As a result they may not understand the nuances of the matchup after sideboarding-simply mulliganing to a hate card isn’t enough to beat you. The matchup game one is so one-sided that most decks have to dedicate at least half of their sideboard slots to beat you in games two and three.Ī few decks are favored against Dredge in game one, which I’ll cover more in depth next week when I talk about matchups.Īnother strength lies in the fact people do not like to test against Dredge. Your game plan is more degenerate than most, and a majority of the time other decks cannot interact with it. The biggest reason to play this deck is that it is heavily favored in game one against most of the format. These synergies allow you to produce a board presence while disrupting the opponent until you eventually kill them by attacking with creatures and tokens. The rest of your deck is cards that synergize with the graveyard: flashback spells, creatures that reanimate themselves, etc. Vintage Dredge is based around the eponymous mechanic from the original Ravnica block, which lets you “draw” the dredge card from your graveyard by milling a certain number of cards and skipping a draw from your library. Next week I'll cover matchup analysis and sideboarding. Today I'm going to cover the basics of the deck and individual card choices. I played Dredge in my second tournament, which I won-since then I have played Dredge almost exclusively in Vintage. I did pretty poorly, but was determined to continue playing the format. I got the opportunity to experience the majesty of the Vintage format in 2010, when I played a Gush list in my first Vintage tournament. Menendian's report about playing Storm in a large tournament was captivating and exciting, and he decided he had to experience all these insane plays Stephen described. After reading it he was determined to learn Vintage. One of the things that got him interested in competitive Magic was a tournament report by Stephen Menendian. Scott Fielder has been playing Magic since the original Ravnica block.

Laboratory maniac in manaless dredge