Manaless Dredge
I'm sure that you learned something about lands and mana costs when you started playing Magic. Forget all of that. We don't use those here!
Instead you use the Dredge mechanic to load up your graveyard, and either smash your opponent to pieces with a lot of recurring undead, or combo off and win in a single turn. And that is sometimes as early as turn two.
But enough about the deck, how do you play it?
How to start
The first and most important step: How do we start dredging? This is one of the most important steps of playing the deck, as you don't cast any spells from your hand with the exception of Once Upon a Time.
Before the game starts, you want your opponent to go first, as you can't do anything on your first turn at all. This is quite important, as you don't wanna give your opponent a free card by starting yourself. When your opponent start, you will draw a card on your fist turn. If you didn't mulligan, which you shouldn't, you will have eight cards in hand on your turn.
That means you'll be able to discard a card at the end of the turn, wich allows you to discard a dredger like Golgari Grave-Troll, or preferrably Phantasmagorian.If you are so lucky to have Phantasmagorian, you can discard up to 6 cards on your first turn, if you stack the discard triggers.
This means that you can start dredging on turn 2, and get the engine going.
The engine
The engine in this deck consists of the dregders and the recurring creatures. A manaless dredge deck should consist of between 14 and 16 dredge cards, since you will then have around a 90% chance of a starting hand with a dredger in it. The reason this list runs 4x Shambling Shell over 4x Golgari Thug is to up the green count, making your sideboard more reliably cast.
If you don't have a dredger in your starting hand, you need to pray that your opponent has nothing to play for the first turns, since it will take you some extra time to get up to eight cards in hand. An alternate you could consider is to use Serum Powder, which can in some cases solve this problem. When you get your dredging going, you can speed it up with Street Wraith, which allows you to dredge another time, letting you dig deeper into your graveyard. But the most important rescourse to you is your creatures.
Your recurring creatures is like lands to other players. Without them it's hard to get anything done. Therefore, it is extremely important that you keep your Bridge from Belows, since they allow you to win before you'd be able to otherwise.
With Bridge from Below you can win on turn 2 to 5, while without it's more plausible to win on turn 5 to 8.
With the extra tokens you create from sacrificing Nether Shadows and Ichorids to Cabal Tharapy, you'll be able to cast Dread Return a turn or two earlier, which could turn a loss to a win.
(Work in progress, more to be added...)
With help from the decklist Manaless Dredge
