The Strange History of The Jund Deck with Reid Duke

we've all been there either visiting your uncle or spending some time with your parents and they'll put on a vinyl of some tacky old rock band you wince and you pretend to be impressed commiserate a little bit with their Nostalgia I recently cast a blood braid elf against a thoroughly unimpressed 20 year old and I realized I'm the Boomer now Epic Magic here at the Players Championship oh boy wow off the top with yasuoka at to life exactly the card Watson from Watanabe what does he Cascade into it's Maelstrom pulse he says I will Maelstrom pulse the Glen alendra archmage yeah it doesn't want a Target time again that's right there is a bell curve new players are slid right into and learning to evaluate Magic the Gathering first you look at cars like Draco Seth ma of flames just look at it it has seven power flies and its text boxes that kind of makes your opponent pick it back up again for a second read how is this not the best magic card but then you learn about archetypes the game is divided into core recurring strategies each with multiple variations the main three for the longest time were aggro control and combo aggro is when you choose to play worst cards on average but they tend to Cost Less Mana so you play them out faster needs to have a fantastic start to get the job done and it looks like done so if I play Deck flow dracuseth on my opponent plays a deck full of Savannah lines for example which is extremely weak in comparison to d-dog over here by the time I even drop my fifth land a deck that is only playing once if analye in a turn will have dealt me 20 damage that's aggro now control is where you choose to play less powerful than average cards but you combine them with draw effects that way over time you overwhelm your opponent with card Advantage the card counterspell for example is not remotely as Game ending as Draco Seth but if you counter or remove a draku Seth and keep on drawing cards with the rest of your Mana then you have a game plan reckon into syncopate and that's live because syncope pretty easily can counter these big burn spells he also could counter the Idol on if you wanted right he doesn't he's just gonna go for the good old Wrath combo is when you've never even heard of Dracula because you found a way to combine a few generally unplayable cards that win the game before your opponent has the time to even dream of seven men blazing show painter servant for example is an innocuous card on its own but if you follow it up with grindstone your opponent's Library does a backflip you see where I'm going here it took a few years but someone at some point asked what happened if I played with only good cards and yes we were talking about mid-range the fourth archetype that took its time before being properly discovered by Magic players and if you enjoyed this please I love making these Deep dive and Magic history videos but they take me six or seven times longer than all the other videos on the channel so to help justify them I beg of you please be kind and subscribe now the cleanest vessel through which I can tell you the story of mid-range is through the story of the Junt deck which is my favorite deck my favorite archetype in Magic that was reeduke making a video about John without him would be like making a video about Kung Fu without Jackie Chan he's a member of the magic Hall of Fame I've been on the pro tour since 2010 and I've been um playing and loving magic for many many years and decades even before that delayed pretty much my whole life we're gonna talk about the days before jund and believe it or not the days before mid-range even in a second but first we have to establish what mid-range even means it's an amorphous blob of a strategy if you need to get aggressive it can curve out an attempt to beat down their opponent before they even play out their game plan but against an aggressive deck it can also lunge back take a solid footing and play defense you think about a card like lava Spike or a card like fire drink Crusader these are great cards they could be very useful but you're not going to choose those for your mid-range deck because they're inflexible if you need to defend yourself those cards are not going to help you so instead Utah tend to choose individually powerful cards that are useful in a wide range of situations and matchups think like tarmagoif uh Liliana of the veil blood braid elf these all can contribute to defending you early in the game when you need that and then they can attack the opponent if if the opponent has a slow draw or when you need to actually get the game over with and mid-range's signature move it's hadouken of sorts is called turning the corner it's when it begins the game in defense position firing off a flurry of removal spells or taking cards out of their opponent's hand to disrupt their game plan and then boom you can turn those those tarmigoys and those Treetop Villages sideways and get the game over with in a very very short span of time this is important because it gives your opponent less wiggle room to draw out of it uh fewer draw steps to to find what they need but there was a time before turning the corner before you could even have a Linkin Park ringtone on your flip phone magic was venturing into Uncharted territories stepping out of the dark darkest winter the game had ever known the summer of 2000 a standard consists of Erza's block masks block and sixth edition of course we could not talk about Magic's history without calling upon card markets in-house historian and editor-in-chief of insight Toby so the conventional wisdom at the time was that you had three archetypes combo aggro and control the idea was that the combo decks would actually beat the aggro decks because they'd be faster which also sounds weird to Modern ears but but they would lose to the slower control decks and the controlled X would lose to the aggro attacks because they would be overpowered the funny thing about this is control and combo usually used blues and black and white and aggro decks often used red white and some green but the combination of black and green was kind of embarrassing in the early days of magic black and green was like really not desirable color combination it was you know you'd go you'd go be trading at your local store and you'd say oh well trade for any dual land but not by you like no thank you on Bayou but like a country rebuilding from the ravages of War a forest regrowing after a fire or your self-esteem after accidentally calling your first grade teacher mom magic was coming out of a Dark Age [Music] recent magic players will often be warned about the few times in recent years with the MTG design team flew too close to the Sun where Ambitions of luring in players with fire design attempting to make every card exciting cause Mass Bannings and standard or when reducing the Mana cost of once great Titans brought upon the eldrazi winter whoa big start here he's got two eldrazi mimics on turn one off of iavugan and that also allows him to play or when the first steps into attempting to print cards straight into Magic's most powerful formats brought upon the dreaded hogak summer yeah what mainly stands out is hogak it was the most played deck uh people were ready for it and still it reached a 56.2 percent uh match win rate in the modern rounds so that's pretty high maybe an understatement there but you'll have to find a gray-haired magic player before you can truly understand the fear of experimenting too far with game design the winter of 1998 to 1999 is one referred to today as Cobble winter was brought about by Erza block first with talarian Academy windfall time spiral all cops that ended up on the ban list later a memory job was probably the height of it in case the name of these cards didn't make your spidey princess tingle when designing The urza Saga block the designers wanted the set to have a solid enchantment theme the creative insisted that they go back in time in the story and showcase urza the master artificer as much as possible is that a little weird we made a set mechanically all about enchantments and you went and focused it on a guy really well known for making artifacts and they're like oh no not a problem that's Mark rosewater the head designer for Magic the Gathering on his podcast drive to work he's lamenting how a bit of infighting during the team and last minute changes led to a combination of fast Mana engines and card draw that well I'll let him tell you what the people at the first combo winter pro tour pro tour Rome described the game to be like there was the early game that was when you roll the die and discovered who went first and you shuffled and then you rolled to die discover who gotta go first then there was the mid game that's where you made Mulligans if you needed to Mulligan and you know you need to reshuffle something and then there was the end game which was known as turn one and Pro Tour Rome many many games would end on the first turn it was one looks broken if I was maybe the most broken Pro Tour environment we've ever had it was like about a year where serious tournament magic was super uh dominated by combo decks fast combo day it turns out that magic is fun and it's better when you get to play play more than one turn of it they first banned talarian Academy windfall and brain geyser oh wait tournament magic is still on fire so they banned dream Halls EarthCraft fluctuator Lotus pedal a recurring Nightmare and time spiral how is there still a fire for the first time ever wattsy had to go against their original announcement schedule and banned memory jar retroactively meaning they would have a Banning window after every set release but after this window was passed in urza's Legacy they realize they're going to lose too many players and could not wait till the next set yeah that was the first time uh Wizards ever emergency banned a card uh not on the regular schedule the dust had settled but now the magic Community was a lot smaller than it had been a year ago but a bright new Sun was shining and most of the ersen Menace had been banned along with the powerful Tempest cards rotating out of the format standard specifically is obviously only haunted by sets for so long it's not that the cards were bad no no standard still had some of the remnants of Fast Math but not technically those I kill you in one turn combo decks you still had Tinker decks with wildfire and metal worker but yeah all of these decks basically were giants with feet of clay meaning they could easily be toppled and in this environment came a deck name that people still use today The Rock if you had to draw a genealogical tree to find the two parents of the rock it would spread out to two decks first was a deck built by Mike Flores and piloted to the U.S Nationals win Napster current modern players might find the naming convention familiar because in the same way there is a scam deck titled that way because you can scam wins away from your opponents with discard and a few ragavan hits this deck was called Napster because it could just map winds from people now for those of you who've never owned a Walkman Napster was a file sharing website where people would upload and download music from to nap something at the time of the yo-yo and hacky sack combo was synonymous with stealing it it's funny because now that generation naps a whole lot but now it's because they're sleepy the Napster deck would combine discard in duress and unmask along with a vampiric Tudor package that would allow you to go fetch from an array of one of hate pieces that had been jammed into the deck like stromgal cabal or Parish look at the absolutely egregious text on those cards Wizards has since stopped printing color hosers but it's like someone at the time went wow magic is really fun how do we make it less fun oh you like playing red spells hmm let's make you do not that back then a lot of the ax had a very clear matchups where they were huge favorites or not uh partly that was because of those super powerful cyborg Arts so now we met The Rock's mommy the Napster deck let's meet its other mommy which was a deck in the urza block format future Hall of Fame member yelgel vigosma won a Dutch Pro Tour qualifier in 1999 playing a black green day and he wrote an article report about it in the dojo you're here on YouTube enjoying magic content and maybe later you'll explore the top decks of the metagame on MTG goldfish or browse the best cards to throw in your commander deck on EDH Rec but kids those days have the dojo which looks like the upside down version of the Wikipedia references chapter of in his report he claimed that his deck didn't have any bad matchups he then admitted it also doesn't have any good matchups at least that was like a departure from how magic often worked back then please note that this is the very first mention of what is a Cornerstone of mid-range decks nowadays the 50 deck the Merced deck in modern or the raktos mid-range deck in Pioneer are all a good example of this Decks that don't have many archetypes that there are a landslide against but also don't have many Auto losses The Stereotype of johned and mid-range in general is that all of its matchups are really close to 50 50 which I think there's some truth to that um it it's a feeling that I like as a magic player where where I can sit down for my match in a tournament and not know who my opponent's going to be or what deck they're going to bring but I know I'm gonna be in it I'm gonna be ready to fight I'm gonna have some good weapons in the matchup and I'm gonna have a fighting chance but let's go back to Yellow girl's deck that had no bad matchups oh my God what no bad matchups but no good matchups either okay so the the block deck used uh deranged hermit and forexim black Lord as the main interesting Cornerstone it had a lot of creatures that produced mana and play diabolic servitude to bring back its Echo creatures it's a somewhat slowish uh creature deck and the love child of these two archetypes was called The Rock an archetype that is still played today its Inception is actually quite well documented since the Wayback machine still has the article posted by its creator soul malka on New Wave Games The Rock takes the best of both of these decks because it has a dress and vampiric Tudor plus hate package but it also has the solid creature in the range hermit and thoraxing plagueglore this deck was special because he could sometimes just beat down like the agrodex but it also had the longevity and it was specifically hard to hate out because it was multicolored and because this just ran good cards and what is most interesting about that article is that Soul calls this deck a control deck which is because the terminology at the time was you had aggro control and combo decks and mid-range was not was not on anyone's radar I feel like you're not asking this but I'll answer it anyways where are the Rocks why is this deck called The Rock uh The Rock and his millions was what Saul marker called this deck initially only the Rocks survive and The Rock here is not from Rock Paper Scissors fame or queries the the name the Rock and his millions is a reference to Pro wrestling's top star The Rock The Rock hat fans and I doubt he counted them off but the name he had for all his fans was his million surprise the millions of the rats so in this deck Soul called the deranged Hermit the rock and all the squirrels are created is millions uh the plague Lord for those wandering uh is the Undertaker that is something that even I had heard at the time it's like a kid playing with puppets and they're like oh this one is going to be the Undertaker this is gonna be the rock now they kiss and since then if you ask most magic players that have been playing for a long time what the Rock means they'll say yeah black green mid-range duh but like a gerbil wheel the standard format keeps on rotating nowadays if you want to play your old cards you have formats like modern or Pioneer but back then all you had was extended which was the format where old standard Staples went to live out their final days with extended and the new sets being printed the deck finally came to the powerful Rock deck most people learn to fear now with pernicious deed and spirit unfortunately that meant that the plague laws and the rain Sherman were gone because the rain Sherman isn't very good with pernicious deed and just like that we lost the Rock and it's me well the rock is out there still making movies and still has millions of dollars and this format of the deck stayed strong for almost a decade as a solid black green deck excuse the rock not because it fit suited his personal playing style but because he just plain thought it was the best it gained troll aesthetic cabal therapy and really cemented the mid-range archetype as something that had game against everything but especially it was hard to beat I I also remember a time at my my local store where I'd go play Magic every Sunday and a couple of the best players they all played black green rock and I remember that I would go to the tournament and I would lose to these these people playing black green rock and I'd be like man I'm gonna get them next week I know that they're gonna bring Rock again next week so let me build the best deck against that and then I'd come with my ideas you know maybe it's white weenie with a bunch of protection from black creatures and I'd still lose and then the next week I'd say oh I'm gonna get him with you know blue white control or something like that and I'm coming I'd still lose and I didn't know what was going on but I think that is just sort of the story of mid-range is that they're so adaptable um such high individual card quality that there's really no weakness that you can that you can obviously exploit and did you ever find a way to beat it uh in those days no I think it was eventually like if I can't beat them join them in 2008 we got uh Shards of Alara which gave us names for three color combinations one of them was John John is a vicious world ruled by dragons where Only the Strong survived three four five six three four five six volumes is at four in the proto-san Diego championship match no but that is it that's our very own Simon gertson winning a pro tour with John and probably the oldest card marketer I've ever seen the Alara block brought us names for three color pairs of cards black red green had not been much of a thing until then but alera reborn brought us the Cascade mechanic along with please start the rock music whole lot brighter and that created a deck archetype that haunted standard for almost the entirety of its existence and that was proper mid-range as we know it nowadays everything in my power not to play this deck really but it still this deck's still the best percentages I thought and that's why I ended up playing it so you wanted to beat this you wanted to check it out some decks against it and it just even Dex specifically designed to beat this deck just didn't so wow probably the scariest way this deck could Flex was by playing blood raid elf and hitting a lightning it was just solid creatures solid removal all the best cards a lot of land the the John deck in standard at the time actually ran 27 lands and that is because all the cards were bangers like you had blood braid elves future at leech was amazing sprouting thronex Siege gang Commander brute mate dragging all of these this deck was the epitome of the boogeyman it put six copies into the top eight of worlds in 2009 and then three copies into the top eight of the standard Pro Tour that year youths playing Arena on their phones could shrug at blood raid elf but this deck utterly dominated That season John was on the map but big and creepy like how they used to draw giant Simons there's on Old navigation graphs for some reason the famous John Pro Tour um that had a bunch of cool moments it was Kyle bogamist versus Craig Wesco played a very famous match where Craig Wesco had white weenie with a bunch of creatures out of protection from black and protection from red and so uh Kyle bogumis sideboarded out all of his black and red creatures and brought in just these whatever he could get his hands on in terms of crummy green creatures like great Sable stag normally a sideboard card against uh you know fairies or blue and black but he just brought it in against white weenie because hey this is a three Mana three three and it could it could block Craig's two Mana tutus and uh that that was how he eventually became the gun player who defeated Craig wesko uh was bought by employing that strategy um so Kyle and Simon met in the finals they had this great match and it was uh Simon gritson winning the pro tour and putting Junt on the map forever and then in 2011 extended got scrapped and replaced by modern a new non-rotating Foreman that's amazing we started off with five rounds of the brand new modern format and we had only the Magic Online daily event results to base our assumptions about the metagame a bright-eyed up-and-comer read Duke on a 400 something player seal event which qualified him for the mocks and the world championships in 2011. and what a weird tournament that was because you had the world championship and right next to it you had the magic online Championship showcase normally playing in just the world championship alone is exhausting but he would play those matches and when that was over I would uh you know put my deck away walk over to the corner of the room which had a ring of computers and I would sit down to play four more matches uh on mine on Magic Online for the the championship series this MOX also had a surprising twist although Reed played Naya Zoo which was considered to be the strongest deck at the time in this with rounds in the finals the players not only knew who they were playing against but got the opportunity to switch to a new day so I was going up against a player named Florian pills and I knew that Florian liked Zoo he liked storm and he liked Affinity so I was like let me look for a deck that has strong game against all of those luckily for Reed his friend Tommy Ashton had been playing in Worlds with the deck that was going surprisingly well already at the worlds in 2011 uh on the modern day three players went uh five and one with uh Decks that looked very much like uh what we know from the Golden Age of modern jund this deck was great at taking out creatures with punishing fire lightning bolt and the new exciting Liliana of the veil that had just been printed allowing you to take it down and take out a time ago if the deck even had thought season the main against storms that's what I chose for uh the finals of the Box sure enough Florian brought zoo and I was able to uh defeat him and and win my first ever big tournament and that is it this was Reid's first real breakthrough it qualified him for pro tours and the first ever Players Championship also it was the first time I had a standing balance in my bank account which is a kind of a silly thing to bring up but but as a as an aspiring magic player that gives you a lot of flexibility to travel to tournaments whereas you know prior to that I was I was mostly just playing uh Magic Online two very important things happened to the jund archetype in 2012. thing number one is that Reed got more money to go to more tournaments thing number two was the printing of deathrite Shaman in Return to Ravnica but let's start with Duke playing for a period of time Reed Duke was associated with jund and everything he said about it became long Duke on John he is one of the players associated with the archetype congratulations thank you uh this wonderful trophy is now yours I had to choose one deck that was my favorite of all time it was the old standard John deck around 2013 you had hunt Master of the Fells you had thragtusk you had bonfire of the dam it was awesome this was a time when the most played deck in modern was John and the most played deck in standard was John and they weren't even playing the same cards but I remember that I played this deck in every tournament uh for for you know over a year even events when everyone knew I was gonna play it like when I went to defend my title at the Magic Online Championship I played Junt everyone knew I was gonna play John um at the world championships in 2013. I played jund everyone knew I was gonna play John but it's something that you don't have to be afraid of because if you're playing Affinity or storm combo you have to worry about your opponents putting eight sideboard cards uh you know in their deck to hate you out but there's just nothing that you can really do if you know someone's gonna play a well-rounded mid-range deck yes the deck in modern and in standard both playing stomping ground and Overgrown Tomb but once the modern deck leaned heavily on the old alera cards The Standard Version got to play a color hungry diversity of cards all leading on the card Farsi as this card just says that you can get planes Island mountain or swamp it allowed you to get dual lands meaning that if you'd cast a farseek on turn two not only did you untap with four lands on your turn three but you usually had all your colors and with all that Mana you could cast big spells like rakdos's return bonfire of the dam or you could just change some back to back drag tests I don't think I stopped playing John until the cards just were no longer legal and standard yeah the quintessential uh Boomers talk to me about how good Liliana of the veil was now this is not a card I think that was on a lot of people's radar as the best card in the format I think you've got to respect uh the Liliana good old Boomer John that's right but I did say the two very important things happened for John in 2012. the first one was reduced yay redo and the second one the one that skyrocketed jumped into super stardom that caused its meteoric rise and its eventual demise is that in 2012 we got death ride Shane when death rate Shaman was first printed I remember thinking this card is pretty interesting uh it's probably strong in the older formats alongside fetchlands um I think uh for this Pro Tour we had like a couple of teammates played John and they had you know two death threat shamans in their deck but I did not realize quite how strong it was and the printing of deathrite Shaman should have made me change archetypes it should have made me throw my storm or my Affinity deck out the window and say all right I'm gonna play John because this card is just so good what people's leaving up death ride chime and quickly realize is that it had way more versatility than originally met the eye the fact that it had two toughness for example meant that it could act as a decent blocker against one power creatures the mana ability was not only ramp but also fixed your colors as it could tap for any of them and the other two abilities not only close games against opponents or gained you time against aggro deck but also completely blocked your opponents from playing graveyard strategies it did so much that people started referring to it as the one Mana planeswalker the power it added to the deck was clearly highlighted in yu-yo watanabe's second place deck list in uh Pro Tour Return to Ravnica where you had death threat Shaman and blood braid elf and the main Act was of course supported by dark confident lightning bolt thoughtsis tarmagoy and this is this is the real famous John deck that dominated modern for a stretch of time and you'd go to tournaments and it was like well I know everyone's gonna play John's but what can I do and the only thing we could do was call for a ban and the powers that be saw the Lynch Mob outside and realized it's finally time to answer the prayers of the players so they went ahead and did the thing and they banned blood braid elf which sounds like an interesting decision and this was interesting because blood breed elf was one of the most iconic cards in John but I think the reality is that blood breed was not the best card in Junt later that year Grand Prix Detroit a 1500 player modern event Was Won by birthing pot then in second place we had jumped in third place we had jumped in fourth place we had Junt in fifth place we had jumped in sixth place we had Infinity but then in seventh and eighth place we had the Rock in class now if you've been paying attention you know what the Rock means black green mid-range or in simpler terms John without blood braid elf I made it to the finals of Grand Prix Detroit in 2013. this was a top eight that had basically six or seven black green mid-range decks many people said that cutting blood braid elf actually made the deck better people were still playing the four Mana elf because it was a classic but reducing the four Mana cards in the John deck meant people play cheaper cards allowing the deck to be more sleek and have more opening hands the deck just really kept winning everything until uh they really decided to drop the hammer and banned death ride Shaman in addition to blood parade off in 2014 deathrite Chapman was asked to leave the island and in 2018 they reversed course on BlackBerry health and Broad blood brightness back to Modern and turns out bloodray deaths not as much of a problem it really was just the death right child Judd was no longer one of the big players of the format now only played for the Nostalgia of its former glory new players coming to the game started calling it boomerjung it's basically old Boomer John I am playing Boomer gen today it only became the Die Hard players like me who kept fighting the good fight with this sort of underpowered version of John yeah when's the last time you registered a John deck in modern well I was I was playing Judge 45 minutes ago right before [Laughter] I was turning tarmagors sideways and taking up liliana's at modern events with pouches under their eyes but they're not doing it for the cash prizes they're casting that blood braid elf to feel young again but the concept of the deck could still come back the idea of raw power that can't be hated out is still potent throughout all of this history we have seen that the the rock or jumped was like not hateable it was the deck that did The Hating so it because of its apparent lack of synergy of aiming very high but rather going like a middling approach it wasn't as easy to pick apart like some other decks you could pick apart if you removed some key piece but this wasn't going so much for Synergy than just card quality so in a magic format if you have to have a best deck a sort of green based mid-range creature deck is not a it's not a bad best deck to have because at least the games are interesting uh you get to attack and block everyone feels like they got to play in every game um as opposed to like a really fast combo deck that kills you on the second turn or a blue deck that counters every single one of your spells um a green mid-range deck like John might be really good and it might win more than its fair share but it still makes for it's still magic you still get to play the games I for One Missed cards that trade one for one with your opponent's creatures every top deck mattering it's the boogeyman that you always thought you could conquer I mean you lost to it but at least you had put up a good fight I'll remind you one last time to subscribe partially because of YouTube growth but mostly because I love doing these deep Dives and discovering the history of John then hopefully this video gets enough traction that I get to do it again and for today for the good old days let's boot up Magic Online join a league and let's tick up Liliana take damage from our dark confident play like it's 2011 and we don't have to go to work tomorrow [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Cardmarket - Magic

Views: 141,536

Keywords: Cardmarket, mkm, Wizards, MTG Arena, Magic the Gathering, MTG, TCG, deck, WotC, MTGO, Magic Online, Sol Malka, Jund, The Rock, Boomer Jund, Zoomer Jund, Golgari, The history of jund, Jund History, Reid Duke, RTR Jund, Modern, Standard, Deathrite Shaman, Extended

Id: f5mqhDz5zp0

Length: 32min 2sec (1922 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023