Welcome to the World of Bloomburrow cube! What a beautiful setting! My main goal when designing this cube was to keep my players immersed in the setting, so I excluded any cards I felt didn't fit into the world. The following are some of the pedantic rules I used to determine which cards could be included (and some examples):
Sadly, this left me with a card pool consisting of Bloomburrow, some Bloomburrow Commander, Special guests and a tiny selection of Foundations to play with, so I didn't have as much mechanical choice as I would have liked (here's hoping another Bloomburrow set gets printed in the near future). I think I cooked with the choices I had though, and the flavor is off the chart!
Since my group is a mix of veteran and new players so I wanted strategic depth while being as "new player friendly" as possible. This included using card versions with keywords defined whenever I could and cutting cards with rare or weird keywords (Evercoat Ursine and Marrow-Gnawer are both at risk of being cut for these reasons). I also tend to like playing with a group rather than one-on-one, which is why I included many of the Bloomburrow Commander cards.
THEMES:
There is so much tribal in the Bloomburrow set that I had to include some, but it's really only rats and squirrels that have tribal cards. Mice and rabbits each have one or two cards that are tribal, while Frogs, Otters, Birds and Lizards have only one each (and those cards had to work on their own without a tribe). Almost all the bats and birds were removed from the cube, as I felt their cards didn't interact well with the themes I was building into the cube.
If you've gotten all the way to the end of this overview, thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your comments or suggestions and if you have any recommendations on other cards that I could include (that work with my ridiculous rules) let me know! This is also the first cube I've ever made and it needs lots of testing, so I'm sure there will be many changes in the future.
I've spend a lot of time on the presentation of this cube and if you're interested in seeing all my silly fancy embelleshments you can find me on instagram @writtenplaces where I also post pictures of many other nerdy projects.