Readers!

We don't have many color combinations left - we are down to just Abzan and today's subject - Jund. With good mana, tutoring and damage, Jund is a potent color combination for builders who love to be the most dangerous deck at the table without the crutch of playing Blue. Jund is a superlative landfall color combination, and I saved it for when I thought I could be calm enough not to blow my entire word count budget on just Lord Windgrace. I am going to talk about landfall literally the second I can, though, I am warning you now.

Before I start frothing at the mouth over how much fun Ob Nixilis can be, I want to talk briefly about where I did my research. Commander Spellbook is a community-driven archive of Magic: The Gathering card combos. What started as a project on Discord now has its own website. I used Commander Spellbook to look at the hundreds of Jund combos in their database to see if I could group any into classes. It seemed daunting at first, but the website is easy to use and has lots of filters so you can or-der the combos based on how many cards they take to work, how many steps - you can even sort by price to find budget-friendly combos.

With that out of the way, it's time to talk l-

Landfall

-andfall. Sorry, I am just excited to talk about Jund landfall. One advantage that Jund has above all other landfall combinations we've discussed before is Squandered Resources. It's the best way to turn tapped lands into mana and set yourself up for a huge Splendid Reclamation or World Shaper. Resources gives you sustainable mana from tapped lands (or lands that came into play tapped that you can't otherwise use) which is how Black fills in the space left when we lost access to Blue and its cards like Mana Breach and Retreat to Coralhelm.

Another innovation is the inclusion of Molderhulk. Landfall decks with no Black have to rely less on accessing lands in your graveyard, or have to get around the 1 land per turn restriction. Molderhulk can put lands back onto your side from the yard and get around the restriction, and as a creature with a cheap mana cost, if you can manage to fill your 'yard as a Jund deck (lol) it's easy to recur for decks with Black's access to Reanimation and Green's access to combo pieces like Dual Nature.

Finally, Takenuma, Abandoned Mire offers a new way for a deck that can rescue lands from the yard to filter their whole deck. In conjunction with World Shaper, you can dig through your entire deck for your finisher. You will need a sac outlet for World Shaper but you are going to be seeing so many cards that you will find something. Jund landfall has some unique approaches with cards like Ob Nixilis, the Fallen Retreat to the Hagra, and Worm Harvest that can make for some truly memorable plays.

Persist

Murderous Redcap is the card that makes Persist worth bothering with (as much fun as gaining a lot of life is, 21 commander damage kills you dead) and being paired with Green means a lot of infinite combo potential. While we had access to Murderous Redcap in Mardu and had a few decent combos, Redcap plus Melira, Sylvok Outcast is enough. It's a combo people might remember from Modern, and it has a lot of redundancy. Lots of Green cards can give a +1/+1 counter to a creature coming into play, meaning the -1/-1 counter from persist is offset and the combo can continue. You even have Protean Hulk to go get you a whole raft of combo pieces - check out this combo to see what you grab with Hulk.

Pitiless Plunderer

Pitiless Plunderer is quite a combo machine and is not limited to use in Jund decks, yet the number of combos with Plunderer at the center in Jund decks dwarfs the number in any other combination so far. Green and Red together offer Pitiless Plunderer a few things that can turn that passive ability into an engine of pure value that few can withstand. The first is commanders like Korvold, Fae-Cursed King and Slimefoot and Squee. The second is cards like Stimulus Package that turn treasure into creatures the way Plunderer turns creatures into treasure. At that point, all you need is a sac outlet, and Red is happy to oblige with its many options, Goblin Bombardment being my personal favorite. Green gives us cards like Doubling Season that can make 1-for-1 trades become 2-for-1 allowing us to go infinite, and creatures like Hornet Queen that can pay for themselves if you can sacrifice the creatures for mana somehow. Plunderer can go in a lot of color combinations, but in Jund it really shines.

Yurlok of Scorch Thrash

Yurlok is VERY Jund, not just because he is exactly Jund colors and therefore is a Jund deck, but also because it's very easy to accidentally draw the game with Yurlok. It's also easy to intentionally win the game with Yurlok, which is where I get interested. Using cards like Umbral Mantle and cards that double the amount of mana can fill up their mana pools very quickly, but also fill yours. However, there are some Yurlok combos that don't require you to dump your whole mana pool lest you suffer the same fate as your opponents. However you go off with Yurlok, he's a truly wonderful exploration of game space we rarely see used - an ability to make people who played in the 90s go on long tangents about the good old days when damage went on the stack and lands went above spells. It's honestly super cool to dust off a discarded rule and bring it back on the ability of a new card, and Yurlok made cards like Citadel of Pain good again to boot. Not bad at all.

There are plenty of miscellaneous one-off combos that are pretty difficult to classify that you'll find in the database, like using The Beamtown Bullies and Thornbite Staff to keep making them put a Bronze Bombshell into play and take 7 on their end step until they're dead. Ziatora, the Incinerator was born to play with Malignus.

Slimefoot and Squee means we have 3 kinds of Squee that are various kinds of recurrable. Jund is color combo with great mana, superlative removal and graveyard tricks coupled with ways to make them take damage when creatures come or go in and out of the 'yard. Jund has classic baddies like Prossh, Skyraider of Kher and new baddies like Ognis, the Dragon's Lash. I hope you take a look at the Commander Spellbook site to find your own inspiration, and I hope you'll join me next time as we bid farewell to this series when we discuss the best combos for Abzan decks. Until next time!