Hi all. It may be known to you or you have noticed lately that the Jund aggro seems to be the most dominating deck in the current Zendikar Standard.

As I have checked on the recent tournaments on Magic Online and on Magic League, the results have proven it. It seems that the new cards aren’t enough to counter the power of the Cascade spells.

However, we analyze a few weaknesses of the deck, which later on we can use to adjust to our deck-building strategies. Here are a few of them:

Unstable Mana Base – Jund needs a lot of mana fixing to be able to curve out a perfect turn 2, 3 and 4 drop. This is provided by Savage Lands, a few M10 duals and the black-green fetch, Verdant Catacombs.

The solution? disrupt it. Land destruction cards like Demolish and Goblin Ruinblaster, which are also used by Jund on their mirror matches, are great answers to this. Just make sure you destroy the right color depending on the setup of the lands in play.

Slow Start – Although most of the time the right play of Jund is a turn two Putrid Leech and a turn three Sprouting Thrinax (before it was either Kitchen Finks or Boggart Ram-gang), there are times wherein the beatdown starts on turn four with Bloodbraid Elf. This means you can get ahead on the beats on the first three turns.

This is mastered by the Vampires deck with a turn one Vampire Lacerator, turn two Bloodghast or Vampire Hexmage, turn three kicked Gatekeeper of Malakir (on the leech), and the turn four Vampire Nocturnus.

Jund can play spot removals though but when you get ahead on the board and play threat after threat, there’s a slight chance they can cope up (even with Cascade).

Prone To Discard – Jund has no card drawers and relies on the advantage of Cascade spells. As a result, a timely discard spell will cripple its late-game play. A back-to-back Blightning also has a big effect.

I’ve experienced a scenario against a 5-color cascade wherein he played a turn 3 Esper Charm forcing me to discard and a turn 4 Blightning on me again. I then relied on my top deck and he managed to stick a Sphinx of Jwar Isle on turn six and that was game.

These three so far are what I see as weak spots of Jund Aggro. As a Jund pilot myself, I can say that the deck is evolving as the metagame shapes up. With lots of expected mirror matches, players have been innovating new cards to deal with it. The current state is that you either play Jund or go against it (build an anti-deck for it).

Let’s see if this trend continues until Worlds this December. For now, just continue cascading into free spells. Until the next post. 😀