jund jund jund.

this time we have a guest writer to just got top 8 the first tourney of the year 2014! jason chen! without much ado... lets enjoy the first of this 3 part gem!

Jund, the King of Midrange. Part 1 of 3
As the title suggests, this will be an unabashed overview of my favourite deck in the Modern format. Having played this deck intensively for almost 3 months, I would like to share some of my insights with my friends and team mates and should they choose to pilot it or play against it in the future, to understand its intricacies. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my long-time playtest partner Alex Weng for creating this wonderful sharing platform. It is the beginning of many more personal anecdotes, tips, tricks and strategies of Magic: The Gathering.

Before I delve deeper into the subject proper, allow me to give an introduction of myself and my Magic history. Friends who have known me long enough or in NS call me Qs. I am an avid Magic player and have been in the game since secondary school days. I started out as a green player, literally and figuratively. Literally because Green was and still is one of my favourite colours in Magic. Having cards with real life parallels made Green a colour I could identify with. I had many fond memories of my Green Stompy deck, not much by today’s standards, but it was immensely satisfying to swing across the battlefield with an oversized fatty. Figuratively, I was considered a greenhorn because I would occupy myself with trivial details such as the flavour text and artist rather than how the card actually interacted with other cards in my deck. I guess this was another reason why I was attracted to green. It allowed me to put together a deck with little to no synergy, and still win me games. I wasn’t much of a Constructed player back then, though I did play in the 2007 Grand Prix Singapore piloting a Blue Green Madness deck (discarding Wonder to Wild Mongrel to give it flying was considered cool). After that, I tinkered a bit with a Temporary Solution deck (a toolbox of sorts held together by the search engine Enlightened Tutor) before I decided to stop playing Magic for good. Magic is a game where you need an active group of friends around you to keep it alive. It just wasn’t that popular among my friends back then.

Fast forward to my NS days, it was a twist of fate that I should meet Weng who reignited the Magic player in me. Our conversation ever since then never fails to bring up the game but this is a story for another post. To cut the story short, I played almost every standard deck that was good during those days. It was the Ravnica-Time Spiral block and I had access to some of the most powerful spells in Magic that are still causing problems today. We eventually ventured into the Extended format, which I will leave it to Weng to share our exploits and fun filled games. After NS, I took a hiatus from Magic again and it wasn’t until last reservist that my love for the game was once again reignited. I guess you can call me a fanatic at heart. You can take away my cards but you cannot take away my accumulated knowledge of the trivial details. Weng can attest to that. Having experimented with numerous Modern decks, I finally settled on a black-green-red midrange deck from a shard of Alara. This deck is notorious in the format for good reasons, and this leads me to my article, Jund, the King of Midrange.

In the first of a three part series, I will begin by explaining to you why Jund is so strong a deck. Rather than reiterate what experts have already commented about the deck, this article aims to provide personal insights while playing the deck and dare I say add on to the immense literature that the deck currently has. In part two, I will share my list here and explain my card choices. In the final instalment, I will provide an overview of how Jund fares against the rest and some advice on piloting as well as going against Jund. I hope you will enjoy reading these articles as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

Jund is at its core a midrange deck. What this means is that it does not seek to win by turn 4 (Modern is a 4 turn format) nor does it benefit if the game drags on infinitely (though Jund can certainly hold its own in these games). In my opinion, it does 3 simple things extremely well, brutal if I may even call it. They are removing opponent’s creatures, disrupting your opponent’s game plan and landing its own game winner. As to which cards serve these purposes will be covered in Part 2. I will now attempt to go through the strengths of Jund based on these 3 facets of the deck.

Strength

• Removing opposing creatures does not warrant a big hooha from any critic but the very fact that Jund does this extremely well and is able to capitalise from it deserves a mention. With so many removals packed in the deck, opposing creatures are not expected to stick around for long (read Bob and DRS). With the path clear, Jund’s very own beatstick will make short work of the opponent in no time.
  
• Being able to disrupt your opponent’s game plan is perhaps one of the most powerful things you can do in Magic. Imagine keeping a hand with a key card that you prayed very hard that you could cast only for it to be stripped away by a certain 1 mana sorcery. Imagine this feeling amplified throughout that game as Jund continues to find ways to strip your hand of key cards. Good game. The fact that Jund is able to disrupt opponent’s game plan makes it favourable in almost every matchup. But other decks could run the same suite of disruption you say. Well, as with the previous point, Jund is able to capitalise profitably after said removal and/or disruption. Not many decks can do that effortlessly.
  
• Landing game winners is usually the stuff control decks are made of. Hold the fort until you can land a Baneslayer Angel or the sorts to seal your opponent’s fate. Well, sorry to disappoint but Jund could do that on the second turn with a Tarmogoyf. When left unanswered, several of Jund’s cards will threaten to take over the game. Again, I dare say that not many decks in Modern have the capability of boasting several game winners in their list of 75.
  

Having covered the 3 main pillars of Jund, I would now like to go into advantages that perhaps we might have overlooked or have taken granted for playing such a powerful deck

• Jund has several 1 drops that are absolutely devastating in their own ways. Lead with a DRS and you are ahead. Lead with pinpoint discard and you have information and most likely have disrupted your opponent’s game plan. If all else fails, putting a tapped manland is not bad at all. You know the manland will cause some trouble come turn 3 onwards. Being able to land 1 drops consistently is a powerful thing to do. You are raising the tempo of the game rather than sit back and “draw-go”. It brings the fight to your opponent’s door step.
  
• The quality of Jund’s 2 drops is unquestionable. Magic has been referred to as the game of 2 drops. You are applying pressure early in the game with either goyf or the “must-kill” Bob. Either way, your opponent will feel uneasy if any sticks. While other 2 drops fade away or become obsolete as the game progresses, Jund’s 2 drops “strangely” gets better over the course of the game. I wonder why [Symbol]
  
• Planeswalkers are a pain in the butt. They often force the opponent to deal with it or risk having the planeswalker take over the game entirely. Jund is blessed with Modern’s most powerful planeswalker, Liliana of the Veil.
  
• Jack of all trades, master of none. Jund does everything well yet does not shine in a single department. No deck has more removals than a UWR control with Snapcaster shenanigans thrown in. No deck has more creatures than Pod, whose creatures double as midrange attackers by day and combo wannabes by night. No deck is more disruptive than Mono black discard/8 rack. Jund cannot and does not claim to be better than these decks in a specific department. Yet it can win against these decks simply because it can do a strong follow up after a “specific action”. Burn and swing, disrupt and land a winner etc etc.
  
• Unlike many other decks, Jund does not have a linear strategy. It seeks to sin through “fair” play by removing, disrupting and good old creature interactions in the red zone. While this means that Jund cannot outrightly (though it can at times) win against other decks, it also means that it does not fold to a specific hate strategy. You can make life difficult for Jund, but you cannot shut it out entirely. Decks like Affinity, Storm, Combo variants are examples of decks that can be hated out.
  Though there are many many more points, I simply cannot write everything. I would like to end off the strengths of Jund with what I believe is its greatest quality, depth. It is resilient against board sweeps (manlands, planeswalkers), aggro rush (tons of removal), fatties (cheap removals), control decks (early pressure with Tarmogoyf), graveyard based strategies (DRS and Ooze). Anything else there is always pinpoint discard. It is a deck with so much raw power that the player is often spoilt for choice as to how to dismantle the opponent’s strategy. In the next part of this series, I will share with you my deck list and do a breakdown of the individual cards in the list. In such a powerful deck, cards need to justify their place just like a Real Madrid team.
  

Till then.
Qs [Symbol]