As an established staple of a format commanding some hefty price tags over three colours, Jund is not a decklist I ever really considered (especially not to flat-out buy into). Then, however, I came across an article on lifesucessfully.com about a fun little budget Jund deck they'd found on MTGO. This presented Bloodhall Ooze as a great starter, and I was really taken with the idea of a relatively cheap deck that hearkened back to the early days of Jund with cool but now sadly overlooked cards such as Blightning. So I used that as a foundation and added my own additional restrictions: no 'walkers, Fetches, Shocks, Goyfs or Bob. Didn't stop me spending money pimping it out with full-art and promo cards to make a casual deck which was still positively oozing with value!
...I refuse to apologise for that. Anyway, "The Plan" - as far as there is one - involves an early Ooze followed up by a Winding Constrictor. That's 4 counters a turn right there, and even without trample puts the pressure on fast. Meanwhile Scavenging Ooze provides graveyard hate in the mainboard with some lifegain as a nice bonus. A Managorger Hydra will quickly punish any opponent who doesn't deal with it while feeding off your own removal spells, and of course also synergises with the Constrictors. Left unchecked they can get very big very quickly. Non-creature spells are predictably geared towards disruption and removal, with the discard offered by Blightning helping to offset the card advantage usually provided by Dark Confidant. Now that Bloodbraid Elf is back in the mix she's replaced Corpsejack Menace because you just can't argue with dat walue. While I was originally concerned that the mana base would be strained attempting to feed three colours on a budget, I've actually found it to be fairly consistent thanks to the shadow/check lands and the relatively low CMC. The Biogenics cap out the curve at five, and any two-land hands without these in are usually safe due to the high amount of interaction offered by the deck.
As it's a casual deck and rarely used, the sideboard only contains a few multi-utility attrition and value cards that can be brought in in some combination depending on the match-up - if this was more serious it would probably have copies of Kolaghan's Command, Pithing Needle, Plague Engineer and Grafdigger's Cage etc.
If you're trying to recreate this even more cheaply the original draft of this deck went with Commander printings wherever possible and had the following substitutions: Duress for Inquisitions; Shocks or Forked Bolts instead of the Lightning ones; Goblin Dark-Dwellers over Biogenic Oozes and Gruul Charm/Golgari Charm/Rakdos Charms instead of sideboard spells. The land base can be replaced with whatever alternatives you have on hand with a slight loss in tempo but will still be a strong budget deck with all the hallmarks of traditional Jund: hand disruption, removal and good value aggressive creatures: when in doubt, Jund 'em out!
