So how do people feel about the concept of not side boarding answers for hate that people like Feldman propose? His logic seems pretty sound.
It's an old article, but the hate we face since it was written hasn't changed much.Originally Posted by Voldaren
I've never tried Revellark in LED-dredge. Anyone else ever run it?
He's about where I feel in most cases, but I differ on a few points.
There's no point siding in much if you don't need to. I very rarely side in more than 5 cards, and when I do it's usually against a deck I may have a hard time beating (like Miracles, Storm etc.).
I tried Reveillark and it is FAR too situational to be considered... but the one time everything aligned, it was awesome. I only ever side-in cards if the deck is running cold and I see hate coming. If I'm running hot or feel my opponent didn't pay the dredge tax: fearless baby. When siding-in cards, I tend to bring one answer as opposed to answers and hardly ever side-in more than 3 cards. Additionally, I may swap the mainboard target with something relevant to the match (Iona vs Elves for example). My 2 cents!
I've been playing a ton of leagues lately with a purely reactive sideboard and been putting up some good results. Right now I'm 22-3 across the five leagues I've done. I think the reactive plan is the way to go, at least with the current online metagame. While it's a fairly open field, I'm still running into a fair amount of DRS, Cage and RiP.
I'm playing quadlazor with the 2 Putrid/2 Wraith set up, and -1 Breakthrough +1 DR, and my sideboard is:
3 Lotus Petal
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Firestorm
1 Mana Confluence
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Dread Return
2 Chain of Vapor
1 Ray of Revelation
I don't have any play-by-plays, but I can look at replays if people want some details on matches, here are my results:
League #1 - 5-0
Rd 1 - BUG Control - W - 2-1
Rd 2 - Infect - W - 2-0
Rd 3 - Miracles - W - 2-0
Rd 4 - Lands - W - 2-1
Rd 5 - Miracles - W - 2-0
League #2 - 5-0
Rd 1 - Belcher - W - 2-1
Rd 2 - U/R Delver - W - 2-0
Rd 3 - Elves - W - 2-1
Rd 4 - 4C Mentor - W - 2-0
Rd 5 - 4C Pyromancer - W - 2-1
League #3 - 4-1
Rd 1 - TES - W - 2-1
Rd 2 - Elves - L - 0-2
Rd 3 - Dredge - W - 2-1
Rd 4 - Burn - W - 2-1
Rd 5 - RUG Delver - W - 2-1
League #4 - 4-1
Rd 1 - Eldrazi - W - 2-1
Rd 2 - BUG Control - W - 2-0
Rd 3 - Reanimator - L - 1-2
Rd 4 - Burn - W - 2-0
Rd 5 - Storm - W - 2-1
League #5 - 4-1
Rd 1 - Death & Taxes - W - 2-1
Rd 2 - Burn - W - 2-0
Rd 3 - Mono-G Post - L - 0-2
Rd 4 - Miracles - W - 2-0
Rd 5 - Eldrazi - W - 2-0
I'm still on the fence, but am leaning towards sticking with the Fearless plan. I started playing Dredge as Fearless, then decided to try reactive SB hate. I haven't been impressed.
There are too many stars that have to align for it to work. They have to have GY hate to bring in, and find it, and you must have the reactive hate in your hand to respond to it. It dilutes your engine, and also makes choosing to mulligan more difficult. 'Should I toss a good hand because it doesn't have Nature's Claim, for something they may not even have in their hand?' I would rather take my chances with Cabal Therapy, and hope for the best.
If they find that one copy of Rest in Peace, and play it on T2? Bless their heart.
love it!
main deck list? thanks
"You either die a Onesto-Player, or live long enough to see yourself become a Dredger"
If we've got sideboard space, not running Nature's Claim or Chain is a very bad idea.
Too many times an opponent's dropped T1 Leyline or has hard-countered our opening looting spells and dropped T1 Grafdigger's. In no way is it a freak occurence for someone to mulligan into their hate cards, and we can't assume they won't have 4 pieces of graveyard hate (especially if they're running a non-optimal list and "JUST HATE DREDGE"). We can't play as though we won't see decks that slay us, and even if they're not that great, graveyard hate is pretty hideously pushed for its cost and losing is losing.
I feel like while people are generally playing only 2-3 pieces of hate, the ones that they are playing are game enders if we go the fearless route. If I'm not mistaken, the article was also written before DRS & RiP were printed, which brought a whole new face to what we have to go up against.
Ideally, the changes you make to the main deck should either be shaving, which dilutes your percentages within a margin of error, or taking out pieces that will help shore up your matchup. For example, taking out LED/Breakthroughs against FoW decks to reduce your chances of getting blown out, while shoring yourself up against cards like Cage, DRS and RiP. Mulligans should always be done based on the strength of your current hand, and your expectation of being able to perform based on the hate you expect the opponent to be playing. Part of sideboarding effectively is understanding what decks play what strategies and why, and playing Dredge to it's maximum effectiveness requires you to have a pretty good understanding of the metagame. Anti-hate making mulliganing decisions more intricate shouldn't have any effect on your choice to play anti-hate.
You should be getting most of your game 1s, so you should be mulliganing second in a fair amount of game 2s. You can get a ton of information on whether to mulligan deeper or if you can keep a solid hand without anti-hate just based on how your opponent decides to keep or mulligan. If they snap keep, and you have a solid hand but no recourse for a hate piece, mulligan. If they waffle a bit before keeping, they're most likely banking on their hand being good enough without hate to do well, and you can keep.
I did a small analysis of the last 3 days worth of league results, just to see what kind of anti-dredge cards people are playing and in what numbers.
24 Decks - ~2.75 hate pieces/deck
Crypt - 4
Leyline - 3
Scooze - 3
RiP - 8
Containment Priest - 5
Faerie Macabre - 5
Nihil Spellbomb - 4
Relic of Prog. - 9
Surgical Extraction - 11
Graf Cage - 13
DRS - 28 (not included in pieces/deck)
DRS is pretty rampant online, accounting for around 30% of the metagame (admittedly skewed since mtggoldfish only looks at decks that perform, but from experience there are a significant percent of decks playing 4 mainboard). He's generally paired with some extra hate out of the board, and while we can definitely outpace a DRS in certain games, in others he's able to slow us down enough for the opponent to do their thing, and is awful to face in multiples.
This list also doesn't account for cards like Green Sun's Zenith or Enlightened Tutor, which effectively up the amount of hate cards people are playing.
All in all, I'd rather win games because I was proactive, understood the metagame, and sideboarded effectively than lose games because "oh well, they did a thing."
So based on that analysis, what kinds of anti-hate should folks run online? Seems like 3-4 Firestorm and 3-4 Natures Claim, but that doesn't cover all the hate (Extirpate/Extraction).
Question on Firestorm, say X = 4 and you are targeting the opposing player and 3 of their creatures. If that player kills or bounces one of his targeted creatures, does your whole spell fizzle or just the portion that was targeting that creature?
I'm pretty sure a spell is only countered if it has exactly zero legal targets on resolution. If I'm wrong, by all means let me know.
Extraction's the silver bullet against us (again, dredge-hate is hideously undercosted). Firestorm seems pretty good, but I'd run a full quad if you're running it at all.
One of the big problems with our deck is that if a spell doesn't have flashback, we can't assume we'll ever get the chance to play it. (For that reason I'm not running PImps; they're the worst one-drop we can play and we don't want to play them just to fuel Ichorids.) If we don't open with Firestorm in hand, we shouldn't count on drawing into it later. So I wouldn't consider it to be essential. Either we hit all the right benchmarks and win really quickly or Deathrite will blow us out quickly enough that we can't afford to bide our time.
If we're facing something like RiP or Leyline (neither of which clocks us on its own), biding our time and conserving our dredges is a good plan and Nature's Claim/Chain of Vapor is a lot more likely to be castable. But Deathrite doesn't give us that luxury.
Not sure how I feel about Abrupt Decay because I haven't tested it in the newly Eldrazi-ridden format yet. A quick glance says we're strongly favored, but a Chalice on 1 would be a real problem, and I don't know how much graveyard hate their deck is going to start fielding once they realize how bad their matchup is. I'm inclined to say that we should run a mix of Decays and Nature's Claims, perhaps with a couple of Chains. Not sure about Ancient Grudge or Ray of Revelation; Ray might be a tad better because we can cast it in response to the RiP trigger to burn out the enchantment, but that doesn't save our graveyard.
I don't know; I take a pretty different attitude from that of the previous posters. We can't assume our opponents WON'T just mulligan into whatever 0-to-2-costed hate card they have that'll totally shut us down. We're playing a very, very direct and inflexible combo to which answers have been printed at a premium for any deck that wants to run them, so for someone playing Miracles to just hope they can push through with a hand of land, land, SDT, Counterbalance, Force, Force, Daze is pretty bush-league.
The good news is that we don't really need much in our sideboard, and often we can function without one or two of the "essential" pieces of our combo. Next to three Lotus Petals, one or two extra reanimation targets, and at least four art/ench removers, everything else I'm running is totally flexible. I've run anything from Abrupt Decays to Mindbreak Traps.
Ok, yeah, I'm with you on the whole not being able to count on casting from the hand thing.
Flashing back Ancient Grudge gets around Chalice at 1, but that leaves a hole where enchantment removal would go. Of course Ray would cover that. Memory's Journey gives you flashback-able answers to extraction effects and DRS/Scooze activations.
Seems hard to get an optimal mix out of those.
If you guys are wanting to guy fearless, why not just go the Painter Servant transformation sideboard?
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle".
- Albert Einstein
Feldman posted an update in November 2014, after cards like Deathrite Shaman and Rest in Peace were printed. He continued to advocate for a Fearless approach.If I'm not mistaken, the article was also written before DRS & RiP were printed, which brought a whole new face to what we have to go up against.
http://www.starcitygames.com/article...ew-Jersey.html
You assume people who prefer Fearless don't understand metagames. They're not mutually exclusive.All in all, I'd rather win games because I was proactive, understood the metagame, and sideboarded effectively than lose games because "oh well, they did a thing."
Hi guys, I always played a SB without lotus and decay (main list all 4x -1break +1 DR) and i want try it.., with a SB like this what do you side in/out vs tier deck?(miracle, delver,D&T etc.)
3x firestorm
3x lotus
2x decay
1x ancient grudge
1x wispmare
2x ingot
1x DR
1x iona
1x elesh
make sense play 3x lotus petal whitout decay (3x nature's claim) only for broken start (or play around daze/pierce)?
@sorry for my terrible english η_η
For what it's worth, I've played this deck for the past three years with excellent results and I can count on one hand how many times a card like natures claim has won me the game. The games I've won have involved fast starts or I've negated Drs activations (usually via street wraith). Coverage proves this deck wins with explosive starts, not reacting to cards that once resolved nearly impend a loss. I get it though, i hate nothing more than a turn one cage.
I think that you're right that just going for broke is usually the best plan. I don't think it's a good idea to rock up without any answers to the cards that straight up KO us, though, even if we're only running those answers for game 3.
I have much less experience than you do, but in roughly a third of the game 2s/3s I've played, my opponent has snap-mulliganed down to fewer than five cards in order to find an answer.
I don't think we need to run many pieces of removal for dredge-hate, but I think it's a pretty good idea to bring them along in the 75. At this point I'd just run a turbo package (Petals), a couple of reanimator targets, and the rest either added removal or Mindbreak Trap.
I'm thinking of running 3x Phantasmagorian in the sideboard in case of Chalice on 1, which seems to be all the rage these days, probably replacing Mindbreak Trap.
Unless All Spells returns to take its rightful vengeance against a format full of stompy.
Turbo from the outset or bring in the petals from SB for G2/3?
Last edited by Zooligan; 02-26-2016 at 12:33 PM.
Short answer, I think it depends on what we're facing. Personally I don't like running Petals in game 1 because we shouldn't really need the speed boost and it forces us to take out cards I don't want to cut. I've always been a proponent of running quads of as many engine pieces as possible (and doubles/singles of Dread Return and its targets) for consistency's sake, regardless of whether it's game 1. Sure, the fourth Ichorid and Thug are the least useful pieces of the combo, but they're still pieces of the combo, unlike PImp, Wraith, Dread Return, reanimation targets, Petals, removal, or whatever else. If I feel like we really need to board in a lot of things, I'd cut the fourth copies of a couple of things, but I don't like to do it unless it's really necessary.
If the opponent's likely to mull into Leyline, Cage, or RiP in game 2 (assuming we won game 1) I'd recommend running hate cards instead. If they're on the play (which is pretty likely if they get to choose), I think it's a lot more important to find an answer to their hate instead of just going faster. After all, if they're on the play, we're already on the back foot in terms of speed. I think there's a case to be made for bringing in Petals and Abrupt Decays against people who aren't likely to be running Leyline. I haven't tested it yet (haven't played Dredge at a tournament in a month or so) but it feels like a good plan if our opponent has a means to counter spells.
For game 3, if we're on the play again, I think the best strategy is to just go for broke. Turbodredging when we're on the play is a great strategy, but it's something we need to remember the opponent is likely to answer in game 2 if they've got hate. In game 3 it's less likely to be a problem because they don't get to go first, and I find that changing out cards between games 2 and 3 is a good way to keep our opponents guessing. If we start with a pretty orthodox dredge plan in game 1, they might not expect to see Petals in game 3.
With that having been said, I still think that in postboard games it's important to keep anti-hate at the ready. Nothing hurts as much as drawing a turn-1-able hand and having the opponent open with Leyline.
What I'm most worried about facing at the moment is Chalice, primarily because it's The New Thing and a lot of people are likely to be playing it. It doesn't shut us down, but it puts us in a really awkward position if we're forced to draw-go against a clock. My gut was to take out Careful Studies and replace them with Phantasmagorians or Abrupt Decays and Petals for game 2. Or maybe a mix, and take out some Lootings and LEDs. We'll run a bit more slowly, but we don't want to find ourselves in a situation in which we can't play cards because they opened with a land and a thing. And favored as we are against Eldrazi, I don't think it's as great a matchup as a lot of people might, especially given that they're starting to experiment with Rest in Peace.
So what's everyone been boarding in and boarding out against Chalice decks lately? I'm interested to hear from people whose opponents also mulligan to 4 or something just in order to hate us out. There's no way I'm the only one who's had that happen, and I don't feel like fearless is a strategy that'll work against such plays.
[EDIT: Forget what I was saying about Phantasmagorian. The more I goldfish it the less I feel like it does what we would want. I'm a bit tied in a knot at this point about artifacts that shut us down; can't decide whether we'll get run over with only a few Decays and Nature's Claims/Grudges or whether I'm just building it up to be a bigger threat than it really is.]
Last edited by Ronald Deuce; 02-26-2016 at 04:28 PM.
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