Summer Bloom

Sorcery

You may play up to three additional lands this turn.

Combos

• Mana Breach + Mystic Sanctuary + Summer Bloom

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Premodern	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vintage	Legal
Casual	Legal
Custom	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal

Discussion (35)

lagotripha on Cash is King

1 month ago

I think I've found something - you can do a pretty good Summer Bloom impression with just the fetches, except it plays from the deck, so Amulet of Vigor and Primeval Titan have a new way to get the insane tempo they had pre-bans.

It won't like like traditional primetime - the double white cost and fetchland demands massively changes the manabase, but the heart of the engine would work, and you'd get the option of also opening up combos with brought back/lotus field with only a few card slots.

plakjekaas on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

To be fair, Summer Bloom is banned in modern because it broke that format too

DrukenReaps on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

I can't speak to the competitive side of things as I am far from a competitive player. I do see your package has a lot going for it but in the cards you've presented I just don't think they would ban any of them. Even if they do ban one it seems like most are easily replaced. So the ban has to fall on one of the linchpin cards, obviously I suppose lol.

The package as presented Bala Ged Recovery  ^Flip, Life from the Loam, Summer Bloom, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Lotus Cobra, Tireless Provisioner, Gaea's Cradle, Boseiju, Who Endures, Strip Mine, Cloudstone Curio, Crucible of Worlds. Suggested additions to it Green Sun's Zenith, Dryad Arbor, at least 5 mana dorks, Utopia Sprawl, and Wild Growth.

Of these Strip Mine, Crucible of Worlds, Azusa Lost but Seeking, and Gaea's Cradle stand out to my casual eye but consider the committee has said they don't want to ban things for cEDH in the past. Since the formation of their advisory group they've relented a little on their stance on cEDH but still... I wouldn't really expect them to ban any of this. Their usual reasoning boils down to "unfun" to play against or absurd value from a single card. The most absurd card here, again to my casual eyes, is Cradle. Which has always been an absurd card and the only card which has a similar example already on the ban list.

Not going to say it is impossible for something here to get axed though or that, if the package is as effective as proposed, something doesn't need to be axed. It'd just likely have to directly impact a large number of casual players too.

griffstick on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

I love data like this jaymc1130. I'm a lil bit of a mtg investor. So when I see the data of this list. I instantly know that these cards are good cards to invest in. Buying a bunch of Summer Bloom today.

plakjekaas on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

Well I've sleeved up the Najeela list on jaymc1130 's profile, and took it to my playgroup. Disclaimer, I'm one of the casuals dipping their toes encouraged by Play to Win and sorts. I've had a little success with a Marwyn, the Nurturer list from the cEDH decklists database, but never played anything blue before. I haven't been able to come close to comboing, which is probably a limitation of me, not of the deck, but I got wrecked by Krarkashima and Godo without much effort. Only the Tymna&Malcolm midrange player was doing consistently worse '^^.

It looks like a fun engine to build your deck around though, I'm definitely keeping it, but I haven't been able to see why it's as powerful as you keep advertising. Which, again, is probably my fault. But if I can't make it work, I'll have a hard time "abusing the setup while having the chance".

I might just tinker around with a shell a bit more, to adapt to what's actually being played at the tables I'm at. How do you feel about Valakut Exploration as a way to recast the Summer Bloom after the Mystic Sanctuary etb, and effectively drawing your deck in the process? It would win the game too, if you have more cards in deck than opponents have life total.

jaymc1130 on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

enpc

There's a whole lot wrong with this statement. Most of it simply is not accurate, or fails as it is working from assumptions based on casual/amateur players playing with cEDH decks.

It's like looking at the recent Marchesa tournament and concluding Magda is an overly powerful archetype because of it's win in that tournament. As far as I know, this was not a professional level MtG event, I do not know of a single professional caliber player that attended. It was an amateur event almost exclusively participated in by amateur level players, and the level of competitiveness is very unlikely to be something one could consider "competitive" in a true sense. Now, you know I have a high standard for competitive play coming from a professional level of play myself over my MtG career, so sure, there is some debate that could be had about where that bar should be set, but, quite frankly, as with any sport or game or competition true competitiveness doesn't really begin until you're talking about the top <1% of players in the world. As a multi time world rank 1 player myself of games like Terraforming Mars I can attest to the simple fact that 99% of my games were, and still are not, competitive in nature. There are about a dozen players in the entire world who can play that game at a truly competitive level out of the 100s of thousands that play. Same goes for, say, the MLB (another thing I tried my hand at competitively that you are aware of as it was a professional baseball career that was my primary focus in highschool which lead to my lackluster performances at professional level MtG events during that time span). College level baseball is simply not competitive in a true sense, it's competitive relative the level of skill of the players participating. The same goes for A ball, and AA ball, and even AAA ball. If I'd been capable of true competitive level play you'd be talking to a multi millionaire celebrity as opposed to a card game enthusiast. So that's first and foremost thing that ought to be addressed.

Secondly, the fact you state graveyard recursion of Strip Mine being around for a while and not being a problem exemplifies the aforementioned inability to discern true competitive level concepts from powerful concepts. Strip Mine recursion lists are the absolute most dominant lists in the meta currently, and have been for well over a year. You can ask SynergyBuild if you want another opinion on how effective that particular concept has been. The true competitive meta for most of the last year has been warped by Bloom and Farm decks, with the Bloom Farm decks that combine the archetypes putting up some pretty insane win rates. Strip Mine isn't going to become a problem because of these new cards, Strip Mine has ALREADY BEEN a huge problem in true competitive settings for over a year, and, as usual, the average casual/amateur player hasn't noticed at all. There's a reason a handful of folks like SynergyBuild and myself are constantly 2 years ahead of the meta changes that occur, and you've got all the evidence you need of this fact here, on this site, with a bevy of posts from just the two of us over the years highlighting meta shifts months and years ahead of them actually happening. And we are by no means the only ones on this site, there are a small handful of others as well.

Thirdly, you've failed to understand how resilient the Bloom concept combos have now become if you think the critical weak points are Crucible of Worlds and Ramunap Excavator. Bouncing lands to hand with Trade Routes or Cloudstone Curio forgoes a need for the combo to have access to the yard at all for some very specific loops, and certainly access to playing lands from the yard in the vast majority of them. These are not unique critical points of failure any more, where 2 and 3 years ago they would have been. That portion of the combo has become so robust it is not viable to attack it from that angle, the best bet is to simply exile and remove the Summer Bloom itself as it is the only unique portion of the combo that is now required.

Now, will these things mean the combo starts to become immediately pervasive throughout the meta? No, as stated, the cEDH community is glacially slow to adapt and learn new things. All people look at is what channels like PwP or LM do on youtube and think that stuff is competitive in nature. It is not. Those are exclusively amateur players playing in a mostly amateur fashion. In fact, from a level of gameplay perspective, most of their videos are unwatchable because the level of play is just plain terrible. It's fine to use those places as resources for the most basic of fundamentals, but that's not how the cEDH community uses those resources. The larger community thinks that IS high level play, and the reality of the situation is that it's slightly above average amateur level of play. So no, as stated in the OP of this thread, I don't expect things to change radically, because, historically, change has usually been extremely slow. You can add to this the fact that Dauthi Voidwalker is a very powerful deterrent to the Bloom archetypes because it blanks most of the value portion of the play patterns and should be an auto include in any deck with Black, but it remains to be seen just how impactful this card can be. The Bloom archetypes have been dealing with graveyard hate this entire time and still managing best in format win rate potentials, so I'm personally interested to see if these factors offset, or favor the Voidwalker or Bloom side of the matchup. The biggest problem is that the exact decks best positioned to make use of the Voidwalker are also the same decks currently employing the Bloom combo, the Sultai midrange attrition based shells.

Of the cards that work as a part of this package, I think you've hit the nail on the head with Boseiju being the one perhaps most likely to be banned. There are really only two choices to hit if this package does prove problematic, and it's the Bloom at the center of it all, or Boseiju that cranks up the power a couple of notches. Personally, I don't have enough data about performance yet to lean one way or another in terms of which I'd find more likely to get the hammer, but it almost assuredly would have to be one of these two.

jaymc1130 on cEDH is going to have …

2 months ago

At least, that is what some of my preliminary data is suggesting. There is a particular 15ish card package that fits into any deck with green that covers a deck's ramp needs, control needs, and combo win needs while also having synergy with each of the independent components leading to some unbelievably robust and powerful play patterns. Right now, in a limited sample size mind you, this package is winning better than 40% of it's games.

There aren't many instances of this occurring in our group's data set. In fact, there are 3.

1. Paradox Engine. Before this card got banned we were seeing a vacuum win rate potential for this card of 40%+, which was absurd. We assumed it would get banned, about 6 months later, it was.

2. Hullbreacher and Opposition Agent. When these cards were spoiled our group knew immediately they would eventually be banned, they are that fundamentally broken in cEDH settings. Sure enough, this 2 card package instantly began posting vacuum win rate potentials of 40%+ (over 50%+ before we learned play patterns to cope with how abusive the play pattern of this package was). Hullbreacher got banned, Oppo Agent is awaiting it's inevitable ban hammer.

3. The Inception Package. This was a concept focused around using Extract and targeted discard to neuter fast glass cannon combo archetypes back in the hey day of the Flash Hulk meta. The concept dominated the meta completely and utterly 4 and 5 years ago and posted vacuum win rate potentials of 40%+ because the cEDH community had yet to realize that running 10+ critical cards devoted to a single combo line of play was very ineffective in the face of any exile effects hitting those critical combo pieces and turning the remaining 9+ cards into dead card slots for the remainder of the game. Over time, as more new cards were printed, the resilience of the metascape improved and the printing of Veil of Summer largely brought the Inception package back to parity within the metascape. Post Flash banning the concept became a less enticing option. Lucky break, no bans needed.

Which brings us to the current issue. The Summer Bloom package that has been powered up as of late with new card printings. It's too soon to tell if this package is problematic enough to require a ban, but it's possible that Summer Bloom should simply get the axe at some point, it is a degenerate combo card after all. The crux of the issue is that the play pattern enabled by this package covers every requirement of a competitive deck within these 15ish cards. Accelerated board development, covered. Combo win line, covered. Card advantage, covered. Consistent deployment of primary game plans by turn 3, covered. Ability to interact with and control opposing board states, covered. Now, it's not too much to ask for all these things from a set of 15 cards in competitive settings, but usually these 15 cards won't all work together to enhance each other's effectiveness and make those 15 cards feel more like 30 cards worth of value in game. This could be a real problem in due time, particularly since the package can be used in any deck with green as a color at the moment, which means the package can be ported into a wide variety of shells.

The package in question: Bala Ged Recovery  ^Flip, Life from the Loam, Summer Bloom, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Lotus Cobra, Tireless Provisioner, Gaea's Cradle, Boseiju, Who Endures, Strip Mine, Cloudstone Curio, Crucible of Worlds. Personally, I recommend a supplement to the package of Green Sun's Zenith, Dryad Arbor, and at least 5 mana dorks. Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth can also be used to supplement the ramp efforts, but aren't critical to the concept and are, in fact, vulnerable to opponents who employ the concept themselves.

Why is this package a potential problem and why is it posting win rates over 40% at the moment in testing? Well, it largely boils down to some fundamental principles of cEDH. Those principles? Playing more cards than opponents is good and improves the odds of winning, seeing more cards from your deck than opponents is good an improves the odds of winning, and using fewer cards than opponents to achieve a desired result is good and improves the odds of winning. Conversely, opponents that see fewer cards, play fewer cards, and who use more cards to achieve desired goals also improve your odds of beating those opponents. This particular package hits along each of these axes, it plays a lot more cards because it keeps reusing the same cards over and over again, it sees a lot more cards because it's constantly thinning it's deck as part of this play pattern reusing lands in particular, and it gets to save space because the core components every competitive deck needs are included already in just these 15ish cards meaning it needs to use less card slots to achieve more things, and the gameplans are consistently able to be deployed and put into place in the early turns of a game. Simultaneously the play patterns of this package are an extreme hinderance to opponents because their board states have a very tough time developing into useful configurations when their lands, artifacts, and enchantments keep getting wiped every turn cycle.

Again, it's very early in this, and I would hesitate to say it's Boseiju that's putting this package over the top right now, but something about this set up is very clearly problematic for the health of the format. I'd abuse this set up while you have a chance, the cEDH community is incredibly slow to adapt to new trends so there's a good chance this package will be abusable for a couple extra free wins per 100 games played for about a year or so. At some point I kind of expect some portion of this package to get the ban hammer, but I don't expect it soon. It took them almost a year for Hullbreacher and Golos after all, and I thought those were cards that ought to be preemptively banned from the format the day they each got spoiled.

jaymc1130 on Convoluted Combos

3 months ago

AstroAA Sometimes a silly initial idea can lead to a fundamentally powerful truth. That's part of why our group initially started running the original Bloom Combo in any Sultai shell. There are lots of combos in the game that are very powerful, and evaluating total efficiency in competitive settings can help a player win more games by streamlining deck play patterns through deck construction techniques.

For example, a quick comparison of some of the combos we've discussed so far, Bloom Combo, Dramatic Scepter Combo, and Thoracle Consult Combo.

Thassa's Oracle + Demonic Consultation requires 2 card slots in a deck to be able to produce a win with a total mana investment of {U}{U}{B}. It's not just compact in mana investment and card slots, it's also stack compact, requiring just the Oracle trigger, holding priority, and the Consult naming a card not in the deck. All of these factors combine to make it extremely efficient at the job it does and this comes with the trade off of extremely high risk to go with such an efficient maximum reward. If your attempt gets stuffed at the point where you exile your deck but your Oracle trigger doesn't resolve successfully then you get to enjoy perhaps a turn cycle before dying immediately on your next upkeep. Extreme efficiency with the trade off of some knuckle whitening risk. It makes this a great combo to employ at a moment's notice in situations where you can fit it in while opponents didn't leave themselves with enough resources to defend against the line of play, but not usually ideal being used into the full grip and untapped mana bases of opponents ready to interact and the two cards won't generate much value while waiting for the opportune moment as they sit in hand.

Isochron Scepter + Dramatic Reversal is a 2 card combo that generates infinite untaps of nonland permanents with a minimum of 1 additional card that itself is a nonland mana producing permanent (ie, Sol Ring). The loop can become mana positive with certain cards or combinations of cards (Mana Vault, or Arcane Signet+Sol Ring). And that infinite mana can be used with some sort of outlet card to produce a win. So it's a combo that at a minimum will require 4 cards to produce a win, though more often 5 or 6. The mana investment is {4} to play and activate, which is more efficient than the number of card slots that will need to be dedicated to it. It's a combo with components that will have at least some value over time before the combo is activated outright since those dorks and rocks can probably cast another spell, so it has some natural play pattern efficiency. If stuffed, there's a pretty decent chance of losing access to this combo in the future. If the Scepter is destroyed in response to it's first activation, for example, you'll be out the exiled Dramatic Reversal from the imprint even if you can get the Scepter back into play later on. So still maximum reward potential, but less impactful risk to go with the slightly less efficient overall set up since you won't lose if stuffed. It's a combo that can be played pretty easily into opponents ready to defend since it will generate mana to interact with them after starting it's loop and the mana investment on your end is pretty low, but an easy one to interact with for opponents so it's liable to be one they stuff if thrown out wily nilly.

Summer Bloom + Mystic Sanctuary + Waterlogged Grove + Squandered Resources + Ramunap Excavator + Noxious Revival + green land is 7 pieces in total, but one is only needed as the "outlet" (Noxious Revival to loop the deck) and another can be essentially any random land that might be lying around to bring the core down to those 5 unique cards. With the initial 6 cards in place and Revival in the deck the initial mana investment can be as low as {G}{1} to begin the line of play by casting the Summer Bloom. If some of the other pieces aren't in play then the initial investment cost isn't quite so shockingly efficient, but the combo is still solid in terms of card slot and mana investment efficiency when not wowing. Not much risk if the attempt is stuffed, and there's a decent chance you can just try again by saccing the Sanctuary and replaying it to get the Summer Bloom back if countered for example, but the same maximum potential reward of winning the game. Most of the pieces of the combo are value components themselves so they fit naturally into most board state development play patterns allowing you to both spend resources reacting to opponents and amass resources in play and in hand when they don't present serious threats. By far the most conservative of these 3 combos, but far more flexible in it's approach while minimizing potential risks to lose the game.