Welcome to another Magic Monday! Today, we’re diving into another deck review. This time, we are looking at the Family Matters deck from the Bloomburrow set. This deck is all about the power of family and the Offspring ability, which ensures you always have a growing family of creatures to do battle with.
The deck is led by Zinnia, Valley’s Voice, a powerful commander who brings the Offspring ability to the forefront. With Zinnia, every creature you cast can, when 2 extra mana is expended, have an itty-bitty baby; a token copy with power and toughness of 1/1. This ability allows you to flood the board with creatures and overwhelm your opponents with sheer numbers. It also means that any triggers that might occur when a creature enters the battlefield can, for a mere 2 mana, be triggered twice.
The primary strategy of the Family Matters deck revolves around Zinnia’s Offspring ability. By creating 1/1 token copies of your creatures, you can quickly amass an army. These tokens can be used to swarm your opponents or to create synergies with other cards that benefit from having a high number of creatures on the battlefield. For example, cards like Divine Visitation (which is not included in the deck as purchased) can turn these 1/1 tokens into 4/4 Angels with vigilance, significantly increasing your board presence.
Many of the creatures in the Family Matters deck have powerful ETB effects. These effects trigger when the creature enters the battlefield, and with Zinnia, you’ll be getting double value as both the original creature and its Offspring will trigger these effects. Cards like Solemn Simulacrum and Restoration Angel can generate massive value; grabbing lands, drawing you cards, gaining you life, or removing threats from the board.
It’s not just the ETB triggers on the cards and tokens that enter the battlefield that are useful, but also the effects of cards already on the board when other creatures enter. Agate Instigator, for example, will do damage when a creature enters, and when their 1/1 token enters. This pairs well with token-generating cards, such as Blade Splicer. If Blade Splicer enters with offspring, not only will 2 Blade Splicers hit the battlefield, but each will also generate a 3/3 Phyrexian Golem token, triggering Agate Instigator 4 times. And that’s assuming you never used Offspring on Agate Instigator itself to have more on the board…
Should you really wish to go down the route of quantity over quality, you’ve got options. Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive will let you launch those little baby creatures at your opponents with impunity, stopping them from being blocked by enemy creatures. Rapid Augmenter will also give these tokens haste, whilst it also gets stronger with every one that you summon.
Blink effects are interesting in this deck. It’s not really built for them, but it’s a good direction for development when you upgrade the deck. These are effects which exile and then return a creature to the battlefield, and they have the potential to be particularly powerful in this deck. By blinking a creature with a strong ETB effect, you can repeatedly trigger its ability. Cards like Ephemerate or Conjurer’s Closet can keep your creatures coming back, generating more and more value from their ETB effects. It should be noted definitively, however, that the offspring effect cannot be triggered by a creature blinking off and back onto the board.
The deck doesn’t do a whole lot with sacrificing creatures, but there’s some scope for expanding in that direction. With the constant flow of 1/1 tokens, you can easily fuel cards like Ashnod’s Altar to generate mana. There are plenty of other sacrifice outlets that can turn your Offspring tokens into valuable resources, allowing you to maintain a strong board state and outpace your opponents.
Zinnia, Valley’s Voice is very much the linchpin of the deck. Her Offspring ability means that every creature you cast will effectively double its impact on the game. This makes her a high-priority target for removal, so it’s crucial to have ways to protect her. One problem with the deck is that there’s isn’t much protection in here. Cards like Swiftfoot Boots or Lightning Greaves could be added to provide the necessary protection to keep Zinnia on the battlefield.
The Family Matters Commander deck from Bloomburrow was my introduction to Commander and my reintroduction to Magic, more widely. Its focus on the Offspring ability provides a really fun way to expand your board state. There are a few fiddly interactions, but this is a deck that’s really good for new players. The deck’s synergies and strategies make it a versatile and powerful option for Commander players, offering lots of possible avenues for tinkering with the deck. I’m still not quite sure what to do with mine. I did quickly add both Panharmonicon and Delney, Streetwise Lookout. I get a lot of value out of those. I was going to blink effects and really multiplying the value of ETB effects, but I got sidetracked by other things. I’ll definitely return to this deck and see what I can do, because it really is a lot of fun.
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