MTG Salvation

There's no way that terminus is just "medium" against humans or spirits. If you want spot removal and snaps, play jeskai.

Faithless looting is good card filtering in our colors. We just need 1 or 2 ways to mitigate the card disadvantage and turn it into an advantage.
Looting feels like the best filtering we will ever get in our colors.

If you want to completely smash the slow matchups, Tracker will do that. I think choke is unbelievably narrow and not something that Jund would ever want to use a sideboard slot on and I'm not sure it is even better against control than
a resolved Tracker+fetch.

If you really don't have much big mana then Tracker is probably what I would lean towards. I know that some other people endorse 4 and 5 mana planeswalkers, but I think Tracker will outgrind all of them if you're patient with your lands.

But Fulminator even after all these years is still good. He's just so flexible. He's not as good as Tracker in the slow matchups, but he's decent at killing their manlands and sometimes causing your opponent to stumble on mana (preventing control from playing Teferi can be a big deal) and he's of course a lot more disruptive against the big mana decks and such.


So if you truly have a wide open metagame then just jam more Fulminators. UW can sometimes just fetch all basics (but not always) and if they can't then each Fulminator often gets better than the last (you can sometimes play like a Ponza deck). A Liliana + Fulminator combo can be really hard for a slower deck to get out from.

I think that confidant is the best turn 2 play the deck has against every deck in the format other than burn and bushwacker zoo.

Other exceptions are if your opponent looks like he is looking to play a grindy game and you have another turn 2 play then you play that first to bait out their removal and play confidant after.

I also think that against most decks mana efficiency/tempo is more important than life. Casting your spells on time will usually save you more life in the end than taking turns off to play it safe. (This is a rule of thumb and not an ALWAYS thing. Magic is too complicated for rules like that)

Is that deck playing 10 3 mana spells and 4 bbe? On 24 lands? That is ridiculously greedy. And risk factor doesnt impact the board in any way. There might be some merit to the card, but I dont think the deck that includes it looks like that

I dont think you're bringing leyline in against UWx control. It doesn't hurt them enough to be worth the opportunity cost.

Dont bring surgical in against fair decks. Stop. I dont want to be harsh, but surgical is probably the card most overboarded in modern. Nihil spellbomb replaces itself so it is reasonable to bring in against fair decks as some splash hate to slow them down.

As a general rule: Surgical and Leyline are only good if your opponent isnt playing fair.

I think you're severely understating the moon effects in this build. You stated your reasoning was your experience with regular jund.

The moon plays out much differently here than in regular jund. You'll have access to the effect a lot more consistently because of traverse, and this deck doesn't rely on manlands as additional threats. You also will almost never screw yourself with it because the deck has 12 fetches and 4 traverse vs Jund's 9ish fetches. This deck is also much better at applying pressure, so the disruption given from the moon is a lot more substantial. Regular jund could give the opponent enough time to draw out of their color screw.

I mean we need something for big mana and such, were you planning on packing a bunch of fulminator instead? I don't think that is as good, but I guess it is an option I can start testing.

EDIT: oh, you want to play TBR in that slot to just kill them instead of trying to disrupt them. Hmm. That's an option I hadn't really considered. That's probably also reasonable. I'm not sure we could actually race them without the blue counter magic, but I guess BBE could also change things.

Regular Jund has better average BBE hits.

But Traverse Shadow instead makes the 3/2 body itself more relevant and it plays WAY more effective copies of BBE. I usually drown my opponent in BBE's. It is not uncommon to cast a BBE multiple turns in a row until my opponent is dead.

Essentially Jund gets manlands, Shadow gets Traverse.
Jund gets Bob/Ooze, Shadow gets.. Shadow.
Jund gets Liliana, Shadow gets zero mana cantrips.
Shadow is also happy to play all 4 thoughtseize which is now really relevant with the amount of 4+ drops being played now.

You're on the BBE version, Godrik?

Minister of Pain isn't quite Izzet staticaster, but it's still really good against Mardu Pyro. I opted for anger of the gods in my sideboard instead because now our mana is amazing and we can afford to play double red. The minister can be traversed for though, which is sweet.

We also aren't susceptible to blood moon any more, which may surprise your Mardu opponent now.

Overall, the matchup is probably close. We both have really powerful tools. They have Reveler+Souls+Pyromancer, we have Traverse+Kcommand+BBE.

Give her a try. I thought the deck looked unplayable with a 4of 4 drop, but it has seriously impressed me so far. The deck definitely plays differently than it did before, but it's not lacking in power.


I'm still pushing for the deck to be renamed Smash Mouth All Star.

Because once the BBEs start coming, they don't stop coming, they don't stop coming.

What do you think about running Wall of Resurgence in the deck ?

And can the Shape Anew combo idea work in this deck and give it an option to win unexpectedly
(in addition to grinding it out) ?

Emrakul still is playing that role of inevitability in my deck; either to more quickly sweep up the board or to break stalemates. Granted, I'm largely facing off-the-wall decks where I'm at; a lot scoop though as soon as she drops (same as ever).

If more Wurmcoil/Ulamog proves better against something like Infect, then I'll definitely try it (and will do so, as Modern is on the rise here). Kozilek is the one that hasn't honestly made much of a difference, even as much as I appreciate it refilling my hand. (I'd sooner put another Ulamog in its place, and will probably do so).