If there's one thing to be said about Magic in 2024, it's just how incredible Bloomburrow is as a set. It's a set with a little something for almost everyone. Some diehard competitive Constructed players would have you believe it's a bit lower on overall power and that the Limited environment is a bit unenjoyable, and there may be some truth to that. However when it comes to the set as a whole, it has a far broader appeal than your average MTG release. There's the cute animals that make up the whole population of the world, the easily accessible draft environment, and even the mechanics of the set themselves!

In fact, I'd argue that the mechanics of the set really make it stand out that much more. Valiant may just be a reworking of heroic and expend is a bit lackluster, but then you see abilities like gifting and offspring. In fact, the latter of the two has proven to be such a beloved concept for a mechanic that Wizards went ahead and designed an entire Commander preconstructed deck around it!

Players quickly gravitated to the mechanic, but there's only so much you can really do with it when it's thus far only been a part of a single set. Thankfully, the fix is a pretty simple one: what if your commander just gave all of your creatures access to the offspring mechanic? That's essentially what Zinnia, Valley's Voice does in a nutshell. This leads to one heck of a powerful commander that gives you a wild amount of potential options for the things you can do at your local Commander nights. So much so that there's going to be no shortage of ways to upgrade the precon itself! Let's check out the list and then get into the upgrading discussion!

Family Matters Precon | Commander

• Commander (1)
• 1 Zinnia, Valley's Voice

• Creatures (35)
• 1 Aether Channeler
• 1 Agate Instigator
• 1 Angel of the Ruins
• 1 Arthur, Marigold Knight
• 1 Blade Splicer
• 1 Boss's Chauffeur
• 1 Circuit Mender
• 1 Cloudblazer
• 1 Combat Celebrant
• 1 Curiosity Crafter
• 1 Devilish Valet
• 1 Hanged Executioner
• 1 Illusory Ambusher
• 1 Inferno Titan
• 1 Inspiring Overseer
• 1 Jacked Rabbit
• 1 Jazal Goldmane
• 1 Junk Winder
• 1 Loyal Warhound
• 1 Luminous Broodmoth
• 1 Ornithopter of Paradise
• 1 Plumecreed Escort
• 1 Pollywog Prodigy
• 1 Rapid Augmenter
• 1 Restoration Angel
• 1 Rose Room Treasurer
• 1 Selfless Spirit
• 1 Shield Broker
• 1 Siege-Gang Commander
• 1 Skyclave Apparition
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Spirited Companion
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive
• 1 Thopter Engineer

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Elspeth, Sun's Champion

• Instants (5)
• 1 Aetherize
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Pull from Tomorrow
• 1 Rapid Hybridization
• 1 Rowdy Research

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Calamity of Cinders
• 1 Chart a Course
• 1 Cut a Deal
• 1 Dusk // Dawn
• 1 Martial Coup
• 1 Stolen by the Fae
• 1 Storm of Souls
• 1 Time Wipe

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Echoing Assault
• 1 Fortune Teller's Talent
• 1 Murmuration

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Azorius Signet
• 1 Bident of Thassa
• 1 Boros Signet
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Helm of the Host
• 1 Izzet Signet
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (37)
• 4 Island
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Plains
• 1 Adarkar Wastes
• 1 Battlefield Forge
• 1 Cascade Bluffs
• 1 Castle Ardenvale
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Ferrous Lake
• 1 Glacial Fortress
• 1 Mystic Monastery
• 1 Path of Ancestry
• 1 Rugged Prairie
• 1 Seachrome Coast
• 1 Shivan Reef
• 1 Skycloud Expanse
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Sunscorched Divide
• 1 Temple of Enlightenment
• 1 Temple of Epiphany
• 1 Temple of Triumph
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Thriving Bluff
• 1 Thriving Heath
• 1 Thriving Isle

Buy This Deck Export text Export Arena

So, before I start talking about upgrades, let me just get this out of the way: I held this one toward the end for a reason. I really needed to think about how I wanted to approach it because, frankly, this Commander is far too open. That's honestly a bit of a weird thing to say, but it's the truth here. Zinnia basically asks you to just fill your deck with good value creatures and that's it. How do you really say anything about that apart from just go through your binder and pull out creatures with powerful effects on them? You could easily do that and just call it a day.

By comparison, talking about a commander like Ms. Bumbleflower last week was a little tricky because that card doesn't have a lot of good ways to build around it. The group hug angle of the precon provided a good basis to work off, but it was still a bit more challenging than initially expected. This is almost worse: a deck that's so open-ended you could fill it with just about anything. I could just sit here and tell you to go through your collection and find all the good Blue, Red, and White value creatures and roll with it, but where's the fun in that? Let's get into it and see if we can't find some good angles to discuss!

One of the more obviously powerful options that can be utilized as far as general value creatures go are the ones that have the evoke ability. This allows you to have flexibility with how you want to get your value from your creatures. For example, let's say you have a Mulldrifter. You can pay five mana and get a 2/2 and two cards. Alternatively, you can pay the evoke cost of three plus the offspring cost to essentially draw four cards. This does end up leaving you with no creatures, as the evoked token will still need to be sacrificed, but it can grant you plenty of great value and flexibility all the same.

Mulldrifter is one example here as well. How about bouncing multiple creatures with an Aethersnipe or blowing up multiple lands with Faultgrinder? The now infamous Fury and Solitude both can be evoked basically for free, making the offspring cost comically low considering the amount of usefulness you're getting out of the deal. Some cards actually get even better with the evoke cost as well. Consider cards like Nevermaker, Slithermuse, and Reveillark. All three of these cards give you a bonus not when the creature enters the battlefield, as most evoke creatures do, but rather when they leave the battlefield.

In a similar vein, you can also do this with creatures that have a kicker cost on them. Unlike evoke, which usually seeks to give you a cheaper effect without the body, these will always cost you a fair amount more. However, you can make them work to your liking as well. Take something like Goblin Bushwhacker that can pump your board an extra time or Kor Sanctifiers for an additional Disenchant. Many of these creatures aren't the most powerful compared to the kinds of effects you get from evoking, but there's still some great effects to be found if you feel like running them.

One of the more obvious options on this front for my money is Karmic Guide. It's such an easily accessible and cheap card that I'm almost surprised it wasn't included in the deck to begin with. For sevem mana, you get to resurrect two creatures and with two small fliers. Sure, you won't likely pay both echo costs, but does that really matter? Getting the double Resurrection along with some blockers for a turn is more than worth it on its own, and if you can pay the costs then that's just gravy.

Other creatures that give you some value by entering are a lot more baseline. Spirited Companion is already in this deck, but it costs very little to stick in a copy of Wall of Omens or the upcoming Helpful Hunter for added redundancy. Cards like Duplicant, Fiend Hunter, and Flametongue Kavu will also act as multi-hit removal options, while creatures such as Kor Cartographer and Pilgrim's Eye find you lands to ensure you keep making your mana drops every turn.

You also don't necessarily need creatures that have powerful effects when they enter the battlefield. Some are better to clone because of the value they can generate over the course of a game. Consider cards like Witty Roastmaster and Goldnight Commander, both of which dish out some serious beatings the more creatures that enter. Since you're getting multiple creatures a turn with offspring, these effects can get out of hand really fast. Similarly, cloning an Emeria Angel will shower you with tokens as you play your lands, which can further fuel the aforementioned cards. You can even go with something that doesn't care about any of that at all like Serra's Emissary and allow yourself more value simply by getting more options on what your stuff has protection from.

It's worth noting as well that all of the creatures mentioned in these last couple paragraphs were found just by looking up creatures and sorting by EDHREC. I only went a few pages deep and found this much quality, but really it's only scratching the surface. There are quite literally thousands of creatures that you can pull from throughout the long and storied history of the game that will give you some powerful abilities you can take advantage of.

Now that we've got the creatures set up well, we need to take a slightly different approach: find ways to take the value train further. The easiest way to do this is naturally with token doublers. Unfortunately, thanks to how high the demand tends to be on these kinds of cards, their prices can be rather staggering. Even recently printed options like Mondrak, Glory Dominus and Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation // Temple of Civilization go for a pretty penny and are unlikely to go down soon. If you can get your hands on any one of those however or perhaps an even more decadent Anointed Procession, it will go a long way in getting all kinds of value from the offspring tokens you're making.

Additionally, how about finding some ways to make your tokens go even further? Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about ways of making more tokens. After all, there's about a million different ways to do that in Magic. Instead, I'm referring to the various ways you can buff specifically your own tokens. Intangible Virtue is the best known of these options, but there's also Phantom General and Prava of the Steel Legion - both of which pump your tokens. Caretaker's Talent can go pretty heavy and also draws you lots of cards as you create more tokens. Arguably more importantly, the likes of both Aven Wind Guide and Roar of Resistance provide some extremely potent keywords, as well as some potential buffs in the case of the latter card.

Oh, yeah, and that whole populate mechanic is pretty good too, I hear. Admittedly, there are very few of these in Jeskai colors - 11 total at the time of writing. Most are just straight up Mono-White and are of varying usefulness. For example, Song of the Worldsoul, Nesting Dovehawk, and Cayth, Famed Mechanist are absolute bombs when it comes to going nuts with populating. But then you see cards like Wake the Reflections and Trostani's Judgment and you can see just how limited your options really are. Still, you should definitely find space for Rootborn Defenses. Not only will it take your value creatures even further, but it'll also defend them easily by making them indestructible and harder to wipe out.

To put it simply: this is hardly even touching on the sheer depths you could go into with a Commander like this. Zinnia provides a nearly infinite number of ways to build a deck and I have to stop somewhere. As such, I'll leave you with this simple word of advice: go through your collection and find the creatures that stand out most to you within the Jeskai color identity. Find your own ways to use them and make the deck something all your own. That's the ideal way to have a great time at your next Commander night. Just make sure you remember to bring tons of Copy tokens when you do.

Paige Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal