The mana base in a deck like Historic Jund Midrange is critical and takes time to get just right. Because we're a deck without any sort of a nut draw, our best way to win, on a macro scale, is by being consistent. That's hard to do when our game plan revolves around disrupting our opponent, meaning we have to have the right piece of disruption at the right time. There's only so much of that you control, hence what people like to call the "drew the wrong half of my deck" syndrome decks like these have. What we do have control over, though, is being able to cut back against the inherent randomness in the game's rules. We don't need to have a nut draw, we just want a hand that can function. Being able to at least play magic closer to 100% of the time will result in free wins, because your opponent's deck usually doesn't have that same quality.
In order to make this happen, Jund wants to have easy to cast spells, lots of color fixing, and a high enough land count to make sure we have mana to deploy our stuff on time. But we also need to make sure we aren't getting flooded. This is why utility lands are so crucial in a deck like this, we want lots of lands, but that cuts both ways.
So the land choices we make for this deck are a balancing act of fixing, utility, and pain-free curve-out enabling. It's not just the number of lands but the exact choices of lands that need to be right.
Usually Black is the most important color to have early in this deck, be it Standard, Modern, Historic, or Legacy. The shocklands are widely considered to be the best lands in the format, but I find that you don't want to play all 12, due to the damage you take. In this particular deck, these lands also have the added bonus of making Castle Locthwain enter untapped, which Stomping Ground does not.
Overgrown Tomb and Blood Crypt are pretty much always going to be four-ofs, but for Stomping Ground, anywhere between 0 and 4 is going to be right depending on what's going on in the format. If your life total isn't that important but making your Rootbound Crags enter untapped is, then Stomping Ground looks a little better. I think I currently have one in my deck, but that's always fluctuating. Like I mentioned, black being the most important color early means that you only need a few Red-Green lands, so you can cut these and play something else if you want.
The checklands and the shocklands play off each other really well, but we also want to be prepared for the times when you don't have a shockland in your opener. I've started to cut back my checkland count when new options have become available, like the Pathways and Blooming Marsh. A hand of Castle Locthwain and two Rootbound Crags is probably a mulligan, but a hand of Castle Locthwain, Rootbound Crag, and Cragcrown Pathway is likely a keep and a pretty solid hand. It's Magic, you can only "depend on" the deck working correctly so much.
Having said all that, Rootbound Crag is the land I'm most interested in having be my checkland of choice, mostly because it's the color combo not represented in the shocklands. Also, the need for Woodland Cemetery and Dragonskull Summit has gone down since the printings of Blooming Marsh and Canyon Slough.
I love Canyon Slough because it does everything we want. It makes our checklands (including Castle Locthwain) enter untapped, it adds two colors of mana, and it cycles when we don't need it anymore. It's nice that it's black and red that cycles, since you kind of want all the green mana you can get for Scavenging Ooze, but excess black and red we can throw away. I think that for this reason, I like Canyon Slough much better than Sheltered Thicket, and the deck can only take so many lands that unconditionally enter tapped. If it weren't for Canyon Slough, we would probably be playing all twelve shocklands, so it's a welcome addition to be able to turn on our lands and let us curve out and also mitigate flood.
The thing about Blooming Marsh is that it's a dual land and adds black on turn one, without making you take damage. Black on turn one is important for casting Thoughtseize and Bloodchief's Thirst, the only one mana spells in the deck, so on turns one through three it doesn't really get any better than this. The big questions, like with Pathways as we'll see later, is whether or not it's worth it to play non-checkland lands. I think that the answer is yes, because making sure your lands enter untapped on turn two or three is probably the most important time of the game. Two or three is what most of our spells cost, and also is when our opponents start casting some heavy hitter creatures that we want to keep pace with. Having Rootbound Crags with no shocklands to activate them will set you behind in these most crucial of turns. The shockland/checkland combo is great when it works, but we might be better off if we can back off a little from it.
The Pathways are solid enough cards, but aren't as good in a deck where you have lots of double-color requirements. Luckily, in recent iterations of this deck, I've been playing Jegantha, so the Pathways are just fine. What's nice is that even in the ultra late game, we really only need two sources of red mana on the battlefield, one to cast Stomp and one to cast Bonecrusher Giant. That means that we can use Cragcrown Pathway for green mana most of the time, since excess green mana powers up our Scavenging Oozes. For this reason, I like the Black/Green Pathway and Green/Red Pathway the best. We also already play four Canyon Slough and four Blood Crypt, so more red/black dual lands aren't as necessary.
I dislike Fabled Passage in this deck. Its first problem is that, for the first three turns of the game, it's just an Evolving Wilds. That's pretty unacceptable when you look at the Historic format and see all these cheap creatures that are just a nightmare if your opponent untaps with them. Mayhem Devil, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Young Pyromancer, Kor Spiritdancer, the list goes on. We have an inherent advantage against these kinds of cards because we can simply remove them, sometimes for value, and then our threats are better later in the game. But what we don't have is time, because these cards all just snowball out of control. It's not that we can't play any lands that enter tapped, it's that we're adding to that amount and the lands that we have that enter tapped already are better. The second problem with Fabled Passage is the amount of basic lands you have to play in your deck. In a list like this, I think we would need five basics at the least in order to make it work, which is just going to set you up for failure. Add to this the games where we run out of basics due to chance or Assassin's Trophy type cards, and I think we have a card that's just a non-starter in this deck. If Prismatic Vista gets put in a Historic Anthology or something, then we can revisit this, but for now Field just doesn't do it for me.
As for basic lands, I'm currently playing just one basic Forest in the deck, but that can change with what our opponents have. I think it's important to have at least one to keep our opponents honest with Field of Ruin and Assassin's Trophy, but if those cards or similar cards see a spike in usage then we might want to think about a couple more so we can't get color screwed.
I don't think we're interested in Canyon Sloughs that cycle for three mana, but in past iterations of this deck I played Mythos of Nethroi with a handful of Triomes to turn it on and didn't hate it. It was nice in that it was Murder at its very worst, but an instant speed Maelstrom Pulse if you drew a Triome to go with it. I don't think that card is necessary at the moment but it's something worth remembering for future metagames.
I get a lot of questions from people who don't own Canyon Slough trying to figure out if Savai Triome is good enough or if they should use wildcards on the Canyon Sloughs. My answer is that Canyon Slough is considerably better, since we do end up cycling it quite a bit and the difference between two and three mana means casting the card we cycled into that turn or the next turn pretty often. Also, in my experience, lands are the best wildcard investment that you can make as an Arena player on a budget. I think I've spent like 20 dollars total on Arena in my life and have been able to pretty much fuel my playing time by doing dailies, and having the patience to use the first wildcards I got on having a good mana base was crucial for that. However, everyone's situation is going to be different, and if you're thinking of picking up this deck and don't have Canyon Slough or the wildcards to make them, that doesn't mean you can't play it. Maybe at some point I'll put together a blog post on a budget friendly version of this deck.
Speaking of budget, I love the Thriving cycle. I think they're a little weak for this format, but you can do a lot worse. One of these in your hand will alleviate any color screw problems you can have, which is about as good as we can ask for. Actually that's not true, we can ask for a Jund Triome. Come on WotC.
Until the printing of Gnottvold Slumbermound, Castle Locthwain was a huge part of the viability of this deck, and now with Slumbermound it's still responsible for half of it. That's because, if you draw a Castle Locthwain at any point during a game, you all of a sudden have the late game power to hang with the late game stages of control decks. That means that we don't have to worry about putting power and toughness on the battlefield quickly to try to get under control decks, we can reserve our creature slots for more defensive stuff for the matchups where time is an issue. Additionally, Castle Locthwain is effectively a win condition even in aggro matchups. When you draw one, all you need to do is keep pace with the opponent and you'll have a source of card draw to take over the game when the dust settles. Sometimes I imagine what my Gruul and other aggro deck opponents must be thinking when I just curve Chevill into seven removal spells, that "how can this guy play a deck like this and expect to beat any blue deck?" And the answer to that is Castle Locthwain.
Slumbermound has been fantastic thus far since its printing in Kaldheim. A land that enters tapped and adds just Red is about as bad of a land as we can get away with, but you can just build the rest of your mana base accordingly. The specifics of Slumbermound line up nicely with the rest of this deck and the format. Seven mana is about the time when we are looking for something to do with all the land drops we made, so we can reasonably expect to activate Slumbermound in lots of games. You get to keep the mana curve low and the land count high with a card like this. Also, I'm currently a big fan on Esika's Chariot and combined the completely take over games, but you really don't need that card to maximize Slumbermound. Slumbermound also attacks the format perfectly, since a 4/4 is exactly what you want against Gruul, and destroying a Castle Ardenvale or Azcanta the Sunken Ruin plus producing a real threat is exactly what you want against UW Control.
Here's the mana base for Historic Jund at the moment:
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Blood Crypt
1 Stomping Ground
4 Canyon Slough
2 Rootbound Crag
2 Cragcrown Pathway
1 Darkbore Pathway
4 Blooming Marsh
1 Forest
2 Castle Locthwain
2 Gnottvold Slumbermound
We've got 19 black sources, 15 green sources, and 15 red sources. Black is the most important color to have early, since it's the color of Thoughtseize and Bloodchief's Thirst, plus Castle Locthwain essentially costs 1BBB. We've got 12 lands that turn on Castle Locthwain and 14 lands that turn on Rootbound Crag, so we are cruising at a pretty good clip on those. Four of our lands cycle, four of our lands have activated abilities, which means we have 8 lands that can turn into action and just 19 that are purely for adding mana. Like I mentioned at the top, one of the keys to this deck is consistency, and we can do a pretty good job here of minimizing our chances of drawing either too few or too many lands.
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So that's that for this series. As always, we are going to have to keep up with the times and check out new cards that get printed, but this is a pretty good baseline for cards to think about including in the future. A single card printed in Strixhaven or a few sets from now can make the whole metagame shift wildly, even in a format like Historic, so it's nice to have some experience in your back pocket of how to best fight specific strategies. Thanks for reading.
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