I come from the future. Bloom does indeed get banned. Sell out while you can.

First off you cant account for “Virtual turn 2-3 wins” because they arent wins. you are failing to take into account all the 1 and 2 mana removal. Any talk of “virtual” wins should be null. Second you should understand what the deck is capable of before you discuss its ban. The deck wins on turn 1, 2, and 3 almost as easily with titans as it does with hive mind.

When I play Amulet, I never win 25% of my games on turn 3 or sooner. I played it at a local Modern event today, and in the 9 games I ended two games before turn 4. However, one was a turn 3 attack for 20 in which my opponent conceded on his turn, and would have been a turn 4 lethal attack since he blocked on turn 3 and didn’t die. The other was a game in which I only attacked for 8 on turn 2, and my opponent conceded before the game ended. I’d actually say that you have hands that don’t really do anything more than you have hands that make 6 mana before turn 4.

The thing to remember with Storm is that you legitimately end the game on turn 2 or 3, whereas Amulet often puts the game to “you’re most likely to win” rather than completely over. There are usually ways to interact with Amulet in those situations. It would be really interesting to see if Wizards counted those games or not.

I’d IoK first before TS, normally they can’t cast the TS target next turn. Then Lili t3/4 this is a normal line of play for 8rack and look how successful my favorite deck is…
Oh, yeah. we don’t wanna talk about 8rack here, sorry I forgot…
😉

Also, I doubt anything is getting banned. Only things that I consider annoying/mandatory are Blood Moon, Snapcaster Mage and Spellskite.

As far as I know, the concept of a “virtual win” with respect to bans only arises in one piece of Wizards writing: Sam Stoddard’s Modern “Development risk” piece from last spring.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/development-risks-modern-2015-05-22

Although Stoddard discusses the concept, even he isn’t clear exactly how it applies to bans. Infect seems okay according to him, whereas old All In Red was not. But how does something like T1 Thoughtseize, T2 IoK, T3 Lily compare to that? Or Affinity’s hand-vomit starts? A turn 2-3 Titan? It’s impossible to know where to draw that line without being deeply subjective, and I’d rather stick with a more concrete measure until we knew more.

Also need to consider virtual wins via something like Blood Moon.

Well, it still means that a turn 2 titan will kill you on turn 3 if you don’t have the answer – and to be fair there aren’t that many answers to the card that come down that early to interact. We’re pretty much talking Path to Exile, double-bolt, and Terminate if the titan resolves, and Thoughtseize if you’re getting it before it resolves. Mana leak might work if you’re on the play but is otherwise a pretty embarassing answer to a big mana deck like bloom.

Assuming the deck needs a nerf (depends on actual win rate pre turn-4) there is certainly a secondary question of whether its summer bloom, amulet of vigor, or hive mind that should go. Hive Mind gets rid of the turn 2 kill perhaps, but the turn 3 kill is still alive and well and if its still doing that 25% of the time then its still too strong and we will have gone after the wrong card.

The deck disappears completely if you take amulet. It might stick around with a summer bloom ban since Azusa can play a similar role while coming down a turn later and being vulnerable to lightning bolt.

Did you read this article? Storm and infect were in the 5% range – and so is bloom. There was never a point where storm was making 20% of the meta – it was 5% and the consistency of turn 3 wins was around 25% which earned seething song a ban seat.

The whole point of the article was to create an actual definition that decks could be weighed against – best guess is 5% meta share and 25% pre-turn-4 win rate, and those are literally based on storm and infect bans. Bloom has the same prevalance at about 5% – the question is whether its winning pre turn-4 at the same 25%ish clip.

My theory is that a resolved titan gives such a huge advantage (pacts of all kinds + huge blocker/beater) that it has to be highly correlated with a game win. If that’s the case, then most games come down to “can u win before titan resolves”? And so, the average turn titan comes into play would be a, if not superior, very helpful in assessing the turn speed of this deck kill potential.

Glad it’s been helpful! I totally agree that more writers and players need to use these methods in understanding the format. It would go a long way towards improving the community and how we process information.

Never in this level of detail and never as a standalone piece. Given how frequently this comes up and how often it is misunderstood, I thought it was important to have one article that focuses exclusively on this critical topic. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on this article, which suggests it was a good decision and one that is helpful to the Modern community.

You should read the article again without biases roaring in your ears.

That’s definitely possible. I do know that Storm very, very rarely won on turn two (you’d need a really crazy hand and lucky draws to do that), so this is mostly something for older bans like Shoal. The best way to figure this out is to check the numbers once the upcoming announcement hits, comparing decks like Infect and Bloom. Infect is certainly a deck with turn two kill potential, whereas it’s a little rarer in Amulet. But we also don’t have good numbers on those two decks yet, so we have to wait and see.

I’m going to try a similar method used in estimating the Storm win-turn rates to see if we can find one for Bloom. I also have a large MTGO dataset I’m going to try and pick through. My guess is that Bloom is in the 20%-25% range, although I’ve seen some players that put it as low as 10%, and some sources (Tom Martell speaking off the cuff) putting it at around 30%. So it’s an open question, but one I hope to address with some more data analysis!

As for virtual wins, I have no idea how I’d account for them. So far, the turn four rule hasn’t actually mentioned “virtual wins”. This concept really only arose, at least through official channels, in that Stoddard Modern Development article from the spring, and even then it wasn’t an explicit reference to past bans. It’s murky territory overall, so I’m just leaving it on the side for now.

You CAN’T connect for 16 in T2 without multiples amulets. On T3 you can, but by then you should have an answer.

In the same way, a burn deck with a good hand (analogue to a Amulet Bloom hand that can summon a T2 Titan) WILL kill you in T3 if you do nothing besides shocking yourself by turn 3, same way a Titan will. It will even roughly do 8 damage with 3 cards on T2, the same way a Amulet Bloom does.

So it is not the Amulets fault for being too overpower that killed you in T3, it’s yours for failing to interact properly. The Titan portion of the deck is hardly what offends the Turn 4 rule.

I can see and would agree with the discussion if the “Ban Train” was focusing on Hive Mind and Hive Mind ALONE. But no, people focus on Amulet of Vigor and Summer Bloom, wich are not the cards to ban.

Banning them would only kill the deck, when you could in fact only ban Hive Mind and still have a just semi-decent midrange deck with some combo-portion attached to it in the same vibe as Abzan Company have.

It seems entirely plausible that against most tier-one manabases that are trying to disrupt Amulet as soon as possible, 16 damage from Titan/Stronghold/Fortress would do the trick on turn 2 or 3. That’s two fetches and a shock. Turn one Polluted Delta fetching Steam Vents, turn two Bloodstained Mire fetching Swamp seems perfectly normal in Modern.