So You Wanna Play Dredge? (Primer V.1.0.)

Casual Aggro BRG (Jund) Combo Dredge

TheLoneDart

Land (17)

• 4x Blackcleave Cliffs
• 4x City of Brass
• 4x Copperline Gorge
• 1x Dakmor Salvage
• 3x Gemstone Mine
• 1x Tendo Ice Bridge

Dredge (8)

• 4x Golgari Grave-Troll
• 4x Stinkweed Imp

Cheat (20)

• 4x Bloodghast
• 4x Bridge from Below
• 4x Ichorid
• 4x Narcomoeba
• 4x Prized Amalgam

Utility (8)

• 3x Cabal Therapy
• 2x Life from the Loam
• 3x Phantasmagorian

Draw (7)

• 3x Burning Inquiry
• 4x Faithless Looting

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So you wanna play dredge? Well then, welcome to my primer - where I aim to help the novice player understand a deck that is one of the coolest and most interesting in all of magic.

Before I start, I'd just like to make a quick disclaimer: dredge can be built a number of ways. Having played dredge in both legacy and modern formats, the deck I am presenting to you is indeed a culmination of both general archetypes. I am building it this way so that readers can see a spread of different cards that impact the deck in each format, instead of being confined to one style. Also, you'll notice this build has only 17 lands - I've done this in order to make more room for spells so that I can cover a broader range of interactions in this primer. A real life, competitive build would likely adjust to add a few more lands, although I've experienced very few problems playing this deck as it's currently built.

Introduction to Dredge

Dredge gets its name after the mechanic dredge, which was first released in Ravnica: City of Guilds. The word dredge means to dig something up from below the surface, which matches perfectly from how the ability plays.

The basic errata of the mechanic says Dredge N - "instead of drawing, you may return this card from your graveyard to hand and instead mill N cards from your library." Basically, what this does is it allows you to get cards into your graveyard at a massively accelerated rate, thereby automatically making grave-based mechanics abusable.

To break this deck down in its most simple way: there are draw/discard spells that allow us the 1. get dredge cards to grave, and 2. dredge them out to mill our library... Non-dredge creatures in the deck are cheated out onto the battlefield en mass through grave-based shenanigans and triggered abilities. From this, we create a massive boardstate to run the opponent over with.

Obviously, the interactions in a deck like this operate in a more complex way than just described so please keep reading for a more in-depth breakdown of each card and its function.

Turn 1 and Turn 2

With dredge decks turn 1 and turn 2 are crucially important to overall success. In order to make sure you're starting the game right, you will need something to the effect of: 1 land, 1 draw/discard spell and 1 dredge card. The point of this is to cast the draw/discard spell, then discarding the dredge card from your hand. At the draw step of Turn 2 you will dredge this card instead of drawing, thus getting the process started.

Please see the custom categories I've made in the decklist so you can see what spells for draw/discard there are and also what cards have dredge.

Underworld Madness

Dredge is such a cool deck because it defies all the regular rules of magic. You get free stuff, creatures enter the battlefield from places that aren't your hand and, when you have a really good hand, the deck produces sooooo many creatures so fast that your whole playgroup will be marveling.

Let's take a quick look at the non-dredge creatures we're using in the deck and how they function in this strategy.

Starting off simple, let's look at Bloodghast. Keeping in mind that this deck revolves around filling the grave just consider that all it takes to get this creature into play is a simple land drop. With 2-3 Bloodghasts in the grave this becomes quite potent.

Now, let's look at something a little more complex: Ichorid. This creature is meant specifically to trigger with another card in the deck, Bridge from Below, which I'll talk about in further depth in a moment. Ichorid requires exiling another black creature at upkeep to receive a 3/1 haste that sacrifices at the beginning of the end step. He's powerful, but he doesn't stay around long.

Now consider Bridge from Below - the card that was mentioned to interact specifically with Ichorid. Basically Ichorid will enter the battlefield and attack, thereafter either dying or sacrificing. What this does is when he (or any other creature for that matter) enters your graveyard you get a 2/2 zombie for each Bridge from Below in your grave.... Now, consider that on turn 3-4, which is quite late in the game for a deck of this speed, you have three Ichorid and three Bridge from Below in your grave, the end result is nine 2/2's... It's a big problem for the opponent and also one of the things that makes this deck such a riot.

Now consider Prized Amalgam. This creature is a freebie if you've had another creature enter the battlefield from your grave this turn. Well, the first two creatures we've talked about, Bloodghast and Ichorid, both trigger this ability. Basically, as you can see, this is now a group effort and we more or less have creatures pouring out of the grave and onto the battlefield waiting to create chaos.

Last, but certainly not least, we have our little jellyfish, Narcomoeba. This card is weird as hell but is yet another freebie for the deck so it's an auto-include. Basically, as you're dredging apart your library these guys will just fly off the top of the deck and onto the battlefield for free. They're nifty, but once again weird as hell. I love them.

Moving things around

Since dredge is a combo deck we need things to be in the right place at the right time. As previously discussed, one of the big ways to do this is to use our draw/discard spells. Beyond this, however, there's some other intricacies that need to be explored. To this end, I would like to re-hash everything from the top down in order to reiterate the important and further explain the function of all spells related to moving things around.

Let's touch back on draw/discard. We have faithless loothing and Burning Inquiry. Looting is ideal to have turn 1 cause you have control of what you're discarding instead of randomly tossing things such as with Inquiry. That said, Burning Inquiry gives us 3 draw triggers for one mana.... Now, let's think about this in terms of dredging. Using a Burning Inquiry more or less allows us to mill about 12-18 cards 90% of the time. This opens the door to more freebies and accelerated graveyard shenanigans. On the other end, Faithless Looting, which, as mentioned, allows us to have more control, also has the Flashback ability, making it doubly useful throughout the game. Both spells are very key in starting the deck and keeping it running throughout the game.

The next card I want to touch on is Phantasmagorian. This card you likely will not see in most dredge builds, but it's something I've grown to love so it's always put into my builds. Basically, this card acts as a way to get more things out of your hand (dredge cards, creatures that you want to cheat out).... I find that sometimes discarding 2 cards with Faithless Looting isn't enough - which is often the case with a really good hand. You have so many items you want to put in your grave so that you can get them out quicker but not way to do so.... case in point for Phantasmagorian. It allows you to not only get those dredge cards in the grave early, but you can then in turn discard it and cycle it back to your hand to get rid of more stuff. I love it and I think you will too.

Lastly here, we have Life from the Loam. This card is often featured in dredge because it bears the ability while also collecting lands from the grave. It's especially important in this deck since there's only 17 lands, often making it hard to get past the first two lands drops. Either way, it's a great card and picks up a lot of slack for the deck in some games.

Well, I hope you got some decent value reading through this list. I will likely add some more commentary to it as time progresses, but for now I think I've covered the jist of the deck and helped explained some of the not-so-easy to understand parts of the deck.

If you like the build or the primer please +1 so other people can see it :)

Date added	5 years
Last updated	5 years
Legality	This deck is Casual legal.
Rarity (main - side)	38 - 0 Rares 11 - 0 Uncommons 11 - 0 Commons
Cards	60
Avg. CMC	2.86
Tokens	Zombie 2/2 B