Bloomburrow: Seasons' Heralds - Introduction and Motivations

04 Sep, 2026

Bloomburrow is an expansion for the popular card game Magic: The Gathering released in August 2024. Inspired by popular existing fantasy media such as the Redwall series, the setting (or "plane", as Magic refers to its unique worlds) centers around an arcadian society of sentient woodland creatures. The set was a smash hit with both casual and longtime Magic fans, principally due to Bloomburrow's charming pastoral aesthetics and cute critters being a nice change of pace compared to Magic's typical offerings. Although Bloomburrow's release slightly predates my time as player (I started in November 2024), I still very much count myself among its geekiest supporters, and I heartily look forward to when Magic inevitably returns to the plane for the sequel set.

Naturally, this brings us to the topic of this blog, my own custom sequel set to Bloomburrow that I've been working on for fun (warned you I'm a geek). In approaching something like this, it obviously needs a good reason for existing. In the case of a follow-up set, it should ideally accomplish at least three things:

• Preserve the feel of the original set
• Expand upon the original, both from a narrative and mechanical perspective
• Address deficiencies in the original design

Essentially, whatever we come up with here shouldn't feel like a reheat of the previous set. I'll be revisiting these tent poles throughout my write-ups as they serve as guiding principles for the ideation process.

The most informative starting point may be in defining the mechanical deficiencies that marred the otherwise rosy reception of original Bloomburrow. In case you aren't aware, the original set had ten limited archetypes, each of which were centered around a different animal species (or "folk"). To quote Magic's head designer Mark Rosewater about the shortcomings of the final product:

While I feel Bloomburrow is the best typal set we've designed, that doesn't mean it's solved all the problems of typal sets. The number one complaint I got about the set was its draft was too "on rails." Once you commit to drafting a certain animal, players felt the options available to them lessened too quickly. ¹

This is a fundamental challenge with typal sets in limited that I still don't quite think Magic's designers have quite figured out, so I certainly don't believe my one-man design outfit would fare any better. Making a sequel with non-typal draft archetypes opens up the space a lot and also just generally makes it more compelling for me to work on, conceptually. However, discarding the animal themes as the primary design element presents a new challenge since, as I've stated, a huge part of Bloomburrow's appeal are the various factions of rabbits, frogs, etc. So, how do we find a new thematic element to build the mechanics and story of our set around? To answer that, we'll need to look to another facet of Bloomburrow's setting.

Season's Greetings

Outside of the obvious charm of Bloomburrow's animal denizens, another very prominent aspect of the world-building for the plane is how seasons work. In Bloomburrow, the passage of seasons is not a predictable phenomenon dictated purely by the passage of time, but rather it is driven by the migration patterns of (relatively) hulking creatures known as Calamity Beasts. A massive fiery bird of prey or blazing cat may bring elevated temperatures and droughts as it passes through the valley, approximating summer conditions. Or the much-celebrated arrival of the gentle elk Beza brings the temperate weather and abundant blooms associated with spring.

For my money, the Calamity Beasts are the most distinctive and interesting pieces of world-building found in the original set. In fact, there were already explorations of Bloomburrow's seasonal theme in the original set by way of a mechanical cycle and a suite of full art basics which display various locales throughout the seasons. As such, a follow-up set which focuses on seasons as the main theme seems both natural and resonant.

And with that, we've established a broad thematic throughline to use as the groundwork for our custom Bloomburrow sequel concept, with the working title being Bloomburrow: Seasons' Heralds (hopefully that name will make more sense as we go). If you're also an amateur designer, your gears may already be turning on some of the possibilities and challenges that would come with a theme like this. If so, I hope you'll join me for the next post in this series where I'll get much more in the weeds with how I'm approaching the mechanical structure of this seasonal design concept. Until then, I'll happily welcome any thoughts or feedback on anything related to this project. Thank you for reading and I hope you'll follow along on this journey!

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