The best deck in Standard is Jund. Matt Sperling could probably show you a dozen graphs and analyses as to why attributing the term ‘best deck’ to Jund is inappropriate, but I think it is pretty clear there is only one Tier 1 deck in Standard right now. Fortunately for the dedicated and adaptive Jund mage, there are enough bad players running suboptimal Jund lists to skew the statistics and make it seem like Jund is simply one of a handful of best decks instead of a clear-cut top dog. This means enough players still have a false sense of security in their Jund matchup, mistakenly believing their 50/50 matchup with Jund will remain 50/50 against a strong Jund pilot with a fresh Jund list. These are the players that foolishly complain about how lucky their opponent’s cascades were instead of acknowledging the fact that playing fair is not the best option when the best deck is far from willing to play fair. If you are not sleeving up Jund, you are probably a victim of such self-deception.
The Best Deck in Standard
In last week’s article I offered a new take on how to build Jund. This week I would like to go into more depth about why I chose to play each of the 75 cards I did and what changes ought to be made to the deck for the upcoming Pro Tour: Amsterdam Qualifiers.
For reference, here is the list I played to a 9th place finish in the Standard portion of the StarCityGames.com Open in St. Louis last weekend:
Creatures (14)
Lands (26)
Spells (20)
I played the same 60-card main deck again, along with two others, in a Chicago PTQ this weekend and our combined record was 18-5-2, including a 2nd place finish in the tournament. We each ran different sideboards and our lack of cohesion in that regard directly cost us the slot in the finals.
Creatures
2 Abyssal Persecutor
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
Aside from the Persecutors, all the creatures in the deck are pretty standard and uncontroversial. There are matchups where boarding out Sprouting Thrinax is correct, but he is one of your best cards in the mirror and is excellent against most decks that do not attack your mana. Bloodbraid Elf, as odd as this may sound, is one of the most difficult cards in the deck to play. Knowing when to run him out into an empty board and when to hold back, when to use a removal spell and when to spin the wheel on the Elf, and when to attack and when to keep him back to block are some of the biggest mistakes I see Jund pilots making. As a general rule of thumb, think about how your opponent is planning to win the game and then decide what line of play gives you the best chance to beat his strategy. It usually involves casting the Elf at exactly the right time.
Abyssal Persecutor is the defining card of this build. I already discussed why I’m running him over cards like Broodmate Dragon and Siege-Gang Commander, but another thing ought to be mentioned about the Persecutor. Against Red decks you can usually tap out to cast an Abyssal Persecutor without worrying too much about what they will do to you. Sure, they can cast Ball Lightning and then Smoldering Spires the Persecutor and then try to burn you out the following turn, but aside from that line of play, the Persecutor will generally stop an opponent’s offense cold and/or absorb 4-6 points of damage. That is typically a more than acceptable trade against Red decks. And if you are not convinced Dragon Claw is the best anti-Red card, Red decks cannot beat a Basilisk Collar on Abyssal Persecutor. FYI.
Spells
4 Bituminous Blast
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Terminate
4 Blightning
4 Maelstrom Pulse
Bituminous Blast is the curve-topper in Persecutor Jund. Some people are running Sarkhan the Mad, but I disagree with doing this. Sarkhan is very good on the play in the mirror, but so are a lot of things, i.e. Goblin Ruinblaster or Slave of Bolas. On the draw the Planeswalker is usually too slow. If you want to play a big stalemate breaker play something like Eldrazi Monument. The better plan, however, is to just out-tempo the opponent and set yourself up for better top decks instead of trying to play control and out-attrition the opponent. Sure, Sarkhan is like a Broodmate Dragon for five mana, but that still isn’t good enough right now.
Terminate, Lightning Bolt, and Maelstrom Pulse finish out the removal package. The Terminates and Pulses are excellent at dealing with your own Abyssal Persecutor after the opponent no longer has positive life. So be sure to ration your last remaining removal spell like a miser, including protecting it against Blightning if possible.
Blightning is a card that is pretty unfair on its own, and leads to absurd scenarios when it is cascaded into. I see too many Jund players get overly scared of anti-Blightning cards. You should almost never board out Blightning. Even when the opponent draws double Vengevine, what are they going to do, sit there with four cards in hand all game? There will inevitably come a time when they have to cast their Vengevines or cast the other cards in their hand to stay in the game and to keep up with Jund’s natural card advantage, at which point you unload the Blightning and wreck their late game plan. Mind you, this is semi-worst case scenario. More likely than not, they won’t draw the nut anti-Blightning hand and will just get wrecked by the card per usual.
Lands
1 Lavaclaw Reaches
4 Raging Ravine
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Savage Lands
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Mountain
3 Forest
3 Swamp
The day before the PTQ we were testing a manabase that ran an extra Lavaclaw Reaches, and we forgot to change it back in one of the lists. It ended up being fine but not great. Coming into play untapped is a really big deal since you ideally want a hand that consists of only one or two lands that enter the battlefield tapped and the rest untapped so you do not miss out on tempo. The trade-off for the extra man land might be worth it, but I don’t think it is.
Sideboard
2 Goblin Ruinblaster
2 Doom Blade
3 Thought Hemorrhage
2 All is Dust
4 Dragon Claw
2 Jund Charm
This is the sideboard I ran, and at the last minute one of the other two audibled to the same sideboard as mine. The other sideboard should be in Pastimes coverage and is a little bit different. I still think the main deck is perfect, which is not something I think I have ever said about a deck after playing it in consecutive tournaments. The sideboard, however, has been changing wildly, and I suggest that it continue to change as the metagame adapts and new technology is revealed.
Gerry Thompson in his article earlier this week suggested Blood Seeker against Turbo Land, and although I had never tested or considered it before, the suggestion sounds very appealing to me. It is probably just better than Thought Hemorrhage since barely anyone is playing Brilliant Ultimatum, Polymorph, or Open the Vaults.
Another card I have been considering is Borderland Ranger. He is probably better than Prophetic Prism since he essentially does the same thing against Spreading Seas while being much better against Goblin Ruinblaster (replacing the land and trading with the Goblin). I would probably run 1-2 Rangers for those reasons.
All is Dust is really good against Blue-White Control decks. It blows up all their Spreading Seas, kills their Planeswalkers and Oblivion Rings, and leaves them with nothing but Celestial Colonnades. Sure, they will likely be able to recover by replaying a Planeswalker, but now all the spells in your hand are unlocked and you get to fight into a winning board position. For this matchup, no other card in the format can turn a losing board into a winning board as efficiently as All is Dust.
Doom Blade is great against the Red decks since it can instantly kill anything they play. It is also good against Kor Firewalker and sometimes Baneslayer Angel. Just keep in mind that it cannot kill your own Abyssal Persecutor, so ration it as the second-to-last removal spell you play, not the last one.
I choose Jund Charm over Cunning Sparkmage for the Mythic matchup mainly because they can’t really afford to play around the card. If they don’t blaze out of the gates with their mana acceleration, they will lose to our point removal and cascaded card advantage. So their best plan is to just play out all their guys and hope we the opponent doesn’t have the charm. Having the charm is where you want to be.
The day before the tournament we went over to Matt Landstrom house to test the Jund versus Mono Red matchup. People are reverting back to the unearth version rather than the Devastating Summons version, which is probably correct if you are intent on playing Mono Red. We tried just loading up on removal and would get beat by burn spells and Quenchable Fire. So we tried out Basilisk Collar, which was great some games, especially on an Abyssal Persecutor, but was not stellar other times. It puts the Red deck on the “burn your creatures” plan, which is usually exactly the plan you want the Red deck to be on, but too many of the Red deck’s anti-creature cards double as direct damage to the opponent, i.e. Searing Blaze, Earthquake. The Collar was a great top deck late game, unlike the Dragon Claw, but was mostly redundant in multiples and not nearly as good early game. Given the fact that half our spells are Red and all the opponent’s spells are Red, the Dragon Claw was just netting more life gain and ultimately got the nod. Just don’t ever bring the card in against any other deck. It’s 100% in there for the Red deck.
The Good Card Theory
A couple of years ago, Tom LaPille wrote an article, found here, outlining his theory of Good Cards. Adrian Sullivan responded with a passionate rebuttal, found here, defending the importance of deck synergy. I recently got into a debate with someone about synergy versus raw power for deck construction, and I think it would be worthwhile to share my thoughts on the subject, as I believe it is a concept that players across various skill levels are still having difficulty understanding.
The basic premise of Tom’s argument is that it’s better to play cards that are good on their own than it is to play cards that rely heavily on synergy with other cards in the deck. Adrian disagrees adamantly on this point and suggests a number of times when it is better to play specific niche cards than to play abstractly good cards. My position is somewhat of a middle-ground stance; I think it’s important to recognize the merits of each position and to clarify where the two authors are talking past each other.
I have known Adrian long enough to know he does not shy away from playing unorthodox cards in his decks, but only when he feels strongly that a particular card is the optimal card for the deck. His open-mindedness in this regard has allowed him to be on the cutting edge whenever a new piece of technology emerges for a particular tournament. Others tend to miss out on the home run tech by being closed-minded and not considering the merits of the suggested card in their own right. Most players lack the ability to evaluate the merits of some new piece of tech, so the fallback is to play the tried and true and not to risk looking foolish. Conley Woods is also firmly in the camp of being open-minded when it comes to fairly evaluating ‘bad cards.’ Someone who takes Tom’s advice too strongly will miss out on valuable role-filling technology that could greatly improve one’s chances of doing well in a particular tournament.
Tom’s argument, however, has an important underlying point that his examples do not seem to illustrate as well as they could. He cites Green-Black Elves and Zoo as decks devoid of much synergy and yet successful because of the individual strength of each card in the deck. What Tom failed to realize, however, is that the cards in these decks have an enormous amount of synergy and rely heavily on each other.
For example, in Zoo, Wild Nacatl does not do very much without ways to reliably cast it and attack as a 3/3 on the second turn. Similarly, Tarmogoyf requires a plan that involves getting a variety of card types in the graveyard quickly in order to attack for sizeable amounts of early damage. Moreover cards like Lightning Helix and Incinerate allow for the deck to commit to the early creature plan because the end game will involve direct damage to finish off the opponent. Without Tarmogoyf and Wild Nacatl, the burn spells are mediocre cards. Without the burn spells, the creatures are lackluster and easy to corral.
Green-Black Elves has even deeper synergy when we start considering the amount of tribal cards needed to support Gilt-Leaf Palace and Wren’s Run Vanquishers, what creatures to include to optimize Profane Command, how to reliably make Tarmogoyf a sizeable threat, removing specific obstacles with hand disruption and creature removal, and how man lands can overcome strategies that the deck is otherwise weak against.
A more cogent argument came from Michael Long at U.S. Nationals over a decade ago when he was half-standing with his foot on a chair surrounded by PTQ-level players advising them how to build a winning deck. His advice was to “love every card in your deck.” What he meant by this was that you should be confident that every card in your 75 is exactly the card you want. Often this means the cards have a high raw power level with supplementary synergy with the rest of the cards in your deck (e.g. Profane Command), but sometimes it means it is a card that in conjunction with another card or cards can create an immensely powerful effect (e.g. Illusions of Grandeur). Still in other cases you know your deck so well that you feel you have a great game plan against everything except one particular strategy and that you have enough sideboard (or sometimes main deck) space to devote entirely to that one strategy that is giving you problems. In such cases, many times a specific niche card that does not see much play is exactly the right card to shore up the matchup and give you an overall 75 that you feel confident is exactly what you want to sleeve up for the tournament.
The take away message from Tom’s article, however, should be to be careful not to overvalue niche technology and to recognize that the payoff for having cards that are heavily reliant on other cards in order to impact the game in a significant way needs to be high enough to compensate for the times when you don’t have the complementary card. In the case of Illusions of Grandeur is clearly was, but perhaps not so with Nightshade Stinger. Adrian’s article also has an important take away message, namely not to overlook the right card for your deck just because it is a niche card. it may very well be the exact hot piece of tech that the deck needs, and just playing generically ‘good’ cards might not put you in a better position to win a tournament.
In conclusion, when preparing for a constructed tournament, you want to be confident that every card in your 75 is exactly the right card for your deck. In general, you want your cards to be good on their own and yet part of an overall plan where each card makes the other cards in the deck better and more capable of accomplishing the deck’s overall goal. Be open, however, to specific cards that could improve the deck’s ability to accomplish the overall goal, even if the cards are not good on their own or are niche cards that no one else considers ‘good.’