Shard · Color Identity
Jund (Black-Red-Green): History, Playstyle and Best Commanders
Jund ramps, kills whatever is in the way, and eats its own board for value. It is the most self-sufficient shard on the battlefield and has nothing at all to say about the stack.
Jund is black, red and green, the three-color identity. A world of dragons and predation: sacrifice everything, remove everything, attack with what's left.
Also called BRG, Riveteers.
Where the Name Comes From
The shard of Jund, from Shards of Alara (2008): red's shard, with its allies black and green.
Jund is the red shard of Alara: a volcanic world of dragons at the top of a food chain that everything else was somewhere on, with no white or blue magic anywhere in it. Its mechanic in 2008 was Devour, which lets a creature eat your other creatures to arrive larger, and which is as neat a summary of a plane's philosophy as Magic has managed.
"Jund" also became a verb, which is unusual for a color combination. A Standard and Modern deck of the same colors (grind the opponent out with removal, discard and efficient threats) was strong enough for long enough that "getting Junded" entered the vocabulary. The Commander version is less about attrition and more about sacrifice, because the format supplies the token makers and death triggers that a two-player format never had room for. Streets of New Capenna renamed the trio the Riveteers in 2022.
All 32 color combinations and where each name came from →How Jund Plays
Jund is the best sacrifice identity in the format. Green makes the tokens and the mana, black supplies the sacrifice outlets and the recursion, and red converts dead creatures into damage. That combination is a self-contained engine: the deck feeds itself, refills from the graveyard, and kills the table with drain and damage rather than with combat.
It also has the widest removal coverage of any shard. Black's unconditional kill spells, red's damage and artifact removal, green's enchantment answers and fight effects: between them there is nothing on the battlefield that Jund cannot destroy, which is a genuinely rare property.
The hole is everything that is not on the battlefield. Jund cannot counter a spell, cannot make anybody discard usefully in a three-opponent game, and has no way to stop a combo turn once it starts. It also cannot gain meaningful life or protect itself from a sweeper except by rebuilding afterwards, which it does better than anyone, but which still costs a turn.
What It Does Well, and What It Doesn't
Strengths
- Complete removal coverage on the battlefield: creatures, artifacts, enchantments and planeswalkers.
- The best sacrifice-and-recursion engine of any identity, with all three pieces natively available.
- Green's ramp plus red's rituals, so Jund reaches its expensive threats a turn or two early.
- Excellent resilience: the graveyard is a second hand and a board wipe is only a delay.
Weaknesses
- No counterspells and no way to interact with anything before it resolves.
- No lifegain that matters and no fogs, so a fast aggressive deck can simply outrace it.
- No evasion to speak of, which makes a stalled board genuinely hard to break through.
- Graveyard hate is a hard counter to most builds, and the identity answers enchantments slowly.
Best Jund Commanders
The command zones that define the identity rather than the ones winning this week: the pips beside each name are its color identity, which is what it lets you play in the other 99.
Commander Spotlight
Korvold, Fae-Cursed King ↗
Draws a card and grows every time you sacrifice a permanent: any permanent, including treasure and lands. The most efficient sacrifice payoff in the format.
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher ↗
Arrives with a Kobold for every mana spent and eats them to grow. The original Jund token-and-sacrifice commander, and a famous combo piece besides.
Lord Windgrace ↗
Discards to dig, returns lands from the graveyard, and makes Cats for the lands you have lost. Lands-matter with black and red attached.
Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire ↗
Every attack makes each player sacrifice a permanent and replace it from the top of their library. Chaotic, symmetrical, and much better for the deck built around it.
Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper ↗
A 3/1 hasty token whenever a nontoken creature you control dies. Sacrifice value that arrives ready to attack.
Xira Arien ↗
Pays three mana to let any player draw a card, including you. An old, slow, political draw engine and one of the format's original three-color commanders.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Jund mean in Magic?
Jund is the black-red-green color combination, named after the red shard of Alara from the 2008 set Shards of Alara: a volcanic world of dragons and predation with no white or blue magic. The name also stuck as a verb in two-player formats, where "Jund" describes a grindy removal-and-threats deck of those colors. Streets of New Capenna renamed the same trio the Riveteers in 2022.
What is Jund good at in Commander?
Sacrifice and removal. It is the only identity with native access to all three pieces of a sacrifice engine (token makers, free sacrifice outlets and death payoffs), and it can destroy any permanent type on the battlefield. That makes it very hard to beat with cards, since it recovers from removal and board wipes better than anything else in the format.
How does a Jund deck lose?
To things it cannot touch. A combo that resolves, a deck that wins in the air before the ground stalls out, or a single graveyard-exile enchantment that switches off the recursion the whole deck depends on. Carrying colorless answers and a plan that works from the battlefield alone is how good Jund lists cover it.
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