The Bloom of the Burrow, Part 1

Welcome to Bloomburrow previews. This week and next, I'll be telling you the story of Bloomburrow's design, introducing you to the teams that made it, and show off some cool preview cards.

The Critters Behind the Critters

This week, I'll be introducing the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams. As is tradition, those introductions are being done by the vision design lead. For Bloomburrow, that's Doug Beyer.

In the Beginning

Bloomburrow started with Aaron Forsythe saying he wanted to do an "animal world." The "anthropomorphic animal" genre of storytelling replaces the role of humans with animals who act like humans. They stand upright, wear clothes, and use human objects. They still have traces of their animal qualities, but through the lens of human quirks. It depicts human characteristics through the lens of animals.

This genre exists mostly in animation and comics, as those are the mediums that are best suited to bringing this type of story to life.

The idea of an anthropomorphic animal plane had come up. Fantasy tends to like humanoid animal species, so it felt adjacent to fantasy. We could push the costuming and worldbuilding in a fantasy direction. It always felt like an idea we'd do one day. It finally hit the schedule when Aaron put his foot down and said, "We're doing it."

Once it was on the schedule, I did a little advance work on the genre to familiarize myself with it. I realized that there were two ways it's traditionally done.

Take #1 – Animals represent groups of people. These people are mice, those people are badgers, and these people are otters. Each animal type has qualities that are consistent among that group, usually things that feel resonant with the real-world animal. In this version, the setting is usually a biome, and all the animals in it are ones who would live in that biome. The animals are roughly proportional to what they would be in the real world.

Take #2 – Animals represent individual people. This person's jumpy, so she's a frog. That person's sneaky, so he's a fox. This other person rushes into things, so they're a rhino. Each animal is used to represent personality qualities. In this version, the setting is usually something more human in structure, often a city, and the variety of animals is much larger. The animal selection here is not limited by biome, so you can have animals living together that normally would never see each other in the real world. The animals are loosely related in size (a racoon is smaller than an elephant), but the scope of scale is compressed.

Take number one is easier for worldbuilding. There are less unique types of animals, and they're organized by creature type. Because animals are used to express groups of people, they tend to act more similarly to traditional species creature types, like Elves, Goblins, or Merfolk. This pushes us more toward a factioned typal theme.

Take number two is easier for design because the designers have access to a lot more animals and can make more individually cool designs. The twelfth Mouse card, for instance, is a lot harder to make different than the first Giraffe. This approach pushes us more toward mechanics that tie into a larger animal theme. It's more likely we'd create an environment that was about a lot of different animals working together, putting the focus more on individual top-down card design.

Aaron was more interested in doing take number one, while I was more interested in doing take number two. So, we did a bunch of market research. It came back exactly even. Half the people we polled preferred take one, and half preferred take two. In a tie, Aaron's original vision won out, so we did take one. (Also, I believe more people internally wanted to do take one.) I do want to stress that both takes would have allowed us to make a cool set. They just head down different paths and would have ended up in very different places, mechanically and creatively.

Gathering the Animals

Take number one pushed us down the path of a factioned typal theme, so we leaned into it. What if the ten two-color draft archetypes each represented a different animal? We started with the ten two color pairs and began choosing our animals.

White-Blue
Blue-Black
Black-Red
Red-Green
Green-White
White-Black
Blue-Red
Black-Green
Red-White
Green-Blue

There were two animals that we knew we wanted from the beginning, as they were pretty core to the genre. The most popular protagonists of anthropomorphic animal stories are mice. We had introduced the Mouse creature type to Magic in Throne of Eldraine. They'd mostly appeared in white, dipping once into red and green-white in Unfinity. Mice as soldiers is a common trope in the genre we wanted to play into, so red-white Mice seemed like the perfect fit.

Mice's common enemy is the rat. Rats go all the way back to the beginning of Magic and have pretty much just been a black creature type. In the genre space, Bloomburrow was targeting, rats are traditionally portrayed as sneaky, so we liked them in blue-black.

Here's where we were at with those two additions:

White-Blue
Blue-Black: Rat
Black-Red
Red-Green
Green-White
White-Black
Blue-Red
Black-Green
Red-White: Mouse
Green-Blue

Next, we looked at the animals that would live in the biome we wanted to build the plane around. Take number two had pushed us more toward a pastoral biome (ponds, woods, fields, etc.). This combined with the genre space we were exploring got us to consider animals like rabbits, frogs, and birds.

Part of designing any of the two-color animal factions would be leaning into the feel of the animal. Rabbits had a very clear identity in the genre, something that leaned into the nature of rabbits, which is that rabbits make a lot of rabbits. We wanted one of the two-color factions to be a go-wide creature token deck, and that probably wanted to be green-white. Rabbit first showed up as a creature type in Portal Three Kingdoms on a green card, although one could argue Kezzerdrix from Tempest was the first Rabbit, albeit a scary one, but it initially didn't have the Rabbit creature type. Kwain, Itinerant Meddler from Commander Legends was the first creature in the modern era with the creature type Rabbit. Rabbits have mostly appeared in white and green, so that color pairing seemed apt. Having Rabbits in the top two creature token–making colors cemented the choice.

Frogs first showed up in Ice Age on Chub Toad, although it had the creature type Toad, later changed to Frog. The first creature with the creature type Frog was Whiptongue Frog from Exodus. The amphibious nature of Frogs made them a natural fit for green and blue. There are even several multicolor green-blue Frogs. We tried where possible to fit the animals in colors that they had a history in, so if we wanted Frogs, and we did, green-blue was really the only choice for them.

My two preview cards today are Frogs, so this felt like the right place to show them off.

With Frogs handled, we figured it was time to take to the skies with Birds.

The very first Bird card, Birds of Paradise, showed up in Limited Edition (Alpha). It was one a few cards to have two words in its creature type, Mana and Birds. Birds eventually started getting individual Bird creature types. I wanted to be able to make cards that cared mechanically about Birds, so I convinced the Creative team that we should use the creature type Bird for all Birds. Since then, they've showed up in all five colors. They're most commonly seen in white and blue, the colors that are primary in flying. Like Frogs, we put Birds in the color combination that had the most support. There was some concern about having a typal theme for creatures that always had flying (a lesson we learned with Faeries in Lorwyn), but Birds felt so natural for the setting that we included them.

So, here's where we were at halfway through:

White-Blue: Bird
Blue-Black: Rat
Black-Red
Red-Green
Green-White: Rabbit
White-Black
Blue-Red
Black-Green
Red-White: Mouse
Green-Blue: Frog

Next up, we considered if this environment would allow us to create more animal creature types that had proved popular with the players but lacked a home to do them in volume.

The first Raccoon card showed up on Squirrel Dealer from Unstable. They showed up in Eternal Magic for the first time in Streets of New Capenna, although on only two cards. The response for the public was very positive, so we'd been looking for a place to do more Raccoon cards. The spots that were available for Raccoons were red-green, blue-red, and black-green. Blue-red played into their nature as thieves, as blue and red are the stealing colors, but none of the Raccoons had been in blue, and green just felt like a more natural center color. We did consider black-green for a second, but we ended up having a better choice for that slot, which I will get to in a bit. We ended up putting them in red-green.

Creature type Otter first showed up on Eon Frolicker in Commander (2020 Edition), released alongside Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. The playful nature of otters made Otter cards a good fit for blue-red. In addition, we'd planned for Ral Zarek to be the Planeswalker of the set, and the Creative team came up with the cool idea that Planeswalkers turn into animals when planeswalking to this plane.

We looked for opportunities to include creature types ahead of the set that mechanically cares about them, with special consideration for creature types like Raccoon and Otter that just had less cards historically. As such, Raccoons and Otters both showed up in Wilds of Eldraine.

Here's where we stood with our archetypes:

White-Blue: Bird
Blue-Black: Rat
Black-Red
Red-Green: Raccoon
Green-White: Rabbit
White-Black
Blue-Red: Otter
Black-Green
Red-White: Mouse
Green-Blue: Frog

We had three archetypes left. One thing we noted looking at the list was that we had several creature types that didn't have a lot of cards (Raccoon, Rabbit, Otter, Mouse, and Frog). For the remaining slots, we chose some creatures that had a little more history with the game. I should note there weren't a lot of creatures that made sense in the biome we were building, but we at least wanted a few that had more than just a handful.

Black-green was obvious. We had a creature type that was a perfect fit for the environment, had proven popular with players, and had a history of being in green and black. The creature type was, of course, Squirrel.

Squirrels had shown up in card art in early Magic, but it wasn't until Odyssey that they started being a creature type. That might have had something to do with the fact that I was the creative lead for Odyssey and I love Squirrels. Squirrels were banned from black-border Magic for a while by the brand team, so I kept putting them in Un- sets, including Acornelia, Fashionable Filcher from Unsanctioned, which was the first legendary Squirrel. Squirrels would eventually return to black-border sets and even become a draft archetype in Modern Horizons 2.

The creature type Bat first showed up on Vampire Bats in Legends. Bats have been a regular creature type for most of Magic although at a slow drip, almost exclusively in black. We needed them to fly, so white-black seemed like the clear winner. We talked about whether we wanted to have two creature types that all flew but decided it was something we could build around, as we really liked bats from a creative standpoint.

We had black-red left. We ideally wanted something a little different to show variety, and we really wanted a creature type with more cards from the past. After much searching, we came up with Lizard. Lizard had first appeared on Leaping Lizard in Homelands but quickly became a staple creature in red. Unlike many of the other animal creature types, Lizard had over 140 cards. In a vacuum, we might have made Lizard red-green, as that's where its history lies, but we liked Raccoon better there. We felt we could flavor lizards a little darker in the world to justify Lizard cards in black.

Here's where we ended up:

White-Blue: Bird
Blue-Black: Rat
Black-Red: Lizard
Red-Green: Raccoon
Green-White: Rabbit
White-Black: Bat
Blue-Red: Otter
Black-Green: Squirrel
Red-White: Mouse
Green-Blue: Frog

We had planned to have a number of other creatures show up as one-offs. Many of these creatures were ones we'd considered but hadn't chosen for one reason or another.

We also liked the idea that the monsters of this plane would be larger creatures. While a Bear might be a 2/2 on a normal plane, it would be a humongous monster on the plane of Bloomburrow. During vision design, we called these the "predators." They were non-sapient creatures, though Set Design shifted them into forces of nature and gave them the creature type Elemental.

We did two things in vision design to reinforce our typal theme. We made a typal mechanic called fellowship and a mega-batch for "animal." Neither of those two things would make it to print. In two weeks, I'll show off the Bloomburrow Vision Design Handoff Document, which will go into detail on these two things, so I will hold off on discussing them until then.

In the end, the answer to the typal theme was as follows. Set Design built each archetype to match the feel of the animal, then added a light sprinkling of typal cards. This meant if you drafted Frogs, you'd end up with a green-blue deck that had a coherent play pattern. A few cards would specifically call out Frogs, but the as-fan would be low, so it would have a smaller impact on Limited games. Most of the typal rewards were higher in rarity, so you could build a Constructed deck if you wanted.

To give you a sense of what I mean by a sprinkling, here are the typal rewards for Frogs:

• A common that costs less if you have a Frog
• An uncommon sorcery with a rider if you have a Frog
• An uncommon land with an effect that helps Frogs
• An uncommon land and a rare creature that cares if a Frog entered the battlefield this turn
• An uncommon creature and a rare creature that grant Frogs an ability
• A rare creature that cares about casting Frogs

The number of typal cards can vary slightly, but that will give you a rough idea of the as-fan I'm talking about.

Scurrying Away

That's all the time I have for today. Next week, I will talk about the mechanics in the set and go through the ten draft archetypes. As always, I'm eager to hear your thoughts on today's article, the choice of animals, and Bloomburrow in general. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Blogatog, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week for part two of the design story.

Until then, may you find the animal that speaks to you.