Bloomburrow (BLB) Limited Primer — Colorless, Lands & Special Guests (SPG)

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Bloomburrow (BLB) holds its prerelease events on July 26, 2024, and launches officially a week later on August 2, 2024. Want to know more about how each card rates in Limited, with recommendations? Then check out this series of BLB Limited introductions!

• For the mechanics, see this article: Bloomburrow Mechanics Breakdown
• For the Limited archetypes, see this article: Bloomburrow Limited Preliminary Look

The articles in this Limited series go by ratings. Some average cards, or cards with fairly simple abilities, won’t get a dedicated comment.

Rating Scale

5.0: Always take it
4.5: Always take it if you are in the right colors
4.0: Worth a first pick
3.5: Strong enough, but not necessarily a first pick
3.0: Above average (you would really like it in your final deck)
2.5: Average, maybe around the 6th or 7th pick of a draft
2.0–1.0: Below average (you would rather not play it than play it)
0.5–0.0: Unplayable (basically don’t play it; it will only help you lose)

Ratings

Colorless

243	244	245
2.0	2.0	2.5

Comments:

• Barkform Harvester: Tribal lubricant, there to fill out the numbers when you are playing a tribal theme.
• Bumbleflower’s Sharepot: It is a clunky sorcery-speed removal spell, but at least it is colorless, universal removal. Making a Food token helps some of the plans along, so it is not entirely a two-mana decoration sitting on the battlefield.
• Fountainport Bell: It fixes colors and doubles as a looting spell. In a three-color deck, or one with a multicolor bomb, running a copy to improve consistency is a reasonable choice.

246	247	248
3.0	3.0	3.0

Comments:

• Heirloom Epic: Once a Limited game turns into a grind, a perpetual card-draw engine like this easily builds a huge resource gap. This set is also very good at making tokens, and some creatures you would never attack with anyway (they would just be giving away a free kill) are perfect fodder for paying the draw cost.
• Patchwork Banner: With the right creature types, it is a strong Glorious Anthem. With scattered types it is a bit awkward, so it has a better chance of paying off the tribal bonus in a draft. At worst it is a Manalith, usable when your deck has truly extreme color-fixing needs.
• Short Bow: For a 2-mana cast with a 1-mana equip, the abilities it grants are very good. A cheap-to-equip piece of gear is also an excellent valiant trigger source.

249	250	251
2.0	3.0	2.0

Comments:

• Starforged Sword: The cost is clunky, but the boost is considerable. In Limited, this kind of plain stat dominance can still be quite useful.
• Tangle Tumbler: Putting +1/+1 counters on creatures at instant speed again and again makes it very hard for your opponent to get favorable creature trades. The pseudo-Crew of tapping two tokens is easy enough to activate in this set.
• Three Tree Mascot: Tribal-theme lubricant and a half-fixer. Use it when you have fairly high tribal or color-fixing demands.

Lands

252	253	254
3.0	3.5	2.5

Comments:

• Fabled Passage: A quality way to fix colors.
• Fountainport: Every ability on it is useful. This set has plenty of ways to produce tokens, and all of them can be converted into more useful card resources. Once you are in a long grind, just making 1/1 Fish tokens is enough to swing the game.
• Hidden Grotto: Because of forage and threshold, surveil gets some extra value in this set.

255	256	257
3.0	3.0	3.0

Comments:

• Lilypad Village: Surveil 2 a few more times helps consistency quite a bit.
• Lupinflower Village: Once you are no longer short on lands in the mid to late game, you can sacrifice it to convert it into extra resources.
• Mudflat Village: Similar to the white Village above, but without the risk of whiffing. If your bomb happens to be the matching creature type, it can even turn into a bomb-recursion machine.

258	259	260
3.5	3.5	2.0

Comments:

• Oakhollow Village: The activation cost is low, and handing out +1/+1 counters has strong pressure in Limited.
• Rockface Village: Sorcery-speed activation is a minor drawback, but it still puts real pressure on your opponent. It is also a cheap, repeatable trigger engine for the valiant theme.
• Three Tree City: To get the most out of this land you need a very consistent creature-type build, which is hard to assemble in Limited. Given its activation cost, you only profit once it makes 4 or more mana, but by the time you can do that, the game is usually in the mid to late stage where you are not short on lands and have few cards left in hand, so you may have the mana but nothing to spend it on.

261	###	###
2.0	None	None

Comments:

• Uncharted Haven: A middle-of-the-road single-color fixing land.

Special Guests (SPG)

054	055	056
3.5	3.0	1.5

Comments:

• Swords to Plowshares: The pinnacle of instant-speed one-for-one removal.
• Ledger Shredder: Triggering connive is relatively difficult in Limited, but for a two-drop, connive twice is already plenty of value. The body itself is decent, and it is the right creature type, a bird.
• Rat Colony: There are a fair number of Rats in this set, so it may still become a body that trades up on defense, but most of the time it will just be a creature with a weak body and nothing else.

057	058	059
0.0	2.5	3.5

Comments:

• Relentless Rats: Unlike the Rat Colony above, which cares about the creature type, this one’s pump is tied to creatures with the same name. I have never seen anyone assemble two copies of the same SPG card in a Limited game.
• Kindred Charge: With a correctly built deck its ceiling is very high, nearly one-card victory, but the odds of assembling a tribal deck that pure in Limited (especially Sealed) are low. In actual play it probably just puts a wave of pressure on your opponent under fairly specific conditions.
• Sylvan Tutor: At its core it is a card-disadvantage tutor. The bomb or key creature it fetches is often worth more than a card, but it comes with limits: you get it a turn late, and it does nothing when you need a noncreature card. If your deck has no bomb-level or key creature, don’t play it. Conversely, if your deck has a powerful creature bomb that can decide the game on its own, it effectively raises your bomb count by one.

060	061	062
4.0	0.0	5.0

Comments:

• Toski, Bearer of Secrets: It is very hard to remove, and as long as it stands it puts enormous defensive pressure on your opponent. One slip in defense and they get pulled into a huge resource gap.
• Frogmite: Even if you are playing a Frog tribal deck, it probably still has no job.
• Sword of Fire and Ice: The snowballing power of the red-blue Sword can win the game outright. If your opponent’s colors happen to be the ones it targets, they may have no way to fight back, and even if they try to force trades with creatures, the +2/+2 boost is hard to ignore in Limited.

063	###	###
2.0	None	None

Comments:

• Secluded Courtyard: Consider it only in decks with three or more colors of tribal, or when you want to splash a mixed-color bomb of the matching creature type.