SCG Worcester - Team Open!

So we headed off to Worcester, Massachusetts. I was on Jund for Modern, Ryan was playing Bolas Brew in Standard, and Ze'eva was playing Sneak and Show in Legacy. I predicted going in that we'd see a lot of Celestial Colonnade and mirror matches, so I was ready.

4 Tarmogoyf

3 Bitterblossom

2 Scavenging Ooze

2 Tireless Tracker

2 Huntmaster of the Fells

1 Grim Lavamancer

1 Dark Confidant

4 Inquisition of Kozilek

3 Thoughtseize

3 Lightning Bolt

2 Fatal Push

2 Dreadbore

1 Abrupt Decay

4 Liliana of the Veil

3 Kolaghan's Command

4 Bloodstained Mire

4 Verdant Catacombs

1 Wooded Foothills

1 Blooming Marsh

1 Blackcleave Cliffs

2 Raging Ravine

2 Hissing Quagmire

2 Overgrown Tomb

1 Stomping Ground

1 Blood Crypt

2 Swamp

1 Forest

1 Mountain

3 Kitchen Finks

1 Huntmaster of the Fells

2 Blightning

2 Duress

2 Damping Sphere

1 Shadow Guildmage

1 Engineered Explosives

1 Jund Charm

2 Nihil Spellbomb

Long story short: I liked my deck a lot, and it was pretty good against the metagame I expected. In fact, I liked all three of the decks we played, but the other two were brand new formats and kinda-sorta crapshoots. Sneak and Show was great, but in the later stages of the day, opponents were prepared for it. The Grixis Midrange brew was also pretty solid in Standard, but the mana was a little wonky and some mirror-match-ish opponents had more streamlined lists. We missed day two.

It's a real shitty thing to be the person who goes "Well my team lost, but I went undefeated" or whatever when it's a team event. It's really just not conducive to success at team formats. I had plenty of room for improvement as a teammate in-match and as a tester and deck tuner for the other two decks we played leading up to the event. Team events are much more than three people playing three separate matches of Magic. Having said that, in the interest of evaluating the testing process for the Jund deck for this blog, I will say that I was pretty happy with the deck and we beat up on Celestial Colonnade all day Going forward, I don't really think there's anything I would change from the deck right now. We have a huge selection of cards that come in against the control and mirror matches while still having enough stuff to hit all the different stuff Modern will throw at you, and it showed this weekend.

My losses were to Ponza (which seems bad but kinda isn't) and Black/White tokens (which seems bad and definitely is). I defeated four control decks, and I also took down a Storm opponent. I was in the middle of game two against KCI in round 8 when our match was decided and we dropped from the tournament, however we played that game out for funsies and I was able to take it down. I'd love to play against that deck some more, I think that I've got enough hate for it, but you never know.

For the moment, I think that this list is great and I don't have any changes that I want to make. I am interested in trying some new stuff, specifically Infernal Reckoning from M19 out of the sideboard. It can hit Wurmcoil Engines cleanly out of Tron, exiles all sorts of Eldrazi including Matter Reshaper, and is solid enough against Affinity. On top of all of that, KCI's big midrange sideboard plan is to find Wurmcoil Engine and cast it and recur it a bunch, but even without that plan Infernal Reckoning hits Scrap Trawler and Myr Retriever quite nicely. I was previously interested in trying out Runic Armasaur in place of Tireless Tracker, but Tracker has been bonkers for me lately so that's probably not happening.

That's pretty much the whole story for this weekend. I think later this week I'll do a more in-depth write-up about how to play the Jeskai/UW Control matchups, because they are everywhere right now. See you then!