I really love Modern, it is an ever evolving format that never feels stale but a few months ago I started to get bored with it. I had been playing the same deck for months and months and it was time for me to switch it up. So a night earlier this summer during the drive out to our local weekly Modern tournament my friend and I decided on a whim to switch decks. We were vaguely familiar with what the other played but didn’t know each other’s decklists when we sat down for round one. He had been playing Jund for quite some time and Mono Green Tron was really the only Modern deck I had ever done well with. Borrowing that deck was a terrible life choice. I went 4-0 that night, got first and immediately started hording store credit to buy Goyfs. I was without a doubt addicted.
Jund
Jund is an incredibly fun deck to play. You quickly destroy their game plan by tearing apart their hand with discard spells such as Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, Liliana and Kolaghan’s Command. Then you destroy their board with Abrupt Decay, Terminate and Liliana while you beat them down using Goyf, Huntmaster and Scavenging Ooze. After playing this deck I quickly understood why Deathrite Shaman was banned in Modern as the deck is extremely powerful with what it has access to already.
It does consistently well against many of the best decks in the format. Affinity is an easy win, not only can you two for one their creatures with Kolaghan’s Command (destroy target artifact and deal 2 damage to target creature) but bolt, Abrupt Decay and Terminate hit virtually everything else that they play. It makes it next to impossible for Affinity to develop a strong enough boardstate to roll you over. Infect is another easy match-up for similar reasons, especially since you can Thoughtseize and Inquisition away many of their pump spells. Most Tron decks move too slowly to beat Jund and if they do start to develop a board Jund has plenty of removal to take care of them. Most importantly, as long as you don’t tap out Jund has a fairly good chance against Twin if you have Abrupt Decay or Terminate in hand. They won’t have the chance to make infinite tokens if you play the match-up correctly and carefully. In addition you have the ability to force them to discard the pieces to their combo and Goyf is a pretty quick clock when it needs to be.
The hardest part of the deck, in my opinion, is that it has a very greedy mana base. If you are going to play this deck you have to be extremely careful with how you play your lands. You’re often fetching for shock lands which makes match-ups against decks like burn extremely tough. However, a lot of people told me when I picked up Jund that Burn was an unwinnable matchup but I’ve only ever dropped one match to the deck. Just remember to fetch and Thoughtseize with care. The deck runs mainboard life gain with Huntmaster and Scavenging Ooze and sideboard it has Kitchen Finks which makes the matchup much stronger than people might believe. However Burn isn’t the only thing that makes fetching hard with this deck, these days Blood Moon is found in quite a few sideboards and is something that Jund players need to be extremely conscious of during games 2 and 3 when fetching.
If you’re like me and love to play control but are unsure pf your opinions on blue make sure to check out Jund. With Twin, Affinity and other creature based decks so strongly dominating the format right now a discard and removal heavy deck like Jund fits in perfectly and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it topping more in the near future. More importantly the deck is both bad ass and fun to play and I strongly recommend sleeving it up if you get the chance.