So far, we've been talking about the upsides of the deck, so let's take a minute to talk about the downside: we literally cannot beat graveyard hate, and I'm not saying this in the hyperbolic "we really struggle against graveyard hate but occasionally win" sort of way but in the literal "it just can't happen" way.Deciding when we need to get back a Vengevine or two as quickly as possible versus when it is better to wait until we stock our graveyard with more Vengevines and Prized Amalgams is tricky and takes some practice. After Turn 1, we want to spend basically every turn dredging, which means we don't actually draw any new cards, so we usually only get one shot at casting two free creatures to trigger Vengevine. One of the most important parts of playing Modern Manaless Dredge (apart from figuring our which hands to keep) is managing your free creatures. Salvage Titan gives us a free creature that we can dredge into the graveyard, return to hand by exiling random artifacts that we mill (like Memnite and Ornithopter), and then cast for free by sacrificing some artifacts from the battlefield (ideally Sword of the Meek, which comes into play for free from our graveyard whenever we dredge a Narcomoeba or cast a Memnite). One of the pinches in the deck is having two creatures to cast to return Vengevine. Salvage Titan is a weird card, but it's really important to our deck's success.While it doesn't happen all that often, we can sometimes have 20 power as early as Turn 2! Hollow One can be played for free from hand once we have a Phantasmagorian to allow us to discard three cards, which, along with a free creature like Memnite or ,] triggers our Vengevines to come back from the graveyard and also triggers our Prized Amalgams to come back at the end of turn. As far as winning with the deck, we get some amount of free damage by dredging copies of Creeping Chill, but we're mostly relying on free threats.It's also important to keep in mind that Phantasmagorian can allow us to discard six cards if we want to, by maintaining priority and activating it twice from the graveyard before it returns to our hand. Sometimes, we can keep an opening hand that has no dredger but has a Phantasmagorian, but this usually involves either multiple Hollow Ones or multiple Vengevines along with at least two free creatures to get the Vengevines into play from our graveyard. Even before Once Upon a Time was banned, we wanted more dredge creatures, and now that it is no longer legal, going up to four copies of Golgari Thug is a really easy choice to help ensure we have a dredger in our opening seven as often as possible. The problem is that we also can't really mulligan with the deck (unless we have Serum Powder) since every mulligan we take puts us another turn away from discarding to hand size, which is our only way to start dredging and filling our graveyard). Basically, for a hand to be keepable, we need a dredge card (either Stinkweed Imp or Golgari Thug) or maybe Phantasmagorian, depending on what the rest of our hand looks like. By far the hardest part of playing Manaless Dredge is figuring our which opening hands you can keep.(I was worried we wouldn't win a match.) The deck can actually be pretty powerful when it gets a good starting hand, although it is also wildly inconsistent and easy to hate out. Record-wise, we ended up going 2-3 with Manaless Dredge, which is actually a lot better than I had expected. (Playing more copies of Golgari Thug, Sword of the Meek, and Salvage Titan likely improves the deck even if Once Upon a Time were still legal in the format-in our experience, Once Upon a Time was the ultimate trap card, making us think we could keep a hand without a dredger and then almost never hitting a dredger.) The good news is that Once Upon a Time isn't actually very good or necessary in the deck.
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