The start of August saw the release of Magic: The Gathering – Bloomburrow, the seventh set of the year, and there’s plenty yet to come with the addition of Foundations to the release calendar in November pushing up the next set, Duskmourn, up to be just seven weeks away. But as anti-cute as Duskmourn promises to be, it’s time to appreciate the fluffy and adorable Bloomburrow.
Bloomburrow is, as we said, incredibly cute. MTG is, at its core, a game where we visit different planes of existence that each have their own rules, lores, histories and so on. Bloomburrow’s shtick is that there are no humans, and any humans that do make their way here are turned into animalfolk for the duration of their visit. The majority of players seem to agree that this is a nice change of pace, but the impact that it has had on gameplay is unfortunate.
This focus on creature types creates what it known as a tribal set, which tends to be quite shallow when it comes to building your deck. This is certainly true when it comes to the draft experience – while experienced players can eek out win percentage by knowing when to pivot, the difficulty level of this set is really quite low, making it very accessible to newer players.
Each creature type in Bloomburrow represents two of Magic’s five colours. Otters, for example, are red and blue-aligned. Mice are Red and White, while squirrels are Green and Black. This is fantastic when it comes to new players learning the game — in Draft (where you pass packs of cards around the table, taking one at a time and adding it to your deck), you can simply pick all of the cards that say Lizard or Frog and put them into a deck, rather than stopping to read each card and see what it does — something vital to more complex sets.
Unfortunately, some animals are more equal than others – how very Animal Farm – and a clear tier list has emerged on Arena. Rabbit (Green-White) and mice decks are hyper-aggressive and win quickly, with slower otter decks struggling to keep up. When one deck is winning on turn three of four and you’re looking at cards you can’t cast until turn five, it feels pretty bad.
It’s rare this early into a set that the format feels like it has been ‘solved’ by players, but the replay value in Draft appears rather… limited.
So, how does Sealed shape up? This is a game of opening six packs at once and seeing what you have. The problem here is much more acute: you either have the cards for a hyper-aggressive deck or you lose. Without much synergy between species, this isn’t a format where you can simply chuck all of your blue cards into a pool and hope for the best. Your frogs will care about returning creatures to your hand, while your birds will care about what has flying and the otters are counting how many non-creature spells you are casting. You can get it to work if you try, but when others can quickly flood the board while you do backflips trying to get your deck to work, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
Fortunately, playing with these cards is more than just Draft and Sealed. Standard, for example, takes all of the Standard Sets (usually four per year, but five in 2024 thanks to Foundations) from the past three years and asks you to build the best deck you can. We’ve just had the rotation where old sets cycle out, which means that until late 2025, we’re looking at everything from Dominaria United onwards. For newer players and those who dip in and out, working with a shallower card pool is always helpful.
Generally speaking, you don’t want a set to come in and completely shake up Standard — this is a sign that the set is overpowered and something has gone horribly wrong. This happened for Modern in June with Modern Horizons 3, when Nadu’s release broke the format so badly that almost nobody wants to play.
So how has Bloomburrow affected Standard? While it hasn’t completely shaken up the format, it has had a sizeable impact. The top deck in the meta, Golgari Midrange, takes a new card and creates a turn-five instant win Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting. Mono-red Aggro (my current pet deck) is around 50% Bloomburrow cards (excluding lands), but that is an outlier since it’s focused on Mice — most decks at the top of the meta that aren’t Bloomburrow decks add a couple of cards and call it a day. And unlike modern, there’s no one deck that really dominates the meta with an outsized win rate. With Bloomburrow in the fold, Standard is quite a lot of fun at the moment, and in a really good place — helped of course by the recent rotation.
Modern won’t be affected by Bloomburrow until Nadu is gone, and even then its expansive card pool isn’t dented by this set – the relative power levels just don’t compare. Timeless and Explorer, by the same token, lie effectively untouched.
