Standard: Composition of Jund decks

Here's a table of successful Jund decks over the last couple months. The four decks on the left are Reid Duke from GP Miami, Paul Cheon and Jose Francisco Silva from this PE, and Owen Turtenwald from his last Jund article. (The other decks in the table are pre-Voice of Resurgence.)

Here are the common elements of our four "up-to-date" Jund maindecks:

   25 lands
    (20 duals + 2 Kessig Wolf Run + 3 other)
   7 "small spells" (4 Farseek + Arbor Elf / Rakdos Keyrune / Ground Seal)
   14 creatures
    (2 Olivia + 4 Huntmaster + 4 Thragtusk + 2 Garruk Primal Hunter + 2 other)
   7 removal spells
    (1 Tragic Slip + 2 Putrefy + 4 others)
   3 Bonfire of the Damned
   1 Rakdos' Return

This formula sums to 57 slots; most of the decks spend the last 3 wildcard slots on "big spells" -- the last Bonfire, extra Olivia or Rakdos' Return, or the potentially-big Mizzium Mortars.

We can say 25 lands / 7 small spells / 7 removal / 21 big spells is the usual formula for standard Jund.

Duke's Miami deck follows this formula the closest:
- His 2 "other" creatures were Vampire Nighthawks.
- His 4 "other" removal were 2 Pillar of Flame, 1 Abrupt Decay, and a 2nd Tragic Slip.
- His 3 wildcard spells were Bonfire #4, Olivia #3, and Rakdos' Return #2.
- His manabase was 22 duals, 2 Wolf Run, and 1 Cavern of Souls.
- His "small spells" were the 4 Farseek, 2 Ground Seal, and 1 Rakdos Keyrune.

Of the four decks we're looking at, Cheon's is the outlier -- it plays 2 Liliana, 2 Arbor Elf, and 3 Forest, which are all "throwbacks" to pre-Voice of Resurgence.

The patterns are a bit different if we look at players' 75s instead of their 60s:

Counting sideboards, our Jund decks all need access to 3 Ground Seal, 2 Vampire Nighthawk, 2 Liliana, and 3 Pillar of Flame, plus some mixture of 5 discard spells. The average sideboard is mostly taken up by filling out those quotas, with a few slots left for big creatures or extra removal or Underworld Connections. Our formula of 25 / 7 / 7 / 21 expands to something like 25 / 10 / 11 / 24, leaving only 5 flexible spaces for sweet sideboard tech.

Reid Duke is really running a "modest" Jund deck here -- he skips out on stuff like Sire of Insanity and Mizzium Mortars, but he includes all 4 copies of Ground Seal and Tragic Slip. The most glamourous thing about the deck was probably that it had 2 Ruric Thar instead of Vraska or whatever, but the Ruric Thars never even made it into the text coverage.

Probably the "big mana" engine makes sideboarding more important with Jund than with other standard decks -- if only 28/60 of the deck is action spells, swapping out 6 cards can make a big difference in what the deck does (unlike in a deck with 40 creatures).

Writing: Willy Edel teaches us to sideboard

Edel with tapped Thundermaw Hellkite.

Hopefully you've already read and loved Willy Edel's new Domri Naya article on CFB. The great thing is how flexible he comes off about decklists; he sounds like he's always trying different versions and different sideboard configurations. He always wins with the deck, but he always adapts to a new optimal build.

Here are Edel's words of wisdom about sideboarding with Domri Naya (and the irrelevance of "sideboard guides"):

More important than a sideboard guide, you need to keep three things in mind when sideboarding:
1 – Don’t sideboard so much that your deck will lose its identity.
2 – Keep a smooth mana curve—taking out all 2-drops for 5-drops isn’t good.
3 – Know what game you want to play and sideboard accordingly. You want to end the game ASAP? Are you the control deck? You want to play a grindy game?

These are just fundamentals but people (including me) miss them all the time.