Golgari Swarm

There are two Guilds on Ravnica that comprise the lower classes of society: Gruul, who are basically the multiverse's largest Anarchist Bike Gang, and the Golgari Swarm, which are what would happen if you kicked all of the Underdark races in DnD out onto the street, then forced them to work either as fast food servers or garbage men. That's right: there's Soy-lent Green in Ravnica, and it's more than just people.

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History

The Golgari Swarm was originally created to deal with dead bodies (possibly by making them zombies), and feeding the homeless (possibly to zombies.) They are aligned with the Green and Black colors of mana, and like the Rakdos, Dimir and Simic occupy the underground of Ravnica. The original Golgari who signed the Guildpact was Svothgir, who was killed by the Sisters of Stone Death, three Gorgons, and then replaced by the Elf-Lich Savra. Who was also killed. Then came back as a lich. And then killed again. And replaced by Jarad. Who was also killed. And then came back as a Lich.

In fact in the entire history of the Golgari and Ravnica they are the guild whose leaders have been killed the most. Seriously, they can't hold on to a decent leader. The only reason Jarad has seemingly remained in power is because nobody else in Ravnica cares. Most of the Golgari is composed of humans, zombies, elves, plant-zombies (which are apparently grown like a fungus,) Gorgons, more zombies and plant-zombies, giant beetles, gorgons, and trolls (like the living under bridges and regenerating kind, not the internet kind.) Recent history has been pretty sad for the Golgari. Despite getting the first green-black planeswalker, they contributed next to nothing to the recent story.

Mechanics

Dredge

Dredge is one of the most powerful key word mechanics in M:tG. A small entry here is not able to do justice to the influence it had, and continues to have, on the metagame and ban lists of multiple formats.

Simply put, a card with Dredge X allows you to return it to your hand from the graveyard as an alternative to drawing card when ever you are able to draw a card, in exchange you take X cards from the top of your library and put them in the graveyard. This is broken because in a deck built around abusing Dredge you have lots of cards that can be pulled from the graveyard to your hand, so in effect Dredge is "Put this card in your hand and then make so many cards available for you to then put into your hand later", this breaks the game because it basically ignores a bunch of rules that other decks have to follow. It also has a few other bull-shit strengths, such as being immune to most disruption effects; opponent makes you discard a card, bring it back and then add a bunch of cards into that pool of potential dredge cards in your graveyard. Not to mention that when built right the graveyard is basically an extension of the player's hand which leads to circumventing the hand limit without having to bother with an artifact, enchantment or creature that can get removed and force you to dump the hand. Coupled with Black's frequent return from the graveyard creatures and cards, triggers based on cards going into or out of the graveyard, sacrifice triggers etc, it can be very, very frustrating playing a Dredge deck that flatout plays an entirely different game of Magic.

Countering Dredge isn't hard so much as having super-specific cards on hand that can stop its bullshit, nail its feet and ballsack to the ground. But these cards do fuck all against everything else except a few related archetypes like Reanimator and decks that rely on recursion meaning that you will almost never have the right cards main-decked for game 1 unless Dredge decks are on the upswing in popularity in the meta. Game 2 is about how well the Dredge player can recover from being castrated by cards like Leyline of the Void, or (more likely) their ability to sufficiently gain the upper hand before castration and be able to win the game (or better yet, for them, beat you before you castrate them).

Scavenge

Scavenging a creature in the graveyard means exiling it and putting +1/+1 equal to its power on one of your field creatures, for a cost (which is independent of the casting cost, unless it's scavenge is being granted by Varolz, the Scar-Striped). Coupled with a quick and huge ramp (a given with green), a large amount of scavengable creatures, sacking and triggers-on-sacking (a given with black) this can result in a huge stampede of creatures with ridiculous power/toughness. Keyword-givers round out the field populator.

Scavenge may seem as cheesy as dredge, but defenses exist in the form of counters (preventing keywords being given) deathtouch creatures (ubiquitous) and penalizing and boardwipe spells, effectively rendering the enemy's wall of meat and muscle a moot point.

Guilds of Ravnica
Azorius Senate	Orzhov Syndicate	House Dimir	Izzet League	Cult of Rakdos
Golgari Swarm	Gruul Clans	Boros Legion	Selesnya Conclave	Simic Combine

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