Manaless dredge how does it work

From there, you can start to go crazy. The worst hands will discard one of the many dredge creatures. Golgari Grave-Troll is the best of the bunch thanks to its high dredge number. Dredging for 6 simply gives you access to more spells. Discarding any of these will allow you to dredge during your draw step, and even if you miss completely on that, your worst-case scenario would be to just discard the dredge card again.

Your preferred start is Phantasmagorian. This creature allows you to discard 3 cards to return it from your graveyard to your hand. You can actually stack this trigger to make sure you can discard 6 cards if you have lots of awesome stuff in your hand that you would prefer to have in your graveyard. There are only a few cards in the deck that are better in hand than in the bin, so this is a useful tool.

Some of the best creatures to dredge into your graveyard are the ones that you can get back for free. Narcomoeba is a big part of the Vintage dredge engine, as dredging 1 into your graveyard gives you a creature at 0 cost. Nether Shadow and Ichorid are additional tools that come back once your graveyard starts filling up. By bringing back creatures, you also have access to Prized Amalgams to continue growing your army.

But now there's a cheap rogue strategy that preys on current top decks revolving around Wrenn and Six and Oko. Learn how to build and pilot Manaless Dredge and what makes it good today! I wanted to play with all available cards and I loved the older cards the most.

Format veterans told me not to buy into Legacy as prices had become unbearable. But this version doesn't need the luxurious and powerful Lion's Eye Diamond and no other cards from the reserved list either, specifically no dual lands, because it doesn't contain any lands or sources of mana at all!

First of all, forget everything you've learned about Magic when you try to understand this deck and learn its ways. We don't play lands, we don't produce mana, we don't even need to cast or resolve spells to win a game. Also, we never want to take the first turn and we absolutely never take a mulligan, no matter how bad our hand is.

There are opponents like fair midrange and control decks that we almost beat every time we play against them, and then there are other strategies we can't hope to beat ever if we face them. I've played my fair share of different Constructed formats and decks, but never did I see a deck that has more extreme matchups than Manaless Dredge. All those quirks work together, and in order to make you understand what I'm talking about, let me explain what the deck is trying to do. We want to be on the draw in every game we play.

Never choose to play first as that simply means our opponent is getting a free Timewalk. The reason for drawing first is we want to end our turn with eight cards in hand. Then we discard a card with the dredge keyword or—even better— Phantasmagorian , which can discard almost our whole hand on the spot without being vulnerable to some means of disruption. From there on, we use dredge to fill our graveyard further, a process ideally sped up by cycling Street Wraith.

Most of the cards put into our graveyard have some ability that works from the grave: some flashback, a lot of triggers that return creatures to the battlefield, produce Zombie tokens, discard our opponents' hand, gain life, or simply end the game out of nowhere. Most of this can't even be stopped by traditional interaction such as counter spells or removal, and our deck doesn't run out of resources as long as we have access to our graveyard.

There are some games where Manaless Dredge produces a limited number of creatures and wins a fair fight through attacking and blocking backed up by Cabal Therapy disruption and direct damage plus life gain from Creeping Chill. However, this deck also features a combo kill that can end the game as early as turn two.

All you need is three creatures on the battlefield and Dread Return alongside Balustrade Spy in your graveyard. Returning the Vampire to the battlefield will dump your complete library into the graveyard. This generates another bunch of creatures—all remaining Narcomoeba s to begin with, which Bridge from Below turns into multiple Zombie tokens when we flash back Therapy.

Then, a second Dread Return returning a lethal Lotleth Giant should seal the deal. Keep in mind that, if this combo fizzles, because the damage dealt is not enough, or because the Giant isn't able to enter the battlefield, you will probably lose the game as you can't draw or dredge from an empty library.

Therefore, always try to make sure the coast is clear with Cabal Therapy before going off. The combo isn't essential to the deck. In fact, I'm often boarding out large parts of it to make room for important sideboard cards. This mostly applies to matchups where you'll win eventually and where speed isn't as important as consistency and interaction. Prized Amalgam gives us a resilient threat, something that keeps coming back to wreck havoc on our opponent's life total.

For specific printings, it only has one, but it is also one of the few multicolor cards in this deck. Search your graveyard for multicolored cards whenever you return a creature to play. It is also critical to understand that this card has two triggers—one when a creature comes into play from the graveyard, and a second on the end step. It is essential to understand how triggers work in any Dredge deck, and I want to further reinforce that MTGO is an excellent tool for learning how to play Dredge because it performs all the triggers for you, guaranteeing that they will not be missed.

While not a threat by itself, once our next card gets going it creates an insurmountable horde of zombies. Bridge from Below is one of the scariest cards to have in our graveyard. With a single Bridge in our graveyard, we can go toe-to-toe with many grindy decks.

Once we get multiples, however, it starts getting out of hand. Letting an Ichorid sacrifice itself and than putting three Zombies into play is one of the most amazing feelings in Magic. However, we sometimes have to be careful about how we attack. All it takes is one of our opponent's creatures dying to exile all of our Bridges from our graveyard. This clause leads to some hilarious situations, such as our opponent Abrupt Decay ing their own Baleful Strix!

Whenever a nontoken creature goes to the graveyard from play, check for Bridge from Below in the graveyard. To keep our engine running smoothly, we run a few utility cards that serve various purposes.

Keep in mind that these are typically only useful when they are in our opening hand. If they are not there, do not plan on them being very relevant in the match. Again, we almost never mulligan, so these cards fill roles that are great to have, but not a necessity. We have eight cyclers—four Gitaxian Probe and four Street Wraith.

Both of these are used to generate extra dredges in a single turn, or they dig through our deck to find our first dredger. Each of these cards, while accomplishing the same goal, also have key differences that let them fill other roles. Street Wraith is a black creature that we can feed to Ichorid , and we can cycle it to stack another creature on top of Nether Shadow. Additionally, we can cycle at instant speed; this can be abused in response to targeted graveyard hate like Deathrite Shaman and Faerie Macabre.

In contrast, Gitaxian Probe is sorcery, so we cannot use it to save a dredger at a moment's notice. Additionally, we actually cast Probe—our opponent can counter it, cutting us off from another Dredge. On the upside, Probe does more than just dumping cards in the bin. Seeing our opponent's hand gives us extra information for planning our turns ahead.

It also synergizes with Cabal Therapy , our only form of interaction in the maindeck. Speaking of Therapy , we run a playset. Sacrificing a creature is easily accomplished in our deck, and allows us to get some value from Ichorid in the post-combat main phase. Usually, we expend our Therapy on cards we simply cannot beat. These are typically hate cards or creatures too large for us to handle.

Keep in mind that while most Therapy decks get two shots per copy, we cannot cast it outside of flashback. This means we only get one cast per copy. We typically are not concerned with cards such as Brainstorm or other cantrips.

Most removal spells will be cast in response to Therapy, and we can try to hit cards like Force of Will or Daze if we need to. Another layer to Cabal Therapy is that we do not name the card until it resolves. If our opponent asks us what we are naming, that means it resolved; they cannot respond to it if they asked the question.

We do have to give our opponent a chance to respond, and we cannot name a card on cast to prevent a response. They are entitled to priority, so do not be afraid to slow it down if you must. To aid our disruption package, we run a trio of Chancellor of the Annex.

As long as we have one in our opening seven, we force our opponent to play off-curve for the first turn or give us a free counterspell. Additionally, it throws off early graveyard hate in post-sideboard games. It is possible to go up to four copies, but it requires cutting another utility card to make space.

While we do not need this card in hand to play the deck, the chance of having free disruption is too good to pass up. Our last utility card is a singleton Ashen Rider. We can Dread Return it into play if we need to remove troublesome permanent, such as Jace, the Mind Sculptor. It is also excellent against Show and Tell and Reanimator decks with Exhume because we get to exile whatever they put in to play.

It is just another fantastic card to play in case we come across troublesome cards, and shores up our lack of interaction. Our last cards are for a combo that can win the game out of no where.

There is some variance among decklists as to how many copies of each combo piece to play. This list is lighter on said pieces, but you could easily include more if you so choose. In order to set up the kill, we need two cards in our deck—the aforementioned Dread Return and Balustrade Spy. Dread Return is pretty self-explanatory; we can sacrifice three creatures with no issue, and we may even get a few zombies from Bridge from Below in the process.

What we should really focus on is Balustrade Spy. The milling ability is irrelevant to our opponent. After all, what is milling a few of their cards going to do? Well, we are not exactly targeting our opponent. When we Dread Return a Balustrade Spy, we target ourselves with the mill trigger. Because we do not run any lands, we flip our entire library into our graveyard! In the process of inverting our library, we hopefully mill a few Narcomoeba s and Bridges.

Our next step is to immediately flashback another Dread Return , this time targeting Flayer of the Hatebound. At this point, we should have Flayer and a horde of the undead thanks to Bridge from Below. This will hit our opponent for far more than the required 20 damage to kill our opponent. While we are performing the combo, it is crucial that the opponent cannot interact with us.

Once we reanimate Balustrade Spy , we either have to kill our opponent or lose to decking ourselves. Sacrificing the Spy to Cabal Therapy will clear the way for a win, assuming we name correctly. At this stage of the game, I would name Force of Will or Daze against a blue deck and Swords to Plowshares against white-based strategies.

Some Dragon Strategies use Faerie Macabre , and remember that if they let you name a card they cannot respond. Once we know the coast is clear, we can finish off our opponent. If we have Cabal Therapies in the bin before casting Dread Return, I would cast them before attempting the combo due to how fragile it is.

If they counter the last Dread Return for Golgari Grave-Troll , we can still attempt to win on our upkeep by putting as many Ichorid s and Nether Shadow s into play as possible. Keep in mind, however, that Spy is not dredging—we cannot put the cards in our graveyard in any order, they must remain in the order they are milled in.