Tuesday 12 May 2009

A new take on Jund ramp

By Jim Marlow

Hey everyone,

I hope everyone is ready to sling some spells at this weeks standard event, which is on THURSDAY!!, if anyone hadnt noticed yet.

I pretty much put down the g/w deck when i got back from regionals, not because it wasnt powerful, but because i had spoken to some old friends about jund ramp and based on their changes i have become very happy with it.

I managed to bump into the guys from cambridge before the regionals on sunday, and we talked about what decks we all had. I discussed my g/w deck for a bit and we talked about card choices et al. I then found out that two of the guys were playing jund, which surprised me for a minute because these guys were good players, and spend a lot of time testing for the best decks and builds. I questioned them over why they thought it was good, obviously because i thought it could sometimes crap out if you drew spells in the wrong order, and a few other problems with it. The basic answer i got from the guys was that they had taken out the ramp pieces for other spells, Darren was playing with just the rampant growths and the other guy Ben was not playing any ramp effects at all.

I post a bit on starcity forums too, and certainly the possibility of rampless ramp had come up there too, but it had quickly been shot down.

However, having seen them both perform well at regionals, which i no doubt attribute somewhat to playskill, i think there is not reason for jund rock to be a viable deck. After all, surely broodmate dragon cant get that much worse when casting it on turn 6 instead of 4.

So after speaking to a few other people about it and some testing, here is my newest Jund Rock deck.


4 x kitchen finks
4 x putrid leech
2 x anathemancer
3 x chameleon colossus
3 x broodmate dragon
2 x cloudthresher

3 x garruk wildspeaker

4 x jund charm
3 x terminate
3 x maelstrom pulse
2 x banefire
2 x primal command
1 x loxodon warhammer

4 x savage lands
4 x treetop village
3 x fire-lit thicket
3 x twilight mire
4 x forest
3 x swamp
3 x mountain

S/B

3 x thoughtseize
2 x thought hemorrhage
2 x makeshift mannequin
2 x cloudthresher
2 x anathemancer
3 x volcanic fallout
1 x primal command

I feel pretty bad now for talking Andy out of playing putrid leech's in his deck on sunday, because they are so good. Also, with more creatures, and considering i didnt see even one faeries deck out of 52 players, i think jund charm is probably better in the main than volcanic fallout, although 7 post board wraths seems great.

I was unwilling to put too much 1 for 1 removal in my previous deck because i thought the meta was heavily based around tokens and lots of small dudes. However, i think the inclusion of extra removal can never be a problem, and i like to have answers for tokens when they get bigger (as they tend to do), rather than just rolling over to anything bigger than 2/2.

Also i love the fact that after turn 4, i am happy to draw almost any card in my deck. I think with the ramp in it, despite it not being a bad thing to rip a growth or fertile ground, it certainly doesnt compete with terminate or anything else. The problem is with ramp that you ideally want to ramp turns 3/4 and then play gas and nothing else, but this is very draw and hand dependent, whereas this rock style decks is far more consistant, depiste not being able to have ridiculoud turn 4 broodmate or cloudthresher draws. Saying this, this deck has a far smoother curve, and even without ramping can achieve hugely aggressive draws.

Despite LSV's condemnation of midrange decks on channelfireball.com, i think this jund rock is a perfect example of a good midrange deck. Although LSV says there are 10 dead cards in most matchups for game 1, i dont really believe this to be the case, because a lot of the cards are very versatile, for example putrid leech, jund charm and primal command can all be used effectively both offensively and defensively, another reason why i am starting to champion the use of jund charm in the main over fallout, because against 5cc you have more than a 3 mana shock.


I would love to hear what people think of the deck, whether you agree that rock is the best form for jund to take, and whether i should be playing bloodbraid elf and making the deck more aggresive?

I guess thursday will be a good test for it. See you all then.


Until then,


Jim


As always, feel free to comment on anything about this article, or anything unrelated to magic whatsoever. If you would like to contribute to the TLM blog, please email any ideas, articles, pictures or anything else to ss07jm@leeds.ac.uk

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