MTG Salvation

So I took out my manaless deck recently, with the idea of running it at the local on legacy night. But I didn't.
(sigh) It's too slow. Gitaxian Probe leaving has meant the blue version with Force of Will & W-Rider is now officially dead for me, the blue count is too low. Without Probe the deck is slower than it was before.
For me, whether you decide to run with Giant or Flayer doesn't matter much, as winning with a Dread Return isn't too common.

Is it just me, or has the banning of DRS resulted in more people running terminal hate like Rest In peace, Leyline etc.?
My local has been taking gravehate very seriously lately....

Would it be possible to run some Madness Archtype cards with Manaless Dredge or would LED Dredge be better with Madness or is Madness COMPLETELY unplayable?

Anyone else building the deck with Hogaak?

Wow. I take a long break from MTG and come back to find Gitaxian Probe is banned. I'm fairly certain that card was unique in what it did so I doubt there is a reasonable direct replacement and if there was WoTC would have probably banned it already for the same reasons Probe got the ban hammer.

How viable are Urza's Bauble and Mishra's Bauble as pseudo replacements? I've done a search and there are no other free blue cards that let you draw a card. I was hoping to find some other blue card to at least be able to keep FoW in there but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen.

Quote from n0bunga »

I’ve noticed a lot of recent decks go for 3 Whirlpool Riders and no Spies. Any reason why?

I think blue variants with FoW prefer Rider to have more blue pitch fuel. Rider also has the advantage, like Griselbrand, of doing a more controlled self-mill rather than a total self-mill. I've heard of decks using Spy -> Flayer getting blown out in various ways when they try to go for Dread Return and then dying of their own mill. It's too risky. I'd rather mill all but 3 or 4 cards, this almost always gives enough gas for a lethal Flayer + GGT, and also leaves enough zombie meat on board to win more slowly if they can answer Dread Return. Rider, Griselbrand, and similar cards that let you draw 7 allow you to typically mill 40-50 in one shot, and by choosing which dredgers to use you can often get the library down to exactly as many remaining cards as you want.

Quote from n0bunga »

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/legacy-manaless-dredge-58790#paper

This was what I found. Not too sure about Lotleth Giant over Flayer of the Hatebound, either...

I think Giant looks good on the surface (only requires one DR, is black for Ichorid), but has flaws. It becomes neutered if you ever get hit by a big crypt, whereas Flayer can still kill just based on zombie token and ichorid generation. And it can't hit creatures, which could be important. idk, it may be worth testing but really I'm not super impressed. By the time we get to DR anything we've probably swung a few times with zombies. Off a big enough self mill, we'll have Prized Amalgams in yard (if not, get them there with some Therapies). Three Amalgams in yard when you DR Flayer is 13 damage total by end step. All four is 17, which kills if you've connected even once with an Ichorid. Who even needs GGT Troll to kill with Flayer?? The nature of a Dredge Deck is to continuously spit out bodies. Flayer adds an additional clock to that, giving them all pseudo-haste, and its Undying means they have to answer it twice if their first answer isn't exile.

Quote from rowanalpha »

I'm going to try Sphinx of Foresight in place of Git probe. I think the free scry 3 is worth trying as a replacement. Anyone try this yet?

That looks like a cool idea but I honestly don't know. I think I'm happier with the baubles. Sculpting my starting hand gives me a slightly better shot at a good dredger and a Street Wraith, but the eventual bauble draw feels better (even though we can't get the dredge off it until t3 at the earliest). Ultimately I think it's better to trust your deck to provide and just focus on dredging more, which means more free draw.

Quote from ajfirecracker »

Quote from thesedaiv »

Would it be possible to run some Madness Archtype cards with Manaless Dredge or would LED Dredge be better with Madness or is Madness COMPLETELY unplayable?

Madness as a mechanic has good synergy but there's not really any madness cards that are worthwhile. The only free ones are Basking Rootwalla and Call to the Netherworld, and neither of those are really where it's at. (Although, Call to the Netherworld grabbing Street Wraith or maybe 1x Demon of Death's Gate isn't the worst)

This is basically my take here. Call to the Netherworld gets back a Street Wraith (everything else is useless in hand), if you have one in your yard to get - but why not just run Baubles instead of Calls and have admittedly weak, slow draw effects #5-8? And I tried Rootwalla for a while when I was putting the deck together and didn't have my Ichorids and it's just terrible. It's a 1/1, no evasion, and never comes back after it's killed the first time. The only way to get it in your yard is to pitch to discard, therapy yourself (oof), or pitch to 'Gorian. No thanks.

Madness is just not very useful in Dredge because the bulk of the cards in our yard don't get there via discard. The only good madness enabler we have is Phantasmagorian and we have to also be using its pitches to:

• get Dredgers back into the yard
• stack creatures on top of Nether Shadows to keep them coming back
• pitch black creatures for Ichorid food
• get DR and its reanimation targets into the yard if they wind up trapped in hand

'Gorian is already overloaded with all these things to do and sometimes we can't get them all done in the same turn. Adding on "enabling cards that would otherwise be utterly useless" is too much to ask of it.

Quote from mulkers »

Anyone else building the deck with Hogaak?

I saw this guy and at first got really, really excited. he's huge, trample is pseudo evasion, he's manaless, and he can come back over and over from the yard. I worry though that he turns on Path to Exile and bounce type removal too much though. He doesn't seem to fit in with the swarm approach or the combo approach of the deck. The average power of creatures in our deck is around 2 (zombie tokens, with Shadows and Narcos below and Ichorids and Amalgams above), tapping down 7 2/2's to make a non-hasty 8/8 seems... slow? we can keep casting him (again, as long as he's not bounced / exiled), sure, but time is a resource too and every turn we waste tapping down to make a fatty that gets shot is a turn we're letting the opponent interact with us and play (ew) fair Magic. Yuck! I want my opponent to be stuck spending their removal on creatures I got for free.

I'll definitely test it (he's cheap right now) but I'm not expecting it to be amazing (him being cheap this long after release is a telling point there). Nice thing though is we can play a whole playset of him because the extras can always feed Ichorid.

Edit: a few things just occurred to me about Hogaak that make him look better than my original comment, I'll add them here:

• He's easier to cast than I thought because a lot of cards that can go to our yard stay there uselessly. Dead Chancellors and Narcomoebas are useless in every way except Shadow stacking and GGT bodycount. Third and fourth Phantasmagorians, and all cycled Wraiths, are useful only as Ichorid food (and Shadow stacking). Whirlpool Riders past the first aren't generally useful since the most common hate cards will take them all anyway (surgical, RiP, crypt, etc). If you can see that on their turn the opponent is going to force you to lose your Bridge(s), might as well Delve 'em. And in sideboarded games your non-creature spells are all obviously Delve trash once they're used up.
• He can be cast on turn 2 (if Modern can do it, so can we gosh darnit!) and matches up favorably to Tarmogoyf, who is difficult for the oppo to get up to 8/9 in this m/u(oppo has to get a dead 'walker and you can just refuse to attack walkers). If Tarmogoyf is worth spending turn two to make it's hard to argue Hogaak isn't also worth spending turn two to make, and he can be a good blocker for Goyf (since we are typically on the draw). If nothing else we can offer to race.
• Being able to be cast from hand and not just reanimated from yard can catch opponents off guard. They're used to operating with pretty good information about our options on our next turn (one of the few handicaps we face playing almost entirely from a face-up zone). And they're used to our hand (post Wraiths) being nothing but trapped dredgers we're trying to discard. In midgame when the most important decisions are happening, we probably have 18-22 in yard. With an average dredge of 5, our next draw gives us +5 "cards" to play with so the oppo is already seeing 4/5ths of our "hand". Some surprises are possible, yes, like flipping into Narco(s)+Amalgam(s), or assembling the pieces of DR+Flayer all at once. But often it's just more of the same incremental advantage. Hogaak coming out of the hand can be a surprise, and it's good to have one or two of those. (Some might say that the clever opponent will remember our Dredge and Gorian pickups. But many hands can never discard down to zero and wind up with chaff like Chancellors and stranded Narcomoebas sitting around. I've gone plenty of pre-Hogaak games holding cards that were essentially blanks that I never got around to pitching a single time and the opponent would never have been able to know what they were (other than by counting copies in my yard and making educated guesses). Hogaak's mere existence forces the opponent to factor in the possibility that that one unknown card in our hand might be an actual live card.
• Extra Hogaaks can be delved to Hogaak, obviously. I feel pretty stupid for not noticing that especially after I spent a whole Standard delving Tasigurs for Tasigur.

I still don't like Delve a ton in this deck. I like being able to rely on Shadows coming back turn after turn. I like feeding my Ichorids. I don't like increasing my vulnerability to permission, especially with spells that require permanent sacrifice of resources! But, the pro's are enough to definitely push me to order a playset and start my testing.

Quote from Rignes »

Wow. I take a long break from MTG and come back to find Gitaxian Probe is banned. I'm fairly certain that card was unique in what it did so I doubt there is a reasonable direct replacement and if there was WoTC would have probably banned it already for the same reasons Probe got the ban hammer.

How viable are Urza's Bauble and Mishra's Bauble as pseudo replacements? I've done a search and there are no other free blue cards that let you draw a card. I was hoping to find some other blue card to at least be able to keep FoW in there but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen.

Well obviously they are terrible compared to Probe. We can't use them t1 for any reason ever, or we miss our all important discard step pitch. So the earliest we get a dredge off them is the oppo's turn 3. And of course we no longer get to see our oppo's first eight cards, instead we only get to see one of them. I was running Baubles but I've been very depressed by how much the deck has slowed down without those explosive starts enabled by having 8 fast draw spells. I'm actually thinking of having those slots be my Hogaak test slots and just accept the slowdown and try to jam more threats onto the board in midgame.