Is Jund Really The Best Modern Deck For Kroxa, Titan Of Death’s Hunger?

Jund has found a bit of a resurgence in Modern, as Patrick Chapin discussed last week, which is counter-intuitive to me as a former Amulet Titan player because Amulet Titan is so good at going over midrange decks, but Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger shows serious signs of changing the dynamic by creating considerable additional pressure and a kind of resource advantage that’s relatively impactful against Primeval Titans in particular.

I think Kroxa makes a lot of sense, but I’m not sure the green makes sense as a color to pair with Kroxa. Kroxa occupies both Tarmogoyf’s and Bloodbraid Elf’s spot on the curve, and while it’s definitely a less impactful use of two mana than Tarmogoyf, there’s clearly some friction between Tarmogoyf and Kroxa with regard to cards in your graveyard, and we might be able to find other cards that play together more smoothly-

Perhaps the best approach is to lean into Kroxa’s attrition elements with another incredibly potent attrition card – Smallpox:

As exciting as Kroxa is for Smallpox, I’m not actually sure that it’s a bigger upgrade to the deck than Castle Locthwain, a card that comes at almost no opportunity cost and quickly overwhelms your opponent in a resource-light game.

Where Jund is a powerful deck that uses Kroxa because it fits in Jund’s strategy, this deck builds its strategy around Kroxa from the foundation.  Every card is chosen to grind your opponent down and trade resources to fill your graveyard so that Kroxa can come back quickly and take control of the game.

The sideboard is fairly standard except for the copies of Death’s Shadow, which come in either against opponents that will attack you enough to make the body good early or when you’re afraid that you won’t be able to rely on Kroxa because of graveyard hate and you want a hard-hitting threat that doesn’t use the graveyard.

Another direction I’m intrigued by is pairing Kroxa with blue:

While my typical approach to building blue decks in Modern is to play several copies of Mystic Sanctuary, I didn’t really like I should try to get away with that with Kroxa.  Instead, I’m using Thought Scour to find and fuel Kroxa, and supplementing my attrition plan with a package of Snapcaster Mage; Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy; Nicol Bolas, the Ravager; and Kolaghan’s Command.

While these cards aren’t as good at threatening my opponent’s life total as Bloodbraid Elf and Tarmogoyf, they’re better at attacking my opponents material resources.  My thinking is that Kroxa is at its best when you can keep your opponent out of resources, and that its damage output in that case is high enough that it doesn’t need to be supported by additional threats.

If this is how it plays out, moving away from green, which primarily offers supplemental threats, to pair with blue instead, which offers better support to outmatch your opponent’s material, could make sense. It also happens to provide access to Aether Gust, which seems to line up well against almost every deck in Modern at the moment.

Finally, we could also look at Mardu:

Sword of the Meek is never really played without Thopter Foundry, but I think grabbing it with Stoneforge Mystic to discard to Seasoned Pyromancer is a pretty strong option.

Historically, I haven’t liked Collective Brutality, but this deck has so many cards you’re happy to discard that I think it’s a pretty good fit.

This deck is largely designed to line up well against opposing decks like Jund, which traditionally struggle against tokens that line up well against Liliana and targeted removal.

The closing speed is a little slower, but Sword of Feast and Famine supports Kroxa in generally stripping opponents resources, so the hope is that helps functionally end a game in a similar timeframe.

Each of these approaches is going to have different strengths and weaknesses compared to Jund.  While all of them are likely reasonable, and it might be possible to play each of them and track results to try to figure out the best choice, in order to make realistically informed deck selection choices, we need to be able to look at decks and evaluate these strengths on a theoretical level, and identify where expectations might be wrong.

Let’s consider Rakdos compared to Jund across a few popular matchups:

VS Amulet Titan

The big-picture differences are that Rakdos Kroxa gains Smallpox, Bloodghast, and Lightning Skelemental, replacing Tarmogoyf, Bloodbraid Elf, and Wrenn and Six – the interactive spells and utility lands are also somewhat different.

Tarmogoyf offers a reasonable clock against Amulet Titan that’s likely to get a bit of extra damage in, but Amulet Titan isn’t going to do a lot to increase the side of Tarmogoyf and if it does its thing, Tarmogoyf won’t be relevant.  For the most part, it’s not really one of the cards you’re looking for in the matchup. By contrast, Smallpox can be backbreaking, especially if you can catch a Sakura-Tribe Scout with it. While bouncelands help, Amulet Titan needs a reasonably large number of cards to execute their plan, and Smallpox sets them way back.

Bloodghast isn’t very good, except that it pairs well with Smallpox.  Bloodbraid Elf is a strong aggressive card, but I suspect that Lightning Skelemental is better, for the same reason as Smallpox.

Wrenn and Six is a strong card, but for the most part, its role is to generate resources for you rather than stripping resources from your opponent.  If Liliana of the Veil leads to smaller games, Wrenn and Six leads to larger games. Amulet Titan prefers larger games – those where both players have more resources – so I’d expect this wouldn’t be a matchup where Wrenn and Six shines.

Overall, I’d expect Rakdos Kroxa to have a substantial edge over Jund Kroxa in its ability to beat Amulet Titan.

VS Jund

Jund is becoming a pretty large player in Modern again, so we need to consider how Rakdos Kroxa would line up against opposing Jund decks.

Jund is built to get ahead in low-resource games.  That means it’s relatively resilient against cards like Smallpox and Lightning Skelemental.  Bloodghast is very bad at attacking through Tarmogoyf and Wrenn and Six is incredible against opponents that are broadly trying to decrease your card count.

I’d expect Jund to be heavily advantaged against Rakdos Kroxa.

VS Death’s Shadow

Death’s Shadow is a threat-light deck that leans heavily on its few large creatures.  Liliana of the Veil and Fatal Push are very strong cards against this strategy and I’d expect both Rakdos Kroxa and Jund Kroxa to line up relatively well.  Death’s Shadow is relatively good at answering opposing Tarmogoyfs, but not especially good at dealing with Bloodghast and weak against Smallpox, so I think Rakdos Kroxa has a better matchup, but I’d feel relatively comfortable with either deck.

VS Burn

Rakdos Kroxa leans very heavily on Collective Brutality, and the sideboard Death’s Shadows might help  Overall, despite that, I think this is going to be a very hard matchup for Rakdos Kroxa. Jund Kroxa is probably slightly disadvantaged against Burn, but the green cards line up pretty well, so I suspect they’re better off, but it depends on how hard they’re trying.  By default, Jund Kroxa is probably going to be somewhat better than Rakdos Kroxa against Burn, but that’s going to vary from a small comparative edge to a large edge depending how many cards Jund Kroxa plays that are dedicated to the matchup.

Now let’s add Grixis Kroxa and Mardu Kroxa to the analysis.

Grixis Kroxa replaces Wrenn and Six, Bloodbraid Elf, and Tarmogoyf with Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy; Snapcaster Mage; and Thought Scour, kind of – it’s not a clean swap and Nicol Bolas, the Ravager is also significant. In general, it’s worse at combat and better trading resources. It would like to be better at generating card advantage, but Wrenn and Six might be the actual king there, yet Grixis Kroxa’s ability to use Thought Scour to enable Kroxa is also important.

Mardu Kroxa replaces these green cards with the Stoneforge Mystic package, tokens, and discard/flashback synergies.

VS Amulet Titan

Grixis Kroxa is going to line up less well in Game 1 against Amulet Titan because the blue cards are best suited to playing the kind of value game that Amulet Titan easily trumps.  After sideboarding it’s possible that Aether Gust considerably improves the matchup. Overall, I think it’s not going to be as strong as Rakdos Kroxa against Amulet Titan, but could get close to Jund Kroxa.

As for Mardu Kroxa, I suspect it is essentially just a worse version of Jund Kroxa against Amulet Titan, in that it replaces the green threats with white threats that don’t add anything to the matchup and don’t kill as quickly.

VS Jund

The Jace, Snapcaster, Kolaghan’s Command package adds a lot against Jund, but Jund has Scavenging Ooze to disrupt it, though Grixis obviously has a lot of answers to Scavenging Ooze.  Nicol Bolas, the Ravager seems strong, but not necessarily all that much better than Bloodbraid Elf. Grixis doesn’t have a great clean answer to Wrenn and Six, which is a big advantage for Jund. My instinct is that this matchup is very close, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things broke such that one deck happened to routinely win close games.

Mardu isn’t as advantaged against Jund as it was before Wrenn and Six gave Jund a realistic plan against tokens, but I suspect the tokens still ultimately overwhelm Wrenn and Six, and I think Stoneforge Mystic is better than Tarmogoyf in the matchup.  I think Mardu has the advantage, but it’s not as dominant as I might like.

VS Death’s Shadow

Grixis Kroxa against Grixis Death’s Shadow is fairly close to a mirror match – the support cards are largely the same, but the threats are different.  Grixis Kroxa is quite good at answering the threats in Grixis Death’s Shadow, and I think Kroxa would really shine in this matchup, so I think Grixis Kroxa would have a big advantage. I suspect this gives it better positioning than Jund Kroxa, but I’m not sure how it compares to Rakdos Kroxa.

Mardu Kroxa doesn’t have quite as many answers to Grixis Death’s Shadow’s threats, but it’s good at blocking them for a long time.  This means it’s relatively weak against Temur Battle Rage, but your discard and removal should make it fairly hard for them to pull that off.  I think Mardu Kroxa will have a good matchup here, but on a level more similar to Jund Kroxa, behind Grixis Kroxa and Rakdos Kroxa.

VS Burn

Grixis Kroxa is likely horrible against Burn.  It’s not really built to end the game in time or defend itself.  It has the worst matchup here by a lot.

Between Collective Brutality, Smiting Helix, and Stoneforge Mystic finding Batterskull, if Mardu Kroxa doesn’t have a great Burn matchup already, it easily could with another sideboard card or two, but I suspect it’s already the best of all of these decks and has a very strong matchup against Burn.

Of the matchups considered, I think Jund Kroxa likely has the most balanced matchups, which makes sense – that’s always been the role that Jund decks looks for. It’s been tuned to balance its matchups across the board and there’s a reason players have gravitated to it and succeeded.  When going against the hive mind, you need a reason to believe you’re doing something new that others haven’t already tested or that there’s a reason it wouldn’t have been found yet if it’s good. In this case, that would be a belief that players haven’t sufficiently explored Kroxa, which is plausible, but I think most of the rest of these shells have been reasonably explored.

So, to answer the central question about whether Jund is the best way to use Kroxa, I’d conclude that there are other ways to build around Kroxa that maximize the strength of the card specifically, and I think this Rakdos approach does that very well, but that Jund is likely just the strongest midrange shell of this variety in Modern.  Wrenn and Six in particular is a standout, and it’s hard to match the synergy between that and Liliana of the Veil.

Is Jund the best Kroxa deck? In an open metagame, yes, but if you know what you’re trying to beat, the other directions can offer meaningful advantages.