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Wondering which MTG Bloomburrow Commander deck is worth getting your paws on? While the latest Magic: The Gathering set has provided players with ample opportunity to fawn over the adorable denizens of Valley, it’s not exactly a viable strategy to choose your precon based on which one you think is the cutest.
To help you choose which animal infantry is actually best for your battlefield, we’ve laid out our full MTG Bloomburrow Commander deck ranking below. By taking into account the strength of each decks’ Face Commander, alternate Commanders, and the full MTG Bloomburrow Commander decklist as a whole, you should be one step closer to figuring out which Bloomburrow deck is set to be your new pet precon.
4. Animated Army
Make trash, do smash is a tempting and flavorful deck blurb and – fittingly for a raccoon deck – it asks you to treat your trash like treasure. Face Commander, Bello, Bard of the Brambles is a 3-mana 3/3 raccoon bard that turns all non-equipment artifacts and all non-aura enchantments into 4/4 elementals with haste and indestructible. When these creatures do combat damage, they also provide you with card draw. Sounds great, right? There is a catch though – these critters only come alive on your turn and only if they’re of mana value 4 or more.
Even with these limitations, Animated Army is still a strong battlefield-builder. Like some sort of fuzzy Pied Piper, Bello can help you quickly amass a board state out of nowhere, swing through for tonnes of damage, and draw more cards than your paws can hold. As well as this, the addition of indestructible makes this Commander’s minions particularly resilient against most board wipes or targeted destruction.
All in all, Animated Army is a well-designed deck with plenty of fun interactions. However, your deadly board state potential can make you the villain of the table pretty quickly. Like a true red deck, Animated Army incentivizes playing it aggro but your elementals only activating on your turn makes you particularly vulnerable to returned attacks. Due to its high mana-curve and reduced focus on traditional creatures, it’s not unlikely that you’ll find yourself saddled with a bunch of quasi-creatures incapable of blocking. So, while Animated Army can bring the pain, you have to be very careful not to get wiped out of the game before you can make that happen.
This deck gives up creatures for artifacts that function as elementals, which means targeted removal can risk you overcommitting to elementals, only to be left trashless at just the wrong moment (yes, having no trash is a bad thing). Luckily, there’s a clear upgrade path to Animated Army, with tons of great artifacts and enchantments worth weaving in, as well as a smarter ramp system. Even out of the box though, Bello’s deck is very cute and pretty powerful, so that might be worth the price of entry alone.
3. Peace Offering
While bribing your opponents is a reliable way to keep them off your back for a couple of turns, group hug decks can be a real slog, especially late-game. Without a reliable win condition, your “kill ‘em with kindness” strategy is one surefire way to finish second in every single one of your Commander games. Ugh. Sure, Magic isn’t all about winning, but it can get frustrating knowing that you’re basically never in with a chance against your opponents’ more robust decks. Thankfully, Bloomburrow’s Peace Offering precon has a number of viable win cons across its decklist that are well worth exploring and are even furthered by some slight upgrades.
The face Commander, Ms. Bumbleflower is a 1/5 with vigilance, meaning she can offer plenty in the way of defense, but combat isn’t where this rabbit’s real strength lies. Whenever you cast a spell with Ms. Bumbleflower on the battlefield, you make one of your opponents draw a card (I’m sure you can see the politics of that coming into play already). If you manage to set this trigger off twice in a turn, you’re treated to two cards yourself. It’s nice to be nice, I suppose.
Cards like Tenuous Truce and Baird, Steward of Argive keep opponents from swinging at you and the likes of Bloodrot Apothecary (which pings enemies with toxic damage for each token they sacrifice) can literally kill people with kindness. The much-hated Propaganda, which means enemies have to pay to swing at you, could make for a good addition here too. This deck gives so much value in the form of card draw and Jolly Gerbils lets you draw an extra card whenever you do the new “Gift” mechanic.
Unfortunately, there aren’t actually all that many gifts to be played in the deck and you won’t sneak the win out, like many other card-draw-heavy blue decks. Your power is mostly on the board at all time, and choreographed to opponents so this is one of the most vulnerable decks to board wipes, even if all your gifts may stay their hand for another turn or two.
2. Squirreled Away
Squirreled Away is a squirrel typal deck that is barely a squirrel typal deck. The face Commander, Hazel of the Rootbloom can tap and pay life to tap as many squirrels as you like for mana, and can even copy a token at your end step. If the copied token is a squirrel, two copies are made instead. This is built with squirrel synergies in mind and when paired with a couple of typal buff cards, can get real dangerous. However, there are surprisingly few squirrels in the entire deck, and some redundancies. It is tokens first, squirrels second.
The newly introduced Patchwork Banner – which is a 3-mana rock that gives creatures of a chosen type +1/+1 – is suspiciously missing. This could perhaps replace Talisman of Resilience and offer a little more for players late game. Despite minor gripes around the deck’s typal theme, it is still super strong, with the ability to amass a huge board state, swarm enemies in tokens, and use food and Beledros Witherbloom to get some of that health back again.
It also has plenty of removal spells in Casualties of War, Putrefy, and Tear Asunder, if a particularly pesky Voltron player is threatening to block one of your many, many little critters. With cards like Garrick, Cursed Huntsman, Bastion of Remembrance, and Moldervine Reclamation, it can bounce back surprisingly quick from board wipes too. It could be stronger with the right types of squirrel synergies or the rather powerful Ygra, Eater of All, but it can still bring the squirrel smack down to any opponent. Wow, squirrel is beginning to not look like a real word anymore. Squirrel.
1. Family Matters
This Jeskai (red-white-blue) deck is equal parts broody and brawny. The ever-growing number of creatures you’ll have on your battlefield aren’t just an army, they’re a family! That’s thanks to the new Offspring mechanic, which allows you to drop a little extra mana while casting your creatures to have them pop out little 1/1 token copies of themselves. While there are a number of creatures across the Bloomburrow set that’ll let you populate your nest, Family Matters’ face Commander Zinnia, Valley’s Voice plays stork for all the critters in Valley. For just two mana, Zinnia allows you to create Offspring of any creature in your deck. While this is a welcome ability in and of itself for the sake of widening your board state, it also doubles any ETB effects and provides opportunities for additional activated and triggered abilities.
This already sounds like a massive boon but once you begin to factor in that Zinnia’s power increases by 1 for every creature you control with base power 1 (i.e. all your Offspring), this Commander seems even more formidable. Zinnia’s already a flyer – making blocking them just that bit more difficult – so if you can buff them and land some solid hits on your opponents, you could be on your way to a win.
Beyond Zinnia, there are some impressive cards in the 99 like Jacked Rabbit and Rapid Augmenter that only further the madness that is your battlefield. For example, Jacked Rabbit creates 1/1 white Rabbits equal to its power everytime it attacks and if you happen to have used Offspring on Jacked Rabbit as you cast it, your Offspring will create an additional white Rabbit token every time either one of them attacks. So, it really doesn’t take long to overrun your table with these cotton-tailed combatants and to add even more tokens to airborne Zinnia.
Need some guidance on how to dive into your new precons? Check out our guide on how to play MTG Commander. Want to catch up on everything Bloomburrow? Everything we know about MTG Bloomburrow will fill you in on everything from the set’s story to its product line. Beyond Magic, why not try out more of the best card games worth adding to your collection?
