Scute Swarm and Mutate is a Match Made in Green Hell

 Scute Swarm is a 1/1 Insect creature for 2G. It has the following text: Landfall: when a land enters the battlefield under your control, create a 1/1 green insect token. If you control six or more lands, instead make a token that is a copy of Scute Swarm.

Anyone who understands exponential functions can realize how insane this gets after only a few lands six and over. It's 2 to the X, where X is the number of lands you play. So after one land, you have two, after two lands, you have four, three and you have eight, etc.

While a 1/1 body is not terribly hard to deal with, the real power of this is overwhelming your opponent with a repeating replication that requires you wipe out every last one of them to keep them from making more.

As such, any sort of sweeping damage spells or black -X/-X kind of sweepers will be very important should this become a major part of the metagame.

But if you'll recall, just two sets ago, we got a mechanic that lets you transform your creatures into some powerful kaiju monsters - Mutate. And because the text of a card will still refer to itself (even if the name is different,) you get some total madness: the Scute Swarm copies any mutated effects, as well as power and toughness if you put something over it, to all copies.

So while it'll still take you 5 landfalls to get over 20 Scute Swarm copies on the board - enough to, in a vacuum, slay the opponent... and given that you'll have 32, it's unlikely they'll have twelve creatures on the board to block enough to keep you from sweeping in for the kill.

But when you, say, mutate a Migratory Greathorn onto your Scute Swarm, not only do you get that extra land to duplicate it, but you've also now got a solid 3/4 body. You only need seven 3/4s to take down a full-health opponent, and three lands (one of which you just got for free) is all you need to get eight of these.

Ah, but we're still thinking in too much of a vacuum.

Another really promising card in Zendikar Rising is Lotus Cobra. This is a 2/1 snake for 1G that has Landfall: add one mana of any color to your mana pool. So you're either getting bonus mana for the lands you drop, or, far more importantly, getting mana out of lands that come into play tapped.

You know, like most ramp spells do.

If you have a hand full of Cultivates or other Rampant Growth variants, they start paying for themselves, meaning at a relatively early turn, you can chain these spells to get out a massive number of lands out.

This is good news for ramp decks anyway.

While I haven't managed to pull it off yet, there's a combo I've built into my Landfall deck (it's Bant colors, with a blue dip for Uro and a white dip actually for just the common... maybe uncommon Fearless Fledgling, which is just there to give me a cheap creature that benefits from Landfall and can get giant.)

Yorvo, Lord of Garenbrig, is a 0/0 Giant Noble for GGG, but it comes into play with 4 +1/+1 counters. Every time a green creature comes into play, he gets another +1/+1 counter, and then another if that creature still has a higher power than he does.

Which means that every Scute Swarm puts a counter on him. And that gets insane pretty quick.

Ok, now, sure, we're overwhelming the opponent with sheer numbers, but what if someone is blocking your Yorvo with something that's indestructible or renewable?

Garruk's Uprising might be the answer.

The important thing to remember with that, though, is to be very careful not to let your Scute Swarms trigger Garruk's Uprising's card draw mechanic. Because you will mill yourself very quickly.

Anyway, this does take a little time to set up, but given the power of Green Stompy last season and the likely power of some variant that incorporates the amazing ramp potential of Lotus Cobra, well... unless Dimir Rogues is enough to stave it off, I wouldn't be shocked if there were some bans here.