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. Yes, the build of Manaless Dredge we played for our videos had Once Upon a Time.

Modern dredge deck 2017