Squirrelled Away Review

Dawn of a new dray…

Magic: The Gathering may be over 30 years old, but with the recent release of the Bloomburrow set, it feels like Magic is as fresh and vibrant as ever. Commander has long been a ‘kitchen-table’ favourite format and the new Bloomburrow Squirreled Away commander deck shows off everything that’s best about the most recent round of Magic: The Gathering pre-cons.

Bloomburrow as a set has been generally well received and it’s easy to see why; the art style feels modern, the creatures are both cute and cut-throat and the mechanics of the set as a whole are easy to understand, fun and fit in well with pre-existing archetypes. As a ‘nation of animal lovers’ who grew up on tales of rabbits and woodland creatures, I can see the set as a whole doing well here. Add to that some actually pretty interesting lore, I think Bloomburrow has a lot to give for those who are interested in the storytelling aspects of Magic too, giving the set a wide potential audience.

I think it was a wise choice to include a squirrel-based deck in this set of commander precons and Squirreled Away has a lot going for it. The deck is semi-powerful out of the box, with a few key cards that provide value to existing players, as well as scope for further upgrades in a few different directions, meaning it’s a versatile deck ideal for newcomers to the game who might be looking to improve it over time.

Nuts and bolts

Squirreled Away features the brand-new green and black commander Hazel of the Rootbloom, whose main effect is to create a copy of a token and two copies if the token you choose to copy is a squirrel token. Hazel only costs a total of 4 mana to cast, meaning that she becomes af-fordable early in the game and so you can very quickly snowball a token or two into a small army of squirrels. Hazel also allows tapping tokens for mana, giving much earlier access to the big flashy spells that usually have to be saved until late game and which can seriously swing the battle in your favour.

On top of all of that, flavour wise, Hazel is just incredibly cool; she’s a powerful druid who leads a faction named after a poison and whose goal is to reclaim the world for nature. I feel like the art direction is just killing it here. “May all your caches be full” reads the flavour text on Hazel’s card and with Hazel at the helm I feel like all my caches are indeed full.

This deck also contains a huge number of token producing and token synergy cards, allowing you to adapt your strategy on the fly as the game proceeds and giving you a number of targets for Hazel’s token copying ability, so that you always have the right tool for the job.

As is usual with the commander precons, this deck also comes with an ‘alternate commander’; a legendary creature designed to give some variety to games and to allow for some different upgrade builds for the deck. Squirreled Away features a classic: Chatterfang, Squirrel Warrior. Like Hazel, Chatterfang also derives a great deal of utility from the token synergies of the deck. Chatterfang’s ability allows extra squirrel token creation whenever another token is gener-ated, again allowing for a rapid deployment of squirrels who are all coming for your oppo-nent's nuts. Chatterfang also has the (admittedly somewhat situational) Forestwalk ability, which, when applicable, can come in handy for consistently whittling away some of your op-ponent's life each turn.

Squirreled Away also contains a possible third commander in The Odd Acorn Gang, who I could see being a force to be reckoned with for those who want to tweak the precon slightly. The Gang provide some well needed juice to power up squirrels as well as what could be a very powerful card draw engine with the right set up, with their ability allowing a draw when a squirrel does combat damage. It’s certainly difficult to argue that this set lacks options!