Bloomburrow: The Best White and Blue Cards

It’s good to be back with these. I haven’t reviewed a Magic set in a little while, but Bloomburrow is too dang charming. So, I’ve looked over all of the cards and narrowed my selection down to the best ones. Three per color, and three for multicolored. I didn’t see any artifacts that are worth mentioning, and only two lands that matter. My criteria, in case you’re curious, are based on 1v1 formats, mostly Historic, Timeless, or Standard. I expect to see all of these cards at least in a few decks.

Beza, the Bounding Spring

I wasn’t sure about this Bloomburrow card until I read it a few times. It intrinsically doesn’t always work the way you want it to. But the ability to recover from most problems with one card is amazing. Flickering it is especially amazing. I foresee it being a useful card in control decks.

Essence Channeler

That’s a lot of abilities for only two mana. I’ve been killed by far too many lifegain decks to underestimate something like this. The only main downside is that the card needs reliable life loss. Fortunately—and a spoiler for a later list—there’s a very good card in Bloomburrow that can go in the same sorts of decks.

Salvation Swan

First off, this card is funny. It’s an obvious, but cute joke. Secondly, the card that this is based on is really good. With Salvation Swan, you can save creatures from dying by removing them from combat during the damage step. You can fizzle removal. You can re-trigger various enters-play abilities. And it also adding flying means that you can set up sudden unblockable attacks on the following turn. This card will utterly ruin people.

Kitsa, Otterball Elite

I’d play this card if it only had vigilance and prowess. But adding all of that other stuff makes this an excellent creature for any Izzet strategy. You can even activate the abilities mid-attack. My only wish is that Kitsa wasn’t legendary; I would love to have a board full of this otter.

Portent of Calamity

This being a sorcery is the only thing holding it back from being a ban-worthy card. It lets you deck search while effectively drawing cards. It lets you cast a free spell. And it puts cards into your graveyard. This is the kind of card control players always want to have.

Thundertrap Trainer

Blue doesn’t have the best suite of cards in Bloomburrow, I’ll admit. This is basically an Augur of Bolas with a cute extra ability that sometimes matters. But Auger did see a fair amount of play, and this is both an otter and a wizard, so it has some good synergies. It’s the kind of card that helps make a strategy work—and those are important.

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And that’s the first article done. Next week, we’ll be doing black and red. Black is, by far, the best color in this set, with the most cards I had to whittle down. And I’m excited to share with you what I ended up picking. Even if you might disagree with me.

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