Let's Talk About Jund's Removal Suite

Image Credit: Todd Lockwood, Kev Walker, & WotC

I am no Frank Karsten, so I won't pretend to be proficient in the hypergeometric calculations required to say truly insightful things about card choice and deck-building minutia. However, I have played a lot of jund, and I have spent a LOT of time brewing with jund, so that has to count for something.

I have a hypothesis about removal suites in modern midrange decks. Namely, that consistency is king, and breadth is important, but quickly yields diminishing returns.

But finding sufficient evidence for this hypothesis would take waaaay more testing than I could ever do. So I'll let you readers do that while I just present my logical case for consistency over breadth.

So let's begin.

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We're talking about dedicated removal here, which I will define as cards that are for changing the board state. Ideally, a piece of removal removes an opponent's board-based card advantage, and finishes the transaction with you ahead on tempo.

For example: opponent plays a 4-mana creature, and at end of turn you fetch and Fatal Push it. You spent 1 card and 1 mana to remove 1 card that cost the opponent 4 mana. So you are net even on cards, but ahead 3 mana in tempo.

There are several things (i.e. permanents) which you can use dedicated removal on:

Creatures
Artifacts
Planeswalkers
Enchantments
Lands

Dedicated land removal is incredibly inefficient in modern, so that doesn't even get considered when jund is looked at removal spells. Dedicated planeswalker removal is not really a thing. Usually it is stuck onto another kind of removal, so we don't really need to consider that category either, at least at first. That leaves us with three key permanent types to remove:

Creature
Artifact
Enchantment

Enchantments fluctuate between a solid third place priority, and a barely third place priority. In the current meta, there are enough decks running around that leverage enchantments to consider it a type of threat that requires answers.

For now, we're going to ignore targeted discard and secondary removal effects (e.g. Kolaghan's Command and Lili of the Veil). Those will come back into the analysis later.

Here is the current jund list ruling the day on mtggoldfish. Its dedicated removal suite looks like this:

3 Fatal Push
3 Lightning Bolt
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Maelstrom Pulse

That's eight dedicated removal spells. Here are the suites from a couple other lists:

1 Fatal Push
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Maelstrom Pulse

2 Fatal Push
3 Lightning Bolt
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Dreadbore
1 Terminate
1 Maelstrom Pulse

Eight and nine spells, respectively. Here is the dedicated removal that I have been running:

4 Lightning Bolt
2 Dreadbore
1 Maelstrom Pulse

Seven spells. Don't take my list to be indicative of my opinion of what you should run, though. I made the list before the meta began to settle. Now I think it is under-optimized.

So what bases do these lists cover? Let's focus on the top list:

3 Fatal Push
3 Lightning Bolt
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Maelstrom Pulse

Creature: 8... 3 dedicated but cmc-limited, 3 burn, 1 cmc-limited, 1 unlimited.
Artifact: 2... 1 cmc-limited, 1 unlimited.
Enchantment: 2... 1 cmc-limited, 1 unlimited.

That's a pretty decent spread for the meta you would (usually) expect to see. You also get some additional value:

Planeswalker: 5... 3 burn, 1 cmc-limited, 1 unlimited.
Player: 3... 3 burn.

But is this what we want? Planeswalkers are not very common, and even the ones that are don't pose too much of a threat to jund. Is five spells that can hit walkers too much? Should we narrow those slots to hit fewer targets but have greater efficiency? Can we?

I think that, even in midrange decks, the adage that your deck should do one thing well rather than a bunch of things with mediocrity, is true. In midrange decks, our powerful cards prevent weak interactions, but when our spells line up inefficiently, we can lose our grip on the game. There are times when drawing Abrupt Decay in the face of a Goblin Guide, instead of a Bolt or Push, can lose you the game.

There are endless arguments to have about certain cards or others in certain matchups. But having a sideboard makes those arguments moot. The questions we need to ask are: which removal spells are best suited for the main deck, and why?

Which spells forward the one thing that jund does well?

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What jund does is hard to describe as only one thing. Technically, what jund does is it forces a game of attrition that it is built specifically to excel in. It isn't pure control, because it forgoes strict card advantage for the ability to destroy the opponent's hand and board presence. It isn't pure aggro because it forgoes immediate value for emergent value in almost all of its creature choices.

So it's attrition then. We are looking for cards that can force attrition or cards that you'd love to draw after attrition is established. What categories of removal fulfill those requirements?

Well, Bolt does by a mile. It is terribly efficient removal for small creature strategies, and as a late top-deck it presents more immediate value than most of what either player will draw. Its blank spot is forcing attrition after your opponent already has a solid board state. Bolt while behind is the worst Bolt. But hey, no card is perfect.

Maelstrom Pulse is the next card that comes to mind, because it complements Bolt perfectly. Pulse is dead before turn three, but it just gets better and better as the game goes beyond that. It takes out any non-hexproof, non-indestructible permannt in the mid-game, and can be a two- three- or even four-for-one in the late game if you resolve it on a board full of Death's Shadows or Lingering Souls. Not to mention it is an efficient one-shot on the most annoying threats in Tron, Titanshift, Ponza, and more.

Okay, so we know we at least want some combination of those two spells. How many, though? And what other spells should we also play?

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This is a good juncture to mention something about the "phases" of the game (for jund). Pretty basic idea: you have the early game, the mid-game, and the late game.

In the early game, you have a bunch of cards in hand, and no board presence.

In the mid-game, you have very few cards in hand, and board state matters the most, but it is still in flux.

In the late game (if you haven't forced attrition), you start building up cards in hand again and the board state is usually pretty stable and stagnant.

The late game can take the longest. So cards you want to see in the late game can be of lower count in your deck, and they can be higher cmc. (Pretty standard stuff here, I know, but insights are coming.) They also need to be extremely high impact regardless of board state, because you could be in a ten-creature stalemate or a zero creature stalemate.

In the early game, if you want to see a card you better be playing 3-4 copies of it. And if you draw early-purpose cards in the late game, they are often of sub-optimal impact when played. However, early cards have a distinct advantage over mid and late game cards in that you can sequence them perfectly and play them in their ideal game state far more frequently than other cards. It's just math: in the early game you've got a bunch of cards and no one has the game on lock yet. Conditions are gonna be ideal in this window of turns far more often than on turn eight, nine, etc.

That leaves the awkward phase: the mid-game. Cards that you want to play in the mid-game are... well... tough. The mid-game is a very short sequence of turns. Sometimes, in matches like Tron, the mid-game hardly even exists. You go straight from the early game to a practically unbeatable board state that will either beat you or require all your resources to handle. Cards that have a lot of their value locked up in mid-game sequencing are dangerous to the consistency of your deck, because they are the card type most likely to be drawn/in hand outside of their ideal sequencing.

Fatal Push is a card that is like that. It obviously has huge early game value, but very little late game value (compared to, say, a Terminate or Path to Exile). One reason it is still highly played is because it can remove mid-game threats more efficiently than nearly any other spell in modern.

But you have to survive the early game to reach that value, and then you have less than a handful of turns to cash in on it. By the time you hit five, six, seven lands, etc., the "tempo" advantage of a one-mana removal spell compared to a two- or three-mana removal spell is pretty much meaningless, as far as jund is concerned.

(See my first post about Fatal Push here.)

I'm not saying push is a bad card. It is a powerhouse against some major modern threats, namely Goyf and Shadow. And it is broad enough to be able to deal with most creatures that show up in the early game, so it's no wonder the card is played so much. However, I don't think it gets shining marks across the board. It suffers in the late game, especially if you don't draw extra fetches. It can't provide any value off a BBE cascade where the opponent has a high-cmc creature in play. Essentially, as a card, it may be too narrow for jund to squeeze that elusive mid-game value out of it and justify its inclusion over some other card that thrives in one, or both, of the other phases of the game (which probably account for 80%+ of the turns of magic you will ever play...).

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So another quality we might include in our search for the appropriate main deck removal in jund is very little value locked up in the mid-game. We are looking for cards that deliver as much value as possible in both the early and late game, not the mid-game.

What removal spells are those? Besides Bolt and Pulse, of course.

Abrupt Decay? Eh... the cmc 3 limit puts it in a very similar position to Push. The fact that it hits non-creatures and is uncounterable is obviously amazing in some niche situations. But we still haven't figured out how many cards in our main should consider those situations.

Terminate? There is a ceiling to how much value this card can provide, but it is pretty high. Pulse is better in the late game, bolt better in the very early game. But terminate is cheap enough to force attrition in the mid-game even through Gurmag Anglers and Bedlam Revelers, and it kills early and late game threats all the same. You can't be disappointed with Terminate, but you never feel like you're getting away with something.

Dreadbore? Sorcery speed hurts removal, there's no question about that. If Jace were tearing up the meta, and I wasn't packing 4 BBE and 4 Bolt, I'd probably stick with Dreadbore. Now, it seems like slow Terminate. Bad.

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Finally, I'll put my two cents in about the secondary removal effects, and then I think I can give my suggestion for what removal suite to run.

Kolaghan's Command is a pretty solid two-of in jund now that BBE is back. Also, it's just an excellent card if your build has enough speed to complement its grindy power. That gives us two additional instances of artifact removal over whatever else we run, and a couple of mid/late-game shocks for low-toughness guys. K Command is the kind of mid-game value card I like. It has so many combinations of effects that even though the mid-game is hard to sequence consistently, K Command always has something it can do to make an impact.

Then there is Collective Brutality. Most lists run two in the side, some run one in the main. I have been experimenting with two in the main and have not been disappointed. At two mana, even just a -2/-2 effect is decent early game removal against aggressive decks like burn, elves, zoo, etc. Not to mention it can be two other useful effects in addition, or instead, if the -2/-2 doesn't cut it. That is a strength of all of these modal spells, which brings us to...

Lili of the Veil. She is just a powerhouse at breaking board stalls and taking down big, expensive win cons like the singleton Gurmag Angler or Prime Time. Obviously a 4-of, no question.

So we are effectively running the following removal spells in our jund deck, but via a much better deck-building strategy:

2 Shatter
2 Shock
2 Disfigure
4 Diabolic Edict

And four-to-seven targeted discard spells that are only limited to non-land types.

So we are better prepared for artifact decks than most decks are in their main board, we can count on having some form of removal for small, early creatures by turn three, and we even pack a very healthy amount of hexproof and indestructible creature work-arounds with the four sacrifice effects.

What are we vulnerable to here? Late games with wide board states, planeswalkers, enchantments, and decks with lots of non-creature artifacts. Some of this danger is mitigated by targets discard, but certainly not enough to just ignore.

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Finally, we've reached the end. Assuming that the secondary removal (in parenthesis) is in our list, I think the ideal removal suite for jund right now looks like this:

(2 Kolaghan's Command)

(2 Collective Brutality)

(4 Liliana of the Veil)

4 Lightning Bolt

1 Terminate

2 Maelstrom Pulse

Here's my reasoning on each front.

1) Why only seven? Not eight or nine dedicated removal?
With modern becoming a more and more proactive format, I think going slightly lower on removal and higher on threats is correct.

2) No abrupt decay?
The things that you would really need to abrupt decay (like Lili of the Veil and Blood Moon), are things you should target with your discard spells. If they manage to draw it post-discard and slip in onto the field, well hey, you can't prevent all of your opponent's good plays. And that is what Pulse is for.

3) Speaking of, two Pulse?
Yes! This card is your fix-all. And, it can wipe a board of codex shredders or ensnaring bridges or lingering souls in one fell swoop. Every nightmare late-game that keep jund players awake into the wee hours can be fixed with this powerhouse sorcery. I think it is a necessary two-of. Also, hitting it off of BBE is just nasty.

4) No Push?
I don't think we need it. Our answer to Gofy has always been an equally big Goyf, and gaining a couple percentage points against Death's Shadow decks is not worth removing a threat from our list.

5) Terminate? Seems reasonable...
It is! There are no hoops to jump through. Sometimes, you just want a two mana, instant speed, unconditional removal.

6) Four Bolt? Shouldn't we play thr-
Shut your blasphemous mouth! Play four. No question. Stop trying to cut them for cards that are worse in jund. End of story.

7) What about early artifacts and enchantments?
This is where you are going to have to hope your targeted discard saves you from a total shut-out in the early game. If you hit the mid-to-late game in artifact and enchantment heavy matchups without being locked or losing, your odds go up because your top-decks are more impactful than theirs, and once you pull the answer you'll need, you can hold it. They have to play the thing to win. That puts you at a tempo advantage, because you can keep applying pressure to them as long as they don't have the win-con or lock out on the board.

That's all for now.

Until the meta shifts once more...