Hitting five attacking Dredge creatures can set the Dredge player back, and getting five basic lands (if they even have that many) isn't much of a consolation.īlack mana, for its part, can cast Surgical Extraction at instant speed, such as on Bloodghast or Prized Amalgam, or even Ox of Agonas. It may cost 2WW, but Dredge isn't always a turn-four victory deck, meaning that the opponent will likely have time to cast this. Path to Exile can hit one creature, but Settle the Wreckage will hit all attacking creatures, with a similar effect. White is the primary exiling color, and Dredge doesn't like exile. It's common for Jund midrange decks to run this in the mainboard, never mind the sideboard. And if those cards were creatures, the Ooze's controller can gain life and put a +1/+1 counter on the Ooze. Scavenging Ooze is a classic anti-graveyard card, a 2/2 for 1G that can exile cards at will. But be aware that Ox of Agonas and Conflagrate can hit the Crusader since they are mono-red. Bloodghast, Prized Amalgam and Stinkweed Imp can't handle this card, and Abrupt Decay can't hit it, either. This isn't the premiere anti-Dredge card, but it can take Dredge players off-guard with its protection from black and protection from green. Some creatures can fight back against Dredge, such as Mirran Crusader. Bojuka Bog is a land that can exile graveyards when it enters the battlefield, and it taps for black mana. In return, it has the classic Leyline effect: it may begin the game already on the battlefield if it's in its owner's opening hand. This effect practically halves the Dredge deck's firepower, and in black mana, Leyline of the Void has a similar effect, though it's more costly.

Also, since we try to keep a high creature count in our graveyard, their will be fewer cards in our graveyard that we'll want to exile through those cards' escape cost.In white mana, Rest in Peace is a go-top option against graveyard-based decks, costing just 1W to exile all graveyards and exiling any other cards that would go there. However I would recommend the flashback mechanic over the two others, since discarding lands for retrace can be a pretty steep cost if we don't have access to Life from the Loam, and the flashback cards like Unburial Rites are just generally better than the cards with the escape mechanic in my opinion. We can play some cards that can be cast from our graveyard through mechanics like flashback, retrace and possibly even escape. Cards can have all types of use in the graveyard, just like we explained that a single keyword like dredge can change a card in our graveyard into an entire self milling engine. However, a card in your graveyard doesn't necessarily mean that card is gone. This is a misconception that many people, especially newer players have. Milling cards into your graveyard is a disadvantage. All you need is to draw a card (can be during the draw step), so just filling your graveyard with other dredge cards will also get you there. This seemingly harmless 2 mana card can cause for fast self milling in combination with lands that have a cycling ability (preferably as cheap as possible) by constantly dredging until you find what you need. My personal favourite dredge engine is Life from the Loam. Another very good way of doing this is through a dredge engine, these aren't one-card engines like the previous mentioned two, however, since a large portion of our deck will be focussed on filling the graveyard, these won't be hard to set up. However, we won't always draw in one of these two cards, so we'll need other ways of filling our graveyard. Both can empty your deck at extremely high speeds like no other cards can, and this very early in the game, thanks to their low mana costs. In my opinion the two best single cards to do this are Hermit Druid and Mesmeric Orb. Besides ramping, we want to fill our graveyard with as many creatures as possible as fast as we can, so that we can go for an early explosive Nethroi play.

Dredge edh