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.

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

Gigapede manaless dredge