Upgrading Commander Precon - Peace Offering, with Ms. Bumbleflower

Every new set brings us new Commander decks, with the new characters and themes of the new Magic: The Gathering cards. This time, we'll get to take a closer look at Bloomburrow's furry forest creatures.

In today's article, we'll review Peace Offering, a precon from this new set, and see which cards we can remove and which cards we can add to make it more cohesive and playable.

I was quite excited to work on the 4 new precon Bloomburrow decks. I love small animals, so Bloomburrow was an obvious success in my eyes. So, I cut a good part of this introduction and decided to go straight to the point: these decks are not as optimized as they could be.

Obvious cards that could be in these decks are not, and, instead, weak options were preferred for their slots in each archetype. Some new cards seem a bit mixed up in these decks, and obvious choices for certain strategies show up in other products. And, of course, there are many cards thrown in randomly in lists they don't belong.

Peace Offering

Now, let's discuss Peace Offering, today's deck. In the box itself, you can find its preestablished themes: +1/+1 counters, a quite intuitive theme, and Group Hug.

Group Hug is a strategy that focuses on helping your opponents, boosting the benefits they get, and improving their game plan. On a surface level, it seems awful, and probably makes new players, who are thirsty to win and only see their own board, give up on the idea. But the true value of the Group Hug strategy goes beyond that.

The benefits you offer your opponents in this strategy are not the same as the ones you'll get - for each bonus you give them, you get two. That being said, this deck fails this strategy spectacularly, and mostly only offers cards that offer these benefits symmetrically, so they benefit you and your opponent in almost the same way, instead of benefitting you more than your opponent.

To improve this list, we'll need to change a lot…

The original list is the following:

Like all precons, this list offers us two options to use as commanders in its colors. One is on the cover of the box, and the other is included alongside the other 99 cards.

Ms. Bumblefower

Ms. Bumbleflower, the rabbit, is this deck's main commander, and is a Bant commander, so, she's blue, white, and green, and has vigilance. Her ability states: whenever you cast a spell, a target opponent draws a spell. Then, you may give a creature +1/+1 and flying. If this is exactly the second time this ability resolves, that is, when you cast your second spell that turn, on top of it all you'll also draw two cards. This means you and your opponents will draw cards with Bumbleflower.

Firstly, this ability is an interesting bargaining chip, as it lets you negotiate draws with players in exchange for favors and advantages throughout the game. Secondly, it looks appealing to your opponents, but it actually benefits you more if you spread it well - you'll always draw two cards while your opponents will draw only one card each. And, of course, you can put the +1/+1 counter on any creature, not only your own, so it is even more relevant to the sense of community the Group Hug strategy leans on. It is also a good tool to protect and buff your creatures, as well as to bargain with your opponents.

Mr. Foxglove

On the other side, you have Mr. Foxglove as your second commander option. He is an outlaw rogue that plays by his own rules.

Mr. Foxglove is not that bad as a commander. On the contrary, I believe he is much better than Ms. Bumbleflower in general. The problem is that he doesn't really fit this deck, and, to play him, you'll need to make significant changes to the list, almost rebuild it entirely, in fact.

His ability interacts with the number of cards in the defending player's hand. If they have more cards than you, you'll draw until you have the same number of cards in hand. So, he's perfect to draw countless cards against certain opponents and trigger abilities like Ominous Seas's and Psychosis Crawler's. If the defending player has less cards than you, you may put a creature from your hand onto the battlefield without paying for its costs and without risking your opponents countering it, once you won't actually cast it. And that's a pity for this deck, as it doesn't really play expensive creatures.

Mr. Foxglove would probably go better in an Eldrazi shell or with other big creatures, like angels, since we're using white. In this deck, he'll return to you some of the advantage you gave to an opponent (namely the many cards you gave them) and make you equals. However, using him as the main card in this deck, straight from the box, is a relatively terrible idea.

So, we'll move on with Ms. Bumbleflower.

As usual, precons include cards you can easily swap for stronger versions, or cards that just don't fit the list's main strategy.

The first card from this precon I decided to remove straight away was Bloodroot Apothecary. Even though this is one of the most fun squirrels around, as well as one of the most potentially destructive squirrels in all of these four Commander decks, we have to agree it doesn't really fit this list.

Firstly, it is very fragile, so all your opponents have to do is wait until they get a removal to get rid of it and then use all the tokens they saved up so far. Secondly, this deck doesn't include other ways to give artifact tokens to your opponents, so its single Treasure won't be that helpful to its toxic ability. Mainly because we'll also remove An Offer You Can't Refuse to add other options.

Martial Impetus is also quite weak and won't protect you all that much. The same applies to Tenuous Truce, which will be destroyed eventually, and, considering the nature of this precon, always by your opponent. Unfortunately, I also had to remove Kwain, Itinerant Meddler, the theme of my first-ever article for Cards Realm - I'd love to build a deck with rabbits and nothing else, but that's not for today.

You can also easily remove Jolly Gerbils from this deck, particularly as we don't have many cards with gift, and the few we have we'll remove as well - for instance, Long River's Pull, which is just a worse Counterspell. We'll also get rid of Octomancer because, once again, we'll hardly create interesting tokens with this deck.

By the way, Fisher's Talent also needed to go. It is a great card, but doesn't add much to this deck, which can draw a lot of cards naturally. Instead, we'll play another talent from this set that makes more sense with what we are planning.

Rishkar, Peema Renegade is great, but we'll use other interactions with counters in its place. Furthermore, we don't need that much mana for this deck.

This means we can also remove Coveted Jewel, a bad mana rock even for a deck that helps your opponents. It also draws an absurd number of cards to anyone who takes control of it. We don't want our opponents controlling a card like this, and it will be difficult to regain control of it once we lose it. The same applies to Secret Rendezvous, which also gives a huge, clear advantage to our opponents. These cards are just too symmetrical.

Otherwise, we also removed Spore Frog, Intellectual Offering, and Promise of Loyalty. One Evolving Wilds came out so we could add another land. Then, we removed Tamiyo, Field Researcher, which is clearly the most gorgeous card in this deck, because she wasn't helping us much.

Instead of Evolving Wilds, we'll play one Scavenger Grounds, which is perfect as graveyard hate. This deck didn't include this mechanic originally, so it is even better.

We swapped Fisher's Talent for Innkeeper's Talent, which can give us many, many counters very easily, and, on top of it all, also protects our creatures with them and gives them Ward 1.

Of course, we also added Propaganda and Ghostly Prison, as we want to protect our deck from intense attacks with wide boards. We need to protect ourselves from enemy attacks as best as we can. Then, we also included The Second Doctor, my mandatory nod to Universes Beyond : Doctor Who for this article.

Since I mentioned Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, let's head to Everybody Lives!, which is a great addition to this deck. It lets us somewhat freeze the game in place and force a stronger opponent to focus on another enemy. As for Sergeant John Benton, he'll draw us a reasonable (even great) number of cards, and help us forge alliances.

Farewell works great as a board wipe, as does Realm-Cloaked Giant. However, Farewell has more reach, and deals with artifacts, enchantments, and graveyards as well.

Grasp of Fate and Fractured Identity are equally great spot removals. The first deals with a problem on each opponent's board, and the second is a true removal for the Group Hug strategy, as it gives our opponents a gift while it lets us remove a threat.

Frantic Search draws us cards and activates Ms. Bumbleflower's ability once for free: it costs 3 mana and untaps three lands.

Mystic Confluence is extremely versatile, so we also added it to our deck. On the other side, The Council of Four fits many situations perfectly and also gives us a lot of value, considering this deck's strategy. After all, it triggers when we cast spells and draw cards.

Wedding Ringis the perfect bargaining chip for certain opponents, as two players (you included!) will benefit from its properties. Drannith Magistrate is great to stall matches; it gets rid of cascade, cards in opponents' graveyards, and even their commanders.

Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar will protect us during our turn and interacts well with the counters we'll put on our creatures, drawing us cards.

Daxos of Meletis will grow considerably in our hands, and should be full of +1/+1 counters by the end of the game. We'll also use it to get cards from the top of our opponents' decks, and gives us a lot of life in the process. We'll use their weapons against them.

Finally, we have Blind Obedience, which is interesting. Its text seems to include one white and black hybrid mana, but that's an illusion. When you look at it a bit more closely, you'll notice that it is only included in the reminder text of the Extort ability. As the reminder text does exactly what it is supposed to - it reminds us of how this ability works - this mana is not exactly in this card. So, in the future, this card might be printed with only "Extort" and not the italic reminder right next to it. That means that you can, yes, use your Blind Obedience in any deck with white, even if your commander isn't black. That being said, we included Blind Obedience in this deck as more protection.

This is how our upgraded list turned out:

Other Ideas

We can also use other cards in this deck, like Counterspell, Prince Imrahil the Fair, Evolution Witness, Emrakul’s Messenger, Fathom Mage, Tidal Barracuda, and many others. They're all great additions to this list!

Finally, here's a deck idea for Mr. Foxglove:

I was delighted with Bloomburrow. The flavor of the cards, the "children's book" aesthetic, which reminded me of "Little Bear", and seeing many of my favorite animals all made me truly happy with this set.

I hope I achieved my goal of improving this deck and making it more cohesive and pleasant to pilot.

Did you like this list? Tell us your thoughts in our comment section below!

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!