I have fallen in love with MTG over the last year, so much so that I am permanently booked out on Fridays for Friday Night Magic. Thus far, the main sets have been a lot of fun to play, but not every theme has clicked with me. I loved the fairy tales in Eldraine and the dinos in Ixalan, but cowboys and detectives are a bit meh. Good thing they were fun as hell to play. Bloomburrow, on the other hand, has had my eye since the announcement. To say I was amped to start playing this bad boy would be an understatement.
But now, with some time and cards under the belt, is it worth checking out? Yes! But read on, I guess.
What’s going on with Bloomburrow?
Bloomburrow is a plane of anthropomorphic animals with no humans. Even Planeswalkers that visit get turned into animals. As such, it’s full of all kinds of awesome character designs and cute-as-hell heroes. The story follows an attack on the heroes by a calamity beast. These beasts are massive animals that causes insane destruction.
What this means is heaps of cute characters on the cards and some truly insane big creatures. I am looking at you, Ygra, Eater of All.
What’s it like to play?
There is some awesomeness here, especially if you lean into the synergies. Most creature types tend to spread between two colours, but there are multiple creature types in a colour. This means that you can be rewarded heavily using two colours, but mostly if you stick to the creatures that synergise well within those colours.
That’s not to say that you have to stick to a creature type. You can still have a two- or three colour deck that pops with all kinds of creatures, but your carrot cakes work a lot better with a rabbit that buffs your bunnies. Also, who isn’t splashing for a calamity beast if you have one?
These interesting mixes of synergies can be rewarding but hard to pull off in drafts, so with everyone on the same footing, this makes for some fantastic draft sessions. Mechanics like Vigilance, which triggers when you target your own creatures, can make for some awesome power in the mouse decks.
New mechanics include foraging, which lets you exile cards from your graveyard to do fun stuff; gifting, which lets you give a reward to your opponent for your card to do cooler stuff; and offspring, which lets you create a 1/1 version of your creature at a cost. These last two are great because they add some additional versatility to your cards. If you create an offspring, you essentially double the card’s effects on the battlefield. This can be strong, but at a lower cost, you can get a body out if that’s the more urgent need. Gifting can be handy as it can make a decent card a strong card, but your opponent gains a small benefit from it.
Then there is the art!
I freaking adore the art in this set. The cute mice with swords, the bunnies with arrows, and the otters doing badass magic. It’s amazing! Best of all are the alternate art cards. These ones have beautiful borders and are paired with some incredible redesigns that look straight out of an old school kids book. They are freaking gorgeous. There is even a slight chance at pulling a
There is even a chance at getting field note-style cards, which are beautifully drawn with some scribbles to make it look like someone is doing it in an old notebook before we had cameras. They look AMAZING.
The collector boosters offer higher chances at those rare cards, but also offer a tiny chance at a dope anime art card, which I have yet to see in person, and they offer the chance at imagine cards. These are planeswalkers that have been redesigned to look like Bloomburrow characters. I wish they had been included as a bonus sheet in the normal play boosters because they could have added some serious flavour to drafting and sealing. Oh, they also look dope.
So how can you buy and play it?
There are the usual play and collector boosters. These come with their own random cards and are generally for cracking packs for your gambling hit or playing sealed and drafting. I am a bit gutted that the planeswalkers are buried in the Collector Boosters, but it is what it is.
The bundle, as per usual, comes in a nice hard box with stunning artwork. Inside you have one of the better D20 dice I have seen in a bundle in a while. On top of that is a dope thundertrap trainer card with alternate art. Then, of course, you get nine play boosters and a bunch of full-art land cards. Thanks to each land having a different art for each season, there is a lot of variety here. This means the bundle is the best way to get the lot.
If you are new to MTG, then there are Starter Kits that come with two 60-card decks that are ready to play. One is a white-green deck based around bunnies, and the other is a red-blue deck based around otters. I have only dabbled with this, but so far it seems fun enough and an excellent way to start your MTG journey.
Then there are the Commander decks.
The Commander Decks!
I am a big fan of the preconstructed commander decks that are released with sets. They are super fun out of the box and tend to have similar power levels, so precon vs. precon consistently supplies a great time.
Bloomburrow is that, but with awesome, fun flavour! Each Commander Deck comes with a full 100-card deck, a crappy cardboard deck box, and a collector sample booster, which has two cards that can be found in a collector booster. They have dropped off the health counter, which, to be honest, is fine, and the proxy commander card. Between the two of them, I preferred the commander proxy card, as it looked nice in my deck boxes. What is on offer here is a third foil card in the deck, which is one of those awesome reimagined planeswalkers. I am honestly happy with that.
I have been playing with the Squirreled Away and Animated Army precons, and I love them. Squirrelled Away is a green and black deck that has Garruk as its reimagined planeswalker. This deck is based around getting heaps of tokens out there, then using those tokens for different kinds of value, which in my case generally means swinging wide. There are heaps of mana generation in there too, which helps when you are ready to do your shenanigans.
Animated Army has Domri for its planeswalker and is a red-green deck focused on enchantments and artifacts. Then, when you have a bunch of artifacts out, you can animate them into creatures to go for the swing. Hence the animated part of the deck’s name.
Both Squirrelled Away and Animated Army are absurdly fun decks to play. So much so that I am weighing up adding the other two decks to my collection. Family Matters and Peace Offering are eyeing me from the shelves. The commander decks are that good.
Should you play Magic: The Gathering Boomburrow?
HELL YEAH! Seriously, it’s a fantastic set. The flavour, the mechanics, the art, the decks. It’s fun in sealed and draft, it’s fun in commander, and it’s fun to collect. Minor annoyances aside, like the reimagined planeswalkers not being in Play Boosters, this set is an absolute slam dunk and so much fun to play.
