I'm going to take responsibility for punting a few games I had no business losing.

As some of you may know, I made a run for the glory this weekend, finishing 9th place at the StarCityGames 5k Open. Sadly, my ~60% tiebreakers weren't enough to earn me a Top 8 berth despite my 8-1-1 record. Rather than bemoan my tiebreakers, I'm going to take responsibility for punting a few games I had no business losing. I don't want to take away from the opponents I played. By and large, they were gracious, polite, skillful and overall very pleasant to play against! Needless to say, imperfect play should not be rewarded with a Top 8 or a perfect record, thus I earned the finish I feel as if I deserve. Thanks to everyone who was rooting for me on Twitter, and at the event. The support really kept me going after my feature match, after which I was burnt out, hungry, and exhausted. Thanks, guys!

A proper tournament report seems in order, but to be honest, I don't have the details of the best matches in my head anymore. The day was long, I wasn't taking good notes, and the majority of games were one-sided for either myself or my opponent. Highlights include a real squeaker with Jeff Peel, which came down to topdecks in Game 3. I felt like it was the tightest game of Magic I've probably played since Mirrodin block, and it was timely, since Jeff was also playing very tight. It was a pleasure to play. My Round 9 bout against Tuffy Maggio was also fantastic. He also played very well, but I did not play tightly in the first game. My mismanagement of Master of the Wild Hunt cost me the game, which also took far longer than it ought to have. He didn't make any apparent mistakes, and earned the win. I took game 2 on the back of a Jund god-draw, and we hardly had time for game 3. His 2nd Baneslayer died on the 5th extra turn to a Siege-Gang powered Chain Reaction, and we played the obligatory game of "still had these, scoop?" Neither of us felt the game was going in a decisive direction. Tuffy was the other hard-luck x-1-1 to miss Top 8, and I feel that I am partly to blame. Had I managed my wolf-pack better in game one, the match would have had a decisive winner and one of us would have cracked the elimination bracket.

Other highlights include me throwing away the third game of Round 7, at the top table, by playing a Mind Rot instead of a Siege-Gang Commander. It sounds as idiotic as it was. My math against the Mythic deck didn't take into account his Celestial Colonnade on the board. I wish I could say he ran the cheats and hid it under his lands but it was nicely separated from the rest, and I have no excuse for missing it. I was setting him up for a game-ending Chain Reaction, but neglected to realize that a Finest Hour-fueled Colonnade was lethal in two. Thinking I'd empty his hand pre-Wrath, I cast the "Blightning without the Lightning", believing I'd Chain Reaction on the subsequent turn, have Thrinax tokens to block any threats and then take over the game with Siege-Gang Commander. Instead, I ought to have just played the Siege-Gang Commander to turn off his Colonnade on the following turn. I didn't do so, and got two-shot by Celestial Colonnade. Sadly for me, he made the exact same mistake in Game 2 when he attacked, doing nothing relevant to me or my board. The counter-attack with Raging Ravine was precisely lethal. I made the bigger mistake when it counted more and got the first loss on the day, fully deserved.

I'm absolutely sick of people trash-talking the deck. I have no personal affinity for Jund.

I want to take some time to talk about Jund. I'm absolutely sick of people trash-talking the deck. I have no personal affinity for Jund. The deck is just a league above anything else being played at the moment, and if people plan to beat Jund, they really need to understand the forces at work in the deck. First and foremost, people who auto-pilot Jund are going to scrub out with it. They're going to lose mirror matches, they're going to mis-time Blightnings, they're going to do bad combat math... it's not like the deck is without skill! The most common complaint is that the deck plays itself, and that's just not true. There are SO many decisions to be made, but the truth of the matter is that the deck is just absurdly forgiving. It's a crutch for weaker players because they can TRY to throw away matches, but the deck will just run SO good and hand them wins. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's why Jund is winning tournaments left and right.

When the important rounds come up, late in the day, a deck like UW Control will lose more simply because the mistakes of the pilot will be magnified. With Jund, there's a chance a mistake will go totally unpunished. This is not the mark of a "cheap" or "stupid" deck - this is the mark of a deck that's so fluid, so powerful, and so devastating in the right hands that it would be a major strategic blunder not to play it.

I spent all day Sunday at a friend's house, feeling very very sick. The plan was to dream-crush win-a-box tournaments all day, but I really never had my head on straight and just sat on the couch all day, testing new ideas against Jund to see what worked and what didn't. As Twitter followers will know, we slammed a UW Aggro deck against the cascading menace, and while the percentages didn't look good on paper, we both agree that the deck had tools for miles. The list is evolving quickly, which is why I'm going to be a tease and NOT share any new tech. Let's just say that Sejiri Merfolk is probably the best creature no-one is playing right now. The best game was the game in which UW Aggro beat Jund, on the draw, facing three Bloodbraid Elves, three Putrid Leech, and a Blightning. The game was decisive and blazingly fast. I'll be sure to write about the deck as the list congeals, but for now it's just a case-study in trying to beat the metagame.

Looking at Jund, we need to figure out how to beat the deck card-for-card. Let's take a look at what I played over the weekend:

Maindeck

[cardlist]4 Bloodbraid Elf

3 Borderland Ranger

2 Broodmate Dragon

2 Master Of The Wild Hunt

4 Putrid Leech

4 Siege-gang Commander

4 Sprouting Thrinax

4 Lightning Bolt

2 Terminate

4 Blightning

2 Maelstrom Pulse

3 Forest

3 Mountain

2 Swamp

4 Dragonskull Summit

1 Lavaclaw Reaches

4 Raging Ravine

4 Savage Lands

4 Verdant Catacombs

Sideboard

4 Black Knight

2 Malakir Bloodwitch

1 Terminate

2 Chain Reaction

2 Deathmark

1 Maelstrom Pulse

3 Mind Rot[/cardlist]

Aside from the fact that my sideboard is absolutely awful and should not be attempted by anyone, it's a pretty stock list outside of the Borderland Ranger. See my 6-2 report from the Midwest Masters tournament to understand my love for him. These are the cards that swing the most Jund games in the deck's favor, and the correct way to beat them.

Bloodbraid Elf

Why It's Powerful: Falling right in the middle of Jund's curve, Bloodbraid Elf is insane, and everyone knows it. It gives you percentage on so many different axes. Having to play around Bloodbraid Elf is very hard, which leads to mistakes. You need to factor in 3 hasted damage when doing race math, and you also have to hedge your plays against 3 more damage off the Cascade. In addition, you have to concern yourself with Blightning, meaning you can't just sandbag cards. 6 damage and a Hymn out of nowhere will end most games in short order.

How To Solve It: You can neuter the threat of Elf's attack with either Prot Bears (Kor Firewalker) or First Strikers. Unfortunately, if you leave back a blocker instead of making an attack, you need to not be blown out by removal, cascaded or hard-cast. Thus, it seems like the Prot Bears are the best route. As far as Blightning, you need to play around it, literally. You can do three things - have enough cards in hand to pitch chaff, have few enough cards in hand so your draw isn't castrated by the discard, or punish them for not using an early play to pressure the board.

Putrid Leech

Why? He's a 4/4 for 2. He blocks well, he attacks better. If you play him right (not pumping him into potential removal and using the pump as a shield against Bolts), he'll smash the game's tempo in Jund's favor while your mana smooths out and you get your real threats online.

How? Spot removal takes the sting out of Leech draws, as do things with Protection from Black. If you are faster than they are, the life loss from pumping can be a boon. A misread on one attack will turn a race in your favor. Shutting down Leech in the early game stops a lot of powerful draws, and doing so without losing too much tempo is the key to beating the Leech draw.

Blightning

Why? Most decks today can't beat this card, and that's why they fail. Jund will Blightning you, on average, once a game throughout the match. If you can't plan your game around -2 cards in hand, don't come to the table. The fact that it can dent Planeswalkers is gravy. The extra damage makes the deck that much harder to race.

How? As mentioned earlier, you can attack Blightning in 3 ways:

1. Dump enough cards early so that you lose nothing crucial.
2. Hold enough cards back to control the game and discard chaff.
3. Be aggressive enough that casting the discard spell on turns 3, 4 or 5 will lose them the game.

Clearly, option 3 is a tough nut to crack given the density of their removal, and sometimes they'll hit Blightning off Bloodbraid Elf and just kill you. Even so, the odds of that are lower than getting hit by a hard-cast Blightning. Rough math says that most lists will hit a Blightning 1 in every 5-6 Bloodbraid cascades. Combine that with an approximate coinflip chance to draw it naturally, and you see why you'll probably eat a Blightning more often than not. Those three avenues of attack will be crucial when we figure out how to beat Jund.

Maelstrom Pulse

Why? Too much of your best card can kill you. This card can take an unwinnable game and turn it into a blowout in a heartbeat. You need to play threats and defenders that don't need to appear in multiples or are immune to Pulse.

How? Protection from Black is great. Shroud is also great. Oddly enough, "dies when targeted" is pretty damn good too, since you can usually get a large body at a discount. Blanking Pulse is pretty solid, so any creature that can do so is a winner. Don't even try to play decks that rely on things like Pyromancer Ascension to win.

A Word on Threat Density: My build runs Borderland Ranger over other mana fixers simply because I want my threat density to be higher in the Mirror Match. Same goes for the 5th man-land and the 4 copies of Siege-Gang Commander. Most decks just cannot handle that volume of efficient, economical creatures.

Jund's early game is powerful enough to keep slower decks on their heels, which opens the door for its Siege-Gangs and Broodmate Dragons to take over the game and just plain WIN. Given the fact that Jund's long game is better than most, and that the best card draw can still be cold to a Blightning, it seems like the best way to attack the deck is to go beneath their curve, not over the top.

Cards like White Knight are spectacular due to the amount of value they add to the board. It sounds insane, but Illusionary Servant - look it up - was quite good too. He is effectively a 3/1 flier for 1UU that gets huge in combat. When it comes to beating Jund, it seems that a combination of powerful spot removal and tempo is the correct angle of attack. I'll leave you with that thought for this week, as it will transition well into a future article about this UW Aggro deck that's slowly coming together. If it can start winning a few more games, it may be a very real deck. Until such a point comes, it's not worth writing about. Keep the angles in mind when building to attack Jund, and remember that you're usually only one turn away from being blown out by them.