MTG Bloomburrow’s variedfactions of woodland animalsmay contain cute and cuddly critters, but a large portion of these animal adventurers are surprisingly lethal fighters.
While Bloomburrow isn’t lacking in endearing Bird Creatures, their primary Commander; Kastral, the Windcrested, is packing some merciless combat abilities to take flight and deplete your opponents’ life totals.
Kastral is a 4/5 Legendary Bird Scout with 4/5 stats and the Flying ability. Many of the all-timegreat Commanders in Azorius colorscome with Flying, and it’s no surprise to see the tricky evasive ability attached to this Bloomburrow Bird.
Outside of its own combat capabilities, Kastral, the Windcrested is easily the bestMTG Commanderavailable for Bird typal decks, edging out previous picks like Gwaihir the Windlord.
Azoriusis usually the Bird color identity of choice in MTG, allowing you to stack a Kastral deck with support from outside of the card’s debut set.
Kastral comes with multiple abilities for its controller to choose from, which activate whenever one or more Bird Creatures you control deal combat damage to another player. These abilities range from drawing a card to buffing your board by putting a +1/+1 counter on each Bird you control.
Kastral, the Windcrested’s more cutthroat combat ability is among these choices, allowing you to put a Bird card from your grave or hand directly onto the battlefield. While this extra board presence without mana investment is highly useful, the selected card comes with afinality counter.
Once the card with a finality counter on it leaves the field, it is exiled, making it incredibly difficult to return to the game outside of a limited selection of MTG abilities.
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By making use of Kastral’s abilities at the optimal time, MTG players can soar over opponents’ defenses with a whole flock of powerful Birds, closing out the game in just a few short turns.
Jack Bye was a Games Writer on Dexerto’s UK team, specializing in ecommerce content. He is a Magic The Gathering and DnD expert, covering all things tabletop games. He also has bylines at WePC and VideoGamer.
