Bloomburrow Promos (PBLB): Complete Guide

Bloomburrow Promos (PBLB) is the promotional card set accompanying Bloomburrow (BLB), the August 2024 main set that whisked us away to a world of tiny, clothed, spell-slinging animals. Like all modern promo sets, PBLB isn't a draftable product - it's a collection of alternate-art, stamped, and event-exclusive printings distributed through tournaments, retail events, and special programs tied to Bloomburrow's release window.

With 160 cards in the set, PBLB draws together prerelease stamps, store event rewards, retail promotions, and a few surprises. Here's everything you need to know about where each promo comes from and how to get your hands on one.

How Bloomburrow Promos are distributed

Promos don't come in booster packs you can crack at random. Each card in PBLB is tied to a specific event, program, or retail product. Think of it as a parallel track running alongside the main set - your reward for showing up, playing, or buying through specific channels.

The main distribution categories for Bloomburrow Promos are:

• Prerelease events
• Buy-a-Box
• Open House / Bring-a-Friend
• Bundle promo
• Store Championship
• Commander Party
• Standard Showdown
• Booster tins (Walmart exclusive)

Prerelease promo

The Bloomburrow prerelease ran July 26 through August 1, 2024, ahead of the MTG Arena release on July 30. Prereleases are one of my favourite ways to get into a new set, and the promo here follows the usual model: players receive a stamped foil rare or mythic rare pulled from the Bloomburrow set. The exact card varies - it can be any rare or mythic from BLB - so there's a bit of lottery excitement baked in.

Format check: Prerelease stamp cards are the same printing as the regular version for rules purposes. The stamp is cosmetic only.

Buy-a-Box promo

The Buy-a-Box promo for Bloomburrow is Flubs, the Fool, a mechanically unique card with the expansion code BLC rather than BLB. "Mechanically unique" means this card doesn't appear anywhere else in the main Bloomburrow set - it exists solely as this promo. If you want a Flubs, the Fool, buying a booster box from a participating local game store during the qualifying window is your path.

Open House and Bring-a-Friend promo

The Open House event ran September 13-15, 2024, and the associated promo is a retro-frame printing of Ravenous Squirrel. Retro-frame cards use the pre-8th Edition card border aesthetic, which gives them a pleasantly vintage look that's become its own collector draw. Ravenous Squirrel is a fan favourite from Modern Horizons 2 (MH2, 2021), so seeing it rewarded to players bringing new friends into the game is a nice thematic fit - squirrels recruiting squirrels, essentially. 😄

Bundle promo

Pick up the Bloomburrow Bundle and you'll find an alternate-art Thundertrap Trainer tucked inside. Bundle promos are a reliable way to pick up a cosmetically distinct version of a card without competing in an event, which makes them a solid option if your local store schedule doesn't line up with the event calendar.

Store Championship promos

Store Championships ran August 24 through September 1, 2024, and this is where things get genuinely exciting for competitive players. There are three tiers of reward:

| Placement | Card | |---|---| | Participation | Monastery Swiftspear (foil) | | Top 8 | Shark Typhoon (foil) | | Winner | Textless Urza's Saga (foil) |

A textless Urza's Saga is a remarkable prize. Urza's Saga from Modern Horizons 2 is one of the most format-defining enchantment lands ever printed - legal in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage - and a textless winner's copy is the kind of thing you frame as much as you play. Monastery Swiftspear and Shark Typhoon are both powerful, widely played cards in their own right, so even a participation promo here has real appeal.

Commander Party promo

Commander Party events ran in two windows: August 16-22 and September 6-12, 2024. The promo is a retro-frame Heirloom Blade, a Commander staple that tutors up creatures of the same type when equipped. Tribal Commander decks have loved this card since its printing in Commander 2021, and the retro-frame treatment makes it a genuinely beautiful addition to any creature-tribal build.

Standard Showdown promo

Standard Showdown ran August 2 through September 19, 2024, and the promo here is a crossover: Ossification with art from the Cowboy Bebop collaboration. This is a notable outlier in the Bloomburrow Promos set - it's the only card I'm aware of in this batch that carries a crossover IP treatment. Ossification is a clean, efficient removal enchantment from The Brothers' War (BRO, 2022), and the Cowboy Bebop art gives it a distinctive look that stands apart from the rest of the animal-folk aesthetic.

Lore aside: Bloomburrow itself is a plane entirely populated by tiny anthropomorphic animals - mice, frogs, squirrels, rabbits - all fully dressed and wielding magic. Ossification's Cowboy Bebop art has nothing to do with that setting, which makes it an interesting choice for a Bloomburrow-adjacent promo.

Booster tin promos

In December 2024, three Bloomburrow-themed booster tins became available exclusively at select North American Walmart stores. Each tin contained five Play Boosters from 2024 releases and two promo cards:

• Patchwork Banner
• A retro-frame Liliana of the Dark Realms

Liliana of the Dark Realms is a Swamp-fetching planeswalker originally from Magic 2013 (M13, 2012), and the retro-frame treatment is a clean collector piece even if she's not a format powerhouse. Patchwork Banner is a Bloomburrow card that rewards playing a single creature type - fitting for a set built around animal tribes.

One of the three tins features art depicting a skunk-folk character who doesn't appear on any card in any Bloomburrow product. It's a small, charming world-building detail: a piece of Bloomburrow's setting that exists purely on the tin art, nowhere else. I find that kind of thing genuinely delightful - it suggests there are more residents of this world than the cards ever had room to show us.

In-set promo card numbers

Within the Bloomburrow card numbering system, the main-set promos occupy card numbers #381-386. The rest of the alternate treatments - borderless, extended art, anime foil, Starter Kit exclusives - fill out the numbers above 281 in the set's collector range. PBLB as a separate set code collects these and other promotional printings under one umbrella for tracking and collecting purposes.

How Bloomburrow Promos fit into the broader set

Bloomburrow itself is a substantial release: 281 regular cards, a full suite of alternate treatments (Fieldnotes, Woodland, Pawprint Seasons, raised-foil anime cards), four Commander decks, Special Guests, and a Starter Kit. The promo set sits on top of all of that as a layer for engaged players - the reward for showing up to events, buying bundles, or hunting down limited retail products.

If you're a collector trying to complete PBLB, the honest answer is that some of these cards require you to either play in specific events or trade for them afterwards, since most aren't available through standard booster distribution. The Store Championship cards in particular - especially the textless Urza's Saga - are likely to hold collector value for some time, in my opinion, simply because the supply is structurally limited by event attendance.

A note on Bloomburrow's place in Magic history

Bloomburrow is the first set in the Dragonstorm Arc and the last set printed in Chinese (Simplified). It also introduced several templating changes that carry forward into future sets - "Enters" replacing "enters the battlefield," and "first main phase" replacing "precombat main phase." These are small but meaningful shifts in how Magic cards read going forward.

The Bloomburrow Promos set, then, is a snapshot of a specific and memorable moment in Magic's history: the release of a genuinely unusual plane, told through a cast of tiny animal adventurers saving the world from elemental calamity. The promos are the collector's record of how that moment was celebrated at tables around the world. ✨