A Dredgeful Strategy

If any of you out there play modern, legacy, or even vintage, there will be one deck that frightens you to your core. Anyone who has faced it, is forever changed by it by the experience. It’s the boggy man of the multiverse, a dark force that crawls out of the graveyard to tear your life total apart. For the few of you out there willing to step over to the dark side, it presents a force that few can resist. No, it not Boogles of which I speak, but rather the chilling power of Dredge.

Seeing a dredge deck going off is, in truth, a beautiful and terrifying thing to behold, like a lion hunting a gazelle. Even though I don’t play such a strategy, many of the gamers in my play groups partake in this play style, and its power is hard to argue with.

So, what would you say if I told you the power of dredge could be yours, and not modern, legacy, or even vintage, but in standard.

 

Dimir if you Dare

Ok, full disclosure, this isn’t a true dredge deck, as it doesn’t have any dredge cards, but the style of the deck is very similar to many current dredge strategies, in that we load up our graveyard, and thus it as an extension of our hand. From there, we can “cast” creatures at instant speed and bring with it a sway of zombies to over run our opponents.

So how do we do this? Well first things first, let’s load up the graveyard. Luckily, we have quite a few ways to do this, including Contingency Plan, Vessel of Paramnesia, Liliana’s Inignation, and Corpse Churn.  All of these cards help our strategy, putting three to five cards into the “bin”, and the Indignation can also damage our opponent. It’s important to note that we should rarely, if ever, use the Contingency Plan or Corpse Churn to find an answer, but rather focus on putting all the cards into the graveyard.

What do want to put into the graveyard? The answer, as many Scrapheap Scrounger, Prized Amalgam and Eternal Scourge‘s as possible. This little combo is the primary way we win our games. We use the Scrounger’s ability to exile Eternal Scourge from the gaveyard and return to the battlefield, bringing with it our Prized Amalgams. If done right, you can bait your opponent into attacking with all their creatures, and when their shields are lowered, bring back the team from the yard. And don’t worry about the poor little Scourge, as he will soon join his friends, thanks to its own ability to be cast from exile. Even if your opponent is able to sweep the board, you can just repeat the process over and over again.

We also want to include a way to slow any aggression aimed our way. A playset of Grasp of Darkness and Liliana, the Last Hope will provide this, and in the case of Liliana, a second win condition in the form of her ultimate. We also want to have more ways of playing creatures from our graveyard, so a playset of Haunted Dead is a must. Three power divided among two creatures, one of which has evasion, is a nice way to round out the deck. 

Planewalkers (3)
Liliana, the Last Hope

Creature (17)
Scrapheap Scrounger
Prized Amalgam
Eternal Scourge
Haunted Dead
Distended Mindbender

Sorcery  (6)
Contingency Plan
Liliana's Indignation
Instant (8)
Grasp of Darkness
Corpse Churn

Other (4)
Vessel of Paramnesia

Land (22)
Choked Estuary
Sunken Hollow
Swamp
Island

 

Sideboard (15)
Negate
Ruinous Path
Ceremonious Rejection
Summary Dismissal
Mindwrack Demon
Void Shatter
Painful Truths

 

So what do you think? Is this a strategy you can get behind? Maybe you could put your own spin on it and try it out for yourself. Remember, fortune favors the bold.

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