MTG Salvation

Jund also has Dreadbore

Hey Shok! Saw you streaming without any Condescends the other night. How'd it feel?

So this is just straight up not true, and being hyperbolic does not help here. Even in a very, very grindy meta, I'd be hard pressed to believe Jund and Jace would combine to 20% of the meta. And if that really is true, according to your sig you also own Utron which is Durdlakul, the Aeons Durdled Away, and you should definitely play that.

Huh? Not getting the last part at all.

Also, you'd be "hard pressed to believe Jund and Jace would combine to 20% of the meta"? Have you been playing in competitive REL on paper lately? It's literally half of what people play. Yes, you're right, I was being hyperbolic, but it's not even close to 20%? You have Grixis, Jeskai, UR, Temur here and Jund and other GRx/BRx on the other and in between you have your typical Tron, Bogles, and Storm. Jace goes into so many paper decks in the meta right now because, well, it's still adapting to the unbans. And people LOVE Jund and most people who were on Death's Shadow are back on it. I would honestly argue that there are more JTMS/BBE decks on paper than online.

If you don't believe me, you can check the Top 8 list here: http://manadeprived.com/showdown-recap-modern-6/

It's 1 Dredge, 6x decks with JTMS, and 1 Jund. It was around 60-70 people tournament and I saw at least 6-8 Jund players who didn't make it to Top 8. There was a good showing of Tron too, but nobody made it to Top 8 either.

Edit: GP Madrid results are up and granted, it's a Team Trios event, but there are lots and lots of Jund decks. I'm assuming JTMS had to go with Legacy so not a lot of showing for Modern. Top 16 are as follows: 4x Jund, 1x RG Valakut (with BBE!), 2x RG Eldrazi, 2x Mono G Tron, 2x BR Hollow One, 1x Death's Shadow, 1x Mono White Taxes, 1x Living End, and 1x UB Control. That is 25% Jund and 44% BBE decks.

How do you cast memory end of turn when it's sorcery speeed? Is there something I'm missing?

Amonkhet split cards like Commit // Memory are both card types at once. So Commit // Memory is an instant AND a sorcery at the same time. Torrential Gearhulk's ETB trigger targets an instant in your GY. You can target Commit // Memory and choose to cast Memory side of the card.

In Modern, especially in paper, people do not switch decks often.

While I agree mostly, that seriously depends on the city and the meta you play. I play in one of the biggest cities in NA with a lot of competitive MTG crowd. My last 1k tournament was half Jund and half JTMS decks. So it does happen when you have enough people with enough resources.

Here are some of my thoughts and questions regarding the meta shift towards Jund and BRx decks:

1. What is the problem?
The problem is that the Big Jeskai relies heavily on efficient removals and card advantages. We fall behind when we can't maintain that card advantage. Jeskai will almost always have answers for basically anything in the game, mainly thanks to W. But we can't keep answering threats when we fall behind in card advantage. Our main wincon is depriving our opponents from their resources and putting down recursive, efficient, threats like JTMS and Secure with protection from our counterspells and removals (or just beat them with Snaps). So we have a hard time dealing with better top-ends that can win off of a topdeck like Tron or the "2-for-1" cards like Reality Smashers, Lingering Souls, or Kolaghan's Command. What BBE has done is to make some of those already 2-for-1 cards into 3-for-1's or even more.

2. GY-Hate
As someone mentioned in this thread, UWR is a meta deck (well, so are most of the control decks in the game). We stopped playing GY-hate because there wasn't enough GY strats except for Dredge and Hollow One for awhile in the meta. Plus Logic Knot and Search for Azcanta were too good for us to play cards like Rest in Peace. So where do we go from here? I personally think playing some Relics now make sense, but it's still not the best card for us. I'd like to ask your thoughts on this as GY-strats are really coming back into the meta.

3. Good Cards in the Meta
So, we need more cards that can provide us our main gameplan: card advantage.

Traditionally, when the meta shifted towards more grindy decks, we've relied less on our removals and counterspells and shifted our deck towards the top-end so it was us putting down hard-to-deal-with threats. So Planeswalker cards like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and Elspeth, Sun's Champion are first cards to come to my mind. Another cards that have been creeping up are Restoration Angel, Blade Splicer, and Dire Fleet Daredevil. All these cards provide good answers to BBE and its triggers, albeit I don't really like the Splicer. Dire Fleet Daredevil is something that I've recently been very impressed with. First of all, it's a clean answer to BBE as a 2/1 First Strike body. It's also almost always a 2-for-1 like Snapcasters and it's another clock against other control decks. It's also surprisingly good against Taxes decks as First Strike is very relevant. Remand is also a card that's become very good all of a sudden as the meta shifted heavily towards midrange, but I don't know if we really want the card as the Big Jeskai shell. I think the card can be very good in the tempo variants of Jeskai though.

4. What do we cut?
I honestly don't like the 3x JTMS in the deck. It is way too slow and tapping down on turn 4 is a scary idea, especially without something to back it up. It's mostly a very expensive Unsummon or a Brainstorm against some decks. I thin x2 or a one-of is a nice place to start. Logic Knot is also weird atm if we're to play GY-hate. Perhaps we can start playing Mana Leak again, as some lists do. Runed Halo is another card that's super weird atm with so many different threats. It's obviously very good against certain decks, but sometimes I feel like it's eating up a slot for nothing.

I'd like to hear all your thoughts as we start to refine our deck more to the new metagame.

It's more BRx than BGx like Jund and Mardu that we have trouble with. And I don't particularly agree with "The unbans didn't change the dynamic a whole lot". BBE into a 3-drop like a Liliana, Lingering Souls, Tireless Tracker, K-Command, Pulse, or even a 2-drops like Goyf or Dark Confidant are hard to deal with for us where we rely a lot on 2-for-1's. It's hard to maintain a card advantage against these decks, especially when they strip our hand away with discards and pressure us with efficient threats. Yes, we have the better top-end, but it's very hard for Jeskai to go to the late game with card advantage against these decks.

I do have to say though that the new Resto build has been quite good against all these BR/BRx/BGx decks.

So a couple of things after I've been playing with my last list for the past few days:

- Chalice is really good right now, especially against all the Blue decks in the format, and is also good against Bogles, Infect, Storm, etc (basically half of the meta); I think running 2-3 Chalices main is very good
- Repeal is one of the best cards we have in the opening hand
- Supreme Will is amazing, but Thirst is still slightly better, I think the optimal number for Supreme Will is anywhere from 2-3, not a full playset.
- There is a lot of artifact/land hate coming from Jund, Ponza, and Mardu/4C Pyro, but Repeal, Remand, and Condescend are quite good against them
- BBE is very very scary, but again, Repeal and Remand can usually deal with the Cascaded spell and it usually ends up in a 1-on-1 trade

I also have been testing 4x TFK and 4x Supreme Will, but I think it's too much 3-drops, especially when we're also playing Treasure Mages and Trinket Mages. I think 3/3 split is better.

Speaking of which, @BloodyRabbit_01, are you running the 4/2 split between Supreme Will and TFK? Are you missing TFK at all?

There was a buyout for Gemstone Caverns last 48 hours. I don't think U-Tron really wants Gemstone Caverns anyways. Its impact is so minuscule.

Batterskull and Tks in only 50 games won were very decisive

What do you mean by this?

It's very interesting to see the opener with 4 lands has the most win rate. It syncs up with my experiences with the deck in that the deck has no problem finding interactions with 4x Thirsts, 4x Condescends, and tutor creatures. But if we stumble on mana, especially because we rely so much on spells that cost = x, we fall behind.

That said, do we want to play 25 lands? These are the probabilities with 24 lands and 25 lands:

24 Lands
Chance to draw exactly 4 lands: 19.64%
Chance to draw less than 4 lands: 72.08%
Chance to draw 4 or less lands: 91.72%
Chance to draw more than 4 lands: 8.28%
Chance to draw 4 or more lands: 27.92%


25 Lands
Chance to draw exactly 4 lands: 21.44%
Chance to draw less than 4 lands: 68.65%
Chance to draw 4 or less lands: 90.09%
Chance to draw more than 4 lands: 9.91%
Chance to draw 4 or more lands: 31.35%

Food for thought.

Did you try EE/O-stone 1/1 split in the main yet? I think it might be better in your deck with Trinket Mage. Chalice is and has always been a clunky card. I think 1-of is fine with Trinket Mage. I've also had very good results with Supreme Will. 4 might be too much? I don't really know. 3/3/3/3 split between Thirst/Will/Remand/Repeal seems like a good start though.



I'm trying this out atm.
Put Solemn back in with all the Jund back in the meta.

@Thnkr

Another is the average converted mana costs, wherein Lantern didn't have much to worry about since the highest cost was three, whereas we are stuck with 6+ cmc spells and not always having Tron to play them. Thus, if we have numerous higher ranking cards all in the same cmc range, we might need to be picky about our exact numbers to account for keeping a decent mana curve.

I think it's important to find out how many numbers of 6+ CMC spells are optimal for our deck. I think we have a bit too much right now.

Peace and love indeed! I've also cut Gemstone Caverns from my list a long time ago and I've never missed it. I hated drawing it so much and wish it was an Island every time that I didn't have it in my starting hand.