Upcoming critter-filled MTG set Bloomburrow features perhaps the strangest sounding Magic: The Gathering mechanic of all time. This new ability, which is going to be particularly prevalent for rabbits – and that’s clearly not a coincidence – is called offspring.
Sorry, furries/don’t worry, everyone else, there’s nothing NSFW about this MTG keyword, odd as it first seems. Instead, Offspring lets you create teeny, tiny baby versions of your Bloomburrow creatures. The examples we’ve seen include unique tokens with very adorable art.
To dive into this mechanic in more depth, it’s (like most mechanics) a version of Kicker. When you cast a creature with Offspring, you can pay an extra two mana. If you do, you create an additional copy of the creature that’s a 1/1 but has all the same abilities.
Take Flowerfoot Swordmaster, an uncommon that works with the mice (red-white) deck’s combat trick theme. The Valiant ability lets you buff all your mice when they’re targeted by a spell, but only once per turn. Making a second mouse with Offspring is obviously useful here, and if you’ve got loads of combat tricks, you could use one on the original creature, then one on its babby to give your entire mouse army a two-power buff.
A much more powerful example is Warren Warleader, which can make attacking tokens or pump the board when it hops into combat. With an offspring token on the board as well, you can have two tokens, two pump effects, or one of each.
Of course, it’s completely adorable to have these baby animals on Bloomburrow. However, there are totally going to be ways to make offspring of creatures that wouldn’t usually have the ability.
In fact, the new Jeskai Bloomburrow commander gives Offspring to every creature card you play. It makes us want to search high and low for the silliest thing to babify. Baby Thalia? Baby Krenko? Obviously, it’s mechanically suboptimal to do this with legendary creatures, but it’s also much funnier.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out this list of all the MTG sets, and our guide to the MTG release schedule.