Mtg how does manaless dredge work

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. Gitaxian Probe and Street Wraith are incredibly important pieces to that puzzle. The other key cards to get into your graveyard are Bridge from Below and your flashback spells. Bridges will allow you to flood the board out. Getting a couple of Bridges into your graveyard lets your Ichorids create Zombies when you sacrifice them at end of turn, allows you to attack into bigger creatures, and turns your flashback spells into game-winners.

Cabal Therapy is a great tool for creating Zombies off of Bridge from Below and to make sure the coast is clear. A Dread Return on your Balustrade Spy mills your entire deck, returns all of your Narcomoebas , makes sure every Bridge is in your graveyard, and will allow you to continue to go off. Flayer of the Hatebound can end the game immediately, dealing damage directly to your opponent as you bring creatures back from your graveyard onto the battlefield.

How you build your sideboard will dictate how expensive the deck ends up being. Commonly, you see counterspells such as Force of Will , which can spike the price a bit. Either way, this is a competitive Legacy deck that you can definitely build on the cheap! Skip to content. 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. While we can only return it to our hand once, making the second trigger fizzle, discarding three cards is the cost of the ability, which makes it impossible to respond to. Stifle and other cards that counter activated abilities do not prevent us from discarding almost our entire hand. Phantasmagorian is also very useful for putting our dredgers back into our graveyard from our hand after they dredge, continuing our self-mill engine.

It is the most powerful play in our deck because it acts like a Fastbond for putting cards into the graveyard, and while it does not win the game by itself, and puts us farther ahead in our gameplan than our opponent is likely to be at on turn one. Now that we know how we put cards into our graveyard, we need to discuss what the payoff for milling ourselves to pieces is.

We run a whopping sixteen creatures that can put themselves into play from the graveyard. Having a critical density of these creatures is important because of every Dredge deck's inherent weakness—variance. We cannot control the position of every card in our deck, and this causes us to whiff on dredges where we hit only utility spells but no action. Manaless Dredge seeks to decrease this variance by dedicating every card to either being profitable in the graveyard or making us dredge as much as possible, and our threat package illustrates this perfectly.

We will start with the most complex of these creatures: Nether Shadow. Upon further examination, this is easier to achieve thanks to how dredge works. Yet another quirk of the mechanic is that, while all of the cards are revealed at the same time, we choose what order those cards enter the graveyard in.

For example, if we dredge Stinkweed Imp , and we reveal a two creatures, Nether Shadow, and two more creatures, we can put Shadow into the bin first, and than put the other four creatures on top of it, thus stacking our yard for the trigger. As we will see, we want as many threats as possible.

Even if its body is not relevant, we have plenty of ways to sacrifice it for value. Plus, there is something rather thrilling about playing the little ghost that could all the way from Alpha. The massive amount of triggers in this deck can make it easy to miss Nether Shadow's trigger.

In situations like this I recommend getting a specific printing of certain cards to help make them more visible in your deck. For Nether Shadow, most printings are white border, and this is wonderful because it makes them easy to spot in the graveyard, so all we have to look for in our upkeep is the white border to let us know we have a Shadow.

Our second creature with haste is Ichorid. Exiling a black creature from our graveyard is not a problem in our deck. As long as we continue dredging, we will have creatures to feed our Ichorids.

Generally speaking, we can exile our excess dredgers and utility cards such as Street Wraith with little to no downside, and in a pinch the less efficient Nether Shadow. While we do need extra creatures to fuel Ichorid, its self-sacrifice trigger actually synergizes with Bridge From Below. A three-power beater is also a very effective clock in Legacy, and in multiples it quickly provides enormous advantage.

When acquiring copies, I recommend Eternal Masters foils or the original printing from Torment. The foils are distinct and should be easy to find in your graveyard while also only adding few dollars to the deck's cost. The original print has a small tombstone in the upper lefthand corner , which is also easy to find. Our next two playsets are creatures that we do not have pay a cost for, but rather come into play by just playing the deck. Narcomoeba Future Sight only needs to be milled to come into play, which gives us a free creature.

Even if the body seems underwhelming, it is free sacrifice fodder for Cabal Therapy. Notably, Narcomoeba does not come directly into play from the library; it still enters the graveyard first.

This gives our opponent a chance to act before it enters play, and a Tormod's Crypt cracked in response to the trigger does neuter our jellyfish. I would nab the Future Sight printing to make them easier to spot while dredging. Besides assisting us in our beatdown strategy, Narcomoeba is an important element to our combo kill.

We will reach that in a bit, but we have a few more cards to talk about first. Our next card is a recent gift to Dredge players in all formats: Prized Amalgam. If this was not reason enough to play Amalgam, we can resurrect it after it dies thanks to Ichorid and Nether Shadow , two threats that return to the battlefield by themselves!

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.