The next Magic: The Gathering Standard Set arrives next month, and today, Wizards Of The Coast took the MTG community on a journey through its newest plane: Bloomburrow.
A world devoid of humans – populated by mice, rats, squirrels, rabbits, frogs, and other animals – Bloomburrow introduces several new factions, mechanics, and more into the MTG world, and we have all of the info from today's stream right here.
Bloomburrow brings the color pairings from Ravnica back to the forefront; this time, however, instead of guilds, each color pair is represented by a specific species of animal. The full list is below:
- Azorius (Blue/White) - Birds
- Boros (Red/White) - Mice
- Dimir (Blue/Black) - Rats
- Golgari (Green/Black) - Squirrels
- Gruul (Red/Green) - Raccoons
- Izzet (Red/Blue) - Otters
- Orzhov (Black/White) - Bats
- Rakdos (Red/Black) - Lizards
- Selesnya (Green/White) - Rabbits
- Simic (Blue/Green) - Frogs
While each color pair has a featured species, some creatures will interact with more than just their designated animal type. Valley Questcaller, for example, can buff every Bird, Mouse, Bat, or Rabbit on the board – or, put another way, every creature with white in its species' color pairing.
The hero of the story is Mabel (pictured above in its Woodland Showcase variant), an intrepid mouse who becomes an unlikely savior against the dreaded Calamity Beasts plaguing the entire plane. Multiple beasts will appear in the set, including Maha (above), a spectral owl who can turn an opponent's mightiest creatures into pipsqueaks simply by entering the battlefield, and Ygra, Eater Of All, whose central strategy revolves around Food tokens…or turning everything else on the field into Food.
Bloomburrow will introduce four new mechanics to the game: Offspring, Expend, Forage, and Gift.
- Offspring, as seen on Flowerfoot Swordmaster above, lets you pay an extra cost to produce a token version of the creature you're casting, only at a reduced power and toughness.
- A card with the Forage keyword, another animal-themed mechanic, will offer an additional benefit if you "forage" by either sacrificing a Food token or exile three cards from your graveyard.
- Expend, meanwhile, triggers new effects whenever you spend a certain amount of total mana during a turn: Expend 4, for example, triggers when you've spent four mana total.
Finally, the Gift mechanic is a bit more complicated, but it becomes an interesting strategic play when used correctly. Let's look at Parting Gust above as an example. As you cast the spell, you can "promise a gift" to another player – in this case a tapped 1/1 Fish token, which comes into play before the rest of the card's effects occur.
Parting Gust will then exile a nontoken creature; however, if you did not promise the gift when casting the spell, that creature will return even stronger when the next end step begins. Essentially, you can help your opponent with a new creature in order to exile a bigger threat, or if you know you can win the game this turn, you can simply exile the creature and not offer anything.
The set will also introduce a new cycle of cards called Seasons. Each Season will have multiple effects on them represented by a number of paw print symbols, and then the card will instruct you to activate effects less than or equal to a designated amount of pawprints.
The only Season we saw during the reveal was Season Of Weaving (above in its borderless variant). Here, you're given a pool of five pawprints, and each effect costs one, two, or three paw prints to activate, but you can spend them however you like. So, you could cast Season Of Weaving in multiple ways:
- You could return each nonland, nontoken permanent to its owner's hand (three pawprints), and then draw two cards (one paw print each).
- You could create a copy of two artifacts or creatures you control (two paw prints each) and draw a card (one paw print).
- You could draw five cards (one paw print each).
That modality is sure to make the Season cycle very interesting in the overall metagame, especially if Season Of Weaving is only the first one we've seen.
As for returning features, Classes are making a comeback from the Adventures In The Forgotten Realms set in 2021. Class cards are enchantments that come out for an initial casting cost, but they can be upgraded by paying more mana, and each upgrade adds another ability. Artists' Talent, for example, costs one generic and one red mana to begin with, but it can be upgraded twice for two generic and one red mana each time.
Also, one of Bloomburrow's adjacent subsets is called Imagine: Critters, a "what if" scenario which sees ten influential Planeswalker cards from Magic's past return in the Bloomburrow setting – which means all ten of them appear as an animal. Jace, The Mind Sculptor's fox form was shown before, but today's stream also revealed Tamiyo, Field Researcher will join the subset as a cute little bunny.
Finally, two acclaimed artists will be making their Magic: The Gathering debut in Bloomburrow: David Petersen and Mitsuhiro Arita. Petersen is the creator of the acclaimed Mouse Guard comic book series, and he is featured heavily in the aforementioned Woodland Showcase alternate artworks, like Mabel at the beginning of the article and Camellia here.
Arita, meanwhile, has provided artwork for a previously revealed alternate version of Lumra, Bellow Of The Woods, a third Elemental Beast. This is Arita's first Magic: The Gathering card, but not his first work in trading card games; to date, Arita has drawn nearly 700 cards for the Pokemon Trading Card Game, from 1999's Base Set to today.
Bloomburrow is set to launch August 2, with prerelease events at local game stores beginning July 26, 2024.
