Jund is Dead in Legacy, Not Modern

Art Credit: Steve Argyle & WotC

Well, WotC banned Deathrite Shaman in legacy (along with Gitaxian probe).

It seems the king of creatures and fair magic is just a little too fair for anything but vintage. Although I do not have much experience in the legacy format, I am confident in saying that "Punishing Jund," a deck which did not exist pre-DRS, will now die a sudden and painful death.

This raises a question which I posed once in a pre-BBE unban world: are there certain decks in certain formats that WotC does not want to exist? Based on the phrasing of the B&R announcement,  the answer is "yes."

And it seems that in both modern and legacy, one of the decks that cannot exist is the deck that uses disruption and fair win conditions efficiently and simultaneously.

But hey, I play modern, so at least things are stable for me. Here is my current deck list:

It has felt really good, and that is in large part because I am doing my best to play at a higher level than I have before. I'm telling myself that the cards are capable of the win, I just need to figure out how to sequence the game to that end-state. I have been losing matches where the archetype is disadvantaged and either luck isn't on the side of my draws, or I play loose. That's fine. The matches where jund is advantaged and I played tight, I win.

Other modern jund players are not so confident. As soon as they see jund sink below 3% on MTGGoldfish, they start sounding the alarms and looking for commies in their ranks.

"Bloodbraid Elf...are you secretly helping the enemy? Are you actually a bad modern card in disguise like your unban buddy Jace?!"

Posts titles like this start popping up all over the world-wide-web:

"Is BBE bad in modern?"

"Has Jund felt bad to anyone else?"

"Is Jund Dead?"

Mama mia, is there any other modern archetype whose player base is more pitifully self-conscious?

Let's take a quick class at the MtG school of hard knocks.

Lesson 1) Jund is a Thoughtseize deck. The ol' fairy-in-the-ear has game against literally every deck in every format. Modern especially. More on this in my next post.

Lesson 2) You can't win a game directly with Thoughtseize, and it doesn't directly enable your win-conditions like a tutor card or a combo piece does. Therefore, I'd characterize Jund (all Thoughtseize decks, really) as primarily disruptive in nature. They are control decks in the most fundamental sense, if you will.

Lesson 3) Playing a control deck is the hardest archetype to succeed with in any MtG format, in any meta.

Here's the first reason why: If your deck plays a few even slightly suboptimal cards, you will be punished by the top tier (aggressive) decks. They can play junk and win because they smash their junk together and it occasionally makes a nuclear bomb. But we live and die on the value of our individual cards, because that is how we react to our opponents. Reactive strategies cannot spend resources or card slots fishing for synergy, because then they will have blindspots where linear decks can take advantage. Control deck value is accrued in tiny amounts over the entire game. It can't be gained faster than that. If it could, then opponents could capitalize on the when and where of that and stop it.

Here's the second reason why reactive decks are the hardest archetype: If you play even slightly suboptimally, you will be punished by the top tier (aggressive) decks. A storm player can be 12 life behind after playing poorly, and then topdeck a Past in Flames or Gift Ungiven and win on the spot. There is no such scenario for Jund. If we topdeck a win, either our opponent died to bolt, or BBE + bolt or removal. In other words, we only topdeck the win when we have worked hard setting up the game to deliver a winning scenario.

But playing optimally means knowing the meta, and knowing your matchups. Again, if Jund is inherently a disruptive/reactive deck, then you need to know how to react to the information you get.

You game one, turn one Thoughtseize and see a Humans hand. It has three lands, hierarch, thalia, freebooter, and mantis rider. What do you take?

If you take the wrong card, you will be punished for that choice for the rest of the game. If you take the right one, it can generate edge value for you throughout the game.

So you can picture the ways to play jund as a 2x2 matrix:

1) bring the correct cards, play well, and win...or...
2) bring the correct cards, play poorly, and lose...or...
3) bring the wrong cards, play well, and lose...or...
4) bring the wrong cards, play poorly, and really lose

Notice that only one of these four scenarios leads to victory. And even if you are sure you will always bring the right cards, that still leaves your baseline win rate at 50/50.

Welcome to fair. Welcome to control. Welcome to Jund. We live on that 50/50 line, and we thrive knowing that any points above or below 50% win rate (across all games) that we have were all about how well we played.

"But don't the "right cards" to play change as the meta changes?" you may ask.

Nope. If a better card is printed, play that if it really is better. But once a card choice is well defined, you are shooting yourself in the foot by straying from that path.

"But BBE is bad in this meta."

Nope. That's the worst way to describe what you are experiencing. The accurate description is, "when I play against certain decks that are considered top tier in this metagame, BBE isn't as capable of winning the game as another 4-drop that I could play instead."

But when you phrase the situation accurately, the error in that way of thinking becomes clear. You can't play the "right" 4-drop for every matchup. You have to make a choice. If you play Hazoret, your tron matchup will improve, but your humans matchup won't. You could play Kalitas to shore up that humans matchup, but then your jeskai matchup suffers a lot. If abzan was the best deck in modern, you could play Olivia Voldaren to shoot down their lingering souls and steal their goyfs, but then UW control becomes a hard deck to take down.

The correct choice of 4-drop is BBE. Hands down. No second place. The ceiling on BBE is so much higher than it is for the other options that you could only justify an alternative choice if the meta was absolutely dominated (i.e. a deck reaching 15%+ of the overall meta) by something that absolutely doesn't care about BBE.

Modern has not seen a deck that dominant in years, so in any given tournament or series of games you are likely to see a whole slew of different decks. In fact, you are unlikely to face the same archetype more than twice, even in a large tournament. The best choice for a card slot is always going to be the best card against the entire field (not just the tier 1 decks, the entire field). Your win percentage is helped most (via your 60 card main deck) by gaining a tiny percentage across all the many many archetypes in modern. Another card choice may gain you significant win percentage against one deck, but it isn't worth losing percentage nearly everywhere else.

The sideboard is where you do all your brewing with jund. It has to be that way because every change you make to the jund core list (which is 58 or 59 cards, as far as I can tell) is going to lose you some points.

I'd even argue that there are 5-9 core sideboard cards that really shouldn't change unless superior cards are printed. That old cliche about a good deck being 75 cards, not 60, certainly has some truth to it.

tl;dr: tighten up your list and tighten up your play. A more consistent list packed with statistically reliable value is far superior to "spice" cards and fun-ofs. It also makes the deck easier to play, which makes it easier to play well.