Pattern Recognition #370 - Dredge

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

12 June 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!


Let's talk about Dredge!

Dredge

Dredge was a one-and-done printing back in Invasion Block and is one of the cards that no one would blink at in a moment give how often it's been reprinted in various other ways in the past twenty years, up to and including Village Rites and let's be honest here, has always been willing to sacrifice to gain. But while it may not look like much, as it is very definitely a lesser version of Opt from the same block, I did see this card see some use in casual and Extended decks where you could cast it early to put a land and an instant into your graveyard to help power-up Tarmogoyf in the early game. Not often, but it was definitely an option that people tried.

But you wall read the title, and you clicked, expecting me to talk about one of the boogie-mechanics of Magic, weren't you?

Well, guess what!

I AM!

Dredge was the Golgari (symbol:GB) Mechanic from the original Ravnica: City of Guilds set, the first in that block. As one of the core concepts of the Golgari was their efforts to maintain the titular Ecumenopolis alongside the Selesnya. They have the unenviable job of maintaining the sewage and waste processing that comes from the sheer amount of people they have had to care for among providing supplementary food supplies and structural reinforcement of the undercity.

Mechanically, this was represented with the Dredge Mechanic. The mechanic reads Dredge N (If you would draw a card, you may instead Mill N cards. If you do, return this card to your hand. Otherwise, draw a card). In terms of flavor, it was the Golgari going through the trash / graveyard to find the good stuff and bringing it back for reuse. Sure, some more stuff would wind up in there in the process, but that's just the cost of doing business, right?

The idea behind the design and the cards were that once they hit the graveyard, if you felt that you could use them again, then you could forgo your card draw for the turn and instead mill some cards to get them back into your hand, ready to be used again!

Now, let me go down some of the Dredge Cards and show you how they worked by design.

First up, Dakmor Salvage. OK, not from Ravnica, but from the subsequent block and set of Future Sight. This is a curiously designed card, except you have to remember that everything in the set was designed as a reference. But before that, it's not that great of a land, really. It just provides one color, and it enters tapped. But the fact that it has a very reasonable Dredge cost of 2? Well, it's purpose was in a way, to help the player recover from Land Destruction, much like Flagstones of Trokair was. If it enters you graveyard, then you can simply Dredge it back to your hand to hwlp you get going again!

But the hilarity and the reference comes from the stat of the article. The card Dredge itself? Allows you to sacrifice a land to pay for it. So sacrifice the Salvage to the Dredge, then Dredge the Salvage back. :)

Darkblast is the only instant with Dredge, and while the effect is still on-curve for cards of this era, the Dredge 3 is a little expensive in my books. However, as it is an Instant, you cast it in your upkeep, Dredge it in the draw step, then cast it again to give something -2/-2, or two creatures -1/-1 until the end of the turn. A cute gimmick, but really, it was more like a draft trick than anything else. If it was Dredge 2 or even 1, I would see more use out of it.

Golgari Brownscale is a common card that gives you two life when you get it back to your hand from the graveyard. Yes, you can Dredge it back, but there are plenty of ways to get it back without needing to utilize that effect. but I did see it used in some lifegain decks back in the day, and the cost of two cards for a blocker and two life? Well, sometimes it would be worth it.

Golgari Thug is a neat recursion effect. However, here's the best part. If there is a boardwipe, and you have the Thug in play, all the creatures that were on the battlefield (under your ownership) are in the graveyard when the trigger has to pick a target. It effectively allows you to 'save' one creature per Thug by putting them on top of your library. I even checked this ruling in the WotC Discord!

Moving on, Grave-Shell Scarab is not a great card by any stretch of the imagination. It's overcosted for the body - a simple 4/4 for an MV of and nothing else worth it in the combat department. What it's really useful for is the cheap card draw you get by sacrificing it. But what's really funny about this card? You sacrifice it to put the ability on the stack. It's in the Graveyard when the ability attempts to resolve. And from there?

You can Dredge it back to your hand in place of the card draw with it's own ability. It's a Self Bounce effect that takes a side-trip through the graveyard! It's hilarious! Thank goodness for the stack, I have no idea where we would be without you.

My personal favorite from the Mechanic is Necroplasm. This little mosnter of a creature is a repeatable boardwipe of the four lowest mana values, and the Dredge to get it back just means you can start the pain-train all over again! On the first turn its in play, it takes out all MV creatures, which in terms of the block, was all the tokens - including all the Saprolings being thrown around. Then it would take out MV, then , then - including itself, which means you can Dredge it on the next turn and do it all over again!

Or you could geet really cheeky, and pop an extra counter onto the creature, skipping over from 2 to 4 +1/+1 counters on it, meaning it will keep going upward and upward, eating each MV in order until it devours the Eldrazi and exceeds all relevant MVs.

Then kill it yourself, and start all over again! Not that I would ever do such a thing!

But while I think those ones deserve some mention, there are two that I skipped over for a reason, and that's because they are the real powerhouses of the mechanic. The first is Life from the Loam. This card is pretty simple on the surface. You can cast it to return three lands from your graveyard to your hand. The victim of a poor Stone Rain? Go and get your Gaea's Cradle back, along with a couple other lands. It's easy as pie to do! And if you want to recast it, why Dredge it back to your hand by milling three, and there may even be more lands in your graveyard now for you to recur!

And sort of Landfall deck loves this card, especially the ones that like to double-dip with their Fetch Lands of various stripes. And if other lands have entered the graveyard that you didn't want there - like someone cast Windfall for example, well, this card will let you get your stuff back, no questions asked!

In fact, this card was so good at reclaiming lands that it even saw pay in Legacy where it could recover Wasteland and get more lands back for cards to be cast with Retrace, or who just needed a card to be discarded as part of its costs. This is a seriously good card, and if your deck cares about lands at all, and it's legal in your format, run it. You won't be disappointed.

The last Dredge card is the biggest one of them all. With Dredge 6, the Golgari Grave-Troll is a 0/0 that enters with a +1/+1 counter for each creature in your graveyard, and you can remove one of those counters to regenerate the creature. This creature was designed to be nearly unkillable, as exile effects weren't really a thing back then. And even if you did manage to kill it, your opponent could simply Dredge it back, milling six cards to put potentially more creatures into the graveyard so when they cast it again, it was simply bigger. I loved comboing it with Cytospawn Shambler, or even Gruul War Plow for the Trample back then as it was just a huge beater that wouldn't stay down!

...

Every word I have just said about how good these cards are, with the exception of Life from the Loam is wrong.

This past week, I asked Mark Rosewter on Blogatog a question about the Storm Scale, and he supplied that in the absence of Storm, then the scale it represents would probably be named the Dredge Scale. You see, the reason for this is simple. No one ever used the Dredge for its intended purpose.

What players very, very quickly discovered was that Dredge was the single more effective method of Self-Mill in the game. MTG.Wiki provides me with The Extended Friggoroid deck that exemplifies how powerful filling your graveyard could get. Read the perfect play-line for the second version of the deck and realize that this was effectively a Turn 2 Win on the power of Golgari Grave-Troll and Stinkweed Imp's high Dredge values.

Aside from Life from the Loam, no one ever played Dredge cards honestly. Dredge allowed you to fill your graveyard far too effectively and because cards in your graveyard are more effective than cards in your deck - you can pick what you want out of your yard better than out of your hand or library, often cheaper and more effectively.

The Grave-Troll was Banned in Modern when it was formed as a way to limit how fast and consistent the deck could get. There was a massive difference between Dredge 6 and Dredge 4 in terms of how far into the deck you could go. It was unbanned in 2015, and then rebanned two years later as it was proving to be too good in the same decks doing the same things it was doing when it was first slapped onto the Banlist.

Then in 2019, for the same crimes, the Grave-Troll was Restricted in Legacy. That being that there can only be one copy of this card in your deck.

Dredge is a fundamentally broken mechanic, one so utterly unable to be fixed that it will never show up in a Standard Legal set again, and will very rarely see very minor instances in Modern legal or Commander/Vintage Legal supplements. The ability to self-mill is something that was very badly mis-understood back in the day, even when all the pieces were in front of the developers at Wizards.

In a way, it was Dredge that finally broke the Graveyard, and made it far more viable and valuable than it ever should be. And part of the legacy of that decision twenty years ago was the reactive proliferation of Graveyard Hate has come about because of the lasting damage that Dredge has done to the game.

We saw Storm come back to Standard before Dredge did. With Stormscale Scion and Ral, Crackling Wit. And self-mill is very firmly in the realm of now. And far less viable and effective for it. Yes, I just called Self-Mill less effective in the color that outright wins with it thanks to Laboratory Maniac and friends! The shadow that Dredge has created and cast over the game lives to this day.

And it will live until Wizards shutters its doors and Magic dies.


Thank you all for watching and reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!

This article is a follow-up to Pattern Recognition #369 - Mana Fixing and You The next article in this series is Pattern Recognition #371 - Eshki DragonBrawler -

Icbrgr says... #1

The strategy that when your new to the game and have it explained to you all you can do is with a slightly confused expression say "okay then..."... and then you come against it and see what it does to you and think it's the greatest ever.

  • Me circa 2010
June 12, 2025 3 p.m.

berryjon says... #2

Dredge as written was pretty simple. Dredge as played had a lot of spinning wheels. So I fully understand your confusion.

June 12, 2025 8:14 p.m.

legendofa says... #3

When I was first (re)learning the game (Portal was a weird set), I got the Golgari Deathcreep and Dimir Intrigues theme decks. The Dimir, of course, had a mill focus. So my introduction to Dredge was basically "Why am I helping my opponent win?" Then someone introduced me to reanimator, then the Time Spiral block introduced me to Dread Return, Bridge from Below, and Narcomoeba, then I was convinced. Then Modern was invented and everything got banned.

June 12, 2025 9:06 p.m.

compacta_d says... #4

Restricted in Vintage. It's unbanned and unrestricted in Legacy (Legacy does not typically get restricted).

and yeah Dredge probably has enough gas to last forever in any format it's legal in. Any further cards made would just get used the same way, increasing the effect by running the highest available numbers.

Fun read!

June 18, 2025 4:34 p.m.

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