to Dredge or to Human
Modern forum
Posted on Jan. 21, 2019, 10:44 a.m. by InnerFlame
I recently have gotten back into magic after being away for about a year and a half and am looking for a new deck to play. I already have spirits and am looking at adding Humans, or Dredge.
I know I would like both and am looking for these 3 things in a deck:
- Resilient
- Will get better over time
- Good against Jund, Tron, and Shadow
If you all could give me some advice on which direction I should go, I'd really appreciate it.
Based on your three criteria, i think Humans would be a better choice. Here's why, broken down by what you want:
-
Resilient- Humans is one of the most resilient decks out there right now. You have a lot of choices to include and ways to protect your creatures. Meddling Mage , Reflector Mage , and Kitesail Freebooter are amazing creatures that slow down or stop your opponent. Add in the fact that the mana base for humans can cast pretty much every card in the deck without trouble and you get resilience. Dredge, on the other hand, is very susceptible to graveyard hate. While dredge has much more of a combo aspect and can easily win game one, especially when people aren't prepared for it, it becomes weaker after sideboarding when opponents bring in their hate cards.
-
Will get better over time- Let's face it, WOTC thinks that dredge was a huge mistake. They rarely make cards to support it. The latest additions were Cathartic Reunion , Insolent Neonate , and Prized Amalgam . WOTC does love humans, as they are the main creature found in the game. You're going to get new humans printed every set and some of those might be good.
-
Good against Jund, Tron, and Shadow- This one is more of a toss-up, but I think that humans is probably better off against these three. The three creatures I mentioned in the first section help protect against the removal that all three of these decks play. Furthermore, all three are prone to graveyard hate out of the sideboard and humans doesn't need to worry about that as much.
So, in conclusion, based on your criteria and the statements above, I believe that humans would be a better choice for you.
January 21, 2019 1:05 p.m.
coltron518 You're right. I haven't played, played against, or seen dredge played since GRN came out so I forgot that it got that new toy. Even with that, I still think that humans is the better choice.
January 21, 2019 7:47 p.m.
InnerFlame says... #7
I had the same thought but was just going to let it slide haha
January 21, 2019 8:01 p.m.
coltron518 says... #8
just be aware that Blood Moon can completely wreck humans.
January 21, 2019 8:57 p.m.
APPLE01DOJ says... #9
IMO Spirits is the best of those 3 options. In your situation I'd build humans since if you own spirits you already own the money cards, Cavern & Thalia.
January 22, 2019 12:01 a.m.
wallisface says... #10
imo i'd be going with Dredge - considering you already have Spirits, Dredge feels like a more distinctly different deck than that of Humans, which shares a lot of similarities with Spirits.
I used to have both a Humans (albeit not 5-colour) as well as a Dredge deck, and ended up just dismantling the Humans because it just wasn't particularly fun for me - so I guess you need to factor in which deck will give you the most enjoyment playing also.
In terms of your 3 criteria: 1 -Resilient: Dredge will always be the more fragile of the two due to virtually every competitive deck ever including some form of graveyard hate in their sideboard (if not main). All the Arclight Phoenix nonsense probably only increases the quantity of hate cards in the meta right now. But Dredge, despite this, has managed to remain a competitive nightmare for people to face. And in that it poses an interesting puzzle as far as figuring out how to hose the stuff people will be bringing to hose you. So still fairly resilient really, just expect a lot of hate cards. Humans obviously get a much easier time, but all it takes is a board-wipe for them to be in a struggling position. Overall i'd say there's far less cards/decks that hose them though, and in general they're probably more resilient.
2 -Will get better over time: It's hard to say. Wizards are obviously very scared of making Dredge too strong, and aren't trying to build cards to strengthen it. Despite this, we've seen new toys for Dredge in almost every recent set. The great thing is that whatever set gets released, there'll always be some graveyard nonsense to look forward to, though you can probably only expect a card (or if you're lucky two) per set to be worth considering for anything. Humans will have tons of differing cards printed, because it's pretty hard for Wizards not to. However i'm convinced the viable/competitive quantities human-cards printed going forwards is going to drop. They'll start using other creature types for particularly string cards imo (conspiracists could argue this has already started looking at some of the pushed humanoid-looking-but-not-actually-human cards in ravnica). I don't think Wizards want to break Modern, and probably consider these aspects when choosing creature typings... now that Humans are a thing competitively, we may see them lower the amount of good human cards they print. Or not, who knows.
3 -Good against Jund, Tron, and Shadow: I can't give too much insight into how Humans pair up against these decks, as my human deck wasn't the full 5-colour variant and was missing a lot of the stronger control pieces. I can say how Dredge fairs though. Jund I would say is almost an insta-win. If they have a way to bin your grave it's an issue, but usually the biggest threat is Scavenging Ooze. The rest of their deck is bad card against you though. Lili just lets you move cards from your hand to your grave-hand, and a lot of their kill spells are worthless when you're bringing everyone back. Dredge probably has advantage against both Tron and Shadow, though more narrowly, in that it can race either one of them and potentially even end the game before they get going (obviously you need to be a bit careful gambling with Shadow). With Creeping Chill being a thing now, you can quite happily just charge in guns-blazing and secure a win pretty quickly. Tron is probably the most iffy matchup, but it really depends on whether they can disrupt your grave long enough to get started.
January 22, 2019 12:28 a.m.
SynergyBuild says... #11
Knight of Autumn and Deputy of Detention are examples of wizards making what, by name and abilities easily could have been humans, but were made something else.
January 22, 2019 10:51 a.m.
InnerFlame says... #12
SynergyBuild I don’t know if I would say that about Knight of Autumn and Deputy of Detention . As far as D-dude goes, U/W has most of its “creatures that do stuff” as Sphinx or the Veldaken. And as far as knight goes, sonic is composed of mostly elves, dryads, and elementals.
Sure, they could have been humans, but anything can really be humans as they don’t necessarily represent a guild. I think wizards just went with the creatures that represented the guilds for the abilities the guild has.
Flooremoji says... #2
I think the real question is, how resiliant to hate do you want your deck to be? 5-C Hummans will get better faster, but dredge will still get better. Just if you don't want to get blown out by R.I.P. that's my opinion anyway.
January 21, 2019 12:54 p.m.