What do

and

 have in common?

That’s right baby, acceleration.

I want to talk about a strategy that local home town hero and fellow road warrior Harlan “Fabio” Firer introduced me too.  Dredge.

This isn’t your ordinary dredge however, its a little bit more resilient and a lotta bit more explosive.

What do I mean by more resilient? Well, we get to play this guy and draw cards.  And since having dudes in our yard is part of our strategy and all of our creatures can become threats, we can pass the thoughtseize removal test.

What do I mean by a lotta bit more explosive?  Well, how does killing people with elvish mystics sound?  Ya, ok I’m in too. Here’s the gem that lets us do this wonderful thing.

Alright, enough shenanigans, lets take a look at the list.

Deck Title : Constellation Dredge (What are you at again?)

Creatures (27) 4 Elvish Mystic 4 Satyr Wayfinder 4  Eidolon of Blossoms 4 Nighthowler 3 Courser of Kruphix 2 Lotleth Troll 4 Herald of Torment 2  Pharika, God of Affliction Spells (8) 4 Grisly Salvage 4 Commune with the Gods Enchantments (4) 4 Strength from the Fallen

Lands (21) 3 Mutavault 4  Overgrown Tomb 4 Temple of Malady 2 Mana Confluence 4 Forest 4 Swamp Sideboard (15) 2 Lifebane Zombie 2 Bile Blight 2 Golgari Charm 1 Shadowborn Demon 4 Nylea’s Disciple 4 Doom Blade

At first glance this deck looks a little too cute to be real, well let me tell you, 28/28 elvish mystics just aren’t cute, they’re mean.  This deck functions off of two main engines, constellation, and dredge.

Constellation is the new keyword from JOU that triggers when enchantments come into play.  Here we are taking advantage of the triggers by playing some very powerful enchantments and enchantment creatures.  Let’s look at the suite: 4 nighthowler, 3 courser of kruphix, 4 eidolon of blossoms, 4 herald of torment

Since we happen to have both enchantments and cards based on the graveyard, nighthowler was a no brainer.  He’s a threat on his own and putting him on a dude is twice the fun.

Herald of Torment might be the best card in the deck since he gives us some much needed evasion.  Often times if you have a strength into play this guy is just like a much bigger stormbreath dragon that comes back after you kill him, which is no joke for sure. For what it’s worth, it also does not die to doom blade.

Courser of Kruphix and Eidolon are our ways of getting value, since we play such a dense amount of enchantments, Eidolon gives us access to a lot of cards, and courser is just a solid butt as well as, you guessed it, an enchantment creature.

Since we’ve chosen to let Strength from the fallen be our primary way to do busted things we also happened to need some graveyard enablers.  We fill this need with the primary engines from Conley Woods Dredge deck (satyr wayfinder, grisly salvage, commune with the gods).  This is the ‘dredge’ of the deck.

One thing I really like about the list is it’s ability to consistently ignore your opponent.  While sequencing can be very important in this list, often times in game 1 we just get try to go ham, which is pretty nice especially in a tournament setting.  This reduces the amount of little decisions you have to make against unknown scenarios which can often help you focus on the more important ones.  We also get to play somewhat like a devotion deck where we are just trying to go over top of our adversaries(which can be fun and gratifying), but we have some added consistency with the card draw and filtering through our dredge engine and constellation triggers.  It’s actually pretty gross how this list can keep a full hand, a full yard and still manage to be putting threats into play.  Strength from the fallen is a very under appreciated synergy based card that this strategy is based around and is never terrible in duplicates.  Most of the time it has an immediate impact on the game and proves to be a threat your opponents just can’t ignore.  The reason I’ve included the second name “What are you at again?” is because of the frequency Harlan used this phrase when testing to turn an empty board and a few cards in the yard into 10+ damage.

I hope you all enjoyed this little gem, and who knows maybe you’ll have this list sleeved up for your next tournament.

Thanks as always for reading and let me know what you think!

The feedback is always nice.

~Schlegel