Why do people say dredge was a mistake?
Legacy forum
Posted on Nov. 23, 2015, 4:40 a.m. by pleasiodmakerblooloo
Question of the title.
Dredge is a replacement effect that lets you put the number of cards equal to the Dredge number into the graveyard instead of drawing a card to recurr the dredge card from the graveyard.
The issue is the Graveyard is a combination of hand, resource and a number of cards interact with it. Anything that lets you easily fill your graveyard is very powerful.
Dredge takes this even further with Narcomeba and Bridge with flashback spells to make a ton of zombies, disrupt the opponents hand and then kill them with a bunch of Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite or Flame-Kin Zealot boosted zombies.
It is a mistake for both power and interactivity reasons.
November 23, 2015 5:39 a.m.
Also I dont know if I would say its a mistake but its just not something they can go past or print again without a power nerf of sorts like the new landfall. Meaning that dredge made the graveyard enabler standard the highest it could be so its hard to make anything better than it and if they made it again they would just put it on cards that dont do much or have low dredge
November 23, 2015 5:47 a.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #5
Dredge basically turns your graveyard into another hand, except other effects in the game make it a trivial matter to circumvent the mana cost for playing cards from it. The mana system is crucial to the structure of the game, and so far every mechanic that has let players ignore it has led to broken and/or degenerate play environments (the Urza's Saga "untap N lands" mechanic, Affinity, Dredge, Cascade, etc.).
November 23, 2015 11:03 a.m.
People don't like playing against it.
It's fun as hell to play.
November 23, 2015 1:07 p.m.
titanreaver says... #7
Its because it lead to a huge shift in the way people had to play the game. Its the same thing that happens every time a new combo deck hits the streets. The main difference is normal control strategies couldn't deal with it, because none of their spells actually had to resolve in order for them to win, so counters are useless. All of their threats come in token form an en mass so spot removal doesn't do anything, and the deck is to fast to wait for board wipes to deal with them. So it came down to make a sideboard against the graveyard or loose to dredge.
On top of that it isn't an interactive deck. You either hose it with youir sideboard or you loose in many situations. The only decks that go toe to toe with it sans sideboard are other combo decks prison decks, but again those have a similiar probl3m of not being interactive and are hence less popular as well. Then on top of that its pretty reliable.
To put it into perspective think of decks like Belcher, it is a one turn kill that bypasses normal game play. It has a warped deck design, and makes for very one sided games. These are all things that you could say about dredge, but there is one major difference. Belcher decks die to mainboard hate like Force of Will, while dredge dies to Leyline of the Void.
So to put it simply, any deck that looks at the 4xBrainstorm, 4x Force of Will decks and laughs makes much of the magic community mad. Decks that go against the normal rules make people mad. In general combo decks make people mad. Decks that require a sideboard to beat make people mad, decks that aren't interactive make people mad. So since dredge is not only all of those things, its arguably one of the best of them it stands to reason that it would upset people.
Lastly because dredge is a mechanic not a single card it tend to get more flack then something like Show and Tell since people can understand when a single card is a bit to much but when an entire key word is abused it makes people a bit more upset.
November 23, 2015 4:19 p.m.
pleasiodmakerblooloo says... #8
Thanks for that. It was incredibly in depth and I feel that you fully explained the subject.
November 23, 2015 11:33 p.m.
malfeischylde says... #9
If one must dedicate spots in their sb to graveyard based decks, they're not a mistake. Dredge, Reanimator and storm are three of the fastest and most powerful decks in the format, and all are yard heavy.
December 3, 2015 7:51 a.m.
Dredge was just ok when it was in standard, it's the eternal formats that have really taken it to the next level, and it was future sight where dredge really took off into something extra nasty.
That being said it's been cultivated into something more than it was destined to be, so much so that another mechanic from that set/block which is debatably better in Transmute is largely forgotten by the majority of the player base.
December 5, 2015 3:50 p.m.
Huh, nobody in this thread mentioned the actual reason that Dredge was a mistake.
Quickly filling your yard and using it as a second hand isn't a problem; it's an excepted and expected functionality of the game. That's why cards like Satyr Wayfinder are still being printed and no one has any problem with them.
What is a problem is that Dredge circumnavigates the mana system of them game, which the the main check on power level and the primary tool for keeping the game balanced. Magic is a game of resource management, and resource management only works if everyone's using the same resources that all develop at relatively the same speed. The fact that Dredge can sit entirely outside of that means that there's no real check on how fast it can operate, and makes it very problematic. Every card Wizards prints that draws lots of cards, like Breakthrough (which has perfectly reasonable drawbacks in every deck other than dredge), will only serve to make Dredge more powerful with no upper limit like, "You can only play one land a turn" built into the game to stop it.
Wizards options in this case are either: A) ban Dredge and piss players off, B) completely avoid printing cool cards that will make dredge more powerful, or C) print better and better grave-hate to shut Dredge down. Option A is bad for the players, B bad for the future of design, and C turns side boarding into a game of rock, paper, scissors.
Q.E.D. Dredge was a mistake.
December 6, 2015 3:15 p.m.
titanreaver says... #12
I would just like to go on record saying that I don't believe dredge was a mistake.
If circumventing mana was a problem then cards like Sneak Attack wouldn't exist, and Storm wouldn't exist. Half of the combo decks in the world try to bend the rules of mana and play without it. I can think of three decks that saw decent professional play that play two or fewer lands besides dredge (Belcher, Oops all my spells, Spanish Inquisition).
So I really don't think that is a problem. The issue with dredge isn't dredge its as Dr.Ache mentioned, Legacy Dredge, and to a point Vintage Dredge.
In a vacuum the mechanic is very sound. Its the other cards that it empowers.
Then as far as sideboarding goes, as I said you generally do need a sideboard to beat it. However its not the only deck that needs a sideboard to beat as malfeischylde mentioned. I only meant that was a reason people got mad at the deck when it came to be. Also as previously mentioned graveyard hate has become almost required anyway. Every color and type of deck has access to ample graveyard hate to beat dredge or any other gimmicky graveyard combo. So there really isn't any reason to get upset about that anymore.
Every year WoTC prints more cards that abuse the yard and more cards that hate on the yard, as well as cards that want to have their mana cost ignored and more ways of circumventing the normal rules of the game. Sometime these things are good and people will get mad about it all year and sometimes their not worth mentioning.
So at the end of the just keep calm and dredge on.
December 6, 2015 11:44 p.m.
titanreaver: I think you misunderstood what I meant by circumventing the mana system.
Cards like Sneak Attack, Show and Tell, and Tinker do exist, and yes, they let you use mana extremely efficiently with no real upper bound on how much value you're able to reap from your minimal investment. Every deck aims to use mana more efficiently than your opponent; that's the idea behind resource management. However, these cards are still using the mana system.
In order to put a creature into play using Sneak Attack you have to pay a total of 
. Sure, that's not very hard to do (as early a T1 with the right cards), but it's still using the resource the game was designed to use, the same one your opponent is using. It sets a threshold on how fast the card can come out (or how much accelerant you need to get it out).
Dredge (or manaless dredge at least) exists completely outside of this system. It cannot be regulated by mana requirements in any way whatsoever. If there was a card that said: "you may discard a card rather than pay this card's mana cost," then Dredge would win turn 1 over 50% of the time it played. (If you don't understand why, look at Phantasmagorian.) That means wizards can never print a card that says that without it going straight into the banhammer, and that's sad. :(
December 7, 2015 3:33 a.m.
titanreaver says... #14
I agree with you to a point sonnet666. I agree that dredge works outside of the normal mana restrictions of the game. Like I mentioned, it can win just based on triggers resolving and never actually resolve a single spell. That's true, however I don't really see that as a problem. Look at Storm decks like ANT. Sure it does technically use mana and sure sometimes that mana comes from lands so the one a turn rule does slow that down. However Storm as a mechanic allows you to get a virtually unlimited number of spells for free.
Dredge as a mechanic does allow for an easy way to enable strange combos more reliably however it also opens the deck up to additional means of hate. Trinisphere kills the deck dead in its track. Mainly because you can't even sac the meba's with out having three mana around to trigger the bringes or to bring back your finisher.
The main problem is just that the deck plays differently than almost every other deck so it's harder to play against.
I suppose what I am saying in general is while ritual based decks do use mana it really isn't as it was intended to be used and at the end of the day really isn't that different from dredge in functionality. It just appears to be different.
Lastly so long as WoTC never prints a car that has an alternate cost that says "graveyards, and cards in graveyards can't be exiled" then I think we will be alright, and dredge will be kept in check.
December 7, 2015 4:41 a.m.
Everyone's missing out on one key aspect of dredge that also makes it utterly broken. I can't believe no-one has mentioned it yet.
Dredge breaks the card economy. THIS is why it can't be printed again.
Magic is a game where you use resources to beat the opponent. For example, you could use burn spells to hurt them, use creatures to attack them, or killspells to remove their threats. Once you've cast the spell, it's gone to the graveyard and can't be used again under normal circumstances. There are ways to recycle cards in the graveyard but they themselves are card resources you must spend. To reanimate a creature costs a card that you must cast for mana and then send to the GY.
Dredge breaks this because dredge allows a deck to use their cards a seemingly infinite number of times. If I kill your creature with a spell then I have lost a card but you have not because you can dredge it. If you are playing a dredge deck then those cards you dredge into your graveyard are not lost because you can dredge them too. If you cast a killspell then I lose a creature, but you dont lose the spell because you can dredge that too etc.
What happens is that my hand becomes smaller and smaller because I have spent my resources whereas your "hand" becomes bigger and bigger because your spent resources go to a zone where they can be used again. It's more than the case that the graveyard is easy to interact with, its that you have infinite cretures and killspells (effectively - but not quite) and no-one else does.
That's too broken for magic because this entire game is based on one-for-one resources.
December 7, 2015 4:52 a.m.
@titanreaver, I don't think Trinisphere is too much of a problem for Dredge. Even if you can't cast Dread Return you can still grind the other player out with all your Zombie tokens. The real killers for it are Grafdigger's Cage, Rest in Peace, and Leyline of the Void.
@ChiefBell: "If I kill your creature with a spell then I have lost a card but you have not because you can dredge it."
Wait, I'm confused. You seem to be talking about Dredge in relation to how it was intended to be played (reusing spells from your graveyard at the cost of not drawing cards). How is that breaking the card economy? You still only have access to one more card a turn, you're just being giving a little more control over what card you want. Lots of cards in magic can gain repeatable card advantage off of the yard, and they do it a lot better than dredge since Dredge is really a net 0 in card advantage.
Dredge isn't a problem when I'm continually dredging and re-casting a bigger and bigger Golgari Grave-Troll, because in that case I'm doing that at the expense of other card advantage. It is a problem when I'm never casting Golgari Grave-Troll and just using it to chain six more cards into my graveyard, because I'm using different resources than my opponent that are tricky for them to interact with.
December 7, 2015 2:20 p.m.
Yes youre right about the intended use of dredge, but i am saying that the intended use of dredge is fundamentally busted. Reusing cards over and over is problematic. Its problematic because it takes the variance out of the game by effectively allowing you to choose your draws, and allows you to use the same card over and over again which is problematic because it counters any basic 1-for-1 strategy.
It's not an issue of pure card advantage. It's an issue of card consistency and resources. If you could make a deck that was 24 lands and 36 of the same creature then dredge would be fine. But you can't.
December 7, 2015 2:28 p.m.
But couldn't you argue that about any repeatable recursion that doesn't exist on the battlefield, like Buyback or Retrace? Those aren't terribly busted or unfair.
That's why I'm arguing that Dredge is only a problem because it allows you to set up engines without using mana to do it. (Also Maro said that, so it's the explanation I'm inclined to go with. link)
December 7, 2015 2:49 p.m.
Yeah for sure! And that's a really, really interesting point regarding buyback or retrace.
In those cases you can see really hefty costs that slow the game down. Capsize for example costs 3 to buybackack which essentially doubles the cost. Other spells similarly cost HUGE amounts to buyback. I think wizards have done fairly well in that case because they've nerfed a mechanic that could be really busted. The problem with dredge is that "buying your card back" in dredges case costs nothing but a missed draw.
December 7, 2015 3:04 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #20
Buyback is busted, and Capsize was one of the #1 offenders for contributing to repetitive, unfun gameplay.
December 7, 2015 3:28 p.m.
AidanOlson says... #21
Dredge is not a mistake. Usually, people will tell it to your face that Dredge sucks, people who play dredge suck, and WOTC sucks for inventing it. The truth is that besides a couple of key cards, the deck is reasonably priced. What astounds me is that people sideboard about 8 cards JUST DEDICATED TO DREDGE HATE! Are they that scared of it? Why doesn't Storm get a bad rep? It's because it costs a fortune. I did some research and found out that Dredge players who incorporate grave hate countering lose because they drew their grave hate counter card instead of a key piece. In the end, if you hate dredge, deal with it!
January 30, 2016 4:12 p.m.
That wasn't a comment about you liking Dredge; it was a comment about you posting in a thread where the last comment was over 3 weeks old.
It's called necro-bumping, and people on this site don't really like it, so Stop That.
January 31, 2016 11:06 p.m.
I know it's a necro, but while we are here...
"I did some research and found out that Dredge players who incorporate grave hate countering lose because they drew their grave hate counter card instead of a key piece"
Umm, what? Say you are on the draw and your opponent lands a turn 1 Grafdigger's Cage. What do you do? What about a turn 2 Rest in Peace? Also, saying "I did some research" doesn't validate your claims.
Dredge is a very good deck, and most people know this. I love playing dredge, and I will 100% agree with people that it's pretty bonkers. Because I play dredge, I also know that the deck folds pretty heavily to some very commonly played sideboard cards. Because of this the dredge player, in games 2 and 3, is forced to maybe sacrifice a little bit of speed for a little bit of resiliency.
February 1, 2016 3:32 p.m.
alanwescoat says... #26
I would suppose that people who do not like Dredge have some trouble sideboarding readily available colorless graveyard hate like Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, Scrabbling Claws, or Grafdigger's Cage. Such people may also have trouble with paying cards like Dryad Militant, Leyline of the Void, and Rest in Peace.
EmblemMan says... #2
Having another interactive section of the game like the graveyard is EXTREMELY powerful and dredge is the best possible enabler and the easiest to be manipulated to make the graveyard really good and useful
November 23, 2015 4:54 a.m.