Thursday, July 9, 2020

My Indatha Mutate Deck Probably Has My Best Win Ratio

Having not totally gotten the concept initially, and figuring out which cards would fit best, I've realized that, when properly stacked up, and given enough time to grow, this mutate deck is nearly unstoppable.

Here's how it works:

Mutate encourages you to focus on making one enormous, nasty monster. Each time you mutate a new creature into it, various effects go off based on all the creatures that have mutated into it previously. For instance, Zargoth Mamba, which doesn't actually have the mutate ability itself (and thus needs to be a base you build onto) gives a creature an opponent controls -2/-2 until end of turn each time you mutate it.

So you're incentivized to keep building on that one creature, rather than spreading the love, because you basically get the same ETB effect each time, stacking up. When you have a Glowstone Recluse (that not only grants reach, but also adds two +1/+1 counters onto the creature each time it mutates) and a Vulpikeet (giving it flying - making the reach redundant, sure, but also giving a +1/+1 counter whenever it mutates) and keep building on that, it's getting a permanent +3/+3 every time you mutate.

I've found that it's good to have a couple of strong base creatures. My favorites are Crystalline Giant, an artifact creature that gets a new ability counter each turn (I think Flying, Vigilance, First Strike, Death Touch, Lifelink, and Hexproof, maybe also Menace?) and Paradise Druid, which helps you ramp up mana and has the massive benefit of being Hexproof while untapped (toss a mutate creature with Vigilance on there like Majestic Auricorn on there and you're untouchable.)

The Hexproof helps tremendously to protect your monster from black kill spells and blue control spells. Meanwhile, if you're stacking up all these +1/+1 counters, it makes any damage-based removal like red's burn or green's fighting ineffective. Frankly, if I have a hexproof monster with vigilance and a way to keep pumping up +1/+1 counters, I don't think I've ever lost.

For some reason, I seem to draw too few land very frequently, which might just mean I need to toss in more. I've got a ton of dual lands and four Indatha Triomes, which means mana issues typically don't become too bad, though it does make the deck a little slow out of the gate given that most of the lands come into play tapped (I do have two Overgrown Tombs, a Godless Shrine, and a Temple Garden to give me the option for fast mana, as well as some basic lands.)

If there's one real weakness to the deck, it's a lack of card draw. Eventually, the deck sort of devolves into a "draw, play, wait" playstyle. The hope, then, is that by this point you've created an unstoppable monster, and you can afford a lack of cards.

I'm really curious to see how this archetypes works with other Triomes. I want to experiment with blue, which I guess would mean U/G/R, U/W/R, or U/B/G. I'm a little hesitant to lost Green's color-fixing, but it's also possible card-draw could make up for that.

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