Bloomburrow Commander decks will be in the wild soon, so I wanted to go over the brand-new cards there that caught my eye for our favorite 100-card format. Let’s hop to it!
New Commanders
The artwork for Flubs, the Fool is a nice homage to The Fool arcana from Tarot cards. Mechanically, the card is wild – drawing you cards if you have no cards in hand, or making you discard if you do have cards in hand. This makes for a really fun deckbuilding challenge to unlock its power, and I can’t wait to see what people will do with it. Dredge cards like Life from the Loam? Delve cards like Treasure Cruise? Retrace cards like Throes of Chaos?
Bello, Bard of the Brambles brings us yet another really cool and unique design for Gruul! I never knew I wanted to beat down with non-Equipment artifacts and non-Aura enchantments that cost four or greater until today! Ms. Bumbleflower brings some group hug vibes straight from the venerable Phelddagrif. If you like politics and casting multiple spells in a turn, this might be the commander for you!
Mr. Foxglove is another commander that can support group-hug and political-style cards, helping opponents to draw extra cards so Mr. Foxglove can draw you extra cards with his attack trigger. Or, you can accumulate cards in hand and use Mr. Foxglove to instead cheat a massive creature onto the battlefield – maybe a Blightsteel Colossus, or Old Gnawbone, or Ancient Silver Dragon.
Magic players love value, especially attached to creatures in Commander, and now you’ve got even more value available in the command zone with Zinnia, Valley’s Voice. It’s actually hilarious flavor that Zinnia is a stork, and she gives the offspring mechanic to all your creature spells. The challenge of course is to have plenty of mana to pay for the offspring kicker in a Jeskai deck without access to green ramp. Wildsear, Scouring Maw gives your enchantment spells cascade, which is also a sweet value engine. There’s some strategic overlap here with Bello, and I can see each of them in the 99 of the other’s decks.
Arthur, Marigold Knight gives me “a fixed and much fairer Winota, Joiner of Forces” vibes, and I’m here for it. Load up on those creatures with enters (or leaves) the battlefield effects like Mulldrifter and Reveillark!
Hazel of the Rootbloom and The Odd Acorn Gang suffer from the fact that Chatterfang, Squirrel General is already such a strong Squirrel deck leader. They don’t even provide a new color identity, so I expect they’ll just slot into the 99 of Chatterfang decks unless pilots just want a fresh face in the command zone.
Expend
Expend is a cool mechanic from Bloomburrow, and I’m glad to see a few more cards with it in Bloomburrow Commander. So many new Magic cards incentivize Commander players to make their mana curves lower and lower, I’m glad to see some incentives in the other direction. If you’re already playing higher-mana artifacts in your deck, Pyreswipe Hawk seems awesome, especially if you can swipe things like Skullclamp or Panharmonicon from your opponents. Trailtracker Scout has a higher expend threshold, but getting back a permanent from your graveyard each time you do is awesome late-game goodness. In the meantime, it’ll provide you with any color of mana you need each turn, or a reasonable early blocker.
Classes
I love to see even more Class enchantments! Mana sinks are always welcome in Commander if you’re playing enough lands in your deck. Food decks will appreciate Gourmand’s Talent, and Treasure decks will love Alchemist’s Talent. Fortune Teller’s Talent is another new spin on Future Sight.
Fisher’s Talent is the one I find the most fun. It’s incredibly slow, but I love the idea of it, getting better and better at fishing – first, you find a 1/1 Fish, next you instead find a 3/3 Shark, and finally you’re hooking an 8/8 Octopus like an expert! Simic colors have plenty of ways to manipulate the top of your deck so that you can more reliably get that trigger, from Brainstorm to Sylvan Library. You can even get more upkeeps if you want with cards like Sphinx of the Second Sun!
Twice as Nice
These popped out to me since they feature a keyword twice for the first time: Scurry of Squirrels has two instances of myriad, and Evercoat Ursine has two instances of hideaway. Neat! Scurry of Squirrels will be great for Squirrel decks, but it also plays well with token strategies in general. I love Sundial of the Infinite in myriad decks, since you can put the end of combat exile trigger on the stack for the myriad copies and then just end your turn to keep the tokens.
Evercoat Ursine is a big Bear for Ayula, Queen Among Bears decks, but it’s also just a nice value card for green creature decks looking to beat down. Give it double strike to get both of the hideaway cards when you first connect with an opponent, and then blink it with something like Conjurer’s Closet to get the hideaway triggers again.
Okay, let’s take a look at individual cards that look like fun for Commander!
Agate Instigator
There are all sorts of combos with cards like Purphoros, God of the Forge where creatures enter over and over, dealing damage to each opponent, and Agate Instigator is a backup card to support this strategy. Plus, that 1/1 Agate Instigator token is super-cute!
Hazel’s Brewmaster
This is a really cool design, and it’s kind of a shame that this isn’t a legendary creature you could build a Commander deck around. You can exile any creature with an activated ability, and then all your Food tokens can use that ability; kill someone’s Llanowar Elves, and your Food tokens tap for green mana. If you really want to get combo-rific, exile Devoted Druid or Cinderhaze Wretch, and then your Food can tap and untap as much as you want until your opponents hate you!
Twenty-Toed Toad
This is a cool mini-game you can build into your deck—how can you get twenty or more cards in your hand, or twenty or more counters on Twenty-Toed Toad when it attacks, and so win the game? Obviously there’ll be a big bulls-eye on our little Frog, so you’ll want ways to protect him too. This will be a tough thing to pull off, but when you do, it will be glorious!
Tempt with Bunnies
The correct move with this card is for all of your opponents to pass on the tempting offer, but come on—it’s cute bunnies! And, you know, a free card? What Commander player will be able to resist this card?
Bloodroot Apothecary
I’m not going to lie—I really dislike just how many cards make Treasure tokens these days, but this Treasure card is on the right side of the battle! While Bloodroot Apothecary is hanging around, opponents can’t sacrifice more than four Treasure tokens without dying to poison counters. But I like that it provides some wiggle room—you can still sacrifice Treasures for a little extra mana if you need it, and once you get enough poison counters, no one is forcing you to sacrifice more Treasures until you find an answer to this pesky rodent.
Rootcast Apprenticeship
Hooray, more modal spells! Modal spells in general are excellent in Commander because you never know which decks you’ll be playing with and what situation you’ll be in when you draw your spell, so having options is very cool. Now, this card is more niche than other modal spells, but it’ll be a slam dunk for token decks, and maybe decks that care about +1/+1 counters.
Perch Protection
This card blows my mind! The gift mechanic is really cool in a multicolor format, and this one actually can gift an opponent an extra turn at instant speed, letting you insert that extra turn outside of the regular turn order, and meanwhile you get four 2/2 Bird tokens with flying, and then you get a Teferi’s Protection effect so you can safely observe the chaos you unleashed without being affected by it.
Jacked Rabbit
As a dad, I can appreciate the pun, and it’s neat to see the ravenous mechanic that was previously only seen on the Tyranid creatures from Warhammer 40,000 Commander now on a white creature. I can see these Rabbit in Equipment decks that can reliably boost its power to make a bunch of 1/1 Rabbit tokens, even if it’s not a deck focused on token creatures.
Octomancer
Again, I love the gift mechanic, and this is another fun spin on it. Gift an opponent a huge 8/8 Octopus and, assuming your Frog Druid survives to your end step, you can copy it and have one yourself! This is obviously going to be best when your deck is spitting out creature tokens from other sources too so you can make a copy during each end step, not just your own.
Rolling Hamsphere
This card is pure joy—hilarious flavor wrapped in a powerful late-game punch. It’s a little slow to get going, since there aren’t really all that many Hamsters in Magic—currently, there’s just Jolly Gerbils as an actual Hamster card, and then there is the Boo token that Minsc, Beloved Ranger and Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes can make. If your deck runs a lot of creatures with changeling, or if Maskwood Nexus has a home, you should definitely consider Rolling Hamsphere.
Murmuration
We have the weirdo cards Crow Storm and Attempted Murder that can make some number of 1/2 flying Storm Crow tokens, and now we’ve got Murmuration, which is also a “storm”-like enchantment that makes those tokens for each spell you’ve cast this turn. Plus, it pumps all your Birds +1/+1 and gives them vigilance. This seems really fun to slot in all sorts of decks, and I can’t wait to see what people do with it.
Calamity of Cinders
This is a really neat way to deal a bunch of damage to all creatures while giving you options to break the symmetry and save your own creatures—creatures you tap to attack with, or tap with some activated ability, or tap to pay for this convoke cost.
Sword of the Squeak
A pun-worthy spin on Sword of the Meek, this card is only going in certain decks that synergize with it—decks with a bunch of one-power (or maybe one-toughness) creatures, and ones that have a bunch of 1/1 Hamster, Mouse, Rat or Squirrel tokens. It’s a little awkward that cards that boost your typal creatures, like Door of Destinies, completely strip the bonus of equipping this card, so I’ll be curious to see where this will fit. At the very least it could be a nice boost to the trampling, hasty Boo token in some decks!
Which cards from Bloomburrow Commander are you most excited to build 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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