Tournament Report: Buncha Duals 4 with Punishing Jund

Buncha Duals is a long running tournament series held by Die Hard Games in Lincoln, RI, where prizes come in the form of duals and other Legacy goodies. This event was the last Buncha Duals, as the owner of DHG is now all out of duals.

I decided to roll with Jund for this event. I've been a bit down on Aggro Loam since SCG Providence and wanted to mix it up, and the deck honestly felt really strong outside of the Omni-Tell matchup. The 75 I registered was:

Punishing Jund, 6/15
Creature Spells (16) 4x Deathrite Shaman 4x Dark Confidant 4x Tarmogoyf 1x Scavenging Ooze 3x Bloodbraid Elf	Noncreature Spells (21) 4x Thoughtseize 2x Lightning Bolt 4x Abrupt Decay 3x Hymn to Tourach 3x Punishing Fire 4x Liliana of the Veil 1x Sylvan Library
Lands (23) 4x Verdant Catacombs 3x Marsh Flats 2x Wooded Foothills 3x Badlands 2x Bayou 1x Forest 1x Swamp 4x Grove of the Burnwillows 3x Wasteland	SB: 2x Duress SB: 2x Golgari Charm SB: 2x Grafdigger's Cage SB: 2x Pyroblast SB: 2x Surgical Extraction SB: 1x Krosan Grip SB: 1x Life from the Loam SB: 1x Nihil Spellbomb SB: 1x Phyrexian Revoker SB: 1x Toxic Deluge

There were >90 people so it was a 7-round tournament. I'm pretty tired and have bad notes so I can only give brief details of each match.

Round 1: MUD (2-0)
This is a matchup I run into a lot and am fairly comfortable with. I made some really loose plays, including completely misunderstanding how Coercive Portal works, but managed to pull out the win thanks to the BGx goodstuff.

Round 2: UR Delver (2-0)
Close and interactive games here but I won out. This matchup is actually a lot harder than one might think due to their heavier burn element compared to other Delver decks.

Round 3: UG 12-Post (2-0)
I'd never played against this deck with Jund before, but it seems quite favorable. The discard spells were just really good. I was hoping for some Loam action game 2 but didn't draw it. Props to my opponent's beautiful foiled deck.

Round 4: Omni-Tell (0-2)
I was kind of hoping to dodge this one but that was obviously wishful thinking. At 3-0 the top tables were swarmed with Omni-Tell players.

Round 5: A.N.T. (2-0)
Got there with loads of discard again, plus help from Surgical in game 2.

Round 6: Omni-Tell (0-2)
This matchup is seriously bad. I might need to try Slaughter Games in my board.

Round 7: Affinity Stompy (1-2)
This was a bit of a wacky deck, with stuff like Chalice, Chrome Mox, Stoneforge Mystic, and Myr Enforcer (who is actually really hard to deal with!) The games were interactive and close but I lost out in the end. I was pretty tired and wasn't really playing optimally at this point.

Final Record: 4-3, out of prizes
Not the best finish overall, but not one I'm unhappy with. As I suspected coming in, the deck is quite strong outside of the Omni-Tell matchup, which I'm not sure is fixable. The second Omni-Tell player I lost to was actually a guy from my store, who ended up making Top 8 which was nice. This was the last big event on my calendar before Eternal Weekend in August, my deck choice for which is still undecided. I think it would be really cool to play Punishing Maverick, which I'll probably sleeve up and test for a bit. First, I have to decide on a list though!

Modern Musings

Watching GP Charlotte coverage this weekend got me thinking about Modern again. Looking back, I started getting into Modern late in 2012 with an Affinity deck ($9 Mox Opals!) but never finished it. I began building GW Hatebears at the end of 2013 and had it finished about a month before the new bannings and unbannings. Hatebears felt kind of bad since it was trying to be Maverick in a format without Wasteland, Stoneforge Mystic, and Green Sun's Zenith, so I moved into a new deck after another 2 months: Scapeshift. I love ramping and doing stuff with lands, and it plays what is possibly the sweetest Blue card, Cryptic Command, so it seemed like a very natural choice.

I tried to play a lot of Modern last Spring and Summer leading into the PTQ season and GP Worcester but I ended up being too busy to go to any PTQs and by Fall I was just playing Legacy instead, despite having the option to play Modern locally twice a week. Since then my Modern deck has remained virtually untouched. A lot of players have strong feelings about Modern; I'm honestly still not sure where I stand on it. The essence of Modern is simple and appealing. People want to build a deck that they can play a long time from a larger cardpool and with strategic depth that Standard Magic simply can't offer. While this experience best describes Legacy, the Reserved List and other factors have made the entry costs of that format quite prohibitive, and thus Modern has to provide a microcosm of that experience to both the Pro Tour and a wider audience. Unfortunately Modern can still be quite an expensive format, especially when Wizards has shown a willingness to ban entire decks out of existence. While the incessant bannings make Modern seem unhealthy, they have shaped it into a format that can offer something different from others. Due to the paucity of individually powerful cards in the format due to bannings, decks built around synergy and redundancy have arisen, which has certainly caused complaints about the over-effectiveness of sideboard cards and BGx decks that can efficiently disrupt synergies. But the nature of the format has allowed unique and quintessentially Modern decks to arise such as Twin, Amulet, Boggles, Living End, Tron, Ad Nauseam combo, and Pod. While some of the bannings seem absurd, they may be necessary to ensure Modern doesn't simply become a worse version of Legacy, but something different instead.

While it isn't for everyone, at the end of the day Modern is here to stay. It has become a very popular format and will only continue to grow as it inevitably gets cheaper with the reprinting of staples. However, in the wake of the MM2 release and accompanying financial upheaval, it remains unclear when prices reach a level where this growth can finally and completely be realized.