News: Duel Decks- Izzet vs Golgari Decklists Revealed!

The problem with dredge is twofold. First, it has limited interactivity. This is an increasingly important factor for Wizards, and its a word you’ll see with frequency come up in their writings on the game on the mothership. Interactivity denotes the degree to which your opponent is relevant to your plans. A perfect example of a non-interactive deck is one that kills your opponent on turn one, and if you’re on the play they never even get to draw (this is part of the reason that Force of Will is so helpful, since it can protect you).

On the opposite end, a very interactive deck might be all creatures, Giant Growths, and Lightning Bolts. Most of your damage will come through the red zone, giving your opponent chances to block, trade, burn, kill, sweep, or whatever they can muster to stop your onslaught, while trying to get their own win conditions on the board.

Wizards likes interactivity, seeing it as a necessary component of fun. The one-turn kill might be fun for the player pulling it off, but not so much for the one who never even got to draw. Interactive games allow both players to play. With dredge, the dredge player isn’t so much playing against their opponent as they are against their library/graveyard. It’s by no means as noninteractive as that first-turn deck, but it’s not optimal either.

The other bugbear is consistency. Dredge decks can be remarkably consistent, since you can simply dredge back the same spell or creature over and over and over again. Wizards regards variance as a crucial element in Magic, and a keystone of its success. Decks that let you largely bypass variance tend to draw scrutiny. You can see this by tracing the history of “tutors,” or cards that let you fetch other cards. Over the course of the game we’ve seen less of them, and they tend to cost more in mana or alternate payments (like life).

For this reason, you’re unlikely to see a lot of dredge returning- indeed, one of its key cards (Golgari Grave-Troll) is even banned in modern (the notes on why are insightful, and can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/144 )

Personally, I love the mechanic, and it worked very well in the Ravnican theme deck Golgari Deathcreep. This seemed to me to be a balanced place for it, as it left in a glaring weakness of the mechanic: lands. In Golgari Deathcreep, you can’t really start turning over the dredge engine until you’ve established a reasonable manabase, since by its nature you’ll never hit a land off dredge (the only land with dredge wouldn’t see print until later as a one-of in Time Spiral block). This gives your opponent adequate time to establish themselves as well, so although the variance reduction is still there, the deck is more fairly interactive.

It’s worth noting that Ravnica recognised the weakness of dredge with regards to land, and printed a rare card designed to address that (Life from the Loam). Since Golgari Deathcreep doesn’t contain that card, the weakness (or “balance,” depending on your perspective) remains.

Note that a real competitive dredge deck doesn’t just contain dredge cards, though- Bridge from Below and Narcomoeba are core components as well in a multi-set combo deck- but dredge might just be a mechanic that has mined whatever design space it’s going to get.