Bloomburrow previews are in full swing, so today I’m taking a look at what we’ve seen so far with an eye towards Commander play. The set looks adorably cute and cuddly, and I expect it to be hugely popular with the Commander community. Who doesn’t want to make a Rabbit deck, or a Frog deck? After the COVID pandemic, the Phyrexian invasion of the Multiverse, and a bunch of Eldrazi showing up again, it will be a breath of fresh air to follow along with small animals and their adventures.
Let’s hop to it!
Calamities
Speaking of cuddly animal adventures, a big part of it seems to involve squaring off against the Calamities, primal beasts of nature that tend to be quite dangerous. As a Golgari mage, I’ve got my eye on Ygra, Eater of All and plan on slotting it into my Gyome, Master Chef deck. Making all creatures – including your opponents’ creatures – into Food is a pretty wild ability to build around and is a flavor win, since Ygra apparently is ready to eat any creature around, including your own!
People building around Maha, Its Feathers Night are going to end up with pretty brutal decks and I would recommend you limit playing it to higher power Commander pods. It’s going to be quite easy to build a deck that just locks players out of playing creatures (including their commander), which might not be the sort of game some people are looking for. Just imagine pairing with Pestilence, Ascendant Evincar, Night of Souls’ Betrayal, and Kaervek, the Spiteful.
Beza, the Bounding Spring seems like a more friendly “Calamity,” offering itself as a catch-up mechanism when it enters with gifts of Treasure, life, creatures and cards when one of your opponents has more of each particular resource. Notably, if you’re down lands it provides a Treasure rather than land, so that seems particularly easy to take advantage multiple times in a game. Combine with blink effects and ways to keep your resources lower (sacrificing creatures, paying life), this looks like a fun build-around.
Spotlight: Lumra, Bellow of the Woods
We saw Lumra, Bellow of the Woods during the Bloomburrow sneak peek back in February, and it’s nice to know we can finally get our hands on this card soon! The ability to bring lands back from the graveyard when it enters is a very powerful payoff to green’s self-milling cards, and other ways that lands can end up in the graveyard. Just think about the powerful Temur Analyst decks built around Aftermath Analyst in current Standard and you can quickly see the sort of shenanigans you can be up to with this card.
I expect Lumra to make its way in the 99 of a lot of decks, and be a very interesting build-around too; the one downside to this as a commander is how it pretty much ignores commander tax, and thus removal spells. It should be pretty easy to build your deck so that each time you cast it, you’ll get back lands enough from the graveyard to pay for its next commander tax. Thankfully, it doesn’t have ward and it doesn’t inherently have trample, so it’s not a completely relentless and game-ending threat.
Gift Giving
The gift mechanic is a neat spin on kicker, paying a benefit to an opponent in exchange for an extra effect on the card. This is even better in multiplayer since you can give your gift – a card, a Food, even Fish! – to someone other than the opponent you’re interacting with. Don’t dismiss the political benefit of gifting an opponent something to soften the blow of, say, destroying their Smothering Tithe with Wear Down. I think a fair number of cards with this mechanic will be solid for Commander.
Offspring
Offspring is another flavorful spin on kicker, letting you create a 1/1 “Mini-Me” version of the creature by paying an extra cost when you cast it. Note that you can only pay the offspring cost once, though I think it might have been flavorful for Rabbits to have a variant called “multi-offspring” where you could make multiple 1/1 versions.
Count me a big fan of these cards because I love having mana sinks in your Commander decks that help reward you for running an adequate number of lands in your deck. I particularly like Tender Wildguide, which packs a lot of value in a two-mana creature. I also fully expect to die to the landfall triggers from Iridescent Vinelasher in the not-too-distant future.
By the way, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) revealed the 1/1 token copy of Warren Warleader, and it is completely adorable! I can’t wait to see the other ones.
Multi-Typal Matters
Typal decks are fun, but they tend to be very linear, and when the particular creature type has been heavily supported over the years (like Zombies, Elves, and Goblins), the Commander decks tend to feel very much the same. So, I love it when cards pull together multiple creature types because it offers different deckbuilding options. In Bloomburrow, these cross-typal cohorts are four different creatures, so you can add these to a singular typal deck, or you can just choose two creature types to focus on or spread out among all four creature types. I’m very curious whether there will be a legendary creature that leads each cohort?
Paw Print Cards
Okay, this mechanic is also adorable – paw prints as a currency to “spend” for resolving the spell’s effect? Genius! Since this is a mythic rare cycle, they seem quite good too. Season of Weaving, I can copy an artifact or creature I control and draw three cards? Don’t mind if I do! Season of the Bold, I can create two tapped Treasures and, until the end of my next turn, whenever I cast a spell Season of the Bold will deal two damage to a creature? Boom! Season of Loss, I can sacrifice a bunch of creatures for profit before casting this, then draw a card for each one that died, and make each opponent lose life equal to the number of creatures in my graveyard? Game over! Can’t wait to see the green and white Seasons.
Classes
The Class enchantments are back, baby! I really like these cards, as they offer up a great mana sink option if you don’t have something better to do, with increasingly good effects as you level up. Hunter’s Talent seems great for creature-heavy decks, especially large creatures that could use that trample ability. Artist’s Talent seems like a great way to set up your big turns for spellslinger-style decks.
Word Salad Creatures
This looks like part of an uncommon cycle of creatures each featuring three keyword abilities, with the green one featuring an extra ability in flash. Will there be a black and blue one too? Cards like Indominus Rex, Alpha and Odric, Lunarch Marshal love getting new creatures like this in the card pool!
New Legendary Creatures
Like all Magic sets these days, Bloomburrow appears to be stuffed to the gills with legendary creatures you can build Commander decks around. Some of these will definitely be subject to Deep Dives in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for future columns!
I really like that Mabel, Heir to Cragflame brings along her own legendary Equipment, and if you have an extra two mana to equip, you get to attack with her right away. Will have enough Mice to build a Mouse typal with Mabel? I bet we will!
Clement, the Worrywort seems the perfect Frog leader, letting you return a creature to your hand to recast. If you’re bouncing a Frog, Clement will let it tap for a mana before bouncing it, helping to pay for the creature you cast or helping you recast the creature you’re bouncing. Clement isn’t the only Frog legend, either; there’s also Glarb, Calamity’s Augur, and its pose in the artwork is extremely similar to another Sultai legend – Chris Rahn’s original artwork for Tasigur, the Golden Fang. Has Tasigur relocated to Bloomburrow and assumed an animal form?
I’ve never been overly interested in the spellslinger archetype for Commander, but Bria, Riptide Rogue might change my mind. That’s mostly because I like the idea of your flurry of spells making your attackers huge and crashing into combat, rather than chaining together some combination of spells to win the game.
Okay, let’s take a look at a handful of individual cards:
Sunspine Lynx
If I see Sunspine Lynx at a Commander game, I know that player is serious about burning down everyone’s life totals! It is truly everything an aggressive player would want — it shuts off lifegain, damage can’t be prevented, and when it enters, it hits every player for a point of damage for each nonbasic land that player controls. I really like that “damage can’t be prevented” clause, which is why I play Questing Beast in any deck that really relies on smashing in for big combat damage; I think Sunspine Lynx serves a similar role, and I will likely play both in my aggro Gruul decks.
Dreamdew Entrancer
The Bloomburrow Frogs are so cute, and Dreamdew Entrancer’s flexibility seems excellent! When it enters, you can tap down a creature and put three stun counters on it, which is a really long time – and if you’ve got any proliferate in your deck, you can extend that out indefinitely. And if you’ve got a creature that isn’t really contributing to your battlefield, you can target it yourself and draw two fresh cards. I imagine people will be bouncing and blinking our amphibian friend quite a lot.
Three Tree City
Three Tree City seems like an auto-include for any typal deck that goes wide, which means this will be incredibly expensive to buy as a single. I really like the different versions depicting each season.
Thornvault Forager
If you thought Tender Wildguide satisfied the rare mana creature that costs two to cast in Bloomburrow, surprise! There’s another one in the set with Thornvault Forager, though this is a bit narrower in that it cares about having Squirrels in the deck and Food tokens to fully realize its power.
Osteomancer Adept
Speaking of Squirrels, Osteomancer Adept – who is also an Outlaw if you care about that – is like a reusable Underworld Breach attached to a creature, which makes it more vulnerable to removal, but since it’s black, you can pretty easily get it back from your graveyard. Don’t forget to find a slot for Power Conduit whenever your deck deals in finality counters — remove it and add a +1/+1 counter instead!
Salvation Swan
We have a new version of Restoration Angel, ready to do fun blinky stuff and upgrade the target with a flying counter! Note that the creature is exiled until the beginning of the next end step, so it’s a good way to protect the creature from a battlefield sweeper that a normal blink effect won’t work for.
Carrot Cake
Okay, so my favorite type of cake is carrot cake, so of course I’m gonna love Carrot Cake! I have a Samwise Gamgee Food deck that will love having another historic Food card you can recur while churning out 1/1 Rabbit tokens.
Tell me, which of the new legendary creatures from Bloomburrow are you most excited to build a deck around?
Talk to Me
Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter! I run polls and start conversations about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun! You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.
I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl, and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can. If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel. You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews.
And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
Visit my Decklist Database to see my decklists and the articles where they appeared!
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