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Spoiler Highlight: Blossoming Tortoise in Standard, Pioneer and Commander

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Wilds of Eldraine has revealed Blossoming Tortoise to us, a card that has synergy with strategies which care about lands. In today's article, we'll analyze this card and its potential to impact multiple formats.

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translated by Joey

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revised by Tabata Marques

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About the Card

Blossoming Tortoise is a 4-mana cost creature, which has three abilities which synergize with lands, deeply valuing the ramp strategies in several formats.

Its first ability allows its controller to place the three top cards in their deck in their graveyard, an ETB effect which also triggers when it attacks, and it even allows you to place a land that is in your graveyard on your battlefield, tapped. Its second ability reduces the cost of activated abilities in lands you control, and the last ability acts as a land creature Lord.

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All three of this turtle's abilities care about lands and fit well in ramp strategies, but its cost reduction ability is by far the most important and powerful, opening up space for many interactions and combos in many formats. Besides that, Blossoming Tortoise is a creature which has a good body for combat, which adds even more to this card.

Now that we have understood its abilities, what exactly can be done with this card? In which formats will it possibly play, and which interactions can it generate?

Blossoming Tortoise in Standard

Standard already has an archetype focused on ramp which tries to put bombs such as Atraxa, Grand Unifier on board as quick as possible, creating lots of value and pressuring your opponent with a powerful creature, but there are many other cards which fit well in ramp strategies and have synergy with Blossoming Tortoise.

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This turtle can play well alongside any of the cards above, maximizing their abilities. Maybe a Simic list, or even a Mono-Green list focused around ramp can appear in this format using Blossoming Tortoise.

Blossoming Tortoise in Pioneer and Explorer

In Pioneer and Explorer, this turtle has high chances of playing in Mono-Green Devotion due to its ability of reducing the activation cost of Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, and even add 2 Devotion. It is still hard to say how many copies of this card this deck could use to extract this turtle's ability as much as possible, but one of the things which makes this card interesting in constructed formats, except Commander, is the fact that it isn't legendary - which makes it easy to use four copies of it in any deck that wants to.

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There are other very interesting interactions this card has with lands, such as Shimmering Grotto, being able to create mana of any color with no additional cost with a land that goes in standing up, or even transforming Mutavault into a creature for free.

Blossoming Tortoise in Commander

In Commander, Blossoming Tortoise makes an infinite combo possible with Lavaclaw Reaches, a land that can transform itself into a creature with an X-cost ability which increases the power of Lavaclaw Reaches by +X/+0.

As the turtle reduces the cost of land's activated abilities by 1 generic mana, so, by having Lavaclaw and Tortoise in play, you'll be able to transform the land and activate its X=1 ability for free, guaranteeing an infinite buff which can be used as a win condition with a Fling, for instance.

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Final Words

Blossoming Tortoise is a powerful card which will certainly see play in many formats, allowing very interesting interactions for ramp strategies. Wilds of Eldrainelink outside website is set to release on September 8th, and there are still numerous cards to be revealed.

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One more article finished, thank you for reading so far. Leave your impressions of the card, suggestions or critiques, in the comment section. I'll try to answer all. See you next time!