The Magic: The Gathering Bloomburrow set launches on August 2, 2024, and transports players to Valley, a beautiful part of Bloomburrow where all kinds of anthropomorphic creatures live together in harmony. In this article, we’ve got exclusive details on two of the cards you can get for your collection from this set.
Part of the fun of a new MTG set, for me, is discovering new cards and figuring out what they do or how they work as you open packs. However, Bloomburrow is a set I can’t stop reading and speculating about, because it includes so many themes that I think many fans adore. Every new card I see fits the world incredibly well, and the mechanics open up some serious potential for mayhem, if you build your deck right.
Two exclusive new MTG Bloomburrow cards to feast your eyes upon
MTG Bloomburrow will add 261 cards to the base game for you to use in collecting and building decks. In the lead-up to the set’s launch, Wizards of the Coast reached out to me to see if I’d like to exclusively reveal some of them. I said yes, and now you get to admire two new cards and their special variants.
Fecund Greenshell
Fecund Greenshell is a 4/6 Elemental Turtle Creature with Reach, one of the best abilities out there. This card gets +2/+2 as long as you control 10 or more lands, which isn’t as difficult as you might think if you build your deck around slapping down as many lands as you can as early as you can.
Whenever Fecund Greenshell or another creature you control with a toughness greater than its power enters (which also means when it enters the battlefield), look at the top card of your library. If that card is a land card, you can put it ono the battlefield tapped. Otherwise, put it into your hand.
This card’s abilities are designed to make it more powerful, but you’ve got to work with those mechanics to maximize its attack power. It doesn’t matter when it enters, but you’ve got to then play cards at or above power 4 so you can, hopefully, play more lands. Something like Dryad of the Ilysian Grove would pair very well with Fecund Greenshell, allowing you to quickly top it up to a 6/8 Creature you can annihilate most other cards using.
Fecund Greenshell Extended Art
The extended art version of Fecund Greenshell doesn’t do anything different than the main version, but it is much prettier. You can see how the berries shooting out of its back are more like barbs, killing the birds that attack it. I think the fact that this creature appears to be based on a snapping turtle is hugely appropriate, because that spiny mouth looks lethal.
Festival of Embers
Festival of Embers is an Enchantment that can make you a force to be reckoned with. It lets you cast instant and sorcery spells from your graveyard by paying 1 life, as well as their other costs. This can be massively advantageous if you’ve been hammering opponents with spells. Even if you only want it so you can reuse one particular spell, it’s worth having in your deck.
The only downside here is that if a card or token is put into your graveyard from anywhere, you exile it instead. So you could reuse a spell, but if it then heads to your graveyard, it’s out of the game instead. To dodge this a little, you can sacrifice the card and minimize its impact on what leaves the game for good, if you need to make the most of your graveyard.
I think Festival of Embers is going to work best with spells that have multiple abilities and effects. If you can really make the most of bringing back just a few spells and then sacrifice it, then I can see it saving you from utter destruction at the hands of your opponents. You’re really playing with fire if you use this, though, which makes sense given the artwork.
Festival of Embers Showcase Woodland
This is the Showcase Woodland variant of Festival of Embers. It’s one of Bloomburrow‘s exclusive art styles, and I think it’s pretty stunning. It gives off vibes of pagan festivals and an evil army amping itself up before a bloody battle. Quite appropriate for the utter destruction it can cause.
This set hits me right in the childhood, because its characters remind me of every story about animals overcoming adversity like Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood. It feels about as close to MTG in the UK’s countryside as you could possibly get, and that’s what I like about it the most. I believe these cards nail those themes on the head, and it’ll be interesting to see if the entire set feels the same.
Despite the darker themes a few cards feature, Bloomburrow is the brightest and cutest set we’ve had for a while in MTG. With Duskmourn: House of Horror coming a few months after, it’s definitely the light of this multiverse right before the night truly sets in.
Published: Jul 16, 2024 12:00 pm