The Kaijube

The Mutate Cube

Introduction

This is my take on the mutate cube with a ton of upgrades from the last year of standard sets due to a lack of attention on my part. I've been doing a lot of work on updating it over the last few weeks (October 2024). Hopefully I can start giving more focused updates with each set as they are spoiled and released. For those of you unaware, mutate was a mechanic introduced in "Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths." One of the main themes of the cube relies on that so there are a lot of synergies between the cards and the easiest paths to deck building is with picking one of the Wedges or an enemy color pair and splashing for a third color. That being said there are also singular cards for the Shards and 4 cards for each ally color pair to allow for the rare off theme draft. Each one of the shard cards are either powerful build arounds or are good role-players to splash into an existing archetype.

• Theme: Mutate, Enemy color and wedge focus
• Power level: Medium-low. This is not an environment where you can play Moxen.
• Construction Quirk 1: Many mutate cards have multiple copies, mostly the lower rarity ones.

Mutate

This cube's bread and butter. The cube isn't entirely about mutate, but every color has a good number of mutate creatures as well as creatures that are good to mutate onto. Some colors - mostly in the Sultai trio - are much better at utilizing the mutate-specific triggers.

One thing about mutate is that, if you didn't draft Ikoria, you probably don't realize that you can't mutate onto Human creatures. I am continuing the tradition from Lee Mcleod and CCR's original build of the cube with no humans in it. The only exception was that with the release of Modern Horizons 3 and the joke that Tarmogoyf has become I decided to make a subtheme of the cube Goyf with a few of the medium goyfs and Disa the Restless included who is a human, so for the uninitiated there will have to be a reminder that you can't mutate onto humans. Additionally, I added the enduring enchantment creatures which add a level of mutate rulings because of the return to the battlefield clause, along with Murderous Rider and Jackdaw Savior.

Here are some examples of creatures you can mutate onto as more of an aura effect:

And some of the best part of mutate is what happens when you interact with a mutate stack. Some fan favorites:

Blinking a mutated stack exiles all the creatures in the stack, and then returns them all to the battlefield unmutated. Basically, the mutated creature falls apart. Similarly, Lesser Masticore's persist trigger would bring back Masticore and everything that was mutated onto it with a -1/-1 counter.

Copying a mutated creature copies EVERYTHING on the copy. It's essentially the whole mutate stack, except since the clone is only one card, it doesn't count for having mutated before. So cards like Auspicious Starrix wouldn't find any past mutations.

When a mutated creature dies, Mimic Vat exiles the entire stack of mutate creatures. Then when you activate the Vat, you pick one of the creatures you've exiled to create a token copy of it.

Color Combinations

This cube primarily supports only the five enemy color pairs, plus the corresponding enemy tri-color wedges. There is a small collection of allied cards which mostly aim to be helpful to wedge drafters, but can also be splashed. Themes between the five pairs are meant to overlap and complement the wedges.

White black is the slowest color combination of the enemy colors. Played alone, you can use Black's removal and value creatures and white's endless supply of fodder to make the black engines work.

: Adding red to put you in Mardu lets you go into a more sacrifice space with the most token producers in the cube. You can go lightly into red for Mardu removal (Crackling Doom, Sacred Fire), or you can go heavy into it and lean into the token theme with Heroic Reinforcements and Fervent Charge.

: Adding green to go Abzan puts you in more of a graveyard focus. Karador, Ghost Chieftan, Nethroi, Apex of Death, and Death's Oasis are all strict Abzan graveyard matters cards, and dipping into just green-black cards gives you things like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis and Chatterfang, Squirrel General for a small squirrel subtheme.

Blue red is, unsurprisingly, the spells-matters color pair. Cards like Valley Floodcaller and Kitsa, Otterball Elite join with Alania, Divergent Storm to allow you to copy and receive bonuses on your spells.

: Adding green twists things and typically gains a more midrange focus. Your Prophetic Bolts and The Royal Scions do more to help close the game out with large green creatures than combo with spellcast cards. The Temur cards themselves like Kalamax, the Stormsire and Vodalian Mindsinger help play into that one-two punch: we're still interested in card flow, but also in killing people with large creatures.

: Spells really matter. Monowhite doesn't give much outside of extra spells and Clarion Spirit, but the Jeskai cards really care. Whirlwind of Thought, Jeskai Ascendancy, and the legendary Vadrok, Apex of Thunder all really play into the base blue red game plan.

If you like graveyard synergies, black/green is the color pair for you. Black and green also have a very large concentration of mutate creatures with mutate triggers, so you can really go about this a few ways. You can go tall with Mutate creatures and combo them with things like Nested Shambler, or just play a midrange graveyard focused deck that can top out at Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis.

: White gives you access to all the graveyard black/white cards like Unburial Rites and the Abzan ones like Karador, Ghost Chieftan.

: Blue gives access to Sultai graveyard cards, which admittedly aren't fantastic other than Sidisi, Brood Tyrant. What blue really adds is an incredible density of Mutate triggers and Otrimi, the Ever-Playful so you can really live the Kaijube dream and mutate as powerful a monster as you can ever go. The blue mutate cards themselves are the best in the cube, so Sultai can be an appealing option for mutate lovers.

Red/white decks really like attacking, preferably with the huge amount of tokens they can create. R/W Tokens works strangely well with the mutate cards in those colors, as they either create tokens like {{Cubwarden}} or explicitly want a lot of creatures in play like {{Huntmaster Liger}}. Red mutate cards themselves don't add a ton, but Red has the highest density of "mutate onto me, please" cards like Kreno, Tin Street Kingpin, Spikeshot Elder.

: Black splashes can add Fervent Charge or Butcher of the Horde for a token-based finisher, or some additional tokens and ways to sacrifice them through cards like Funeral Room // Awakening Hall or Invasion of New Capenna.

: Jeskai is heavily spells-matter focused, so any blue splash will likely be for the spells it offers for a tempo gameplay. Cantrips, bounce spells, and counterspells to leverage the batlefield R/W generates.

If green/black has mutate cards, green/blue has MUTATE CARDS. With both Essence Symbiote and Pollywog Symbiote, and all the good mutate triggered cards, blue/green is really the big mutate colors in this cube.

: As discussed previously, black offers EVEN MORE mutate creatures, along with some removal options.

: Temur is an oddball here, but mostly wants to utilize the creature base of green/blue and use the creature ramp (whether it be Copper Myr or Migratory Greathorn) to put out pressure ahead of schedule with heavy-hitting gold cards like Vodalian Mindsinger or Roaring Furnace // Steaming Sauna.

There's a lot of space to explore and I think with the swath of changes I made over the last few weeks it adds a lot of good options for every one of the archetypes. I did slightly reduce the number of the lower power mutate cards, but I think it gives the mutate options more space to feel like a part of the cube or a piece of the puzzle to solve instead of something that has to be a piece of every deck. To me it makes them more of a fun option that you want to be able to splash into for the non-mutate decks.