aww1979 explaining a dredge deck with examples...

[aww1979]

Ok, well somebody asked about this in the tendrils thread, so I'll try to explain a dredge deck. I'm not quite as good with it, but I practiced up a bit and I think I'm ready to give a decent explanation. I'll write the commentary as I go, to avoid any bias by knowing how things turn out.

Firstly, the deck I built:

;dredgetest
;
;#oldgames
;
;27/01/2010
;1
;4th Edition
;

.705 4 Bridge From Below
.398 4 Bazaar of Baghdad
.681 4 Narcomoeba
.700 4 Dread Return*
.691 4 Ichorid
.711 4 Serum Powder
.684 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
.678 4 Golgari Thug
.680 4 Stinkweed Imp
.1967 4 Life from the Loam
.675 3 Flame-Kin Zealot
.654 4 Leyline of the Void
.682 4 Unmask
.666 4 Cabal Therapy
.1531 1 Angel of Despair
.171 4 Nether Shadow

If you haven't unlocked Leyline of the Void or Serum Powder, I'd use 4x Dryad Arbor, a 4th Flame-Kin Zealot, and maybe 3x Crop Rotation or Force of Will or Pact of Negation or something.

The basic premise of the deck is 1) Get as many cards in your graveyard as possible, 2) Put creatures into your graveyard to make zombies off Bridge from Below, 3) Dread Return a Flame-Kin Zealot to haste your zombies and attack with them all.

The deck is stronger in manalink than in real life, because in manalink, counterspells don't work on flashbacked spells. In real life, you can bet your life someone's going to try and counter your Dread Return or other key spells.

The deck isn't really all that faster than most type 1 decks, but its main advantages are 1) the combo is fairly hard to stop and 2) the deck doesn't cost more to insure than your car (though this is a nonissue in manalink)

The reason for the sole Angel of Despair is to Dread Return him in case the opponent gets something ugly like Moat or Propaganda before your combo works.

I'll also play against my normal gauntlet, just to keep the uncertainty of what the AI has higher, as opposed to 'oh its the goblin deck, I know his entire list' in challenge mode. With 1535 playdecks as of this time, uncertainty is much higher.

Here goes game one...

[aww1979]

Game one was just me watching the AI goldfish me in about five turns :p Not much to see here, other than an epic fail. If that happens again, I'll mention here that I lost without getting a bazaar, but I won't bother posting any details, since it's a waste of time and you can't learn anything from it. (besides why I wouldn't play dredge in a tournament :p)

I'll set the rest of the pics to be in *.bmp format so that they upload faster; I must have missed that the first time. Still, it was only about 3.5 Mb.

edit: Ok, looks like jpg is actually smaller than bmp, by a lot :p I don't know how I forgot that... anyway, resaved game 2 as jpg and upped it. Won the game easily due to having a bazaar and facing a really stupid deck.

edit: Game 3 was a win, too. AI got another stupid deck. Based on the hand I saw with cabal therapy, it was probably something really old, since it had only microprose cards in it.

[aww1979]

Game 4 faced no opposition, either. Pretty much like games two and three...

Game 5 was an easy win, too. The last turn I saw with therapy the same junk he had before, plus another island and a braingeyser, so there was no opposition.

Off to take a break for awhile. I might do a couple more games later tonight.

edit: Game 6. Based on the cabal therapy, this was probably the best deck I faced, but it was still over in three turns.

[aww1979]

Game 7 went well, and was another win. For the curious, the turn I won, the cabal therapy showed the two lands I knew it had (from an earlier therapy) and a vampiric tutor and a braingeyser, so I'd guess the deck was some sort of academy deck that never got off the ground, though with that hand, it could have gotten any card in the deck, since it had access to 6 mana, 5 of it any colour :p Still, tutor and geyser for at least one leaves at most two mana of any colour, and not even balance would have saved it. Probably nothing would have, anyway, but it didnt even try.

Game 8 started horribly. As you will see by the end, not only could the AI have seriously slowed me down, it might even have been able to *win* with what it got, depending on which turn it drew one particular card. Given that it had such a hand in a 499 card monowhite deck, it is truly a crime that it did not capitalize on the chance.

One more I think is all I can take of dredge... :p Mulled to 6 and got a bazaar, so it'll at least have something to report.

Game 9 went smoothly, but I'm pretty tired of playing dredge, and so it is the last one in this series.

Other than where noted in the commentary, I don't think I made any play mistakes, but feel free to point them out if I did. The more likely source of a mistake on my part is in the decklist itself. In particular, I am wishing I had put in a fourth Flame-Kin Zealot... that's what I get for looking at dredge netdecks beforehand to make sure I didn't miss anything; most of them ran less than four.

[jatill]

The credo for playing dredge is "mulligan until you get a Bazaar". Literally. If you have 2 cards and no Bazaar, mulligan! This deck should always either mulligan to oblivion (20% of the time), or win by turn 3.

[aww1979]

Yeah, that's about the sum of it. Stupid mulligan rule...

The deck works really well, when it works, but it is too vulnerable to either not getting a bazaar or certain types of disruption, like Leyline of the Void, Echoing Truth, (on zombie token) or any means of putting a creature in graveyard. (unless the dredge deck got a leyline in its opening hand) Bad things can also happen if dread return is countered, but you could recover from that, since you'd still have a bunch of zombies for next turn.

[grinnin]

Oh man I'm so glad you put this up. I finally sat down and tried to figure out dredge today and I've now re-beat the first two challenges with one as practice. It seems like a really simple and powerful combo, but also a little boring (mainly because there are fairly few decisions to make, other than 'how many times to I redredge this Flame Kin- How big do I need my zombies to really be?')

Thanks a lot for putting this up, Aww!

[grinnin]

Oh- is anyone else noticing a bug when you flashback the 4th dredge return?

[aww1979]

Did you get something like 'not enough room to add a card?' If you got that, it isn't actually Dread Return causing the problem, it is the dozens of 'flamekin zealot' effects on all your zombies. It's why in one of my examples I said not to play more zealots than necessary to be sure you won. The problem isn't even the zealot itself, it's just the engine can't handle more than a certain number of effects/cards out at once.

[aww1979]

Oh man I'm so glad you put this up. I finally sat down and tried to figure out dredge today and I've now re-beat the first two challenges with one as practice. It seems like a really simple and powerful combo, but also a little boring (mainly because there are fairly few decisions to make, other than 'how many times to I redredge this Flame Kin- How big do I need my zombies to really be?')

Thanks a lot for putting this up, Aww!

Yeah, I find dredge to be quite boring, too. Other than for a few of the challenges, I never play it. Once you figure it out, it's not very hard, though.

Just be sure you read -all- the cards and don't be like me. When Jatill coded the dredge cards in, I didn't read Bridge from Below close enough to see that it said 'creature from play put in grave' and not 'creature put in grave'. As a result, my first dredge deck was a bit 'different' than most, and completely failed because it lacked key components I didn't think I needed.