Legacy Manaless Dredge

So finally I decided to dive into the giant ocean that is the Legacy format. I wanted a good playable deck that wasn’t going to cost an arm and a leg to build. To be fair, I already have a reasonable number of staples, but unless I was going with some sort of wonky BUG – excuse me, “Sultai” – creation, I just wasn’t going to get there. So I went looking for the cheapest realistic options.

As a general rule, in almost every format Monored Burn is one of the best decks to build on a budget. It wins a lot and there’s always enough cards to make it playable. But I wanted something a little more interesting. I love the idea of being able to attack for Many Lots of Damages (TM), but Burn just wasn’t what I felt like doing. On the other hand, I found I already owned at least a third of a Dredge deck quite by happenstance, and Dredge is definitely an Interesting Deck (TM). And Manaless Dredge decks tend to be cheaper since they don’t run lands, let alone Lion’s Eye Diamonds, just extra Dredgers, Phantasmagorians, and Balustrade Spy/Griselbrand instead.

In about a week and a half I will be leaving to head to Grand Prix: New Jersey, which is expected to be a Very Large Legacy Tournament Indeed (TM). Fortunately, I found out from Tyler Priemer that there would be a Legacy GPT on Sunday November 2, so I got some tips from him for adapting Juha Tolvanen’s list from a recent SCG Open where he placed third. By the time I was done, this is the list I registered:

MANALESS ICHORID

4 Golgari Grave-Troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Golgari Thug
3 Shambling Shell

4 Street Wraith
4 Gitaxian Probe
2 Mishra’s Bauble
3 Griselbrand
4 Phantasmagorian

4 Cabal Therapy
2 Faerie Macabre

4 Narcomoeba
4 Ichorid
4 Nether Shadow
4 Bridge from Below

4 Dread Return
1 Flame-Kin Zealot
1 Flayer of the Hatebound

SIDEBOARD

4 Leyline of the Void
4 Unmask
3 Sickening Shoal
1 Contagion
2 Ashen Rider
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

First, a few words about Dredge in general. Dredge is a graveyard-based deck that, at the end of the day, wants to cast Dread Return on something to win the game. Various builds over the years have used Sutured Ghoul, Flame-Kin Zealot, Griselbrand, Elesh Norn, Iona, and a host of other targets. These can be divided into two groups: large creatures that disrupt your opponent’s game plan, and creatures designed to win the game fast. Dredge, however, never plans on paying full price for Dread Return, instead opting to flash it back for the low cost of three creatures. As a result, it tends to play a lot of creatures that can enter the battlefield for incredibly cheap. For example, Nether Shadow simply has to be in your graveyard with three creatures on top of it on your upkeep, whereas Narcomoeba just has to get milled into your graveyard to come out. Bridge from Below makes additional tokens when you sacrifice a nontoken creature, and then Ichorid comes onto the battlefield on your upkeep if you exile a black creature from your graveyard. Ichorid also dies at the end of turn, netting you a token if you have Bridge in the graveyard. And Cabal Therapy helps you get started since it allows you to sacrifice only a single creature, netting you tokens from Bridges.

Then there’s the fact this is a Manaless Dredge deck. This means there’s no lands in it, and typically also means no way to make mana whatsoever. As a result, you have to run other things to get started. A typical Dredge deck will have some way to draw and discard cards (sometimes both on the same card, sometimes a card does one but not the other) so it can get cards into the graveyard to start its shenanigans. Many of the most common ones cost mana, which is a luxury Manaless Dredge can’t afford. Therefore it looks elsewhere:

First of all, Dredge wants to be on the draw. This means that if it keeps a hand of 7, on its first turn it will have 8 cards. At the end of turn, it will have to discard a card due to hand size. This means discarding a Dredger is a good way to get started. Better, discard Phantasmagorian, a creature from Planar Chaos that didn’t see play until it got remembered a couple years ago when Manaless Dredge came out of hiding in Legacy. Its key ability is an activated ability that reads “Discard three cards: Return Phantasmagorian from your graveyard to your hand.”

Additionally, Manaless runs Street Wraith, Gitaxian Probe, and even occasionally Mishra’s Bauble as manaless ways to draw – I mean, DREDGE – extra cards. A typical Dredge deck can play 10-12 Dredgers because it has ways to draw into them easier; Manaless Dredge typically run 15-17, touching on Darkblast or Greater Mossdog for the 17th.

Then there’s this list in particular. I started with a Balustrade Spy list: four Spy, one Blightsteel Colossus, and two Flayer of the Hatebound. After some discussions with Tyler over Facebook, the Spies and BSC were cut for a triad of Griselbrand. Griselbrand lets you combo off just as easily and doesn’t require an extra card in your deck “just in case” such as Colossus or Progenitus. I also didn’t have a second Flayer as earlier lists I had seen only had one. That gave me three slots to play with. I had replaced the second Flayer with a Flame-Kin Zealot as that allows easier wins in certain circumstances, for example having a Bridge in the bin, enough creatures to sacrifice to Dread Return with a couple left over, and a Flayer means swinging for at least 16 damage. A lot of decks seem to deal a lot of damage to themselves as well, between fetches, Gitaxian Probe, Dark Confidant, Force of Will, Surgical Extraction (faced that in one match), and so forth, such that it didn’t take long for Griselbrand + Flame-Kin Zealot to finish the job just attacking.

That left me two extra slots in the maindeck. Tyler suggested Faerie Macabre for the two slots, and even though most of the time they were just Ichorid food, in one game having one allowed me to win.

The sideboard was a little more fun to play with. The Leylines were almost a necessity but never made it into the main. I feel like two Ashen Riders may have been too many; one may have been sufficient. Again, they never came in. Elesh Norn, on the other hand, came in quite often, but not as much as Unmasks, which more than once I had wished were Mindbreak Traps instead. Then the discussion of the 3/1 split of Sickening Shoal over Contagion. The primary difference is that Contagion is good for hitting more than one small beastie whereas Shoal can blow up a Rather Large Beastie (TM), since you can pitch an extra Phantasmagorian or Griselbrand to give a creature -7/-7 or -8/-8. I hear that will kill most things pretty dead. 🙂

As for the matches:

Round 1 I faced Ryan playing a blue-red Delver deck with Young Pyromancer in it. As commonly happens with Manaless Dredge, I won game 1 and proceded to lose games 2 and 3 because cards like Grafdigger’s Cage are really hard to interact with. I do believe game 2 of this match was where my opponent mulliganed down to three cards and a no-land hand, praying to Richard Garfield that his turn 1 Gitaxian Probe would get him a land , and it did, letting him drop Cage on turn 1.

Round 2 I was up against Steve and this one ended up 1-1-1, the third game not completing in extra turns. I’d sided out the Flame-Kin Zealot and if I had that instead of Flayer of the Hatebound I could have turned that into a win instead of a tie, because FKZ gives the ability to win *that turn* with only a single Dread Return – something Flayer can’t do. I’m relatively certain he was on Sultai though.

Round 3 I face Ethan and managed to beat him in two games. It seems that reanimating Griselbrand and Dredging into Flayer of the Hatebound + Golgari Grave-Troll + the other Dread Returns you need is enough to win the game, even if you still have half your deck left over. Who knew?

Round 4 was against Michael who handed me another loss, though this was a bit more enjoyable. He Stormed out on me, spilling out 10 Goblins in one turn fairly quickly game 2, sacrificing one to Cabal Therapy. After the second attack putting me at 2, I realized I had no way to win the next turn, so I cast Gitaxian Probe.. paying two life and putting me to 0. He was, however, happy that I had enough Goblin tokens with me for the games! Game 3 he made 14 Goblins and I was deader than an unanimated Ichorid.

Round 5 was the last round, and I feel bad for how I won the first game. Franz seemed a good guy and he got a game loss because it turned out he had too many cards in his sideboard. He found this out when he cast Doomsday and it wasn’t in the maindeck, where it should be. Game 2, on the other hand, I had a feeling the graveyard was going to be relevant, and managed to hold onto a Faerie Macabre for quite a few turns that he didn’t know I had. Finally he cast Doomsday to set up a pile, which would end in Predicting a Laboratory Maniac was next, milling that, drawing two cards emptying his library, then Unearth it into play and attempt to draw a card with Sensei’s Divining Top for the win. In response to the Unearth, though, I pitched the Faerie – maindeck, remember! – exiling the Maniac and the Nihil Spellbomb and gaining me a win.

All in all it was a fun outing and I learned a few things about Manaless Dredge and about Legacy in general. Let’s see what happens when I hit New Jersey in under two weeks for the Grand Prix!