Jund

By Peter Bui

Why I Play Jund or Why Play Jund?

These days, many people at the local shop (and on our locally run Twitch stream) know me as the avid Modern Jund player – or that crazy guy who plays a foiled out Jund deck all the time.

For those who have known me a little longer they might more accurately know that I most often have enjoyed midrange style decks in multiple formats.

Midrange style decks all have similar play styles- namely a balanced strategy of reactive “answers”, likely some sort of card advantage engine, and medium-paced defense/aggro plan to “come back” and close out a game.

The aspects of play one can expect to encounter with such a deck typically involve being faced with multiple critical decisions, a need to have intimate knowledge of your opponents’ decks and strategy, and one of my favorite reasons: getting to play magic for more than a just a few minutes in an interactive manner!

There are other decks that can do this too – but Jund has the right balance of versatility, power level, design strategy, and efficiency to consistently do so over the course of many metagame changes. It’s

a “worthwhile” deck investment not likely to be made entirely obsolete or irrelevant over time.

Jund also offers an ongoing learning path due to the complexity and learning curve of navigating the myriad decision trees to find a path to victory. New experiences, lessons, and nuances that keep things from getting stale abound. Other highly “linear” or tightly-focused deck strategies can get old after a while because the gameplay is more repetitive and unchanging.

When playing the deck, each game can unfold to victory or defeat based largely on the conscious, deliberate decisions you make moreso than with many other decks because the playing decisions that must be made in order to win leave little room for error. The margins are thinner than with other decks where it might not be as critical to choose between casting big scary Monster A vs Monster B for example. Successfully navigating a game can thus feel more rewarding.

With Jund, you will always have a decent chance of winning no matter the matchup – even for “unfavorable matchups”. You will, at the very least, most likely get to play a significant portion of your 50-minute round playing magic – even if you don’t ultimately end up winning. A competent Jund player can walk in to any card shop and know that they have a decent chance of doing well.

Jund is able to achieve this because the arsenal of cards available to it are generically often applicable to most situations and able to answer most anything in Modern. It thus also follows that there are very few ways that other decks can easily completely “hose” Jund unlike other decks (e.g. Stony Silence for Affinity, Grafdigger’s cage for Dredge and Company decks, etc.).

Additionally, in a small predictable environment, such as at a typical LGS that you frequent, you can easily customize the deck to best optimize your probability for success with the large arsenal of options available to the deck. It is a huge advantage with Jund (more-so than many other decks) to be able to customize your sideboard and also sit down across a known opposing deck and make optimal mulligan decisions. Not to say Jund is not capable of playing in a larger open environment like a GP, but that at a more predictable environment it becomes even stronger.

Strengths and Weaknesses

I am not claiming that Jund is the best deck in Modern – in terms of winning appearances at major events – although I believe such win rates are tightly correlated to deck popularity which itself is often based on fickle, less rational reasons behind it (e.g. “new toy” syndrome).

Regardless let’s enumerate some of strength and weaknesses of Jund.

Strengths:

It’s great at picking apart most creature-based decks which themselves constitute a fair chunk of the Modern metagame (e.g. Affinity, Infect, Collected Company decks, Merfolk)

It is the best deck to disrupt combo decks

It is resilient to hate

It is consistent and mulligans well

It naturally has a versatile set of tools for most situations thus it will rarely find itself in a completely lopsided matchup

And as I have already mentioned it will likely always be relevant and resilient to metagame changes.

Weaknesses:

Go wide strategies such as tokens can overwhelm Jund’s removal capacity

Fast ramping “go-big” decks that quickly outclass Jund’s threats and answers (Tron style decks)

Decks that attack land/mana are an issue for Jund due its 3-color nature

Low-interactive decks that are resilient to being disrupted with Jund’s discard spells or have few creatures rendering many of Jund’s cards irrelevant (Burn, Living End, Scapeshift)

Decks that have strong forms of card-advantage/value such as recurring creatures or spells or card draw spells (certain blue-based control decks, some g/w creature decks with lots of Kitchen Finks, Voice of Resurgence, etc.)

Some good news is that the decks that do have an edge over Jund are themselves more statistically susceptible to encountering lopsided matches. Burn vs Coco, Tron vs Affinity, Ad Nauseum vs Infect, etc. So there is a chance factor that in a given event such decks and matchups can be avoided due to the nature of tournament elimination whereas Jund is more even-keeled in that regard.

Build and Play Strategy

I’m going to avoid giving specific Jund decklists and play instructions for a few reasons.

For one, there is already a plethora of places one can “netdeck” a current list. There’s no point in me regurgitating that information. But, the primary reason is that one has to realize there is no single “correct” list (be it for the maindeck or the sideboard). For example, it would be incorrect to say that “the right count of discard spells is 6” or “x amount of Fatal Push cards is right”.

Instead, I like to think that there are deck building and playing strategy *principles* one should adhere to. A well-built Jund deck should adhere to certain Build Principles – which in turn should go towards enabling some Play Principles.

As such, this could result in shifts of actual deck lists and card counts as the metagame expectations change. For example, if one expects a meta with lots of small creature decks then Jund decks would up their count of Fatal Pushes and Lighting Bolts – maybe even main-deck sweepers. What’s “correct” today will likely not be in the future.

The overall strategy though has and will likely continue to be proven and valid and I believe pointing them out will prove more insightful and useful to prospective Jund players than a more typical “play this card or that card” type of guide.

Play Strategy:

The typical game plan Jund should have is to disable, retard or poke a hole in the opposing player’s strategy, and at the same time or over the course of several turns either exhaust their resources or game play options long enough to then come back and kill them.

So the two main Play Principles are:

Disruption: whatever strategy or plan the opposing player has they will likely need to struggle to enact that plan – or they should if the Jund player is doing things right. Attrition: the typical main resources all players have at their disposal in the game are cards in-hand, and non-land permanents. The Jund player should typically seek to exhaust these resources from the opponent as much as possible while maintaining parity with its own. Then, rely on its own statistically greater individual card power advantage to dominate the remainder of the game.

Build Strategy:

So what are the key Build Principles particular to Jund that should go hand-in-hand with the Play Principles?

Hand Control Relevant Versatility Independently Impactful

Jund’s cards are almost always high-impact, multi-purpose, and independent of other cards in the deck. Along those lines, if you are considering playing a card in the deck that does not meet those descriptions then it probably doesn’t belong in the deck.

Hand Control

Being able to remove cards directly from the opponent’s hand has been and likely always will be a defining characteristic of the deck and is the biggest tool in Jund’s arsenal fulfilling both the disruption and attrition principles of play.

Currently, the main cards of choice to enable hand control are Liliana of the Veil, which fulfills multiple roles of disruption, removal, and threat in a single card and the selective discard suite of Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek.

These spells, particularly the one-mana selective discard spells, offer unparalleled fast and efficient early removal and disruption. Even if an opponent holds what would be a problematic card the Jund player could potentially simply force them to discard it before they are even able to play it!

Being able to also simply see and have knowledge of what your opponent has in their hand is a

huge advantage that enables the Jund player to formulate a plan for winning. This is often an overlooked effect by many. When most opponents get Thoughtseized they might gripe about losing a key card when instead they should be concerned with the fact that the Jund player can now reliably predict what they will *do* going forward.

Magic is typically a game with “imperfect knowledge” – where neither player has full knowledge of the other’s available resources and possible moves. This is unlike a game with perfect information, such as Chess, where all resources and potential moves are out in the open. Changing this fundamental aspect of the game provides a huge advantage for a very negligible cost.

Relevant Versatility

As mentioned, one of Jund’s strengths is being versatile at dealing with many other decks. Put another way: it seeks to have the best average win/loss ratio in the first game of a match for as many of the expected decks in a given metagame environment – then, sideboard and optimize games 2 or 3 to increase the statistical likelihood of winning a bit more.

When making card choices you should favor ones that are going to have application against the most number of decks you expect (or guess) to be present even if the chosen cards aren’t the most optimal for certain matchups.

A quick look at the more common deck listing websites will often accurately portray the current meta you could expect (largely because most players have a tendency to netdeck). Also, as I pointed out earlier if you regularly frequent an LGS you will quickly come to know the local meta there too.

Then, using this information make card choices and optimizations that will, on average, be better for the largest number of expected decks. Whip out some pen and paper, a spreadsheet or do it in your head – it’s a simple matter of counting.

Example 1: Let’s say you are faced with a decision of whether to play with 3 Abrupt Decay + 1 Maelstrom Pulse, or 2 Abrupt Decay + 2 Maelstrom Pulse. If you knew a large percentage of decks at your LGS played with big planeswalkers like Nahiri or Karn you likely would choose the second choice right?

Example 2: You are faced with making sideboard choices for your “lifegain slots”: say, Kitchen Finks vs Feed the Clan. Feed the Clan is by far the stronger anti-burn card (because it can be played instantly, is easier and quicker to cast, and is guaranteed more lifegain with a potential for a game-winning amount). So why do most Jund players choose Kitchen Finks instead then? Because it has other applications against so many other decks (the mirror, control, aggro decks, Tron, and so on). And again, it’s not a particularly good “silver bullet” solution against those decks either – but it is versatile for many matchups.

Independently Impactful

Jund is often described as a “pile of good stuff”. This is somewhat true – but not because some person at some point in time with zero creativity decided to mash a bunch of good cards together. Instead, the card choices are (or should be) carefully tailored to contributing towards the Attrition Principle.

Often, due to the nature of the deck and its playstyle of reacting to and answering “threats”, both players will have little to no remaining resources (cards in hand or permanents on the field). Or, at least, equal amounts of resources. This is because the typical cost of removing resources from an opponent will itself likely be the same amount of your own resources.

In such situations every card you draw going forward – which usually only happens one card at a time – must be able to function on its own and ideally also be a pretty strong card in its own right. You don’t want to be drawing cards that rely on the presence of some other card to be effective.

Jund should mainly have three kinds of non-land cards in the deck that it could draw: answers, threats, or value.

If you have followed the Versatility principle, then any “answer” card you draw should have a pretty good chance of being able to deal with whatever your opponent plays.

If you draw a threat, particularly on an empty board, it should be able to close out a game quickly on its own and/or dominate any other threat on the other side of the board.

If you draw a value card then you are by definition getting more “card for your money” than your opponent.

Cards that fulfill multiple roles of answer, threat, or value are therefore even more impactful. Dark Confidant, Liliana of the Veil, Huntmaster of the Fells, Scavenging Ooze, Kolaghan’s Command, and Kitchen Finks are all examples of such.

Counter Examples: Grim Flayer or mana dorks. Both are examples of cards that often rely on other cards or situations in order to be effective or only make some other card better. Drawing such cards when the corresponding prerequisite situation or accompanying card is absent is a recipe for failure.

Summary

Sticking to the high-level principles pointed out and constantly evaluating your build and play choices with them in mind should reward you.

Hopefully, I’ve been able to give some long-lasting insight into this favorite deck of mine that you will find useful and informative should you choose to play with it, or against it.

Good luck and happy Junding!

Watch Peter play Jund vs Conner playing Titanshift on youtube! Match starts at 3:13:00-3:51:00