It’s amazing how easy it is too feel like a complete outsider to a format. I’ve played so much Modern, but having put my focus exclusively on Modern Masters for the last three weeks, now Modern itself just look so alien. Ari Lax wrote an excellent article that should get me up to speed, but it just doesn’t resonate for me. I can either believe in my world or his, but I can’t just update my world with his world’s information because they’re incompatible.
Everything looks very different to a combo player. If you approach Legacy as someone who always plays Storm and you believe it’s the best deck, it’s easy to look at the cards and decks other people play and wonder what they could possibly be thinking. Why don’t they respect you? Why do they fill their decks with all these awful cards? Why don’t they just play something real and stop pretending they’re playing a creature format?
This is a biased perspective that has little relation to reality. The reality is that Storm has a certain win percentage, and that this percentage is probably pretty similar to the win percentage of many other decks, and that it makes up a certain percentage of the field, and players shouldn’t give it more credit than its representation deserves.
When Ari presents Modern as a format that revolves around Lightning Bolt, I know this to be true – it’s been the most-played card at almost every Modern tournament. I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s never been a professional Modern event where Lightning Bolt wasn’t the most-played card. Despite that fact, it’s also possible that it’s even particularly true right now, that Lightning Bolt is in a better position against the field or that there are more of them than usual.
However, when it comes to Modern, I feel like I’ve been Born Again. I’ve seen the Higher Truth and I don’t understand why everyone else is so preoccupied with earthly concerns. You know, concerns like how your one- and two-mana removal spells line up with opponent’s one-and two-mana threats, and how to best generate a two-for-one on turns three and four.
When I stopped paying attention to Modern, Amulet Bloom felt like the best deck. Now I read about people getting excited about casting Collected Company, or amazed by how much mana they can generate if they happen to draw Utopia Sprawl and Arbor Elf. I read these things and I just wonder what people think this format is about.
There are a million cute little synergies in Modern that do something really awesome, and I’d love to play a format where they all mattered. But at the end of the day, most of these are about setting up value plays in the mid-game. Amulet Bloom’s cute interactions just kill the opponent on turn two or three.
Admittedly, often the game goes a little longer than that, but your two-for-ones come from drawing one of your lands, and your real payoffs laugh at the very idea of card advantage. How many cards is an endless string of Primeval Titans worth? How many cards are you ahead or behind when you cast Summer Bloom with two bouncelands in your hand?
Reading what Ari has to say about Amulet Bloom, I agree with everything he says, but I also disagree with him. It’s funny how that can work.
Incentives to Play This Deck:
Amulet Bloom has the most raw goldfish power in the format. If you draw the right seven cards, you just win.
This is a true statement – well, for a certain definition of “in the format.” It’s possible that a Goryo’s Vengeance deck has more raw goldfish power, and Storm or Infect might have debatable claims, but I’m not interested in nitpicking that point and that’s not where my disagreement stems from. We agree that the deck is at the top of the goldfish power spectrum, and we agree that you just win if you draw the right seven. That is everything Ari has to say about the incentives to play the deck, and to me, that’s not just underselling it, but missing the point.
I’ve read several articles over the years about how important it is for good decks to have nut draws that just win. Faeries in Standard almost always won if it has Thoughtseize into Bitterblossom – that was practically a two-card combo that killed on turn two, but I didn’t play the deck as a two-card combo deck, I played it because it had solid fundamentals and played good Magic against everyone. The “Oops, I win!” draws pushed it from being a good deck to being one of the most dominant decks ever, but they weren’t necessary and they weren’t what the deck was about. When describing how Faeries was advantaged against other decks, you’d talk about how the rest of their cards lined up, but it was also understood that sometimes Faeries brings its A game and just wins.
Amulet Bloom is the same way to me. The nut draws offer insurance against bad matchups. When you have a deck that just wins on turn two a certain portion of the time, that puts a floor under how bad basically any matchup can be. If you kill the opponent before finding out what they’re playing 15% of the time, then you’re basically at least 15% to beat anyone. That’s not exactly true, as some decks can disrupt you on the first turn, but it approximates the truth enough that the idea is real: decks that do unfair things can steal games from decks with good matchups against them. They won’t find themselves in the spot that some decks find themselves in where they have some matchups where everything they’re built to do is meaningless, and they essentially can’t ever win – certain pure control decks against certain Emrakul, the Aeon’s Torn Tron decks come to mind.
Weaknesses:
You aren’t beating the first deck. You aren’t beating the second card.
This quote is only mostly true. You don’t beat them, unless you happen to nut draw them and kill them before they can cast the Blood Moon in their opening hand. That’s a thing that happens a real portion of the time. Not all the time, but enough that when combined with the fact that people usually don’t have Blood Moon in game one, and don’t always just draw it when they sideboard it in, I’m not expecting to lose to every person who happens to have a couple Blood Moons in their sideboard when I play Amulet Bloom.
Also, Splinter Twin is a terrible matchup, but a large portion of that comes from Blood Moon, so this is somewhat redundant. You’re actually not that far behind them in game one, it’s just that games two and three become a real nightmare.
Anyway, my point is that my “Incentives” entry for this deck would read very differently.
You’re strong enough and fast enough that the opponent is forced to try to disrupt your game rather than trying to play their own game. You control the narrative: the game is about the things your deck does. A lot of people have the wrong answers. Lightning Bolt in particular doesn’t disrupt what you’re doing. Because you control the narrative, every card in your deck is live, the cards that don’t interact with that narrative in your opponent’s deck – most of their creatures and generally even a lot of their removal – aren’t live. When your opponent casts Scavenging Ooze, most of the time they’ve functionally tapped out to discard a card. At the same time, basically every way that people have to disrupt you functions on a one-for-one basis, but the nature of your deck is such that Simic Growth Chamber is basically a real two-for-one and resolving a single Primeval Titan wins almost all attrition wars. If your opponent has the wrong ways to disrupt you, they usually just die. If they have the right ways, you sideboard into a much stronger attrition deck where you have more threats that demand more answers each and just bury them.
Basically, I don’t play Amulet Bloom because it can win the early game, I play Amulet Bloom because I think it’s favored at all stages of the game against most decks. You have more high-impact expensive spells, so you’re going to play better off the top than almost anyone.
Amulet Bloom is beatable, but not enough people are trying to steal narrative control from it. Blood Moon changes the story – it doesn’t try to trade resources or generate value, it just wins. It’s a card that attacks the narrative from a completely different angle. This is the deck’s biggest weakness by far, which is why it gets top billing, but Ari has more to say:
Your median goldfish is also significantly less impressive than the best case dream scenario, and Primeval Titan isn’t necessarily an instant win or even an instant stabilize button. Random things like Merfolk can just have too much on board for your turn 4 “win” to handle.
I’d put this slightly differently. While your fastest kills race anyone, some decks have a better median kill than you do. When you play against one of them, you’re forced into their narrative – and you have very few interactive tools, so you’re not good at operating in an opposing narrative. You can sideboard red sweepers that help a lot here, but against a deck that’s really built for speed you’re leaning pretty heavily on your nut draws. Fortunately, your undisrupted nut draws are common enough that I think you’re only ever barely behind these decks, and I think you’re often favored, but it is much more likely that you’ll lose to them than to someone playing a more interactive deck that operates on the wrong spectrum. As far as weaknesses go, this isn’t far enough from “well, you don’t always beat everyone, some decks have a good chance” for it to be a real concern for me.
There’s also an inherent instability to match the high end power the deck offers. The full sets of Serum Visions and Ancient Stirrings help here, but there’s almost as many hands that flounder around as there are autowin hands. The “do nothing” hands still play a Primeval Titan, which might be good enough, but other combo decks can easily take advantage of this.
This is largely priced into the previous statement, as it’s where the slower median kill is coming from, but I think he’s overstating how often Amulet Bloom whiffs or how slow it is when it doesn’t have everything it needs. This reads more like feeding into the view that it’s a high variance glass cannon deck that sometimes loses to itself, which I think is a pure misclassification.
There’s also a very high deck specific skill floor for Amulet Bloom. Lots of numbers, lots of tutoring for one-ofs.
This is one of the decks biggest strengths, assuming you know how to play it. This is what keeps it from getting popular enough to draw more hate, and this is why more people don’t have a lot of experience playing against it – it’s not necessarily easy to find someone to pilot it against you in testing.
In this week’s Fact or Fiction article, Brad identifies this:
I believe the deck [Amulet Bloom] won’t see much play at the Season Two Invitational, but not due to how complex it is. I’m under the impression that this deck is not only difficult to play, but doesn’t even give the pilot any benefit for playing such a complex deck. The deck is merely okay, but people fall in love with it due to its complexities. Magic is difficult, and lines are missed all the time. It’s just easier to see them with a deck that completely plays solitaire with their opponent.
Brad recognizes the complexity as something that draws people to the deck, but where he thinks they’re just enamored with the complexities, I think I was drawn to the win percentages much more than the unique lines it offered. To say that it doesn’t give the pilot any benefit is reductive and dismissive in a way that is absurd. There are obvious advantages to Amulet Bloom, as Ari and I discussed. What Brad means is that, played optimally, it’s not better than any other deck on average, and then the complexities just offer people the ability to drop their win rates even lower. I’d argue that this claim is baseless, and suggest that all evidence that I have – both in results and, more importantly, in theory and current metagame positioning – suggest that, played optimally, it does win more than other decks.
The weakness Ari didn’t go into is that is does have less well-known bad matchups. As I mentioned earlier, as a combo deck, Amulet Bloom is bad at shifting narratives or interacting with opposing narratives. If a deck’s basic game-plans trumps Amulet Bloom’s basic game-plan, all it can do is hope for a nut draw. Infect trumps it by consistently being about a turn faster. Hate Bears trumps its game-plan by attacking its mana and tutoring in fast, effective ways. Leonin Arbiter is the most devastating, but Path to Exile and Ghost Quarter are both huge, and both Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Aven Mindcensor are very potent.
There’s a lot of hate out there, and Amulet Bloom’s definitely reliably beatable, but when I’m constantly reading hype about Lightning Bolt, Arbor Elf, Collected Company, and Kolaghan’s Command… as a predator armed with Amulet Bloom, I’d start salivating. Those aren’t even cards from this deck’s vantage point.
Modern feels like it’s shifted and left me behind, but I have a feeling it’s just forgotten about me.
Amulet Bloom probably isn’t the deck for you, but remember that whatever you choose, in a format as diverse as Modern, your top concern should be about finding ways to control the narrative: to play the game on your deck’s terms. Every turn you give your opponent where you’re not killing them or disrupting them is a turn they can use to take control of the narrative. If you’re not answering their threat, you should be playing a threat they have to answer – if you play something they can ignore, they get a turn to play something that can redefine the game.
Modern is ruthless, and as many cute things as there are, things I’d love to do, you can’t just mess around. I’ve always had the best results with a focused, streamlined plan that let me dictate the direction of the game.