Howdy, gamers! It’s hard to believe that yet another set release is upon us, which means it’s time for another list of the ten most Cubeable cards from Magic’s latest expansion! Bloomburrow has proven to be an immediate fan favorite by capitalizing on the appeal of cute animals, and the set has many appealing individual card designs as well. Before we get into that, let’s take a look at some of the set’s themes and mechanics.
Critter Typal
A major focus of Bloomburrow is to give support to a lot of animal creature types, most of which have not had much historical support. Birds were a thing once upon a time in Onslaught, and if you want to see some typal cards that really don’t hold up that’s a fun block to rummage through!
I don’t expect the typal themes in Bloomburrow to have much immediate impact on the world of singleton Cubes, but there are a lot of charming cards here, and you could definitely make this stuff work by breaking singleton for something like a set Cube. For the most part, using these under-supported creature types is a way to put some pushed typal themes into Standard without having to worry much about impacting older formats.
Offspring
Offspring is a really cool mechanic that lets you make a 1/1 token copy of some creatures by paying an additional cost when you cast them. Many of these cards have some kind of triggered ability, which makes the token copy scale in a big way. You couldn’t build something like an offspring deck per se, but there are a handful of individual cards with this mechanic that I find very appealing for the world of Cube.
Classes, Tokens, Food, Forage, and Gifts
Bloomburrow offers some returning mechanics in Classes, Food, and general token support. There’s nothing groundbreakingly powerful in the Food department, though the forage ability is a new way to take advantage of what Food you can generate. Classes are a really cool take on enchantments, bringing more game to the card type. I’m pretty excited to see them here, and have a few slotted for some of my personal Cubes.
I lumped gifts into this section because many of the implementations of the mechanic involve tokens, and because there’s not much to report about the mechanic broadly. It’s a cool concept, and it theoretically offers interesting choices; it’s just more of a multiplayer and retail Limited thing than a Cube thing broadly.
Valiant and Expend
Valiant and expend don’t necessarily offer anything that we haven’t seen before, with valiant being a new take on heroic and expend being a payoff for using mana to cast your spells, but I do think that both mechanics are awesome.
Heroic is something I have had some interest in building a Cube around, but the only way I could figure such an environment involved an obscene amount of pump spells and not very dynamic gameplay. Valiant is gated to once per turn, but opening up room to trigger off being targeted by abilities massively increases the space to play in as a Cube designer.
Expend is one of those mechanics that rewards players for what they should be doing anyway. It strikes me as a useful tool for making just regular gameplay more exciting for newer players, and while very few expend cards jump off the page for my personal Cubes, I think there is a lot to work with here as far as offering a great new player experience.
Seasons
Lastly, we have a new take on modal spells featured on a cycle of five seasons. I love this template, and it offers players a lot of agency and room for making interesting decisions. None of these cards are especially powerful, and they show off new templating technology more than anything. I will say that Season of Loss is likely the most significant Cube card of the lot for offering both a solid sweeper effect and a bit of a payoff for Sacrifice decks. I want to love Season of the Bold, but it’s a bit inefficient to realistically support the Storm decks in most Cubes that are into that sort of thing.
Now let’s get to my list of the ten most broadly Cubeable cards from Bloomburrow!
10. Sunspine Lynx
Sunspine Lynx maybe doesn’t look like much in the year 2024, but “players can’t gain life”, “damage can’t be prevented”, and damaging players for the number of nonbasic lands they control all add up to something meaningful in the world of Cube. They also come stapled onto a 5/4 body to boot!
Lifegain has gotten much, much more powerful in recent years, and the meaningful ways for players to pad their life total only increase over time. I’m not saying that Sunspine Lynx compares favorably in the heads-up exchange against Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, but that is the most recent example in the trend I’m describing. I also don’t know that Sunspine Lynx has a home in many Cubes containing The One Ring, but making damage unpreventable is useful against that card, too.
Mostly, I like that this is a creature with some potentially relevant text that also incentivizes players to play a mono-color deck. If I called the shots, I would have given this card haste, and then I’d really be all about it! As is, it’s a fine card that will find a home in a fair number of Cubes.
9. Mockingbird
Mockingbird is a little niche, but it fills the role for two narrow archetypes. It’s both a cheap creature for Cubes looking to power up blue aggressive decks, particularly those interested in Curious Obsession, and a Clone effect for critical mass decks. I intend to pick up a copy for the Spooky Cube with the express intent of copying Thalia’s Lieutenant!
Mockingbird will be inefficient relative to the most powerful Clones out there, so you won’t see it hanging around in Vintage Cube the way that Phantasmal Image and Phyrexian Metamorph can. That said, there’s a lot of potential for a Clone that gains flying in lower-to-the-ground environments. Pun neither intended nor redacted.
8. Zoraline, Cosmos Caller
Say what you will about this fact, but I simply don’t have it in me to put Lurrus of the Dream-Den in my maindeck. If I can’t companion the Cat, I simply go without. Not to mention that Lurrus is totally busted if you can companion it, making it not the most appealing card for most Cubes. Zoraline has some downsides relative to Lurrus, costing black and white mana rather than hybrid, costing life and more mana to recur the cheapest things, and the addition of finality counters, but an extra point of toughness plus flying and vigilance are nothing to scoff at!
I don’t think that Bat synergies will put this card over, but it’s worth nothing that Zoraline does curve out well with one of the most Cubeable black cards in recent memory in Deep-Cavern Bat. This one might not land in many Cubes, but it’s undeniable to me that this card is strong and in some ways more desirable than similar cards in terms of both balance and impact on the battlefield.
7. Darkstar Augur
Speaking of Bat synergies, Darkstar Augur is one of my favorite cards from Bloomburrow. Even when you have the mana, it won’t always be obvious whether you want two Dark Confidant effects or if you should just stick to one, and I absolutely adore this card for that!
On those lines, it’s also not obvious whether this card is stronger or weaker than Dark Confidant. In Cubes with higher mana curves, you would likely rather stick to Bob, but Darkstar Augur is a really powerful top-end in Cubes with lower mana curves. I find the inherent tension in the card delightful, and I absolutely intend to give this one a spin in the Tempo Twobert!
6. Portent of Calamity
Portent of Calamity is one of those cards that reads much more powerful than it is, and for that exact reason it makes for a great campfire card. You’re unlikely to get to cast a spell for free off it, and until you spend a good chunk of mana, you won’t always get to add as many cards to your hand as you would like. That all said, there’s something really cool and fun to chase here, and putting this card on the stack seems really fun. If nothing else, this is awesome for an environment like Live the Dream Cube.
5. Warren Warleader
I had intended for this card to be lower on my list, but despite there being a healthy roster of cool Cube cards from Bloomburrow, Warren Warleader stands out as one of the cards with the most obvious applications and the highest impact in its role in the average game. There’s give and take here as compared to Hero of Bladehold, but both the offspring ability and the fact that the Warleader triggers off other creatures attacking to give the ability “haste” count for a lot.
Is this a Vintage Cube-caliber card? No, not really. But it could show up in a Vintage Cube, and it does enough to hang in white aggressive decks at any power level. I don’t currently intend to pick up any copies for myself, but this has the shape of a fun and Cubeable card.
4. Maha, Its Feathers Night
A 6/5 with flying and trample for five with ward: discard a card is a rate worth paying attention to. Specifically, any ward that isn’t just for life can be obnoxious to pay, and discarding a card is a real cost. Changing all of your opponent’s creatures’ base toughness to 1 is also a potential nightmare, given that this will make it really difficult to make good attacks even through something as innocuous as a Lingering Souls token. Not to mention the wombo-combo with Toxic Deluge to sweep your opponent’s battlefield and leave yours intact!
Maha isn’t quite it for something like Vintage Cube, though it is amusing and worth noting that the ward ability makes this a legend that isn’t trivial to police with Karakas. This is more of a Legacy Cube or just below sort of card, that likely becomes unfun at power levels much lower than that.
3. Ral, Crackling Wit
I want to start the discussion around Ral, Crackling Wit by saying that I believe Jaya, Fiery Negotiator is quite powerful and that it would have excelled in plenty of older Standard formats and can definitely hang in a lot of singleton Cubes. Upticking for prowess bodies either sets you up for excellent attacks at some point or blocks for you or your planeswalker while you try to figure your way out of a tough spot.
Ral’s -3 is inefficient card draw, but it’s a fail case for when you’re too behind to convert the tokens into anything meaningful, and card selection is useful to have in those spots. I would also wager that Ral’s static ability makes it easier to recoup the steep loyalty cost here if Ral sticks around for a turn or two than it might seem at a glance.
But what I really like is that Ral, with minimal additional support, opens up something of a “one big turn” combo deck by virtue of its ultimate. Ral is sort of Jaya meets Sift meets Thousand-Year Storm. I fully intend to try this one in my Vintage Cube, and I see it is a fun addition to a wide range of environments.
I also want to shout out Stormsplitter, which plays largely normally but can add some Storm finishes to a Cube environment without much support, though Ral goes a lot further in this regard and plays much better as a standalone card as well.
2. The Infamous Cruelclaw
On first reading The Infamous Cruelclaw, the dream is cheating an Emrakul onto the battlefield. Realistically, there’s a lot more variance here, and this is another card that reads as much more powerful than it plays. But the ceiling is undeniably high!
This card is a fun mini-game at a rate that means your opponent can’t just ignore it. It’s vulnerable to removal and costs three mana in two colors, but the 3/3 body is solid and menace means it can’t easily be chump-blocked. Sometimes the hit trigger will give you something undesirable, and sometimes it will give you a massive spell. Anything can happen, and that stands to make for a fun, if volatile, play experience.
I intend to try this one out in my Vintage Cube as well as in the original Twobert. In truth, I don’t know which environment it will prove a better fit for, and there’s something fun in that exploration itself!
1. Kitsa, Otterball Elite
And that leaves us with number one in Kitsa, Otterball Elite! They keep printing more and more awesome Merfolk Looters, and this one does not disappoint! I can think of a time when Shoreline Looter would have been a standout in this regard, but the times sure have changed on that front.
What makes Kitsa stand out is the combination of vigilance and prowess. Kitsa can not only both attack and loot on the same turn, it can potentially attack for a lot! If you have the mana, Kitsa can also be used to copy instant and sorcery spells, an ability that comes online after a mere two prowess triggers. This opens up real potential to copy Ancestral Recall and Time Walk in Vintage Cube, and for my money, I’m interested in copying the myriad one-mana spells in the Tempo Twobert with Kitsa.
Once we’re getting into powered Cube territory, I do think that Kitsa falls a bit short of Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy for Jace’s ability to amount to more when you have less going on otherwise, but I love the way that Kitsa is more impactful in games that are about combat. I fully expect Kitsa to make an impact in a lot of higher-power environments.
Cute and Cubeable
Bloomburrow has been an immediate hit for its delightful aesthetic, but the set is also long on intriguing card designs. I’m very excited to get my hands on some new Cube goodies from this world of cute critters, and I hope you are, too!
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