One, two, three, four... FIVE ARMIES!? (a brief discourse on jund)

So I played in two online PTQs in the last three days, and finished, well... not spectacularly. The first one I don't want to talk about, but the second one I will post a report on in a day or two. This post, however, is about Jund. I played Jund five out of a possible 12 rounds. Not overly oppressive, I know, but it seems to be too much. The only other archetype I played more than once was polymorph (hehe... polymorph), which somehow I ran into 3 times, and lost to only once.

But back to Jund. People are really sick of this deck. People have called for the banning of Bloodbraid Elf. People have called for the banning of Blightning. People have complained that the popularity of the deck makes playing in tournaments excruciating. The Jund mirror is so common, and so hard to gain an edge on, that it makes very skilled players not want to play it, but when they don't, they have a hard time finding anything to beat it.

Before I bash the Jund haters, it must be said that some of these claims are justified. The card quality across the board in Jund is so good that if you design a deck with the sole purpose of beating Jund, you will still only beat it maybe 65% of the time. Its a deck that is rarely mana screwed because it plays so many lands, yet at the same time rarely mana flooded because so many of those lands are good man-lands, giving you excellent mana sinks. Its average card quality is so high that when Wizards printed the best planewalker ever, which sees heavy play in the best deck in Extended and some play in Legacy and Vintage, Jund players collectively went "actually, I think we can handle that." However, Jund is far from broken; and as recent mtgo ptqs have shown, with the right tools, the deck can be handled (though in a tournament full of decks built to beat it, Jund still finished third and fourth).

Its important to understand, first and foremost, what the word Jund means. Jund merely describes a color combination that consists of approximately equal parts of Black, Red, and Green cards. This distinguishes it from something like Faeries. The Faerie deck was built along very linear lines, and from the time of its creation after the printing of Bitterblossom, functionally did not change hardly at all during its time in Standard. This made the printing of hate cards, like Volcanic Fallout and Great Sable Stag, relatively simple. With Jund, the same principle doesnt apply. Print a card that counters multiple spells (and is better than Double Negative or Mindbreak Trap), and Jund simply moves away from Cascade and towards more hand disruption. Attack Jund with protection creatures, and Jund simply changes the composition of its creature base. Attack it by blanking its removal, and Jund drastically reduces the amount of removal it plays. Attack it with one for ones, and Jund moves back towards more Cascade. All these factors combined make it very difficult for any one deck to consistently hate out Jund -- whatever angle you try to attack them from, they have the tools to adjust to your strategy. I asked a friend of mine how he would "Great Sable Stag" Jund (that is, print a card that is good against every card and strategy in that deck), and he said 2/2 for 3, first strike, protection from red and black. Which might work, until you remember that jund has access to Master of the Wild Hunt, Garruk, and Great Sable Stag...

Another reason Jund is so hard to beat is the method in which it attacks players. And no, I'm not talking sending Savannah Lions into the Red Zone. Jund attacks your hand, permanents in play, mana base, Planeswalkers, creaturs, and your life total all at the same time, in a way that is really difficult to overcome. Every deck has a plan by which it hopes to win, but Jund's plan is far more flexible than any other decks. It can beatdown better than most aggro decks, and until Jace was printed, was actually just the best control deck as well. Makes it hard to argue against playing Jund, doesnt it?

And after all that, I think nothing in Jund should be banned, and the deck is fine. Thanks for reading!

Fine, I'll explain myself.

I have three reasons. The first is that there is always a best deck, and you have to be able to beat it. Affinity, Faeries, Jund, whatever. Just because one strategy is slightly better than all the others does not mean it should get special treatment. Faeries never had anything banned, and just before the printing of Great Sable Stag, was actually just considered one of a number of potential fair but very good decks to play. A deck has to be so good that there is literally no point in playing anything else if you want to win, something which was partially true of Ravager Affinity, but is not true of Jund. There are decks that beat Jund, and there are decks that have an edge on Jund (albeit very slight ones) and still perform very well against other decks.

The second is the upcoming rotation. Cards like Vengevine, Wall of Omens, and Student of Warfare are all decent to very good against Jund (even if Jund does have access to Vengevine, its not nearly as good there as it is in decks that have Ranger of Eos). Will Jund adapt to the rotation? Almost certainly, and will most likely continue to perform very well. Will it be so soul-crushingly dominant that you have to play it or a deck that only beats Jund or you have no hope of winning anything? I highly doubt it.

The third and final reason is that tournament attendance is not suffering. One of the primary reasons that Wizards laid the ban-hammer on Affinity was that the deck was causing people to literally not play Magic. If we can take tournament attendance as a measuring stick for how popular Standard is, then it has never been more popular. The largest standard tournament ever was held in Brussels last month (and won, unfortunately, by Jund). The StarCityGames 5k's are posting record attendance numbers. The playability of cards in Standard warped cards prices more than Extended, in the middle of the extended PTQ season. The format is clearly very popular, perhaps in spite of Jund.

Is Jund annoying? Yes. Is it good? Very. Would I rip out a fingernail in exchange for never playing against it again? Not yet, but I'm getting there. But do I think any of its cards deserve a banning? Absolutely not.