Bloomburrow is finally here, and it promises to be a successful, enjoyable Magic set! I've already seen positive comments about the Limited environment on various platforms, and I'm optimistic this one will continue to win over the hearts and minds of players during its time in Standard.

One reason this promises to be a popular set is that it leverages a typal theme. In other words, there are certain synergistic creature types in this set that work together to drive a more powerful strategy. Previous sets with a typal theme have also been largely successful, including Lorwyn block and Onslaught.

For Bloomburrow, the creature types align with each two-colored pair:

• White-Blue: Birds
• Blue-Black: Rats
• Black-Red: Lizards
• Red-Green: Raccoons
• Green-White Rabbits
• White-Black Bats
• Blue-Red Otters
• Black-Green Squirrels
• Red-White Mice
• Green-Blue Frogs

Some of these creature types, such as Raccoons and Otters, are relatively new to Magic--these have only been creature types for a handful of years. Others, like Rats and Bats, have been around since some of Magic's earliest sets.

Then there are those in-between creature types. The kind that were never really relevant before, but thanks to Bloomburrow are now suddenly on players' radars. These in-between creature types are the ones I want to explore this week. I'm going to focus specifically on older cards whose creature types were updated in the official rulebook, making them relevant to Magic's Bloomburrow creature themes. If you're interested in building a Commander or Casual deck around these typal themes, you'll definitely want to consider some of these oldies-but-goodies below.

Rabbits

When I search Gatherer for Rabbit creatures, I find 30 matches in total. About half of them are in Bloomburrow, and another portion are from other recent sets. Nearly every Rabbit was originally printed with the Rabbit creature type. But not every one...

All the way back in Exodus, released in 1998, we saw the printing of a Rabbit card in Jackalope Herd. This pesky creature was aggressively costed for its time: a four mana 4/5 creature was nothing to sneeze at, even if you had to constantly bounce your own creature back to your hand. This card was initially printed as a "Summon - Beasts" but has since been updated to be a Rabbit Beast. Given their artwork, I'd say this is a fitting description!

Then there are two Magic classics: Vizzerdrix and Kezzerdrix - two other creatures that started as Beasts and have since been relabeled Rabbit Beasts.

I remember when these cards initially came out. Vizzerdrix was one of those rares you never wanted to open, but I guess at the time a Blue 6/6 creature with no drawback was hard to come by. Kezzerdrix, on the other hand, received media fame when it was featured on one of Wizards of the Coast's early television ads for Magic (if you haven't seen these old commercials, I highly recommend watching them for a laugh). They may not be all that powerful by today's standards, but these two, along with Jackalope Herd, go down in history as Magic's earliest rabbits!

Frogs

The Frog roster in Magic is a fair bit deeper than Rabbits--I found 73 Frogs in Gatherer. With such a deep lineup, it's no surprise the list includes many creature type updates over the years. It turns out Frogs have been around in Magic for a long time now, but they weren't labeled as such! The complete list would be extensive, but let's focus on a couple noteworthy cards.

First off, there are a group of Anurid cards (a reference to the Order Anura) that were once labeled as "Beast" but have since been updated to include the Frog creature type. The list includes Anurid Barkripper, Anurid Brushhopper, Anurid Murkdiver, Anurid Scavenger, and Anurid Swarmsnapper.

These creatures first appeared in Judgment, and you can see their initial printings with the "Beast" creature type pictured above. I didn't play competitively back in 2002, so I can't say much about the power level of these cards. What I will say, though, is Anurid Brushhopper appears in Brian Kibler's 2002 and Daniel Zink's 2023 World Championship Decks, so the White/Green rare must have been good back in the day! Long live the Frogs!

Before there were Frogs running amok in Magic, there were a number of creatures with the Toad subtype. This includes Bloated Toad, Chub Toad, Morgue Toad, and Noxious Toad.

These creatures aren't all that impressive, but I'm thankful Wizards of the Coast decided to errata them from Toads to Frogs. I'm not sure I could tell you the difference between the two--as far as the game is concerned, there's no need to differentiate. Now they're all part of the same group!

Finally, two classic Frog creatures worth knowing are Spore Frog and Whiptongue Frog. Granted, these were both originally printed as Frogs, so they shouldn't surprise anyone. I just think they're worth an honorable mention because of their age. Spore Frog was initially printed in Prophecy and Whiptongue Frog in Exodus. Come to think of it, these may have been Magic's earliest Frogs, since contemporaneous cards were labeled as either Beasts (Anurid) or Toads!

Lizards

Let's pivot next to the Lizard creature type, a highly proliferated creature type that has been around for a long time! Looking at Gatherer, the earliest card printed with a Lizard creature type I can find is Leaping Lizard, released in Homelands in 1995. Since then, there have been around 165 Lizard creatures printed (physically and/or digitally) in Magic!

Not all of them contain the "Lizard" subtype on the card, however. In fact, there are many Lizards that don't mention the word at all! For starters, there are two Legendary Creatures from Mirage that very much look like Lizards, but weren't initially printed as Lizards. This is because Legendary Creatures back in the day had the Summon - Legend type line.

The two creatures are Hivis of the Scale and Zirilan of the Claw. Both cards refer to Dragons in their text box, but Wizards has since errata'd them to be Lizard Shamans. Because they're more related to Dragons, they don't exactly support a Lizard typal theme all that well, but they're still good to know about.

Then you have the long list of Viashino creatures, which have since been updated to Lizards. I started listing them all, but the group of Viashino creatures that are now Lizards is well over thirty deep. A few examples include Bloodscale Prowler (Guildpact), Cornered Crook (Murders at Karlov Manor), Gloryscale Viashino (Alara Reborn), Mezzio Mugger (Streets of New Capenna Commander), Retromancer (Urza's Saga), Shivan Sand-Mage (Future Sight), Viashino Grappler (Invasion), and Viashino Warrior (Mirage). You can see that Viashino creatures were printed as early as Mirage and as recently as this year!

In this way, the Lizard creature type received the most significant overhaul of all the typal themes in Bloomburrow. Wizards made the decision to classify Viashino as Lizards, but I'm not sure how a newer player would know to assume this. I much prefer when cards identify their creature types accurately directly on the cards, but when it comes to Viashino, you just have to know that these count as Lizards, I guess.

The last Lizard I want to shout out is Rampart Crawler. As printed in Mercadian Masques, Rampart Crawler isn't a Lizard, nor is it a Viashino. It's not even a beast! Instead, this creature was printed as a Mercenary of all things!

Granted, Mercenaries were a popular and powerful creature type from Mercadian Masques block, so it's not like Wizards of the Coast chose a random type to give Rampart Crawler. It just seems like a miss that they didn't give this creature multiple subtypes. Why couldn't this be a Lizard Mercenary? I guess this was outside the bounds of what they were comfortable doing. Either way, this is one of the few Black Lizards in Magic worth being aware of!

Wrapping It Up

This wasn't a comprehensive list by any means. There were various changes to creature types made regarding Birds, for example. I distinctly remember many Falcon creatures from Magic's early days, and those have all since been updated to be Birds.

Perhaps I'll have to dive into a part two so I can finish rounding out some of the important creature type updates made over the years that will impact play with Bloomburrow cards. The list is long, and it's not always obvious that a card's type has changed. Hence the need to write them up here, to drive awareness, and possibly inspire the inclusion of various older cards in modern-day decks!