Fundamentally, Magic is a game about resource management. Players start the game with access to the same amount of tangible resources (7 starting cards plus 1 more each turn, 20 life, 0 mana sources in play), and can build their decks and play styles in ways that allow them to accrue their resources or attack their opponents’ resources at different rates. Players can spend one resource to get another (and in fact they have to; you can’t get mana sources into play without spending cards from your hand), and try to find edges where they get more out of their resources in order to win a game. So of course, anything that lets you get a resource for free is an incredibly powerful effect.

Broadly speaking, there are three important ways to cheat on resource management. The first of which is cheating on mana, which is the one that jumps to everyone’s mind the easiest. Many spells with have alternative casting costs, or ways of discounting themselves, or of letting you spend unimportant resources to cast them cheaper and faster. 

The second way to cheat on resource management is to draw, or otherwise get access to, more cards. This one is actually more complicated to quantify, because unlike cheating on mana, how many cards a player should have access to at any given point, and for the resources they are spending, is fairly ambiguous. If a player is meant to draw 1 card a turn, Divination drawing two cards, for the cost of only one, puts them up on resources! But okay, wait, that costs mana, and as a result of it costing mana while not impacting the board, it actually ends up being fair. What about something like Ancestral Recall? Again, it feels hard to call that cheating on card advantage; it is substantially above rate of other draw spells, but that ends up being more like cheating on mana than cards. As a result, I think the easiest way to conceptualize cheating on cards is when you mill over or discard a card that can be cast from your graveyard. All of a sudden, you have access to a card that the game didn’t “give” you, and often that you didn’t spend mana to draw. If you cast a spell that mills you five cards as an incidental part of the effect, and you mill over an Uro, it is like you drew the Uro for free. 

The third and final way to cheat on resources is to create board presence without spending mana or cards. Functionally, this is just the previous two points combined, but it is the last piece of the puzzle I’m about to introduce. Magic is a game where control of the board is generally incredibly important, and games are typically decided by one player’s life reaching 0 as a result of creatures being turned sideways. Anything that lets you protect your own life, or threaten your opponents’, without eating into your ability to enact the rest of your game plan, puts you at a sizable advantage.

Okay, so now that we understand that cheating on resources is powerful, and the three general ways you do so, I want you to picture a scenario. Imagine a deck that contains a very compact engine; by using two cards in conjunction with each other, they can put large chunks of their library into their graveyard. By doing so, they spontaneously create large board presences, cast free Lightning Helixes, and draw removal spells. And now imagine that everyone insists that the issue is the engine that lets the deck self mill, and not the cards that are actually cheating on resources.

The discourse surrounding Dredge makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

In fairness, I do think there is a way to explain this disconnect, but I’ll get to that answer later. But before I do, I think it is important to acknowledge that the majority of people on the internet making memes about Dredge, or designing custom cards for that matter, have never actually played against a Dredge deck. They know it from Mark Rosewater discussing it, or from anecdotes they read online, or from looking at the modern banlist and going “Wait, really? Why is that banned?” They shortcut all this information to a simple “Dredge (the mechanic) is broken” and move on with their lives.

And of course, people don’t just do that for Dredge. In another totally-not-hypothetical, imagine we have a deck that uses a 0 mana artifact that can be sacrificed for 3 mana, 1 mana cards that can produce 2, 3, 4, or even 5 mana, a 3 mana card that produces 5 mana, all to cast a 9 mana sorcery as fast as possible, which puts a lethal number of dragons into play. Somehow, I don’t feel like the broken thing about this deck is the 9 mana sorcery. It’s 9 fucking mana. But no, designers everywhere look at a deck like this and their conclusion is “Wow, Storm is broken.” If you are one of those designers, your gut reaction to this might be defensiveness. “The Storm Scale” is called that for a reason, and literally every format has a history of playable storm decks. But I really think that Tendrils of Agony is just another Hypnotic Specter.

For a brief history lesson, Hypnotic Specter was once in discussion to be banned in standard. Wizards of the Coast stopped printing it for years because it was too oppressive. Looking at this guy, it doesn’t really make sense, especially with modern sensibilities. These guys had Lightning Bolt in like every other core set, and a 3 drop was a problem? Well, in the same way that Bolt was constantly reprinted, Dark Ritual was as well. And Hypnotic Specter is a lot, lot scarier when it is coming down turn 1, rather than turn 3. The thing that makes Storm bullshit isn’t Storm, it is the effects that let you cheat on mana.

But the thing is, if we don’t have those rituals, Storm spells aren’t really playable. The same thing is at least (partially) true for the flashback or freecasting spells that Dredge plays; who on earth would register Stinkweed Imp if all they are doing is growing their Lhurgoyf? And if R&D has to choose between “cool graveyard synergy cards” and “card that does nothing except for break cool graveyard synergy cards”, I do think that the choice is pretty obvious.

I’m not here advocating for a Golgari Grave-Troll unban, nor am I asking for a Narcomoeba ban for that latter. All I’m trying to point out is that people have a tendency to treat Dredge and Storm like thought terminating cliches, and it makes them substantially worse designers. Understanding what actually breaks Dredge, and what actually breaks Storm, lets you look past a lot of bullshit. 0 mana artifacts that do nothing don’t break Storm. Hell, 0 mana cards that replace themselves only sometimes manage to break Storm. You break these sorts of decks via giving them the ability to go up on resources, not just by giving them the ability to spin the wheels or generate minor upsides/synergies. If all Grapeshot is doing is following a few cantrips to do a Fury impression, you wouldn’t bother playing it.

Even in a format without traditional Dredge, Pioneer, we ended up seeing Narcomoeba, Prized Amalgam, and Creeping Chill threatening turn 4 kills and leading to two bannings. With the advent of Zendikar Rising and Modal Dual Faced Lands, two RTR bulk cards suddenly found a home again, allowing players to mill their entire library, which incidentally dealt over half their opponent’s starting life and put 28 power into play. Wizards choosing to ban the mill engines here isn’t something I disagree with (those cards are less likely to do interesting things than the recursive creatures), but it does sort of feel like whack-a-mole.

I think custom designers often undervalue the danger of “free” resource generation; MSEM used to have a problem where we had a density of Narcomeba style effects, which eventually lead to a Dredgeless Dredge deck; players would target themselves with efficient mill spells, and put a disproportionately large amount of stats into play. The solution there wasn’t to conclude that mill spells are broken, it is to recognize that Dredge is the key, and Narcomoeba is the jackass that decided to scrape your car with it.

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