to churn out my engine. A few zombies later I take game 2.

1-0

Round 2: Death & Taxes
Game 1: I cast careful study and bin Troll and Stinkweed. He drops a vial on his turn. On my next turn I dredge and then cast breakthrough ending game 1.
SB: +3 Wispmare, +1 Ancient Grudge, +1 Undiscovered Paradise, - 3 Breakthrough, - 1 Golgari Thug, -1 Faithless Looting
Game 2: He mulls to 4 or 3 not being able to find hate or any relevant interaction. Over the course of a few turns I generate enough advantage to receive the concession.

2-0

Round 3: Merfolk
Game 1: He opens with Mutavault Aether vial. I'm able to cast an LED and a careful study without fear of daze binning a couple of dredgers and already being ahead. I don't remember him doing anything crazy this turn. On my turn I'm able to dredge and flashback faithless looting dredging another 12 cards. Eventually no gravehate means I can chump his fish and build my army without much struggle. I take game 1.
SB: +1 Ancient Grudge, +2 lands -3 Breakthrough NOTE: you can board in the DR and the Iona in this matchup. Depends on how aggressive you want to be.
Game 2. He mulls to 5 or 6 attempting to find some hate.

3-0

Win in in

Round 4: Elves! Ryan Ariola (Top 4)
Game 1: No deathrite shaman or meaningful interaction means I snag game 1.
SB: +1 Pithing Needle, +1 Dread Return +1 Iona -1 Golgari Thug, - 1 Putrid Imp, - Ichorid/Faithless Looting
Game 2: He drops turn 1 DRS while I open on Putrid Imp with 3 Dredgers and a couple of draw spells in hand (not too shabby). However, his turn 2 he goes nuts and ends up with a scavenging ooze and Geas Cradle and eats my entire graveyard leaving me with no resources and him with a gigantic beating Ooze.
Game 3. I mull to 3 and die....

3-1. Wheels might have just fallen off the wagon.

Round 5: Esper Stoneblade Corey Ivy (Top 4)
Game 1: I mull to 4.. and hit nothing relevant. This is just the inconsistency of the deck at work. I don't blame my losses on any particular misplays (though there might have been some), but sometimes you can't string together the correct combination of cards.
Game 2: He opens with double Nihil spellbomb and its curtains for me.

3-2

I drop as my hopes of top 8 are dashed. lol.

[Vlad Teppes]

I'm not dismissing anything yet, not even firestorm main deck.

we need playtesting and results,but I don't think that taking LED is going to do us any good.
I'm still thinking about Street wraith, then I will move my firestorms to main and see how it does.

Also: Street wraith is bonkers main deck, but it make us go DDD a lot, and loose a lot of life (rainbow lands hurts us, coliseum hurts us, wraith hurts us)

EDIT: using firestorm instead of LED main deck saves SB space for some stuff, just saying.

[raikenxy]

I don't think you guys really understand Dredge's place in the metagame, you should be doing everything you can in the MD in order to beat aggro-control and Firestorm gives you a higher win% vs aggro-control than Lion's Eye Diamond does as well as smoother mulligans overall. Even if combo is faster than us, and keep in mind Firestorm eliminates 7 of 11 of Belcher's win conditions and an entire angle of attack from TES and ANT, the archetype itself shouldn't be popular in a metagame where aggro-control is and your win% can be addressed post-board with Unmask or Leylines where our deck gets better vs theirs but their deck doesn't get better vs us.

Reanimator is a lost match up, nothing I have ever done to Dredge has managed to make it a winning match up so I'm willing to concede it as the better graveyard deck in the mirror and the worse graveyard deck in the metagame.

That leaves Show&Tell, and as weak as Firestorm appears vs Show&Tell it's important to remember that it's still an uncounterable discard outlet vs Force of Will, Daze and Spell Pierce and if the opponent understands his role in the match up he should be aggressively countering our outlets if we aren't aggressively discarding his combo pieces in order to leave the draw spells without dredge targets and turn them into tempo sinks.

Now, I'm not saying Firestorm is better than or equivalent to Lion's Eye Diamond vs combo, with the exception of Belcher where you have an overwhelmingly positive match up thanks to the distribution of their win conditions, but it still removes an angle of attack from Storm and increases our clock so it's not a dead card in that match up and the fact that it's uncounterable discard is highly relevant vs Show&Tell. That makes the card serviceable in most of the match ups I can think of, where the main EV is comming from a higher win percentage MD vs aggro-control and additional SB space that can be used vs combo if necessary in order to regain ground in the match up. So you're probably asking yourself why play Firestorm MD if all we're doing is sacrificing EV in the combo match up for EV in the aggro-control match up? Well just look at the distribution of the field and Top 16s in the metagame and you'll see that Deathrite Shaman has a much bigger presence than combo and Deathrite Shaman, go is a much faster, more consistent play than anything combo can do.

So if we go back to the drawing board, I think it's clear where we want to get our overall EV from vs the metagame and that's Firestorm because Rest in Peace is no longer a MD consideration for Miracles and Deathrite Shaman is now the ubiquitous MD hate card of the format. So it makes sense to move Lion's Eye Diamond out, Firestorm in and SB an additional anti-combo card like Leyline of the Void for Reanimator, Hermit Druid and ANT or maybe 4 Griselbrand (along with the 2 Dread Return in the SB) in order to take advantage of Show&Tell's symmetry or increase the clock overall.

There's a lot to be done to improve Dredge's match ups, and contrary to the other Dredge player's posts in this thread I think the metagame is actually improving for us because True Name Nemesis surplanted Tarmogoyf as the omni-present threat from aggro-control and Miracles can't afford to play RIP in the MD anymore with the presence of UWR in the metagame.

You guys can disagree as much as you like, but I haven't seen any of you do anything other than playing more of the same and then bitching about how the metagame is against you - it's basic Darwinism.

I still honestly don't think firestorm in the maindeck is necessary... . We are already favored against aggro-control do to the sheer amount on non interactivity our deck is capable of. The return of esper blade i believe is a great sign for us, as esper control used to be one of my favorite things to play against as their counterspells were absolutely just useless and their board pressure wasn't anything close to terrifying.

Combo is actually not that bad, as LED's allow us to increases our fundamental turn on parity to that of TES and belcher. Our god hand is just as scary as belchers to any deck not playing force of will. We can race combo, always have and that should honestly just be our main plan against them. We have superior disruption in therapy that enables our kill conditions

Reanimator is tough, but it's def not lost. I would say its more or less 60/40 in their favor. But I haven't lost to reanimator since the very first FNM i went to years ago. Cabal therapy and tight plays can easily take games away from them. If they kill u turn two they kill u turn two, they god handed you (as combo decks sometimes do) and theres nothing you can do about it. I advocate flayer of the hatebound in this match up as he will essentially say you better play show and tell or else you die to a big ass grave troll, whether your elesh norn is out or not.

Show and tell is 50/50 as we can race both a griselbrand and don't care about annihilator from emrakul. If they alpha strike u, w.e, they got that game. just pick up the cards and win the next one.

I'm still of the opinion deathrite shaman is not that big of a deal on its own. With tight play it's pretty useless and you opponent will often just timewalk themselves holding it back for it's activation. Deathrite shaman plus force of will is a different story. The only decks i even expect to play that are deathblade which is on the decline, shardless bug which is on the decline, and bug delver... of those i would expect more bug delver decks to surface... i will admit firestorm will be great in that match up. However i still see it as a sideboard card, and have never thought we needed more space in our sideboards for anything. If deathblade starts making a big comback i'll be worried, but i think right now dredge will be in a great spot for a while. Our deck did just top 8 a grand prix lol

[Final Fortune]

@Que, I'm 30, if I had time to go to and win SCGs and Grand Prixs I would, but I don't.

@Raikenxy

I'm willing to agree to disagree based on different metagames, for me Esperblade is dead, RUG is uncommon, UWR is the new deck on the block, Miracles doesn't play MD RIP anymore and BUG is the most popular form of aggro-control with various forms of combo here and there and Jund/Junk are the closest things to aggro I see

I'm sure LED Dredge can still put up numbers, but as far as I'm concerned the format is ran by Deathrite Shaman and I want the bastard dead. If I have to give up ground vs combo in order to gain ground vs aggro-control, I'm 100% ok with that given the distribution of those archetypes in the metagame.

[raikenxy]

@Que, I'm 30, if I had time to go to and win SCGs and Grand Prixs I would, but I don't.

@Raikenxy

I'm willing to agree to disagree based on different metagames, for me Esperblade is dead, RUG is uncommon, UWR is the new deck on the block, Miracles doesn't play MD RIP anymore and BUG is the most popular form of aggro-control with various forms of combo here and there and Jund/Junk are the closest things to aggro I see

I'm sure LED Dredge can still put up numbers, but as far as I'm concerned the format is ran by Deathrite Shaman and I want the bastard dead. If I have to give up ground vs combo in order to gain ground vs aggro-control, I'm 100% ok with that given the distribution of those archetypes in the metagame.

@final fortune

It's all good dude, agreeing to disagree is more then respectable lol.

[raikenxy]

took my list to an fnm tonight and went 3-0-1, intentionally drew the last round with my friend as we wanted to get food and just split some store credit

deathblade: 2-0
Shardless BUG: 2-1
AD Nauseum: 2-1

The list felt good, I got pretty lucky round three as ichorid beats dealt enough damage to the ANT player to make him kill himself with ad nauseum. Street wraith and putrid imp were bonkers against shardless bug.

[Vlad Teppes]

Testing firestorm today was... interesting to say the least.
I cut 4 LEDs to try some firestorms, since I only own 3 Firestorms I used 1 dread return main to compensate.

My local meta allows me to do these stuff, but Idk about you guys.

Who would be a good repleacement for the 4th firestorm?

[Final Fortune]

Testing firestorm today was... interesting to say the least.
I cut 4 LEDs to try some firestorms, since I only own 3 Firestorms I used 1 dread return main to compensate.

My local meta allows me to do these stuff, but Idk about you guys.

Who would be a good repleacement for the 4th firestorm?

My stock list is a page back.

[Dice_Box]

With Shaman, Ooze and Blade decks taking over the format, I can see moving LED's to the side as being a smart choice. Not only that but adding into the deck something that is commonly a 2 of in the side to prominence in the Main I think will have shock value.

Also, Stoneforge is becoming a problem. It's perfectly fine to just leave her be but if your just going to let her pass by, you want to be dame sure you can race. Also take note some people will kill Stoneforge with their own Jitte. A royal pain that.

I like the idea of a fist full of Brand, but If I was going to have any option off SnT, I like that guy that's says we draw at end of turn and their hand side is reduced by 7. Forget it's name sorry.

[cadaver]

Jin-gitaxias, core augur is who you are thinking of my good sir

[Vlad Teppes]

Gitaxias is a little too slow, I think he sucks as a DR target.
We are better of with things that insta-win or locks out the opponent, like griselbrand, flayer, Iona, or elesh norn, Ashen rider is passable

[raikenxy]

Gitaxias is a little too slow, I think he sucks as a DR target.
We are better of with things that insta-win or locks out the opponent, like griselbrand, flayer, Iona, or elesh norn, Ashen rider is passable

agreed, gitaxious was good in reanimator as that deck was able to protect him with counterspells. The fact that he is a mandatory draw seven can actually end up just killing you if had gone off to find him, sure your opponent has no cards in hand... but u also now have no cards in ur library... lol If you prefer the combo route of dread return then the combo has to win immediately or be so overpowering ur opponent can't do anything against it. jin-gitaxious does neither of those.

[Vlad Teppes]

This is the list I will be using this weekend:

3- tarnished citadel
4- City of Brass
4- Gemstone mine
4- Cephalid Coliseum

3- Ichorid
4- Golgari Grave-Troll
4- Stinkweed Imp
4- Golgari Thug
4- Narcomoeba
4- Putrid Imp

3- Firestorm
3- Breakthrough
4- Careful Study
4- Faithless looting
4- Cabal therapy
4- Bridge from Bellow

SIDEBOARD:

1- Breakthrough
1- Wispmare
1- Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
2- Ancient Grudge
2- Dread Return
2- Ashen Ghoul
3- Unmask
3- Chain of Vapor

I'm not really happy about my sideboard, but I think it will do OK, since I mostly board in the grudges and chains on the blind board, and elesh/DR package when I know I'll have to grind my way to victory.
I still have my doubts about going without LED, but I will test it anyway to see how it does.

[Que]

I'm not really happy about my sideboard, but I think it will do OK, since I mostly board in the grudges and chains on the blind board, and elesh/DR package when I know I'll have to grind my way to victory.
I still have my doubts about going without LED, but I will test it anyway to see how it does.

idk bout you, but I personally enjoy running 4x Black Lotus in my Dredge deck. :U