DredgeDredge, A Custom Magic: The Gathering Format

Magic: The Gathering is a pretty fun game. It also has the downside of relying on the participants to bring preconstructed decks, or to sit down and draft. The first one makes spontaneously playing Magic very difficult, the second one is a long process best categorised as “an afternoon” rather than “a game”. DredgeDredge is designed to make “let’s play a game of Magic” possible as a spontaneous action, like one might play a boardgame both people know, and making it more to be about 10-45 minutes, rather than multiple hours.

The name is a riff on Dandân, the name of the eponymous card in the (relatively) famous deck/mini-game originally called The Forgetful Fish. You can find an overview of Dandân here. Long story short, it’s a single deck that is used by both people, along with a shared graveyard.

Initially I built this as a one-off idea, and it gradually has morphed into one of my favorite ways to play Magic with a friend. A big difference from Dandân is that there is no one singular DredgeDredge deck, and it’s instead something you can build different versions of. The other use of it is as a little game you can bring to a draft or similar and play it in the downtime between rounds.

The Rules Of DredgeDredge

DredgeDredge is mostly regular boring Magic, with a small list of conceits that make it different:

• A 100 card deck shared between both players, in singleton format (as in, there are no duplicates of any cards except for basic lands)
• A shared graveyard.
• An emblem on the table that says “Discard a card: Target card in graveyard gains ‘Dredge X, where X is the mana value of the card’ until end of turn.” This is the main conceit of the format.
• I’ve been experimenting with a rule that says to have an additional draw phase. This means that if it’s the first turn of the game, you draw one card, otherwise you draw two. This makes the game a lot smoother, and makes games longer. Drawing one card leads to shorter, swingier games. I’ve also found that some decklists really rely on either mode, and have a hard time switching between them. You should experiment with this, if you build a list.

Okay sure, but for the people that aren’t familiar with the precise rules of Magic, what does that mean? Dredge is an old mechanic that works like this: Whenever you would draw a card, you can instead choose to take a card with Dredge X from the graveyard to your hand, and then take X cards from the top of your library and move them to the graveyard. The implication here is that you can get something out of the graveyard, but in the process of doing so, you might put something worse than what you got from it into the graveyard via milling.

It also means that card advantage is much, much bigger than it would otherwise be, and also that instant-speed card draw can be used to steal your opponent’s dredging target, after they already have discarded a card. You can similarly exchange a card in your hand for a land in the graveyard during your draw step, allowing you to work around land starvation. (since lands have a mana value of 0, you technically dredge them from the graveyard rather than drawing a card, then milling 0 cards)

It plays a lot like Limited, in a way. An interesting change to regular gameplay is that you and your opponent have similar gameplans and strategies, so you can judge how bad a card would be to give to your opponent relatively easily. The rest depends on your specific deck.

How to build a DredgeDredge list.

The format I recommend is 60 singleton cards and 40 lands. Here’s some guidelines for how to pick cards:

• I generally prefer a lower power level in DredgeDredge, which makes your own bulk collection the perfect and likely only place to search. Lower power level also makes for games with more comeback potential, because you aren’t immediately killed when your opponent hits some cards with synergy.
• I prefer to make lifegain hard to come by, because it means that gradual life loss will prove fatal, and HP is a precious resource. The game has to end at some point, too, and making life easy to come by risks stalling the game.
• Be careful with instant-speed card draw. Having some of it is good and fun, having a lot of it means nobody will engage with the mechanic that’s the ostensible center point, as everything they discard a card to dredge will get yoinked from under them.
• Bounce effects, while generally fun, are worded in a way that means you can bounce an opponents creature to your hand, making them card draw and powerful removal at the same time. I’ve found them to be gamewarping in the bad way, in that the bounce card will be played, then immediately dredged by the opposing player, then dredged again, until someone manages to exile it.
• You should have 3-6 cards that exile things from the graveyard. A very fun group of sets that has that as a mechanic while also being appropriate in power level is the Theros block, with it’s Escape keyword mechanic. Tizerus Charger is a mainstay in the original DredgeDredge list. This ensures things don’t become stale repetitions of the same gameplay moves.
• I’ve found that going heavy on the creatures makes for a very fun play experience, as games (especially in draw-two) become long value-oriented slugfests. Sorceries and Instants on the other hand make the game faster and more volatile, which is also fun but I’ve found harder to make feel balanced.

Part of the fun of the format is, at least to me, the building and tinkering of the list in response to how it feels to play. With it making use of mostly bulk cards, nearly any card you come into possession of can potentially find a home in a DredgeDredge list, and it feels really fun to see cards you would otherwise see not even in Draft or Sealed shine because the usual rules of “what is a good card” don’t fully apply.

My Two DredgeDredge Lists, and A Small Request.

I’ve built two lists for DredgeDredge, one that is relatively interaction heavy and about 50% blue, with relatively-large splashes of White, Black and Green, and one that is in Green, Red and Blue focused on being a no-holds-barred melee beatdown focused on the EOE Lander mechanic as the tension to pure aggression.

Here’s a link to the OG list and here’s a link to the Temur list.

I hope you find this format as fun as I do, if you do build a list for it. My one small request is that if you do build one, tell me what you think! Good, bad, whatever, but I do want to know how other people like it, and what they find to be good/bad rules of thumb, as well as the lists others build. Thanks :D