MTG Salvation

Quote from Protohype86 »

Been reading this thread for ages it seems, playing jund for about 2 years now, but this is my first time posting. I think that the biggest problem is that we're all still treating bloodbraid elf as an auto include in our lists because she's unbanned now and she used to be so powerful. The problem to me is that our deck lacks consistency, and BBE does nothing to solve this problem. She's a decent body with a random chance to get you a free LotV and that's about the best you can expect from her. Half of the time by turn 4 her p/t is no longer relevant and it feels real bad to cascade into a thoughtseize when you're low on life or the opponent has an empty hand or a fatal push on an open board. The random nature of cascade plays directly against the consistency were looking for and so BBE seems like a deck building trap. I've cut all 4 of them for a combination of huntmaster of the fells and kalitas, and I couldn't be happier with the changes. Each of these 4 drops do much more to advance our board state and pose an actual threat to the opponent once we've slowly built an advantage in the earlier turns.

As a side note, a couple grim flayer work extremely well with Bob, and I don't think should be overlooked with how easy it is to turn on delirium, or swing on an open board to manipulate our topdecks, grow the tarmogoyf, or make a Bob trigger painless.

In regards to faithless looting, I've tested out 2-3 copies in my 60 and it seems like what flyingdelver has been saying about the deck needs to be entirely redesigned around maximizing the potential of looting with delve creatures, which would come at the expense of tarmogoyf. It competes in the one drop slot with all our discard and removal, and generally felt like the wrong decision to play looting until later in the game when you can play it the same turn as a threat or removal spell.

All in all, I'm feeling that my current build of jund is a lot more potent and consistent when compared with the seemingly "stock" bloodbraid list I was running previously. I'd love some feedback on this from anyone else who has tried it however, I can't take my mtgo and local game store wins as absolute proof of concept after all. I'm very interested in seeing what else I can learn

Quote from Spsiegel1987 »

Quote from chaos021 »

One top 8 doesn't make me feel warm or fuzzy. It makes me think that guy had to get lucky and grind like a champ just to get there. I don't know what deck I can say right now that I want to sit across. Tron maybe? Storm? I seem to be alright against the UR Thing/Phoenix decks. I honestly couldn't tell you right now.

I'm glad you're being logical. Some people definitely say, "but it was in the top 8, it's fine, you're overreacting". The real question is---what deck are we happy to play? Humans---no, not really. Spirits--nope. Tron? Nah. Dredge---definitely not.

Like, I get a fair deck has a grind to it, but there's no longer matchups where I'm like, "sweet, I feel good about my hand and this matchup".

Jund doesn't know what it wants to do. Blue can also rip it's deck with cantrips (Visions, Thought Scour, Azcanta, etc). These other new waves of combo aggro and midrange plays faithless looting, getting rid of dead cards and reloading. That saying of Jund having the best topdeck is definitely dead. That stopped sometime around fatal push's printing, right?

Jund no longer has the right in saying, "Our topdeck is better than yours".

Tribal decks are crazy resilient now, and going either taller and wider or being evasive. Combo decks are becoming more resilient.



I actually think Grixis Shadow/4C Shadow is now the deck we should be playing if you're trying to get that midrange itch. Unfortunately the conversation is nearly non-existitent here for some reason. Grixis is actually seeing quite a bit of results in top 8s. That may be due to Humans being just another good deck instead of THE deck.


I wonder as time goes by if modern could be a format where not playing blue as a fair deck could be very difficult.


Either way, I've been jamming Shadow decks but it sucks to have no one to discuss it with.

I do like that more Jund decks have come to a consensus though, it was looking rough for a while. When a fair deck looks drastically different from one another that is usually a very bad sign to me. It's one of the reasons why I don't think I'll ever be a true UW Control/Jeskai player.


Lets even look at the new Phoenix decks. If anyone watched SCG this weekend, the way both versions ripped through it's deck with Manamorphose, Bedlam Revlar, tormenting Voices and Loot was amazing. When you get to see that many cards in a deck you see a lot of consistency. It doesn't hurt that you get to even use some of those cards after they're discarded.

Jund will remain popular because it's a style people like...but if you guys pay attention to modern, you can clearly see this deck is being left behind as obsolete. I REALLY, REALLY want to be wrong. I'm waiting for Jund to receive just a few cards to push it over the edge, as that can easily happen. What we need now is not better removal, we need either some kind of broken creature or spell that helps rip through our deck.