So sorry, should of said “rocked” instead of “jund”. This is a joke right? (“The Rock” and “jund” share the same core, it happens to be the same core “junk” shares.) The meta never “souled” before rhino until it had first “junded”, or sorry “ROCKED”, because lingering souls is awesome in the mirror. And sure when DRS got banned people were TRYING oblitorater rock, and when that didnt pull enough weight switched back to jund. The printing of anger of the gods was the nail in the coffin because jund now had a trump card against pod. The printing of TC was the only time that BGx strategies were ever really “dead” in the meta. As long as the core of the deck is still legal (discard, goyfs, abrupt decay, lili) GBx will always be a deck you need to prepare for in the modern meta game, regardless of the 3rd color splash.

You can’t rely on this kind of turn 3-4 “burst” lifegain against Burn. It was risky even BEFORE Atarka’s Command, and now it’s just stupid. You can now count on Burn having at least 6-8 Cracks/Commands in games 2/3, and even as many as 7 in game 1. This means your turn 3-4 lifegain doesn’t do anything to save you. It’s much more important to answer those early creatures as efficiently as possible. Jund can do this with Bolt. Abzan has to do this with Path (which accelerates Burn into a turn 2 Eidolon/Bolt combo), or AD (which doesn’t trade at parity). Moreover, Abzan’s manabase is very painful. Jund can go turn 1 Cliffs into turn 2 Bolt to both answer a Guide at parity AND to take 0 damage in the process. Playlines like this are what gives Jund a much better Burn matchup than Abzan had.

What exactly is it you think make jund better against burn? Abzan has rhinos and timely reinforcement to combat the life loss.

Hmm the tables should already be sortable by percent via the arrows at the top of each column. The table settings also confirm that they are sortable by visitors, so it should be working.

Yeah, we’ll have to see what happens. A big reason I made the prediction is because Grixis Delver IS that deck with consistent MTGO results. Even decks like Affinity, Twin, and Abzan don’t have that kind of consistency these days. But every daily I see, despite averaging about 30 4-0/3-1 players or so, still gets about 3-4 Grixis Delver. The deck would only need 2-3 lists per Daily to sustain that over time, and many dailies have three times that.

Of course, this needs to be revisited after the June GPs. Failure at those events would be a metagame share crash for Grixis Delver. Success would be the opposite.

I like Soul Sisters a lot, but there are a few things I think keep it out of the top. The first is the lack of removal. If I’m entering unknown metagames, I want some high power removal. I’m thinking Terminate or Decay. Bolt or Electrolyze. Soul Sisters is just really light on removal. Taking that a step further, it’s light on interaction period. That can be good in some Modern decks that are doing really powerful proactive things (Burn, Infect, Amulet), but Soul Sisters doesn’t have a gameplan that is particularly powerful. It’s just gaining life and playing a bunch of life. So now we are playing a deck with bad interaction and fairly low power. This can be a turn off for Modern players who are trying to pick a deck. I think this is a little irrational, but I also see the merits to these kinds of objections.

I’m not sure if I agree with your assessment about “junding”. In fact, I’m not sure if I agree with your assessment of how the metagames shift from different BGx decks to other BGx decks. When DRS got banned back in January 2014, the metagame was split on whether to stick with Jund or jump to BG Rock. April through July saw the two decks pretty evenly matched in the metagame, with both at around 5.5%. But by September 2014, BG Rock and BGw Souls pulled out ahead. At that time, BGw Souls/BG Rock were collectively at about 6.5% while Jund dropped to 4.5% or so. And of course, the TC era of Modern saw the effective death of Jund, first to Delver and Burn, and then to Pod and Abzan. TC got banned and this didn’t change either. Abzan was clearly the deck of choice, because it had the power (i.e. Bloodbraid Rhino) that Jund lacked.

All of this is to say that Jund wasn’t nearly as consistent as your analysis comes across to me. The metagame has actually never “junded” since DRS died. If anything, it “rocked” or “souled” as players shifted away from Jund. Jund came back, yes, but it was less viable for a long time.

Part of this arises from how different people use different definitions for “tier 1”. For me, it’s a measure of prevalence more than anything else. There is a moderate correlation between prevalence and performance (an upcoming article will discuss this), but prevalence is the primary driver. In essence, tier 1 decks are the ones you can be almost sure to see at tournaments in a date range, and decks you can reasonably expect to perform. You can still play lower-tier decks that are good against the metagame, but those decks aren’t tier 1. And there are times when Jund is such a deck and NOT one of those megadecks.

GET ‘EM BOLT! I expect to see a lot of Burn which means I also expect to see a lot less Abzan. Something has to fill the BGx gap in that metagame, and Jund can rise to the occasion.

I do wonder, is there a way to make the tables sortable by percentages? It would allow you to sort by the info you find most relevant(other than overall prevalence).

Is it though? I’d agree that past turn 3 it is, but before that I’d say definitely not. Against most aggro decks its fine, but do you really want to be giving grixis delver/ twin an extra land to be working with? Probably not. I think it is an amazing card and a defining card of the format, but it’s more of a “necessary evil” type of card.

I don’t think that Terminate is better than Path to Exile right now.

I’m also surprised by the fall of Living End for more or less the same reason (do we have any theories on why it did poorly on the SCG/TCGs?), though I fully expect Living Twin (or whatever we end up calling that deck) to pop up in its place and claim its meta share.