Jund Hate

by Johnny Cycles, January 11th, 2024

What happens when we play a main deck full of sideboard hate against the best decks in the format? Let’s find out!

I know I’m not the first person to see if they could game the system by building a deck full of cards typically found in sideboards. After all, if game 1 against a deck like Living End is almost always a loss and Living End players are counting on this to help win matches, why not play graveyard hate in the main? If Blood Moon hoses Tron, why not see if we can steal game 1 on its back before our opponent brings in their own answers for this hateful enchantment?

Many sideboard cards, however, are just too narrow and too unimpactful to play in the main deck without lowering our own win percentage significantly.

At least, they used to be.

The printing of Dauthi Voidwalker and Endurance have changed the equation for main deck hate against graveyard strategies. Dauthi Voidwalker, in particular, is an undercosted, overpowered creature without all that text that comes after Shadow. Include the rest of the text and it’s no wonder it’s a 4-of in Rakdos Scam. Meanwhile, 3 mana for a 3/4 with both flash and reach make Endurance a more than respectable creature in today’s Modern. Go back 5 or 1o years ago and there aren’t too many analogs to this Elemental Incarnation. Add in the graveyard hate and suddenly we have another busted Evoke Elemental that over performs against Living End, Dredge, Mill, and even Izzet Murktide. It’s a testament to the absolute over-powered nature of all the Evoke Elementals that no one talks about Endurance as too good.

These two Modern Horizons 2 cards got me thinking about building a deck to beat the meta. Dauthi Voidwalker was already seeing play in the main deck of Rakdos Scam, while Endurance was mostly a sideboard card. But should it be? Did it have to be? Didn’t its stats, mana cost, and text box make it worthy of inclusion in the main? Couldn’t we win some games simply because we have Endurance main deck? What about other sideboard cards? Are there similar powerful cards usually found in sideboards that we can take advantage of in the main?

We have two cards to build around, both of which hate on graveyard strategies. What other decks are popular? Before I continue, let me say that my first version of this deck was before the most recent banning. I have some pictures from those games that I’ll include just for fun at the end of this article. Now that the meta has had a chance to reset after the loss of Fury and Up the Beanstalk, I decided to revisit the deck and see if I couldn’t win some games with a hateful deck against the majority of popular decks and some of the most played cards.

Popular Deck/Card	Our Hate
Tron	Blood Moon
Burn	Leyline of Sanctity and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
B/X Scam	Leyline of Sanctity
Rhinos	Engineered Explosives
Affinity	Brotherhood’s End
Decks relying on 1-mana spells	Chalice of the Void
The One Ring	Questing Beast and Stomp
Decks looking to draw a lot of cards	Orcish Bowmasters
Go-wide creature strategies (Merfolk)	Brotherhood’s End, Orcish Bowmasters, and Engineered Explosives
Combo and Control	Thoughtseize

If you look at the list of our hate, we have quite a few powerful cards that are legitimate main deck inclusions in the right strategy. Thoughtseize, Orcish Bowmasters, and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse all see play in popular and powerful main decks. Questing Beast is a powerful answer to The One Ring, though it doesn’t see play in any tier 1 decks. I, of course, think it should. Bonecrusher Giant is another card that has been in and out of various Modern decks. Thus, beyond Dauthi Voidwalker and Endurance, we actually are playing some legitimate main deck cards that already hate on certain strategies.

The risky inclusions, though, are Leyline of Sanctity, Chalice of the Void, and Engineered Explosives. We could add Brotherhood’s End to this list, as well. These four cards will often be dead draws that hurt us more than our opponent simply by being in our main deck. How can we ameliorate their uselessness in the wrong match ups?

That’s right. We play another of Modern’s all-stars in Fable of the Mirror-Breaker. This powerful enchantment allows us to discard the hate that doesn’t line up with what our opponent is doing to dig for the hate that does. Like many midrange decks that play Red, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is the rug that ties the room together. Without it, we would be left with dead cards in hand too frequently to have a legitimate chance of winning more games than we lose.

Can this be a winning strategy? Only one way to find out!

Before I get to the deck and game play, I would like to say a few things. We can’t fit all the sideboard hate out there in our main deck. We have to hedge against what we expect to play the most and hope to dodge the decks we aren’t prepared for, or simply sideboard in the appropriate hate like the average deck does. Second, I ran the following build through a league and knew immediately that I wanted to change some things. And, if I’m being honest, I never meant to play the following decklist in a league. I wanted to test it in some best of three games first. However, after tweaking it, I went to start a league with my Lukka Surprise deck and was myself surprised when I saw a hand from this deck instead. I guess I forgot to change decks.

This isn’t to say this version of the deck is bad or that it doesn’t do what I wanted it to do. But it doesn’t have Blood Moon anywhere in the 75, which is a mistake given Tron’s resurgence (did it ever really go away?). That’s the big oversight. The second thing is that I wanted to try out Bitter Reunion in the main. After seeing how well it performed in my Lukka Surprise deck and knowing how important it is to have a way to discard the hate that doesn’t actually hate on what our opponent is doing, I wanted another discard outlet. I already play Cathartic Pyre, but Bitter Reunion is a card I wanted to test. And I still will. It’ll just be in another league.

Enough preamble! On to the deck!

Deck Tech

Decklist – Jund Hate

by Johnny Cycles
Format: Modern

Creatures (18)

4 Dauthi Voidwalker
4 Orcish Bowmasters
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Endurance
3 Questing Beast

Spells (7)

4 Thoughtseize
1 Cathartic Pyre
2 Brotherhood’s End

Artifacts (5)

3 Chalice of the Void
2 The One Ring

Enchantments (8)

4 Fable of the Mirror-Breaker
4 Leyline of Sanctity

Lands (22)

2 Blood Crypt

4 Bloodstained Mire

1 Boseiju, Who Endures

3 Forest

3 Swamp

1 Ziatora’s Proving Ground

Sideboard (15)

3 Engineered Explosives
2 Fatal Push
2 Scavenging Ooze
3 Terminate
4 Bonecrusher Giant
1 Brotherhood’s End

Primary Game Plan

We’re looking to jank our opponents out and get some free wins by playing a whole bunch of hateful sideboard cards in our main deck. Once we shut down what our opponent is trying to do, we want to close out the game quickly with Tarmogoyf and Questing Beast. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is essential to our plan, as it gives us a way to get value out of whatever dead cards we draw.

Weaknesses

Other than playing sideboard cards that won’t impact the game, our chief weakness is not playing any 1 drops other than Thoughtseize. This is a consequence of playing Chalice of the Void in our main deck. What this means is when we’re on the draw, a turn 1 Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer will get at least one hit in before we can answer it.

A second weakness that is tied to the first is since we’re playing so much hate against the field in our main, we aren’t playing a lot of removal. Orcish Bowmasters and Cathartic Pyre are our spot removal, while we have 2 copies of Brotherhood’s End to sweep away cheap threats. Otherwise, we’re looking to win in combat with Dauthi Voidwalker, Tarmogoyf, and Endurance as our primary way to deal with creature threats. For this reason, we play quite a bit of removal in our sideboard.

Finally, like with any deck, we sometimes simply draw the wrong answers. Playing a Leyline of Sanctity on turn 0 is great against Burn, but useless against Rhinos, Amulet Titan, and Tron. We also sometimes draw the right answer at the wrong time. Again using Burn as our example, drawing Leyline of Sanctity on turn 2 is pretty useless. Similarly, a late-game Chalice of the Void is often a dead card. This is the reason we play Cathartic Pyre and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, but sometimes we won’t draw those to allow us to discard our dead cards.

League 1 – Friendly

Match 1 – Jund

Who would’ve thought 2024 Modern would see a match of Jund vs. Jund? Who has the better Jund deck? Should we be playing Questing Druid?

Match 2 – Izzet Murktide

Can I ever win a match against Izzet Murktide? Let’s find out!

Match 3 – Burn

My computer ran out of memory and so it didn’t record the match. I didn’t notice until the end, so I talked the whole time, per usual. TL;DR: we didn’t have Leyline of Sanctity at any point and our opponent was too fast for our hate.

Match 4 – Living End

Can our 7 main-deck cards that hate on graveyards carry us to victory?

Match 5 – Boros Food

Maybe one day I’ll fully understand what these decks do and how they win, but in the meantime, I’ll just keep trying to stop them. We have main-deck answers. Will it be enough?

League Record: 2-3

Impressions from League 1

That’s all the videos I have for now. I’ll definitely tweak the deck and run it back through a league soon. I’m hopeful and excited about the deck’s potential in today’s Modern. And, just for fun, check out a match I played with an earlier version of the deck before the banning of Fury!

Thanks for reading and watching!

Pre-Banning Game

Match 1 – Affinity

Game 1 – First game with the deck and it performed beautifully. OP stuck it out, but the combination of Chalice on 1, Fury sweeping away their first two threats, and drawing into my own finishers made it feel easy.

Sideboard Plan – Leylines out, as they do nothing against OP’s deck. Same with Endurance. Thoughtseize feels underpowered against a deck full of cheap threats that synergize with each other, but I could be wrong on that front. I brought in Engineered Explosives to fight against all the cheap creatures and Urza’s Saga tokens. Orcish Bowmasters and Bonecrusher Giant are just great cards that give me a clock. I thought about Assassin’s Trophy, but ultimately decided Stomp would be good enough. As you’ll see, Bonecrusher Giant closed out the game for me.

Game 2 – OP had a fast start and their own sideboard hate, but I drew extremely well…multiple sweepers, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, and my own big threats were too much for OP. I’m sure they were a bit salty about the second Brotherhood’s End followed by the second Engineered Explosives (I discarded one to Fable).