Instead of trying to take advantage of the Flayer combo LED is more interested in getting Ichorid, Prized Amalgam, and making a ton of zombies. They will normally choose to play and then use cards such as Breakthrough, Faithless Looting, or Careful Study to start filling their graveyard. LED Dredge has a different plan for filling their graveyard. The goal is to either make a ton of zombies and attack with them or to Dread Return a Flayer of the Hatebound and a Golgari Grave-Troll which should be large enough to kill your opponent when it enters the battlefield off the Flayer trigger. They have Bridge from Below to make zombies whenever they sacrifice a creature for to flashback Cabal Therapy or Dread Return. Once they are able to start dredging they try to dump as much of their deck into their graveyard as possible (sometimes Dread Returning Ballustrade Spy targeting themselves to dump their entire deck into their graveyard) to get Narcomemba onto the battlefield as well as bring back Ichorid, Nether Shadow and Prized Amalgam. ( Phantasmagorian has the ability of discard three cards to return it to your hand, you can hold priority and activate this twice to discard six cards and get your graveyard off to a good start.) Or even better they like to discard Phantasmagorian which allows them to discard almost their whole hand. Manaless Dredge normally likes to draw instead of play since it will allow them to discard a card on their first turn (like Golgari Grave-Troll) that will let them dredge instead of draw. LED dredge is definitely the more popular of the two but I’ll cover both.

Manaless Dredge is more like The Epic Storm, much more likely to win on one turn but more glass cannon, while LED Dredge is much more like Ad Nauseam Tendrils, a little bit slower and much less likely to win on turn one but also much more reliable. The differences between the two types of Dredge are much like the differences between the two types of Storm decks. There are two types of Legacy Dredge: Lion’s Eye Diamond dredge and Manaless Dredge. Since Legacy Dredge is the one that I most familiar with, let’s start with this one this week. This week I thought I’d start a series where I slowly dive into each version of Dredge and how to play against them a little bit deeper. A few weeks ago I wrote a quick overview of the Dredge mistress (or monster depending who you are).

Dredge deck legacy