MapReduce has become an increasingly popular framework for large-scale data processing. However, complex operations such as joins are quite expensive and require sophisticated techniques. In this paper, we review state-of-the-art strategies for joining several relations in a MapReduce environment and study their extension with filter-based approaches. The general objective of filters is to eliminate non-matching data as early as possible in order to reduce the I/O, communication and CPU costs. We examine the impact of systematically adding filters as early as possible in MapReduce join algorithms, both analytically with cost models and practically with evaluations. The study covers binary joins, multi-way joins and recursive joins, and addresses the case of large inputs that gives rise to the most intricate challenges.