Let's. Get. Nuts.

Bloomburrow is so close you can almost smell it, like a distant thunderstorm arriving on the wind. Wizards has been hyping this set since February, and it looks like it may deliver on that hype. The art is amazing, invoking classic fantasy novels like Redwall while also harkening back to the early days of Magic. The set feels like pure nostalgia, but in a way that's different from the nostalgia we felt a couple of years ago when we returned to Dominaria and the Phyrexian storyline.

For the first time in my life, building a squirrel deck is somewhat difficult. We finally have options! For so long, building a deck with a squirrel theme was, "Just jam every squirrel you can find in there; they'll all fit." But when I sat down to brew a squirrel deck for post-Bloomburrow Standard, I really struggled trying to figure out which squirrels to include and how many of each should be included.

Squirrel fans are truly blessed. What a time to be alive.

Here There Be Squirrels | BLB Standard | Travis Hall

• Creatures (23)
• 1 Curious Forager
• 2 Bakersbane Duo
• 4 Bonecache Overseer
• 4 Camellia, the Seedmiser
• 4 Osteomancer Adept
• 4 Valley Rotcaller
• 4 Vinereap Mentor

• Instants (7)
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Pawpatch Formation
• 2 Feed the Cycle
• 3 Cache Grab

• Sorceries (2)
• 2 Season of Loss

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Scavenger's Talent

• Lands (24)
• 2 Forest
• 3 Swamp
• 1 Argoth, Sanctum of Nature
• 1 Oakhallow Village
• 2 Mudflat Village
• 3 Restless Cottage
• 4 Blooming Marsh
• 4 Cavern of Souls
• 4 Llanowar Wastes

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Soul-Guide Lantern
• 1 Season of Loss
• 2 Feed the Cycle
• 2 Lively Dirge
• 2 Tranquil Frillback
• 3 Pawpatch Formation
• 4 Duress

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When building a post-rotation deck, I tend to lean on the newer cards more than established cards, mostly to determine the power level of the new set. For example, I'm including Season of Loss in this build when it's possible that Gix's Command is a better card for the deck. Similarly, instead of just jamming a playset of Go for the Throat, I want to try out Feed the Cycle. It may be that Feed the Cycle eats up too much of our Food (pun not intended) and it interferes with the rest of our deck, but it may also be that the Food loss is negligible (or even beneficial if Camellia is in play).

Until we play with the new cards, we won't really know if they're good enough for the format. So, let's jam as many as we can in our decks these first few weeks. As a typal deck, Squirrels was always going to lean heavily on Bloomburrow cards anyway, since there is only one other squirrel card in Standard.

Forage is the main ability for Squirrel decks in Bloomburrow, so when building your deck you need to figure out whether you plan to lean on Food tokens or filling your graveyard to enable the mechanic. Since Wizards opted to reprint Rest in Peace (a decision I hate with the fire of a thousand suns), I leaned toward Food tokens in this first build, though there are some graveyard synergies still present, and Osteomancer Adept is just too strong not to include.

Camellia, the Seedmiser is the cornerstone of the deck, and as such, I decided on running the full four copies even though she's Legendary. Squirrels are traditionally a go-wide deck, and Camellia is the best card at pushing that strategy, making your creatures harder to block thanks to granting Menace, while also popping out little Squirrel tokens and pumping all squirrels with +1/+1 counters at the same time.

Vinereap Mentor is probably the most important building block in the deck.

Valley Rotcaller will probably win you some games you had no business winning. The life gain is sneaky relevant, as it breaks the symmetry with the aggro decks if you're just smashing into each other.

I went back and forth on how many Bonecache Overseers to include, starting with two and ultimately deciding on the full four copies. There aren't many ways to recover from an early sweeper in the deck, to the point where I considered Lively Dirge in the main. I'm hoping the Little Squirrel That Could here can provide the card advantage you need in those matches where you need to recover quickly.

Scavenger's Talent is the one card I'm most unsure of. It may be that we don't need the Class, and that the squirrels enable Food tokens well enough that additional creatures would be better for the deck.

The mana base is deceptively difficult. There are a lot of options for dual lands to include, but finding the right balance and making sure you don't include too many lands that enter tapped is a struggle. In a perfect world, we could run the full set of Restless Cottage as a way to create food, and a full set of Underground Mortuary to put cards in the graveyard. I would bet on Standard being a fast format post-rotation, and eight lands that always enter tapped would be too many to consistently compete with Mono-Red or Boros. Looking ahead, it may ultimately end up that the format is dictated by Sunspine Lynx and we have to move to mana bases dominated by basic lands, but until that hoary beast rears its ugly head, we're going to be greedy and try to maximize our lands. Argoth, Sanctum of Nature was the last land included, but it's a low-cost way to enable Forage.

The sideboard is as basic as can be until we get a better look at how the format shakes out.

Other Cards Considered:

Thornvault Forager or Bakersbane Duo? In this iteration, I wanted to put as many Forage enablers in the deck as I could find, so Thornvault Forager was the last card cut. We don't really need the acceleration, and while the search ability would be fantastic, it felt like the deck shouldn't run the card primarily for that ability. If, after playing a few games, it feels like we have plenty of ways to make Food, we may move Forager back into the deck.

Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler was one of the first cards I added to the deck, and it was like a dagger taking it out. But with Tyvar in the deck, we just weren't running enough creatures to make it worth the inclusion. I opted for Cache Grab instead.

Heaped Harvest was spoiled very late and I think it has the legs to see Standard play. However, the average cost of the cards in this deck is so low to the ground that I don't think it's worth inclusion here.

And there you have my first take on Squirrels in Standard! I can't tell you how excited I am to play with my favorite creature type. There are a lot of synergies in Squirrels, and I'm hoping it can prove to be a playable deck.

You can find more of my musings on Twitter @travishall456