Dredge
Dredge is the keyword attributed to the Golgari in the Ravnica block.
From the Comprehensive Rules (November 8, 2024—Edge of Eternities)
- 702.52. Dredge
- 702.52a Dredge is a static ability that functions only while the card with dredge is in a player’s graveyard. “Dredge N” means “As long as you have at least N cards in your library, if you would draw a card, you may instead mill N cards and return this card from your graveyard to your hand.”
- 702.52b A player with fewer cards in their library than the number required by a dredge ability can’t mill any of them this way.
- Dredge lets you replace any card draw, not just the one during your draw step.
- Once you decide to replace a draw using a card’s dredge ability, that card can’t be removed from your graveyard “in response” (replacement effects don’t use the stack).
- You can’t use dredge unless you’re going to draw a card and the card with dredge is already in your graveyard.
History
Dredge was occasionally reused in supplemental sets like Conspiracy, Modern Horizons and Modern Horizons 3.
Dredge in practice
the idea behind Dredge is to gain recursion from a spell sitting in the graveyard and waiting to be used again, in the case of Life from The Loam you might want to recover the spells to get more lands from graveyard to hand and then play them, while also filling up the graveyard for other intented effects as Golgari Grave-Troll greatly benefits from this.
