I'll preface this by stating that i know that the following is an utter bastardization of two distinct kinds of decks. I am likely to get some criticism for breaking from the tried & true uses of these cards. But I was compelled by the question: what if you didn't go for a big combo win with the dredge tactic, but rather just pre-filled your graveyard for every delve spell you are about to cast?? Admittedly, I do not know much about the dark arts of dredge, but I imagine this to be a deck that would rely heavily on drawing first and discarding troll or imp, a bit like manaless dredge. phantasmo, putrid, & good ol' cabal therapy help. Probes & Wraiths are there to fill the 'yard as usual and to trigger dredges. Lake of the dead is a little aesthetic choice that can ramp up to get you the extra mile for a latter delve creature. Circling vultures is this deck's Delver of Secrets , maybe not the best card but supportable once we get dredging for several turns consecutively. Stick Gurmag Anglers, Tasigur, and Tombstalker in the early game for the win! (i think it must use all of them in order to have enough to reliable 'go off' with, because there's no hope of real card drawing here.
It has disadvantage of being almost completely unreactive, which is much more of a liability for an aggro deck than a true combo deck. But I think with some modification this low cost deck could at least manage to sling 2-3 big delve creatures very quickly, for whatever that's worth. I want to make this as a deck for my wife who wants to play something mono black, but wouldn't want me to spend the money on say, thoughtseizes, dark confidants, entombs, etc. Please, any advice would be quite welcome
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LegacyHelm LegacyBelcher LegacyCheeri 0 s LegacyManaless Dredge CubeDragons
Its certainly an interesting take on the archetype but I really don't think it would be too successful in a highly developed meta game. Lake of the Dead seems really bad in particular because you lose a land when it enters and it is vulnerable to being hit with wasteland--sacing lands for mana seems like a bad proposition too to be honest. The other thing is I think your deck loses focus--trying to dredge and trying to disrupt the enemy--dredge goes all in and accepts its vulnerability to graveyard hate. Going in half hearted just seems to be taking a huge risk. Dredge gets alot of free creatures with bridge from below or ichorid. I just think your plan to ramp out a 4/5 isn't enough for legacy. Swords to Plowshares wrecks your game--without trample, mother of runes is another huge pain--and that's not even really looking at the standard threat of countermagic. Usually countermagic isn't such a big deal for agro, but when you are working aggressively into filling your graveyard to dredge so you can launch one powerful creature, it becomes alot more like a combo deck than an agro one. I was helping a guy build a budget combo deck that could just win on turn 4 or 5...which is about as fast as burn does. I just don't think without drawing into your therapies, you'd have a huge chance against alot of the decks in legacy. It seems like your gameplan is disrupt them with discard and play big creatures in a mono black--if everything goes according to plan. The closest deck to yours seems to be The Gate. For Reference.
I think you nailed your own deck's weakness when you said, you aren't interactive--about 6 to 8 discard spells is what you usually want. That's a death sentence in legacy unless you blazing fast (Belcher) or non interactive yourself in some way (Burn). Mono black needs discard to interact.
If I had to build it on a budget, I'd probably go with this--
Creatures 4 Gatekeeper of Malakir 4 Vampire Nighthawk 4 Abyssal Persecutor (I think he's honestly really good. Conventional wisdom is he's better than Desecration Demon, though I am not entirely sure myself. 4 Phyrexian Revoker (answers planeswalkers, and a host of other annoying things--could be pithing needle, but having legs lets us swing in) 2 shriekmaw
4 Innocent Blood 4 Duress (or Inquistion to Kozilek if you have them) 4 Hymn to Tourach (we might slip a funeral charm or 2 in here to cast on their turn in here as well--once their hand is empty, you can basically time walk with it by casting it before their mainphase) 2 Loxodon Warhammer (recently reprinted and under dollar--for the price the power level is pretty high--not as good as a Jitte, but 1/30th the price) 4 sign in blood (can be a bad burn spell in a pinch--or budget Dark Confident) 2 geth's verdict
I mean you could run say 4 geth's instead of shriekmaw or vice versa--or if you have diabolic edict, that's nearly as good. If you have something like hero's downfall, that wouldn't go badly into the list either. It is hard to know what you might have in your collection already that's worth playing--and using what you have is usually the key to making a deck on a budget. I avoided cabal therapy, if you have own them already, feel free to make use of them.
With an all swamp list, when I use a major website and optimize the cards, there's nothing in there more than 1 1/2 dollars. With duress/hymns the deck can wreck your opponent's hand. You can make them sac an insane amount of creatures. Percy can finish them off quickly and you can kill him pretty fast yourself when the time comes--you have a potential 12 sac effects and equipment makes any of your creatures a decent threat.
I know that's not entirely what you wanted, but I think it follows the same gameplan (discard to support agro), on a super tight budget. (I clock the whole deck at 32 dollars on TCG low with the assumption you again have nothing. If you even had say hymns, the price goes down a large amount as they are running at 6 bucks for a playset. But you can print proxies and try it out and see if its what you before you buy.
This is basically Lichenstein Delver with a worse version of Delver and a more variable engine to fill your graveyard. While I love Dredge, there are some awkward points trying to integrate it with an aggro shell. A few comments:
1) I guess your goal is to use the Dredge engine as the most efficient way to fill your yard, instead of just using spells like Thought Scour. It's true that Dredge is a more efficient way to fill your yard. However, the most efficient incarnations use Faithless Looting/Careful Study/Breakthrough/LED in conjunction with 12+ dredgers to get several triggers per turn, filling your GY crazy fast. The Phantasmagorian version is designed to play a slower grindy game, dredging only once per turn to dodge graveyard hate but not necessarily fill your GY as quickly. You are basically using a watered down version of the slower Phantasmagorian version, which means you'll be filling your yard even slower. You only have 8 dredgers (they run over 12), which means you won't always have one in the opener to start things off. Moreover, without Dread Return tricks or Faithless Looting-type cards, you basically have no way to Dredge more than once per turn once you've used up Probes and Street Wraiths from the opener. So basically, you're using a slower version of the Dredge engine to fill the GY. Not saying that's wrong, just that I hope you're aware of that. It may still be faster than using Thought Scour and friends though, which may be why you chose it.
2) Dredge sucks at making land drops. So a land like Lake of the Dead is not supportable. And making subsequent land drops to hardcast things is awkward and unlikely. The problem is that you are giving up draw steps to dredge, which means you aren't drawing as many cards as most decks and are less likely to draw lands when running the same % of lands as other decks, making it harder to make subsequent land drops. Dredge doesn't care about that, but you might if you run into disruption and need to hardcast Stinkweed Imp or pay more for a Delve guy to stay in the game. There's also a lag effect when you decide you want lands. You may Dredge the first few turns, then decide you want lands, then have to stop dredging for several turns and take several draw steps, waiting turns until you see that land while losing out on Dredge gas. So yeah, land drops may be awkward.
3) Dredge is full of card disadvantage. Things like discarding 3 cards just to get Phantasmagorian back, Cabal Therapying yourself, and pitching cards to Putrid Imp. Dredge doesn't care about cards, since its "hand" is actually the GY, so these effects all become draw spells for Dredge. Since you still want to cast spells from hand using mana, for you the effects just becomes card disadvantage. They support cheating out your creatures, but you also empty your hand faster without playing as many relevant permanents as other decks.
4) Because of the last point, you're going to quickly run out of gas after the first few turns. You'll basically be able to dredge a few times, use up any cantrips, and Delve out all the fatties in your opener extremely efficiently, emptying your hand. However, to get those dredges you will be skipping your draw steps. That means that if your initial fatty or two get countered/killed, you are left with an empty hand and almost empty graveyard. Then you'll probably have to stop dredging and start trying to draw again. To avoid this situation, you may even want to draw instead of dredge at earlier points to avoid emptying your hand at all. These draw vs dredge decisions can get awkward.
5) Dredge sucks at topdecking. By default, due to all the weird cards in its engine, the probability of topdecking a useful card is really low when you have so many engine cards in the deck. Dredge is designed to not care about that because it doesn't want to draw, but your deck does (because it has no other way to refuel when it runs out of gas, since it needs creatures to cast). Worse, your deck also needs to dredge to make its cards drawn have value (e.g. topdecking Tombstalker with only 2 cards in the GY is not useful). Therefore, you'll end up alternating turns between drawing and dredging to try to draw into another beater while still filling your yard so you can actually cast it. (Effectively, you have to cast Time Walk on the opponent and Twincast it three times). So the deck becomes super awkward at refueling if your first wave of attackers doesn't win you the game.
6) Just to repeat, your deck becomes super awkward at refueling if your first wave of attackers doesn't win you the game. If the wave is stopped, you're way behind in the game as you're behind in cards and mana development and board position. That means that even though this is built under the guise of an aggro deck, it will probably run more like a glass cannon combo deck, as you have built-in card disadvantage and are using an engine to dump your hand and deploy a wave of attackers without much protection or adequate ways to refuel. Glass cannon decks are great when what they deploy threatens to win the game. I've got nothing against them. 4/5s and 5/5s are definitely strong, but I'm not convinced that playing two fatties by turn 3 is necessarily going to win you the game. Therefore, I have to wonder if it's worth falling so far behind in the game for.
Keep in mind the Dredge shell only works when the pilot doesn't care about mana, cards in hand, board development or other normal Magic things. The Dredge engine absolutely fails at playing normal Magic. It's just really good at playing Dredge Magic.
Therefore, I wonder if the Dredge engine is actually a net positive. You might just be better off playing those 12 Delve guys in another shell to fill your graveyard without setting you so far behind in the game.
How does the list test against other decks so far?
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Golgari Grave-Troll
4 Putrid Imp
4 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
4 Gurmag Angler
4 Tombstalker
4 Street Wraith
3 Phantasmagorian
2 Circling Vultures
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Gitaxian Probe
Lands (20)
4 Polluted Delta
4 Bloodstained Mire
8 Swamp
1 Overgrown Tomb
3 Lake of the Dead
I'll preface this by stating that i know that the following is an utter bastardization of two distinct kinds of decks. I am likely to get some criticism for breaking from the tried & true uses of these cards. But I was compelled by the question: what if you didn't go for a big combo win with the dredge tactic, but rather just pre-filled your graveyard for every delve spell you are about to cast?? Admittedly, I do not know much about the dark arts of dredge, but I imagine this to be a deck that would rely heavily on drawing first and discarding troll or imp, a bit like manaless dredge. phantasmo, putrid, & good ol' cabal therapy help. Probes & Wraiths are there to fill the 'yard as usual and to trigger dredges. Lake of the dead is a little aesthetic choice that can ramp up to get you the extra mile for a latter delve creature. Circling vultures is this deck's Delver of Secrets , maybe not the best card but supportable once we get dredging for several turns consecutively. Stick Gurmag Anglers, Tasigur, and Tombstalker in the early game for the win! (i think it must use all of them in order to have enough to reliable 'go off' with, because there's no hope of real card drawing here.
It has disadvantage of being almost completely unreactive, which is much more of a liability for an aggro deck than a true combo deck. But I think with some modification this low cost deck could at least manage to sling 2-3 big delve creatures very quickly, for whatever that's worth. I want to make this as a deck for my wife who wants to play something mono black, but wouldn't want me to spend the money on say, thoughtseizes, dark confidants, entombs, etc. Please, any advice would be quite welcome
Legacy Helm
Legacy Belcher
Legacy Cheeri 0 s
Legacy Manaless Dredge
Cube Dragons
~
I think you nailed your own deck's weakness when you said, you aren't interactive--about 6 to 8 discard spells is what you usually want. That's a death sentence in legacy unless you blazing fast (Belcher) or non interactive yourself in some way (Burn). Mono black needs discard to interact.
If I had to build it on a budget, I'd probably go with this--
4 Misha's Factory/Ghost Quarter/or just more swamps
Creatures
4 Gatekeeper of Malakir
4 Vampire Nighthawk
4 Abyssal Persecutor (I think he's honestly really good. Conventional wisdom is he's better than Desecration Demon, though I am not entirely sure myself.
4 Phyrexian Revoker (answers planeswalkers, and a host of other annoying things--could be pithing needle, but having legs lets us swing in)
2 shriekmaw
4 Duress (or Inquistion to Kozilek if you have them)
4 Hymn to Tourach (we might slip a funeral charm or 2 in here to cast on their turn in here as well--once their hand is empty, you can basically time walk with it by casting it before their mainphase)
2 Loxodon Warhammer (recently reprinted and under dollar--for the price the power level is pretty high--not as good as a Jitte, but 1/30th the price)
4 sign in blood (can be a bad burn spell in a pinch--or budget Dark Confident)
2 geth's verdict
I mean you could run say 4 geth's instead of shriekmaw or vice versa--or if you have diabolic edict, that's nearly as good. If you have something like hero's downfall, that wouldn't go badly into the list either. It is hard to know what you might have in your collection already that's worth playing--and using what you have is usually the key to making a deck on a budget. I avoided cabal therapy, if you have own them already, feel free to make use of them.
With an all swamp list, when I use a major website and optimize the cards, there's nothing in there more than 1 1/2 dollars. With duress/hymns the deck can wreck your opponent's hand. You can make them sac an insane amount of creatures. Percy can finish them off quickly and you can kill him pretty fast yourself when the time comes--you have a potential 12 sac effects and equipment makes any of your creatures a decent threat.
I know that's not entirely what you wanted, but I think it follows the same gameplan (discard to support agro), on a super tight budget. (I clock the whole deck at 32 dollars on TCG low with the assumption you again have nothing. If you even had say hymns, the price goes down a large amount as they are running at 6 bucks for a playset. But you can print proxies and try it out and see if its what you before you buy.
1) I guess your goal is to use the Dredge engine as the most efficient way to fill your yard, instead of just using spells like Thought Scour. It's true that Dredge is a more efficient way to fill your yard. However, the most efficient incarnations use Faithless Looting/Careful Study/Breakthrough/LED in conjunction with 12+ dredgers to get several triggers per turn, filling your GY crazy fast. The Phantasmagorian version is designed to play a slower grindy game, dredging only once per turn to dodge graveyard hate but not necessarily fill your GY as quickly. You are basically using a watered down version of the slower Phantasmagorian version, which means you'll be filling your yard even slower. You only have 8 dredgers (they run over 12), which means you won't always have one in the opener to start things off. Moreover, without Dread Return tricks or Faithless Looting-type cards, you basically have no way to Dredge more than once per turn once you've used up Probes and Street Wraiths from the opener. So basically, you're using a slower version of the Dredge engine to fill the GY. Not saying that's wrong, just that I hope you're aware of that. It may still be faster than using Thought Scour and friends though, which may be why you chose it.
2) Dredge sucks at making land drops. So a land like Lake of the Dead is not supportable. And making subsequent land drops to hardcast things is awkward and unlikely. The problem is that you are giving up draw steps to dredge, which means you aren't drawing as many cards as most decks and are less likely to draw lands when running the same % of lands as other decks, making it harder to make subsequent land drops. Dredge doesn't care about that, but you might if you run into disruption and need to hardcast Stinkweed Imp or pay more for a Delve guy to stay in the game. There's also a lag effect when you decide you want lands. You may Dredge the first few turns, then decide you want lands, then have to stop dredging for several turns and take several draw steps, waiting turns until you see that land while losing out on Dredge gas. So yeah, land drops may be awkward.
3) Dredge is full of card disadvantage. Things like discarding 3 cards just to get Phantasmagorian back, Cabal Therapying yourself, and pitching cards to Putrid Imp. Dredge doesn't care about cards, since its "hand" is actually the GY, so these effects all become draw spells for Dredge. Since you still want to cast spells from hand using mana, for you the effects just becomes card disadvantage. They support cheating out your creatures, but you also empty your hand faster without playing as many relevant permanents as other decks.
4) Because of the last point, you're going to quickly run out of gas after the first few turns. You'll basically be able to dredge a few times, use up any cantrips, and Delve out all the fatties in your opener extremely efficiently, emptying your hand. However, to get those dredges you will be skipping your draw steps. That means that if your initial fatty or two get countered/killed, you are left with an empty hand and almost empty graveyard. Then you'll probably have to stop dredging and start trying to draw again. To avoid this situation, you may even want to draw instead of dredge at earlier points to avoid emptying your hand at all. These draw vs dredge decisions can get awkward.
5) Dredge sucks at topdecking. By default, due to all the weird cards in its engine, the probability of topdecking a useful card is really low when you have so many engine cards in the deck. Dredge is designed to not care about that because it doesn't want to draw, but your deck does (because it has no other way to refuel when it runs out of gas, since it needs creatures to cast). Worse, your deck also needs to dredge to make its cards drawn have value (e.g. topdecking Tombstalker with only 2 cards in the GY is not useful). Therefore, you'll end up alternating turns between drawing and dredging to try to draw into another beater while still filling your yard so you can actually cast it. (Effectively, you have to cast Time Walk on the opponent and Twincast it three times). So the deck becomes super awkward at refueling if your first wave of attackers doesn't win you the game.
6) Just to repeat, your deck becomes super awkward at refueling if your first wave of attackers doesn't win you the game. If the wave is stopped, you're way behind in the game as you're behind in cards and mana development and board position. That means that even though this is built under the guise of an aggro deck, it will probably run more like a glass cannon combo deck, as you have built-in card disadvantage and are using an engine to dump your hand and deploy a wave of attackers without much protection or adequate ways to refuel. Glass cannon decks are great when what they deploy threatens to win the game. I've got nothing against them. 4/5s and 5/5s are definitely strong, but I'm not convinced that playing two fatties by turn 3 is necessarily going to win you the game. Therefore, I have to wonder if it's worth falling so far behind in the game for.
Keep in mind the Dredge shell only works when the pilot doesn't care about mana, cards in hand, board development or other normal Magic things. The Dredge engine absolutely fails at playing normal Magic. It's just really good at playing Dredge Magic.
Therefore, I wonder if the Dredge engine is actually a net positive. You might just be better off playing those 12 Delve guys in another shell to fill your graveyard without setting you so far behind in the game.
How does the list test against other decks so far?