One would think it difficult to play BB spells with Blood Moon in play.
Indeed it is. Like I mentioned, it requires making concessions elsewhere to make it work -- 3x LOTV are the only double black cards, only 6 cards that cost green, etc. You basically have to be prepared to cut off your own arm if it takes both your opponent's legs with it. Still tinkering with it after 3-2, 3-2, 3-2 in Competitive Leagues. Blood Moon is swingy at times, but that's to be expected; the one surprise so far has been how little work it did versus my only two matches versus Eldrazi Tron.
BM is close to useless against Etron, never bring it in against them if you are on jund. They have wastes and ways to find them (Map) and on top of that Mind Stone to cover colourless mana. You will definitely hurt yourself more since you shut down your manlands with BM in play. And the biggest aspect of playing BM against Tron variants is to slow them down enough to finish the game before they can cast their huge threats. But since we are cutting ourselves off our arguable best finishers (ravine) this is somewhat counterproductive. So in that sense, no, we really need other ways to beat Etron, BM is definitely not the way to go here. And the same argument goes for regular Tron as well.
let me know how you go! I went 4-1 last night and surprisingly got stomped by Affinity 0-2. Last week I got wrecked by affinity as well so it may be time to put in shatterstorm and grim lavamancer in my 75 in addition to my x2 ancient grudge.
I had an abysmal time at last nights fnm with the deck I posted. I actually wasn't able to focus on testing the new PW rule at all and neither the rabblemasters. The reason behind this was that I had mana issues throughout the whole tournament. I kept track of how many mulls I made, which looked like the following:
Game 1: Mull (one lander)
Game 2: Mull (one lander)
Game 3: Keep (had 2 Ravines as only lands, lost because I couldn't resolve LoTV on turn 3 due to this)
Game 4: Mull (6 lands and 1 spell, mulled to a 2 land hand and was stuck on 3 lands)
Game 5: Keep (was ok)
Game 6: Mull (5 lands and two 2-drop creatures against Affinity)
... the rest I didn't remember anymore
Obviously, the issue what I want to adress here was that I only played 23 lands in my jund deck. I, like many others of us nowadays, thought that, since I had no 4 drops in my deck, playing 23 lands is fine. The format is quite fast and you have little time to interact with the opponent, for which reason you simply don't want to flood out. I thought playing 23 lands therefore is fine. But over the course of several weeks, I consistantly had experiences similar to the ones shown above. Clearly this is an indication that something is wrong here. The first and foremost argument for this could likely be my own shuffling behaviour. I do believe there are insufficient ways to shuffle the deck and this could cause such problems. However, the thing is that I changed my shuffling behaviour throughout the weeks and tried different ways to shuffle the deck, in order to possibly get rid of that problem. Nothing changed though. And last night was just too much for me at this point. I was really pissed off tbh, I hated my deck (And my deck seemed to hate me too).
So I remembered an article from Frank Karsten where he was talking about how many lands you need to consistantly hit your landdrops (Article) and read through it again. In this approach, you need to define the amount of lands you need to hit by a certain draw step. Lets say if you want to hit 4 lands in 4 turns it would mean that from the 3-4 drawsteps you get (including the opening hand and considering mulligan decisions as well) you want a quite high probability (~ 80 %) to hit your 4 lands every turn.
So, what does this mean for jund? I get that Jund decks more and more play less 4 drops, but do we actually play smooth games when having only 3 lands in play? I would argue not. You get to likely cast each spell in your deck, but we all know, that Jund really goes off and gets ahead by casting multiple things each turn. So I think that we at least want to hit 4 lands on turn 4 consistantly, and ideally 5 lands on turn 5. What is the probability for that 2 cases with 23 lands?
77.4% (draw) / 67.7% (play) for hitting 4 lands on turn 4
59.1% (draw) / 47.6% (play) for hitting 5 lands on turn 5
So basically only ~ 3/4 of your games you will hit 4 lands on turn 4 here. And this is not including the second big issue we have sometimes: tapped lands (Ravine and fastlands will always come into play tapped on turn 4, and there are between 6-9 of that lands in every deck basically, which is a huge percentage)
Going up to 24 lands would increase all probabilities shown above by about 5 %. This really wants me to just jam the 24 lands again. IDK how you guys have been perfoming with 23 lands (those who run it) but I really think, even wihtout any 4 drop, we just cannot play only 23 lands in jund. Its just too greedy. I think I will rework the SB primer a bit and include the aspect of cutting a land in a 24 landbase when being on the draw. Hitting landsdrops highly depend on being on the draw or on the play (difference in consistancy is always about 10%!) and cutting a land in some matchups might be something I want to do more in jund. I did it before at times but not following a straight up plan.
What do you guys think about this? Let me know your experiences with 23 land jund. I for one have to say, I am done with it I guess.
I took Jund to FNM for the first time last night and did really badly! Like the worst I've ever done, 0 wins. I've been on BG and BGw for a while now and doing well (usually go 3-1), so I think I must need to improve and change my playstyle for Jund. Please help me get better!
Here are some areas of play I noticed I felt uncertain about:
Mulliganing decisions. How aggressively do we mulligan? How important is it to have a turn 1 discard spell? Reading articles from pros tells me that I should be more aggressive with mulligans against linear/combo decks and more conservative against midrange/control decks.
Sequencing. I have an opening hand with Goyf and Scooze. Which do I play first? How about Bob? What if Raging Ravine is thrown into the mix and makes things more complex with sequencing? It feels deceptively complex!
Fetching lands. I have a hard time deciding if I should fetch a basic or shock myself in the early turns. I hate taking unnecessary damage, but we're a 3 color deck that needs all 3 colors. Against ghost quarter or path to exile decks it seems more obvious, but against other decks I'm not sure.
Jund surprisingly feels a lot harder than Abzan. I can't just lean on Lingering Souls to cover up small mistakes I make in early turns
I took Jund to FNM for the first time last night and did really badly! Like the worst I've ever done, 0 wins. I've been on BG and BGw for a while now and doing well (usually go 3-1), so I think I must need to improve and change my playstyle for Jund. Please help me get better!
Here are some areas of play I noticed I felt uncertain about:
Mulliganing decisions. How aggressively do we mulligan? How important is it to have a turn 1 discard spell? Reading articles from pros tells me that I should be more aggressive with mulligans against linear/combo decks and more conservative against midrange/control decks.
Sequencing. I have an opening hand with Goyf and Scooze. Which do I play first? How about Bob? What if Raging Ravine is thrown into the mix and makes things more complex with sequencing? It feels deceptively complex!
Fetching lands. I have a hard time deciding if I should fetch a basic or shock myself in the early turns. I hate taking unnecessary damage, but we're a 3 color deck that needs all 3 colors. Against ghost quarter or path to exile decks it seems more obvious, but against other decks I'm not sure.
Jund surprisingly feels a lot harder than Abzan. I can't just lean on Lingering Souls to cover up small mistakes I make in early turns
I wish I could give you a simple answer to all of your questions. The truth is though, it all depends.
Generally, mulliganing is not something we need to do a lot of times. The deck is fairly consistant in that sense. The most important thing is to look at a good ratio of lands to spells. However though, certain matchups require other main focuses. Like you said, against combo you ideally don't want a hand with a bunch of removal or just creatures, you want discard. If I personally know what I am playing against, then I look at least for some kind of interaction. If I am playing against Grishoalbrand and don't have discard but an Ooze instead, I would keep it if the rest is at least fine too (like a LoTV, a Goyf, 3 lands and a Terminate or whatever). I don't mind not having discard here all that much.
Sequencing is a whole book on its own. Concerning Goyf vs. Ooze first, there are several aspects to consider: Which creature is more valuable against the opponent in general? If the deck is not playing much removal then play the more relevant first (like Ooze against GY based decks which are likely to be fast). If you play a midrange mirror, then I usually value Ooze a little higher than goyf, since it can shrink opposing goyfs and can outgrind the opponent. However, you still wouldn't want to play a goyf into a opposing possible lightning Bolt if you don't have discard turn 1 (and a land in the yard).
For bob it also depends, is your hand lacking a significant piece you need otherwise you loose likely? then play bob first to start digging for it. If you had discard turn 1, is the opponent able to kill the bob? If yes, probably play something else first sicne you want bob to stick.
Ravine makes things extra hard of course. You need to decide if you need to play LoTV on turn 3, which could possibly be more important than a turn 2 creature. For that case, I would just play a ravine on turn 2 and have 3 untapped lands for LoTV on turn 3 then. But like everything else, it depends on the match, and specifically on the pace of the match! Are you able to play around certain things? Or do you need to just make the best plays available since you would die otherwise more likely?
If you can, you should take minimal dmg from fetching obviously. That means that you need to aks yourself if you need to be able to cast a Decay/Terminate on turn 2 (maybe having both options available also, what the Swamp plus Stomping Ground combination would allow for example) and LoTV on 3 (for example) or if you can afford to fetch for a basic swamp. If you have Blooming Marsh and a stomping ground in play, you can most likely fetch for a basic swamp unless you think you need to be able to have double red available at some point (like Bolt plus Terminate). Do you need multiple green for Ooze shenanigans? Do you have a second red source to activate ravine etc. There are soo many things to consider, its hard to tell you what you generally need to do. The best thing is to think about the next turn at least and how it will play out, to determine what lands you want to get.
Thanks for the thorough response, I really appreciate it. I know that there are no easy answers here and that a lot of it will come with experience. Do you have any advice on how to practice/improve without MTGO? Currently I just go on cockatrice and play against myself, but that's fairly limiting since I can't pilot the common decks at nearly the level I face in person. Luckily my LGS runs modern 3 times a week so I get those opportunities, but it would be nice to have a way to improve outside of that.
Thanks for the thorough response, I really appreciate it. I know that there are no easy answers here and that a lot of it will come with experience. Do you have any advice on how to practice/improve without MTGO? Currently I just go on cockatrice and play against myself, but that's fairly limiting since I can't pilot the common decks at nearly the level I face in person. Luckily my LGS runs modern 3 times a week so I get those opportunities, but it would be nice to have a way to improve outside of that.
There is also XMage as a free source to play against other opponents online. It does not always run smoothly, but its free at the very least.
One would think it difficult to play BB spells with Blood Moon in play.
Indeed it is. Like I mentioned, it requires making concessions elsewhere to make it work -- 3x LOTV are the only double black cards, only 6 cards that cost green, etc. You basically have to be prepared to cut off your own arm if it takes both your opponent's legs with it. Still tinkering with it after 3-2, 3-2, 3-2 in Competitive Leagues. Blood Moon is swingy at times, but that's to be expected; the one surprise so far has been how little work it did versus my only two matches versus Eldrazi Tron.
BM is close to useless against Etron, never bring it in against them if you are on jund. They have wastes and ways to find them (Map) and on top of that Mind Stone to cover colourless mana. You will definitely hurt yourself more since you shut down your manlands with BM in play. And the biggest aspect of playing BM against Tron variants is to slow them down enough to finish the game before they can cast their huge threats. But since we are cutting ourselves off our arguable best finishers (ravine) this is somewhat counterproductive. So in that sense, no, we really need other ways to beat Etron, BM is definitely not the way to go here. And the same argument goes for regular Tron as well.
Good description of what I experienced. Useless versus ETron, although I'm not sure Ravine is fast enough without other pressure and near perfect disruption. I'll defer to those of you that are more experienced in that match-up than I am though. Moon had some value versus actual Tron though -- won a game versus GW Tron for me in the Modern Challenge when I would've otherwise faced a T4 Karn.
Speaking of the Challenge (subtle segue, eh?), here's the list I ran to 30th place with a 4-3 record. Beat GW Tron, D&T, Naya Counters Company, and Merfolk. My three losses were to BW Eldrazi (who finished #4 and #22) and Titanshift (#14). Not exactly pulling up trees with that finish, but not awful either. Feel free to critique -- Marsh Flats should probably be Wooded Foothills.
Jund won SCG modern classic. Nothing new in the list that stands out.
You say that, but that list is interesting to me. Only 5 discard spells, main deck Kitchen Finks, up to 3 Lightning Bolt in the main, down to 2 Terminate and a sideboard Obstinate Baloth are very interesting choices. It's kind of telling for what he expected to deal with.
He even brought TWO Feed the Clan in the sideboard. That's just plain weird when we have Collective Brutality for Burn.
Thats weird, I actually thought about going up to 7 discard spells lately. I think our removal is just too situational and dead more often than not (especially Push is often dead for me, which basically reflects the meta, since mostly decks which dodge Push are at the top. Thats why I run more Bolts than Pushes lately) but discard can always at least hit something from the hand.
"The worst part isn't the pain, or the smell, or even the fear of death. It's hearing the clatter of bone on stone and knowing the bones are yours."BRG
He even brought TWO Feed the Clan in the sideboard. That's just plain weird when we have Collective Brutality for Burn.
I assumed he would bring the Feed the Clan in against scapeshift in addition to burn and the typical aggro decks. I've never found it to be worth the slot(s), for what its worth.
...a sideboard Obstinate Baloth are very interesting choices...
I don't think Obstinate Baloth is interesting at all. I always have 1 in my SB. Good in Jund Mirrors, Grixis Shadow, Burn, Eldrazi (Reality Smasher).
How often are you running into GB mirrors?
Valid point.
Regardless it's still very good against Kolaghan's Command decks.
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"The worst part isn't the pain, or the smell, or even the fear of death. It's hearing the clatter of bone on stone and knowing the bones are yours."BRG
The very bad thing about Jund is Lightning Bolt being a very weak card since rising of Death's Shadow decks. Amd even worse is that Jund really needs Bolt to be good because it is also quite good game ending spell. Without having a Bolt in Jund I would just play straight BG because what is the point of red without a playset of Bolts?
The very bad thing about Jund is Lightning Bolt being a very weak card since rising of Death's Shadow decks. Amd even worse is that Jund really needs Bolt to be good because it is also quite good game ending spell. Without having a Bolt in Jund I would just play straight BG because what is the point of red without a playset of Bolts?
"There's more that red offers than just bolts" would be my answer. Having played a lot of rock over the last few weeks, it is a solid deck but has trouble in dealing with higher cmc threats without resorting to conditional removal spells like Go for the Throat or less efficient spells like Maelstrom Pulse. You also get access to solid 4 drops like Olivia Voldaren and Huntmaster of the Fells and sideboard staples such as Ancient Grudge.
Lightning Bolt has become somewhat weaker but it can deal with a lot of the lesser toughness 3+ drop creatures that people have started moving to in an attempt to avoid Fatal Push like Tireless Tracker, Goblin Rabblemaster, all of the cmc reducing creatures from Storm, etc. It can also provide the reach to end a game as well as kill planeswalkers. Should you be running a full four? Maybe, maybe not. Meta call, yadda^3.
I think the biggest reason for red is still Ravine, KCommand and Terminate. Then followed by SB cards and the 4 drops.
The thing about Bolt is that its really bad right now, which is a bummer on its own, but I am actually not satisfied with Fatal Push either. Many of the top tier decks just dodge Push with their creature suite which completely blanks the card in our deck. Bolt does of course not feel great either, but at least can go face, which is very desperate, but makes me feel that Bolt is still more consistant due to this.
Before the shake up of the meta Jund's removal suite always had its targets, nowadays I am struggling to find targets for our removal, and if I find them, it always feels much effort was put into it and it does not feel solid at all. In the past we felt great when we were able to Decay a Goyf, LoTV or any creature, nowadays we are stranded with Pushes and Decays in our hand and our opponents play Gideons, Primeval Titans or etc.
Our removal suite was defined by efficiency and value. I feel this is not the case anymore, which bothers my quite much.
...a sideboard Obstinate Baloth are very interesting choices...
I don't think Obstinate Baloth is interesting at all. I always have 1 in my SB. Good in Jund Mirrors, Grixis Shadow, Burn, Eldrazi (Reality Smasher).
How often are you running into GB mirrors?
Valid point.
Regardless it's still very good against Kolaghan's Command decks.
Again, usually only seen in midrange grindy decks. Even then, the most prominent of them (Grixis Death's Shadow) isn't as prevalent as it used to be. The rest of those decks don't make me want Obstinate Baloth. All of this makes a lot of the SCG Classic winner's deck choices really odd to me, but it's also very telling.
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BM is close to useless against Etron, never bring it in against them if you are on jund. They have wastes and ways to find them (Map) and on top of that Mind Stone to cover colourless mana. You will definitely hurt yourself more since you shut down your manlands with BM in play. And the biggest aspect of playing BM against Tron variants is to slow them down enough to finish the game before they can cast their huge threats. But since we are cutting ourselves off our arguable best finishers (ravine) this is somewhat counterproductive. So in that sense, no, we really need other ways to beat Etron, BM is definitely not the way to go here. And the same argument goes for regular Tron as well.
I had an abysmal time at last nights fnm with the deck I posted. I actually wasn't able to focus on testing the new PW rule at all and neither the rabblemasters. The reason behind this was that I had mana issues throughout the whole tournament. I kept track of how many mulls I made, which looked like the following:
Obviously, the issue what I want to adress here was that I only played 23 lands in my jund deck. I, like many others of us nowadays, thought that, since I had no 4 drops in my deck, playing 23 lands is fine. The format is quite fast and you have little time to interact with the opponent, for which reason you simply don't want to flood out. I thought playing 23 lands therefore is fine. But over the course of several weeks, I consistantly had experiences similar to the ones shown above. Clearly this is an indication that something is wrong here. The first and foremost argument for this could likely be my own shuffling behaviour. I do believe there are insufficient ways to shuffle the deck and this could cause such problems. However, the thing is that I changed my shuffling behaviour throughout the weeks and tried different ways to shuffle the deck, in order to possibly get rid of that problem. Nothing changed though. And last night was just too much for me at this point. I was really pissed off tbh, I hated my deck (And my deck seemed to hate me too).
So I remembered an article from Frank Karsten where he was talking about how many lands you need to consistantly hit your landdrops (Article) and read through it again. In this approach, you need to define the amount of lands you need to hit by a certain draw step. Lets say if you want to hit 4 lands in 4 turns it would mean that from the 3-4 drawsteps you get (including the opening hand and considering mulligan decisions as well) you want a quite high probability (~ 80 %) to hit your 4 lands every turn.
So, what does this mean for jund? I get that Jund decks more and more play less 4 drops, but do we actually play smooth games when having only 3 lands in play? I would argue not. You get to likely cast each spell in your deck, but we all know, that Jund really goes off and gets ahead by casting multiple things each turn. So I think that we at least want to hit 4 lands on turn 4 consistantly, and ideally 5 lands on turn 5. What is the probability for that 2 cases with 23 lands?
77.4% (draw) / 67.7% (play) for hitting 4 lands on turn 4
59.1% (draw) / 47.6% (play) for hitting 5 lands on turn 5
So basically only ~ 3/4 of your games you will hit 4 lands on turn 4 here. And this is not including the second big issue we have sometimes: tapped lands (Ravine and fastlands will always come into play tapped on turn 4, and there are between 6-9 of that lands in every deck basically, which is a huge percentage)
Going up to 24 lands would increase all probabilities shown above by about 5 %. This really wants me to just jam the 24 lands again. IDK how you guys have been perfoming with 23 lands (those who run it) but I really think, even wihtout any 4 drop, we just cannot play only 23 lands in jund. Its just too greedy. I think I will rework the SB primer a bit and include the aspect of cutting a land in a 24 landbase when being on the draw. Hitting landsdrops highly depend on being on the draw or on the play (difference in consistancy is always about 10%!) and cutting a land in some matchups might be something I want to do more in jund. I did it before at times but not following a straight up plan.
What do you guys think about this? Let me know your experiences with 23 land jund. I for one have to say, I am done with it I guess.
Here are some areas of play I noticed I felt uncertain about:
Jund surprisingly feels a lot harder than Abzan. I can't just lean on Lingering Souls to cover up small mistakes I make in early turns
I wish I could give you a simple answer to all of your questions. The truth is though, it all depends.
Generally, mulliganing is not something we need to do a lot of times. The deck is fairly consistant in that sense. The most important thing is to look at a good ratio of lands to spells. However though, certain matchups require other main focuses. Like you said, against combo you ideally don't want a hand with a bunch of removal or just creatures, you want discard. If I personally know what I am playing against, then I look at least for some kind of interaction. If I am playing against Grishoalbrand and don't have discard but an Ooze instead, I would keep it if the rest is at least fine too (like a LoTV, a Goyf, 3 lands and a Terminate or whatever). I don't mind not having discard here all that much.
Sequencing is a whole book on its own. Concerning Goyf vs. Ooze first, there are several aspects to consider: Which creature is more valuable against the opponent in general? If the deck is not playing much removal then play the more relevant first (like Ooze against GY based decks which are likely to be fast). If you play a midrange mirror, then I usually value Ooze a little higher than goyf, since it can shrink opposing goyfs and can outgrind the opponent. However, you still wouldn't want to play a goyf into a opposing possible lightning Bolt if you don't have discard turn 1 (and a land in the yard).
For bob it also depends, is your hand lacking a significant piece you need otherwise you loose likely? then play bob first to start digging for it. If you had discard turn 1, is the opponent able to kill the bob? If yes, probably play something else first sicne you want bob to stick.
Ravine makes things extra hard of course. You need to decide if you need to play LoTV on turn 3, which could possibly be more important than a turn 2 creature. For that case, I would just play a ravine on turn 2 and have 3 untapped lands for LoTV on turn 3 then. But like everything else, it depends on the match, and specifically on the pace of the match! Are you able to play around certain things? Or do you need to just make the best plays available since you would die otherwise more likely?
If you can, you should take minimal dmg from fetching obviously. That means that you need to aks yourself if you need to be able to cast a Decay/Terminate on turn 2 (maybe having both options available also, what the Swamp plus Stomping Ground combination would allow for example) and LoTV on 3 (for example) or if you can afford to fetch for a basic swamp. If you have Blooming Marsh and a stomping ground in play, you can most likely fetch for a basic swamp unless you think you need to be able to have double red available at some point (like Bolt plus Terminate). Do you need multiple green for Ooze shenanigans? Do you have a second red source to activate ravine etc. There are soo many things to consider, its hard to tell you what you generally need to do. The best thing is to think about the next turn at least and how it will play out, to determine what lands you want to get.
There is also XMage as a free source to play against other opponents online. It does not always run smoothly, but its free at the very least.
Good description of what I experienced. Useless versus ETron, although I'm not sure Ravine is fast enough without other pressure and near perfect disruption. I'll defer to those of you that are more experienced in that match-up than I am though. Moon had some value versus actual Tron though -- won a game versus GW Tron for me in the Modern Challenge when I would've otherwise faced a T4 Karn.
Speaking of the Challenge (subtle segue, eh?), here's the list I ran to 30th place with a 4-3 record. Beat GW Tron, D&T, Naya Counters Company, and Merfolk. My three losses were to BW Eldrazi (who finished #4 and #22) and Titanshift (#14). Not exactly pulling up trees with that finish, but not awful either. Feel free to critique -- Marsh Flats should probably be Wooded Foothills.
Is the meta becoming favorable for Jund?
http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=116409
You say that, but that list is interesting to me. Only 5 discard spells, main deck Kitchen Finks, up to 3 Lightning Bolt in the main, down to 2 Terminate and a sideboard Obstinate Baloth are very interesting choices. It's kind of telling for what he expected to deal with.
He even brought TWO Feed the Clan in the sideboard. That's just plain weird when we have Collective Brutality for Burn.
Its definitely not a staple in Jund SBs though.
How often are you running into GB mirrors?
I assumed he would bring the Feed the Clan in against scapeshift in addition to burn and the typical aggro decks. I've never found it to be worth the slot(s), for what its worth.
Regardless it's still very good against Kolaghan's Command decks.
The very bad thing about Jund is Lightning Bolt being a very weak card since rising of Death's Shadow decks. Amd even worse is that Jund really needs Bolt to be good because it is also quite good game ending spell. Without having a Bolt in Jund I would just play straight BG because what is the point of red without a playset of Bolts?
Modern
WUBRG
"There's more that red offers than just bolts" would be my answer. Having played a lot of rock over the last few weeks, it is a solid deck but has trouble in dealing with higher cmc threats without resorting to conditional removal spells like Go for the Throat or less efficient spells like Maelstrom Pulse. You also get access to solid 4 drops like Olivia Voldaren and Huntmaster of the Fells and sideboard staples such as Ancient Grudge.
Lightning Bolt has become somewhat weaker but it can deal with a lot of the lesser toughness 3+ drop creatures that people have started moving to in an attempt to avoid Fatal Push like Tireless Tracker, Goblin Rabblemaster, all of the cmc reducing creatures from Storm, etc. It can also provide the reach to end a game as well as kill planeswalkers. Should you be running a full four? Maybe, maybe not. Meta call, yadda^3.
The thing about Bolt is that its really bad right now, which is a bummer on its own, but I am actually not satisfied with Fatal Push either. Many of the top tier decks just dodge Push with their creature suite which completely blanks the card in our deck. Bolt does of course not feel great either, but at least can go face, which is very desperate, but makes me feel that Bolt is still more consistant due to this.
Before the shake up of the meta Jund's removal suite always had its targets, nowadays I am struggling to find targets for our removal, and if I find them, it always feels much effort was put into it and it does not feel solid at all. In the past we felt great when we were able to Decay a Goyf, LoTV or any creature, nowadays we are stranded with Pushes and Decays in our hand and our opponents play Gideons, Primeval Titans or etc.
Our removal suite was defined by efficiency and value. I feel this is not the case anymore, which bothers my quite much.
Again, usually only seen in midrange grindy decks. Even then, the most prominent of them (Grixis Death's Shadow) isn't as prevalent as it used to be. The rest of those decks don't make me want Obstinate Baloth. All of this makes a lot of the SCG Classic winner's deck choices really odd to me, but it's also very telling.