BloomburrowThe Set Review

These are our scores, not a community aggregate. Limited is graded on the archive: format speed, archetype spread, and how much of the outcome the die roll decides. Commander is graded on EDHREC inclusion rank. Opening value is graded on median rare price and how concentrated the set's value is. Nothing here is a measure of whether the set is charming, which it plainly is.

There is no Metacritic for Magic sets, so treat any single number you see as one person's opinion. What the record does support is a split verdict, and the split is consistent.

Commercially and popularly, it was a hit. Bloomburrow is widely described as the 2024 set with the broadest appeal, credited with reaching people who bounce off Magic's usual grim aesthetics. Presales for the Commander decks ran high enough that Wizards reprinted and re-released them on 6 January 2025, which is not something that happens to a product that underperforms.

Among experienced Limited players, it was polarising. The recurring criticism is that the format is too simple: linear, kindred-driven, and short on decisions. The most quoted version of that came when Duskmourn followed it, with a player describing the switch as being "awoken from a coma." The counter-argument is that simplicity was the brief, and the set delivered it cleanly.

Reception sources: MTG Rocks, Bloomburrow and Duskmourn Limited extremes; CoolStuffInc, Ranking Magic's 2024 draft formats; TCGplayer, best-selling cards of Bloomburrow; Wikipedia, Bloomburrow. Card-level reviews: Draftsim, MTG Arena Zone.

Six mechanics. We bucketed every card with at least two thousand recorded games by the mechanic printed on it and compared against the set median of 55.6 percent. They split by whether the mechanic costs you tempo.

As a design, the ten-family kindred frame is the set's best idea and its limitation at once. Ten colour pairs each with a named animal, a mentor uncommon and a clear plan is the most legible archetype grid Magic has printed. It is also why the format plays out the same way most times you sit down.

Prices move. This is a snapshot, and it is two years after release, which is the useful vantage point: the speculation has drained out and what is left is what people actually want. Base price means the cheapest printing, so it is what the card costs you. Where a premium treatment runs materially higher, we note it.

We hold both the full Limited archive and Commander inclusion data for this set, which lets us do something a normal review cannot: check whether the cards that matter in one format matter in the other. Mostly they do not, and the gap is extreme.

274 of the 280 cards carry an EDHREC rank. The rank is global across all of Magic, not relative to this set, so a card at #48 is the 48th most played card in the format overall. One caveat worth stating: for reprints the rank belongs to the card, not to this printing.

48

176

201

353

635

676

By colour identity

By strategy

Bloomburrow reprinted sixteen non-basic cards, and the set is not a reprint product, so this is a thin list by design. One of them carries real weight.

The signal is consistent with everything above: the cards holding value are Commander cards, not constructed ones. No Bloomburrow card commands a price that suggests it defined a competitive constructed format, and the top of the list is a kindred land, a green ramp mythic and a mono-black legend. For Pauper, the 93 commons plus the Banishing Light downshift are the contribution worth tracking.