I'm slightly frustrated with Jund because it very much feels like these aggro decks can easily go under us and we easily can have this other decks go way over us.
This was the overall conclusion that I came to after testing various B/G/x decks after Assassin's Trophy came out. It just feels like everything is a bad matchup now, even the creature-based matchups that were traditionally favorable for us. I ended up moving to Traverse Shadow and then back to Grixis Shadow, which is what I've been playing this year up until the Trophy printing. I would actually play either Shadow deck over one of the other B/G/x decks right now, because they operate similarly but have much higher card efficiency, which lets them keep pace with the faster decks of the format. Grixis, specifically, also has an absurd amount of flexibility in how you build/sideboard/execute it.
It's hard to even say what it is that Jund actually needs at this point. Trophy did so much for the deck's bad matchups and freeing up it's sideboard, but the clunky set of removal it replaced was the most glaring issue in the deck's shell. I really liked Jadine's recent list and how it lowered the overall curve of the deck, but even then it's still a 24 land deck that can't filter its draws. I think that the high land count and inability to really mitigate flooding are what's made grinding with Jund so much harder lately.
Some of the high points of Jadine's article:
- The 4 Confidant/3 BBE split is a response to her expecting more uninteractive decks, where Confidant helps you find your sideboard cards and your life total isn't as relevant. If you're expecting more creature decks and midrange/control, she still likes the 3 Bob/4 BBE.
- She's super high on Assassin's Trophy, and credits it with freeing up her sideboard enough to play as much anti-dredge hate as she did.
- Adding Assassin's Trophy lowered her curve a bit, so she felt comfortable going down to 24 lands. She wanted 3 Ravine and no Treetop because of a desire to cast Anger of the Gods consistently, but likes Treetop if you're expecting a lot of U/W control.
Beyond that, there's a lot of the great detailed analysis that makes her a Premium writer to begin with. It's definitely worth the full read.
Cage has some overlap in that it's good against Coco and Chord, though. I like how diversified her graveyard hate is because it makes it much harder for Dredge to play around, which seems important.
Jadine's manabase is almost exactly what we typically played in 2015-2016, and it was generally stable enough to support Anger and Finks if you fetched with those cards in mind. In general, the construction of her main deck looks like a throwback to that era of Jund, which I really like.
Oh Manamorphose is legit. I was also hesitant to pull the trigger, but the deck is an absolute freight train when you cut some of the clunkier cards like Liliana for Manamorphose. I was playing on Monday, and on turn two with only a fetchland in the graveyard, I played manamorphose, which drew into Street Wraith, cycle Wraith and draw Bauble, crack Bauble, play a Grim Flayer and now I have delirium. It smooths out delirium really nicely, and also makes the deck much more resilient to Blood Moon and mana disruption.
I've been playing Traverse Shadow for the last few weeks for that reason. I think the problem is that Jund wasn't well-positioned before BBE, and BBE isn't great against the current best decks in the format, and if you're going to run Jund without BBE then you're basically back to where we were before the unban. I think that the other issue is that Humans, Hollow One, and Affinity are all exploiting Jund's historic weakness to fliers, which is one of the reasons Mardu Pyro looks really appealing against those decks over Jund. If I wasn't on Shadow right now I'd be running Mardu.
One thing that's also relevant against Ponza, is that your basics are better in your hand than on the battlefield. Ponza spends it's first few turns messing with your mana, in the hopes that it locks you out of casting spells in the long run. If you can nullify the effects of that disruption while establishing a clock, you can set yourself up to win even if a Blood Moon resolves. One of the ways to do that is not to play basics until after the Blood Moon comes out, because they'll need to choose between blowing up your basics (and not committing more to the board), or playing out creatures and allowing you to continue casting spells. Also, the deck lowering it's curve with Tracker and BBE makes it's creatures a bit easier to answer, and it means that Tarmogoyf is only outclassed by Inferno Titan. Ponza is a bit of an odd matchup, but the more I've played it the more comfortable I've gotten with it. It definitely takes practice to figure out the right play patterns, because how you sequence your lands can really set you up for success or failure in the mid-game.
Storm feels a lot like what it used to be like to play against Infect: I feel favored, but like any slight misplay could lead to me immediately losing. I would call it a very stressful matchup, but on paper we definitely have the tools to beat them. I've found that my losses to storm mostly come from being too hasty and tapping low, giving them a window to combo off. I've started opting more for the conservative line against Storm and have had some general success with that approach.
I wouldn't call K-Command excellent against humans. It's fine in that it can kill dudes and blow up vial, but it doesn't kill Mantis Rider and it's real bad to cast for 4 mana under Thalia. It's fine in burn but still not excellent. It is great in the other matchups you listed.
You talk to much about tuning 0,02% with lands and to less about playstyles and Tipps against several other opponents
The thing is, the primer already covers the basics incredibly well. It goes over card choices, different flavors of building the deck, matchups, sideboarding, and even has links to several other great articles that are relevant to Jund. The current state of the primer is the sum total of everything we could offer to new Jund players or existing players looking to get more insight into how the deck works. And while spending 5 pages debating 24 vs 25 lands sounds silly, those kinds of micro decisions matter a lot because Jund is an extremely fluid deck and you have access to a lot of very powerful cards.
Granted, discussions at that granularity aren't super helpful for newer players, but any time someone asks about matchups or sideboarding you have at least 2-3 people offering opinions and advice.
I think that Dreadbore is incredible in Mardu Pyromancer, and that's about it. It's definitely a little "too cute" for Jund, and just not necessary when BBE can just blow up planeswalkers on her own.
On the topic of graveyard hate, some of the lists doing well lately have been shaving on actual graveyard hate in favor of Anger of the Gods as pseudo-hate, which is an interesting direction to go in. I think the problem right now is that no one option is good against everything. Grafdigger's Cage does nothing against Living End and is vulnerable to K-Command, Nihil Spellbomb is a one-shot effect that decks can rebuild after, Leyline of the Void is a high-risk, high-reward card, and Ooze is slow. I think that it isn't enough to say "I need graveyard hate", but to decide which graveyard decks, specifically, you want to hedge against. With that in mind, Anger is actually pretty solid, being a strong option against Dredge and Hollow One while also just being a general wrath effect for creature matchups.
I also love the idea of the 3rd Ooze in the sideboard, and the list I'm looking to try next Monday is Delver's main deck -1 K-Command and +1 Liliana, the Last Hope, with the sideboard slightly more skewed towards my local meta.
Only stuff that really have fallen are other BGx decks such as Abzan and BG Rock, which I'm not sad to see fade. IMO Jund is a lot more fun anyway.
I think the problem with Abzan is that it's currently a weaker version of 3 different decks:
Mardu Pyromancer is a better Lingering Souls deck
Jund is a better slow Tarmogoyf deck because of the raw power level of it's cards
Traverse Shadow is a better aggressive Tarmogoyf deck
I just don't know what would make you sleeve up Abzan over one of those decks right now. I think that straight B/G is still a good option though, on the back of better resilience to Blood Moon and the strength of Field of Ruin.
I went 3-0-1 last night beating Traverse Shadow, Ponza, and Abzan Company (Melira/Anafenza combo), then drew with my last opponent. He was on Tron, which is a matchup I'd actually like to play more to get a feel for it in a BBE world, but I was looking to get out early if possible. I played the same maindeck as the 2nd place GP list, but retooled the sideboard a bit to make room for Fulminator Mage. The deck ran well, but my Shadow opponent was very new to the deck and my Ponza opponent had some mana issues, so it wasn't a "fought through by the skin of my teeth because I'm great" night. I'd like to try a 24 land list like what Delver posted, though I'll probably drop the second K-Command for Liliana, the Last Hope.
I think that sweepers are a mistake against humans, specifically, because they have a lot of ways to make them bad. Freebooter, Thalia, and Meddling Mage all impact your ability to play them, and if you don't play them soon enough you run the risk of humans just growing a board big enough to where their creatures can start living through it. I think that Grim Lavamancer is actually the secret sauce to that matchup, because he gets past Thalia, can come down very early, and can clean up random goons so that you can save your removal spells for the cards that are actually important. If I was really worried about humans I'd drop the second Liliana, the Last Hope from my side for a second Lavaman.
Abzan is basically just BG with Lingering Souls and Stony Silence at this point, it's a reasonable direction to trend in. With nearly every 2-color midrange deck using Field of Ruin, you really can't just arbitrarily play a random assortment of 3-color cards anymore. Having to run a single Mountain puts a very real strain on our mana base, but at the same time it's hard to play 4 BBE, 3-4 Bolt 2 K-Command, and 2 Terminate without it. And that's ignoring sideboard cards like Anger of the Gods.
I played two IQs this weekend and ran pretty different lists, with 24 lands on Saturday and 25 lands on Sunday. I strongly preferred the 25 land base, it was actually the same as what Reid Duke registered for the Super League, but with -1 Blooming Marsh and +1 Bloodstained Mire.
How'd you do? Any report? Any insight to choices or the deck in general?
Work has been nuts so I haven't been able to do a huge write up, but I did have some thoughts at the end of it.
On Saturday I played a 24 land list that was just too greedy. I had a lot of clunky hands and ended up going 2-3, with several losses being because I just couldn't play my cards in a timely manner. In particular, I was kind of unhappy about my hand getting clogged up with Kolaghan's Commands, and when I saw Jadine's deck tech that night I was convinced to move the second one into the sideboard and move a Liliana, the Last Hope back into the main (I had 2 in the side). My list on Saturday also had no Abrupt Decay and 2 Terminate, and I moved to 1 and 1. I also had a pounding headache from when I woke up to when I went to sleep, so I'm not sure that a slightly better list would have done much to salvage the day for me.
On Sunday the IQ had 86 players. I registered this:
I went 4-3, narrowly losing to Mardu Pyromancer to go 5-2 and make top 16. My other losses were to Affinity and Eldrazi Stompy, and I beat Burn, 4-Color Pyromancer, U/W Control, and Skred. I was happy with the list, and liked having access to a second copy of each of the maindeck 3 drops in the sideboard. I'm interested in trying out a 2/3 split of Ravine/Treetop, dropping the Terminate to move the Pulse to the main deck, and going 3/3 on Fatal Push/Bolt. These are mostly minor changes though, and the kinds of flex spot swapping that I would normally be trying out anyway. I'm still very attached to 25 lands, when I was on 24 it felt like I kept running into situations where I needed to draw lands to play my spells, but I needed to draw more spells because I was falling behind because I couldn't play my spells fast enough. Playing 5 manlands felt like it mitigated flooding a lot, and I honestly didn't feel flooded at all on Sunday.
As much as I ragged on her, having Liliana, the Last Hope back in the main felt very good in the midrange/small creature matchups. I think that she's better than K-command at catching us up if we fall behind in the first couple turns because of lands coming in tapped, and that in the matchups where she's not great (Tron, Scapeshift) she's not substantially worse than K-Command. Those are also matchups where we're highly unlikely to win game 1 anyway. She's also hugely important to fight against Lingering Souls, and the Mardu Pyromancer deck is a very strong choice if people want to beat Jund while playing a midrange strategy. Unless something drastic changes, this is the shell I'm looking to play moving forward.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
This was the overall conclusion that I came to after testing various B/G/x decks after Assassin's Trophy came out. It just feels like everything is a bad matchup now, even the creature-based matchups that were traditionally favorable for us. I ended up moving to Traverse Shadow and then back to Grixis Shadow, which is what I've been playing this year up until the Trophy printing. I would actually play either Shadow deck over one of the other B/G/x decks right now, because they operate similarly but have much higher card efficiency, which lets them keep pace with the faster decks of the format. Grixis, specifically, also has an absurd amount of flexibility in how you build/sideboard/execute it.
It's hard to even say what it is that Jund actually needs at this point. Trophy did so much for the deck's bad matchups and freeing up it's sideboard, but the clunky set of removal it replaced was the most glaring issue in the deck's shell. I really liked Jadine's recent list and how it lowered the overall curve of the deck, but even then it's still a 24 land deck that can't filter its draws. I think that the high land count and inability to really mitigate flooding are what's made grinding with Jund so much harder lately.
- The 4 Confidant/3 BBE split is a response to her expecting more uninteractive decks, where Confidant helps you find your sideboard cards and your life total isn't as relevant. If you're expecting more creature decks and midrange/control, she still likes the 3 Bob/4 BBE.
- She's super high on Assassin's Trophy, and credits it with freeing up her sideboard enough to play as much anti-dredge hate as she did.
- Adding Assassin's Trophy lowered her curve a bit, so she felt comfortable going down to 24 lands. She wanted 3 Ravine and no Treetop because of a desire to cast Anger of the Gods consistently, but likes Treetop if you're expecting a lot of U/W control.
Beyond that, there's a lot of the great detailed analysis that makes her a Premium writer to begin with. It's definitely worth the full read.
Jadine's manabase is almost exactly what we typically played in 2015-2016, and it was generally stable enough to support Anger and Finks if you fetched with those cards in mind. In general, the construction of her main deck looks like a throwback to that era of Jund, which I really like.
The thing is, the primer already covers the basics incredibly well. It goes over card choices, different flavors of building the deck, matchups, sideboarding, and even has links to several other great articles that are relevant to Jund. The current state of the primer is the sum total of everything we could offer to new Jund players or existing players looking to get more insight into how the deck works. And while spending 5 pages debating 24 vs 25 lands sounds silly, those kinds of micro decisions matter a lot because Jund is an extremely fluid deck and you have access to a lot of very powerful cards.
Granted, discussions at that granularity aren't super helpful for newer players, but any time someone asks about matchups or sideboarding you have at least 2-3 people offering opinions and advice.
Damn it man, I'm trying to get work done today.
On the topic of graveyard hate, some of the lists doing well lately have been shaving on actual graveyard hate in favor of Anger of the Gods as pseudo-hate, which is an interesting direction to go in. I think the problem right now is that no one option is good against everything. Grafdigger's Cage does nothing against Living End and is vulnerable to K-Command, Nihil Spellbomb is a one-shot effect that decks can rebuild after, Leyline of the Void is a high-risk, high-reward card, and Ooze is slow. I think that it isn't enough to say "I need graveyard hate", but to decide which graveyard decks, specifically, you want to hedge against. With that in mind, Anger is actually pretty solid, being a strong option against Dredge and Hollow One while also just being a general wrath effect for creature matchups.
I also love the idea of the 3rd Ooze in the sideboard, and the list I'm looking to try next Monday is Delver's main deck -1 K-Command and +1 Liliana, the Last Hope, with the sideboard slightly more skewed towards my local meta.
I think the problem with Abzan is that it's currently a weaker version of 3 different decks:
I just don't know what would make you sleeve up Abzan over one of those decks right now. I think that straight B/G is still a good option though, on the back of better resilience to Blood Moon and the strength of Field of Ruin.
I think that sweepers are a mistake against humans, specifically, because they have a lot of ways to make them bad. Freebooter, Thalia, and Meddling Mage all impact your ability to play them, and if you don't play them soon enough you run the risk of humans just growing a board big enough to where their creatures can start living through it. I think that Grim Lavamancer is actually the secret sauce to that matchup, because he gets past Thalia, can come down very early, and can clean up random goons so that you can save your removal spells for the cards that are actually important. If I was really worried about humans I'd drop the second Liliana, the Last Hope from my side for a second Lavaman.
Work has been nuts so I haven't been able to do a huge write up, but I did have some thoughts at the end of it.
On Saturday I played a 24 land list that was just too greedy. I had a lot of clunky hands and ended up going 2-3, with several losses being because I just couldn't play my cards in a timely manner. In particular, I was kind of unhappy about my hand getting clogged up with Kolaghan's Commands, and when I saw Jadine's deck tech that night I was convinced to move the second one into the sideboard and move a Liliana, the Last Hope back into the main (I had 2 in the side). My list on Saturday also had no Abrupt Decay and 2 Terminate, and I moved to 1 and 1. I also had a pounding headache from when I woke up to when I went to sleep, so I'm not sure that a slightly better list would have done much to salvage the day for me.
On Sunday the IQ had 86 players. I registered this:
4x Blackcleave Cliffs
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
1x Forest
2x Overgrown Tomb
3x Raging Ravine
1x Stomping Ground
2x Swamp
2x Treetop Village
1x Twilight Mire
4x Verdant Catacombs
Instant (9)
1x Abrupt Decay
2x Fatal Push
1x Kolaghan's Command
4x Lightning Bolt
1x Terminate
4x Bloodbraid Elf
4x Dark Confidant
2x Scavenging Ooze
4x Tarmogoyf
Sorcery (7)
4x Inquisition of Kozilek
1x Maelstrom Pulse
2x Thoughtseize
Planeswalker (5)
4x Liliana of the Veil
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Ancient Grudge
2x Collective Brutality
1x Engineered Explosives
4x Fulminator Mage
1x Grafdigger's Cage
2x Kitchen Finks
1x Kolaghan's Command
1x Liliana, the Last Hope
1x Maelstrom Pulse
1x Nihil Spellbomb
I went 4-3, narrowly losing to Mardu Pyromancer to go 5-2 and make top 16. My other losses were to Affinity and Eldrazi Stompy, and I beat Burn, 4-Color Pyromancer, U/W Control, and Skred. I was happy with the list, and liked having access to a second copy of each of the maindeck 3 drops in the sideboard. I'm interested in trying out a 2/3 split of Ravine/Treetop, dropping the Terminate to move the Pulse to the main deck, and going 3/3 on Fatal Push/Bolt. These are mostly minor changes though, and the kinds of flex spot swapping that I would normally be trying out anyway. I'm still very attached to 25 lands, when I was on 24 it felt like I kept running into situations where I needed to draw lands to play my spells, but I needed to draw more spells because I was falling behind because I couldn't play my spells fast enough. Playing 5 manlands felt like it mitigated flooding a lot, and I honestly didn't feel flooded at all on Sunday.
As much as I ragged on her, having Liliana, the Last Hope back in the main felt very good in the midrange/small creature matchups. I think that she's better than K-command at catching us up if we fall behind in the first couple turns because of lands coming in tapped, and that in the matchups where she's not great (Tron, Scapeshift) she's not substantially worse than K-Command. Those are also matchups where we're highly unlikely to win game 1 anyway. She's also hugely important to fight against Lingering Souls, and the Mardu Pyromancer deck is a very strong choice if people want to beat Jund while playing a midrange strategy. Unless something drastic changes, this is the shell I'm looking to play moving forward.