Thursday, December 10, 2009

10 Ways to Beat Jund (Senseless)

This is a good article written by "Wrapter" as he is known on channelfireball on how to fight the Jund matchup.

I hate spreading around good ways to beat the Jund matchup, but whatever, it's inevitable that this sort of information gets out. I just wanted to point out that, for the most part, my thoughts on the GW matchup were accurate, as seen in this previous post.

Here's a quote from Wrapter's article:


This isn’t to say that you can’t grind through Jund’s resources; you can, if and only if you are focused enough to make only some of Jund’s resources relevant. Green-White, for example, can slog through Jund’s removal and beat Jund going long, but it does this only by marginalizing Jund’s creatures. Green-White’s threats so thoroughly outclass Jund’s that sticking one of them is as good as multiples from Jund. Since Green-White does a good job of making only Jund’s removal (and Blightnings) matter, it plays a game of attrition with just Jund’s removal spells, which is winnable.
Green-White should assign little value to removal against Jund; removal spells should always be discarded to Blightning over threats and necessary mana. If you want to tune your Green-White deck to beat Jund, start by cutting all of the removal. If not from the main, at the very least have a sideboard plan that involves boarding all of it out.
Similarly, it’s actually possible for a control deck to grind through Jund’s creatures, and to get ahead in cards by blanking Jund’s many removal spells. At least until Jund boards out all of those blanks, anyway.


He does point out something interesting, though, which I was probably previously wrong about. Emeria (and probably Master) is a bigger threat than Baneslayer angel. The 10-point life swing is not as big of a deal as a threat that creates other threats. So if Jund has a Bloodbraid Elf, and GW has the Baneslayer out, he should play the Elf over a more definite removal spell like Terminate. Because missing on the Cascade isn't too bad. But if the Cascade hits, BBE goes off for full value. Whereas if the opponent chooses not to play Baneslayer and instead plays out Emeria or Master, Jund will have to use the removal spell in hand to take care of it before the next turn begins. And Jund's mana efficiency will not be maximized.

If the GW sideboard plan is to board out all removal, I think adding Dauntless Escorts and Vines of Vastwood should be perfect. Because after sideboard, Jund has even more removal. And if you blank even a few of those spells, Jund will get washed over by a tidal wave of superior creatures.

BTW, I recommend glancing at the comments in that article... they're kind of ridiculous ^_^