Bloodbraid Elf or Bust at Dallas?

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Newsletter
Thursday, March 8th

On February 12, Wizards of the Coast announced the unbanning of Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Bloodbraid Elf in Modern. Coming on the heels of two very healthy and competitive Modern events, Pro Tour Rivals of Ixalan and Grand Prix Toronto, the announcement seemed to make little sense. Why shake things up when things were so good?

Many still ask themselves that today, but while we can ponder that decision forever, one thing has happened that most haven't seen coming: Bloodbraid Elf is performing better than Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

Is there a reason the 3/2 haste Elf with cascade has been outdueling the best planeswalker of all time? We here at SCG have been trying to figure it out just in time for the Dallas Open. Sam Black knows that Bloodbraid Elf and its Jund counterparts are the deck to beat in Modern right now, but that isn't stopping him from brewing and attacking Modern from an unforeseen angle.

Five-Color Humans aficionado Collins Mullen has taken some time out of his busy schedule to see if he can dissect exactly why Jace underperformed at the Worcester Open and the Magic Online Championship. As for our newest Premium columnist, Jadine Klomparens? She's happy Bloodbraid Elf and Jund are back to their winning ways because she knows how to tackle the one area where most players are lacking: the mirror.

Will Bloodbraid Elf and company continue their dominance at #SCGDFW? Join Matthias Hunt, Ryan Overturf, Nick Miller, and the rest of the @SCGTour crew as they work their way through fifteen rounds of Modern action to see if Jund truly is unstoppable. Or perhaps, and I can't believe I'm saying this, Jace, the Mind Sculptor will save us. The fun begins at 10:30am CT at twitch.tv/scgtour!

— Cedric Phillips, Content Coordinator

March 24-25
Team Constructed

April 7-8
Modern

April 28-29
Team Constructed

Getting Weird In Modern
By Sam Black  

It's not that Jund is unbeatable or that Bloodbraid Elf is broken; the fear of unbanning Bloodbraid Elf is that it would collapse several different archetypes (Jund Death's Shadow, Abzan, and any other G/B/x roughly midrange deck) into one single archetype with a very close consensus build. When this happens, it shrinks the format around it, as it becomes a sole target, so people move to decks like Burn, G/W Hexproof, and Tron that are expected to do well against Jund, and linear decks like Humans and Affinity get pushed out of the format.

As someone who would love to see Modern stay fun and healthy, I'd rather encourage people to find creative new ways to beat Jund than just recommend playing one of those decks to try to keep it in check, since that mentality can still collapse the metagame. Of course, as competitive players looking for the best possible edge in your next event, you'd probably do well to ignore me. Modern may be vast and surprisingly unexplored, but a vast majority of new experiments will fail.

For those who are still with me and would like to try to find a new answer to Jund, I'd like to show you what I've been thinking about this morning.

Worcester Open Weekend Winners

Drake Sasser
Legacy Open

Jordan Boisvert
Modern Classic

Zac Turgeon
Legacy Classic

Surprises After
The Modern Unbannings
By Collins Mullen  

Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Bloodbraid Elf have been unbanned for a couple of weeks now, and we're finally getting a more accurate snapshot of how heavily they will impact Modern.

In the first couple of weeks, these cards were everywhere in the format, mainly because they were new and shiny for some and nostalgic for others. Now that the novelty has worn off just a bit, I expect the metagame to trend more towards what we can expect to see in the future.

This past weekend was pretty big for Modern. Not only did we have the Magic Online Championship, where the best players in the world got to showcase what they believed to be the best Modern deck, but we also had an SCG Classic in Worcester and the most recent Modern Challenge on Magic Online. That's a pretty sizable chunk of information to dig through. So what did we learn from the weekend?

Jund Mirrors? In This Economy?
By Jadine Klomparens  

Jund mirrors have a little bit of everything. The opening turns are intensely tactical and the mid-game is deeply strategic. You seek to assemble the more imposing battlefield, but you can't completely ignore the life totals. Card advantage is usually the most important thing, but the right draw can allow you to be successful via adopting an aggressive stance. It's midrange gameplay at its finest, with both players having many decision points each turn and their overall gameplan shifting constantly.

It's truly beautiful Magic.

The criticisms you hear about the Jund mirror generally center on it being very high variance, that games are often decided by late game topdecks. I don't find that to be the case. Historically, my best matchup with Jund has been Overgrown Tomb mirrors. Back in 2016 I made the Top 8 of an SCG Tour® Invitational wielding Jund in the Modern portion, going 5-3 with it in the Swiss. Not a stellar record, but notable here because, of those five wins, four were B/G/x mirrors. I joked that I should have just played Tron if I was only ever going to beat Jund and Abzan, but truth be told I would never give up an opportunity to play more Jund mirrors.