Magic The Gathering: Bloomburrow Review
Magic: The Gathering – Bloomburrow is so fluffy I’m gonna die.
Riffing heavily on Brian Jacques’ beloved Redwall series, this latest set pulls planeswalkers into a realm of anthropomorphised fuzzy animals; ‘a tiny idyllic land’ as its creators themselves describe it, full of bird bards, raccoon rogues, and all manner of other good citizens of the fantasy forest. There’s a storyline going on in the background about how the creature-citizens must band together to stop an existential threat of course, but Ms. Bumbleflower the innkeeper has her forever-stew to manage too, and damn if that doesn’t, (correctly), feel like the higher tonal priority.
I am not typically a sucker for this kind of stuff, but Bloomburrow’s visual and narrative take on it all has absolutely charmed the heck out of me. The whole card series just has a radiant warmth to it akin to sipping tea out of a Beatrix Potter cup and saucer set at your grandmother’s place. It is the definition of inviting and cozy, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve gone back and thumbed through my collection of the cards several times just for the sheer pleasure of perusal.
As a set to actually play Magic with however, it and I kind of got off on a bad foot. This comes due to my game experience with it initially having been playing the slow-building Peace Offering Commander deck directly opposite the rapidly spammy Squirreled Away one. I’m not taking my dumb luck of the review unit I happened to receive being incredibly lopsided vs. the one that my friend did as an indictment of the set itself, but it was an unfortunate welcoming. There are a lot of hugely fun cards to be found here, and those two decks themselves are really enjoyable in their construction when not played opposite one another.
The new key mechanic this series brings is called Offspring. When summoning a creature with this keyword, you may pay an additional mana cost to also summon a token copy of that creature. The copy retains all of the abilities of its parent, but has only a 1/1 statline.
A significant number of Bloomburrow’s creatures carry this ability, and one commander card that even bears the ability to bestow Offspring onto other creature cards that don’t otherwise feature it. I’m already thinking about how hilariously this could be played off of something as wildly atonal as Chaos Terminator Lord or Sierra, Nuka’s Biggest Fan and I am intensely keen to experiment with it.
I really like Offspring for its thematic representation of animals travelling with their young, but mechanically it also opens up the gameplay to some really inventive card combos. It’s a simple idea effectively executed upon. I like it a lot.
Another thing that I like a lot is Bloomburrow’s willingness to feature cards that bring alternate win conditions into play along with a number of cards directly geared toward synergizing with them. Triskaidekaphile is an old favourite, but the utterly adorable and delightfully fun to say Twenty-Toed Toad is entirely new. Never in a million years do I envision myself being able to successfully get his game-winning ability to build all of the way up, but as an unabashed fan of when Magic gets wacky, I reckon I’ll be tossing him into some future blue decks regardless just for laughs.
I can’t speak in depth to how any of this will impact upon the meta or the seriously competitive scenes of any format as it’s just not how myself and the Magic community around me really engage with the hobby. The beautiful thing about Magic though is in how broad the range of engagement you can have with it is, and Bloomburrow offers something for just about everyone. There’s undeniably powerful cards here, but also a tangible warmth to the whole thing too that just makes it deeply pleasant to play with on the less competitive end of the spectrum. It’s arguably the least mechanically cluttered set so far this year also which I think is a good thing for everyone. (Yes, Outlaws still has me bummed out.)
Bloomburrow is an absolute winner, and it’s a plane that I dearly hope that we return to soon.
Magic: The Gathering – Bloomburrow was reviewed using products kindly provided by Wizards of the Coast.
