Against the Odds: The Obsessive Pursuit of Mutagen Token Combo (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to build around Mutagen tokens! Mutagen Man, Living Ooze might sneakily be one of the most powerful cards in the set due to the massive number of Mutagen tokens it can create (and its static ability letting us crack our Mutagen tokens for free!). While putting a +1/+1 counter on a creature is nice, Mutagen tokens actually have a shocking amount of synergy, with a bunch of cool tricks stuffed into the deck! Are Mutagen tokens actually good? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Mutagen
The Deck
The most important card in our deck by far is Mutagen Man, Living Ooze. The Ooze Mutant does two things for our deck: First, thanks to its X casting cost, it allows us to dump all of our mana into it to make a bunch of Mutagen tokens, which is exactly what our deck wants. Second, and even more importantly, it reduces the cost of activating our artifact tokens (like Mutagen) by one. This means that with a Mutagen Man, Living Ooze on the battlefield, we can crack all of our Mutagen tokens for free and also crack Clue tokens for a single mana, which is key to our deck's play. This not only allows us to make a massive Mutagen Man, Living Ooze but also opens up a ton of sneaky sacrifice synergies!
Of course, since we're a green creature deck that needs mana, we're playing Llanowar Elves and $60 Llanowar Elves Badgermole Cub. While these cards aren't essential to our synergies, they are essential for speeding up the deck and helping to ensure it can keep pace with the rest of Standard.
Back to the fun stuff, the most important synergy in our deck is Mutagen Man with Obsessive Pursuit. The enchantment does a couple of things for our deck. First, it offers a steady stream of Clue tokens that, with a Mutagen Man, Living Ooze on the battlefield, we can crack for just one mana to draw cards. (We also have one Forensic Gadgeteer, which lets us crack our Clues for free if we have it on the battlefield alongside Mutagen Man.) Second, and more importantly, Obsessive Pursuit is one of our best finishers. We can play a Mutagen Man to make a bunch of Mutagen, crack them all for free to make a massive creature, go to combat, attack, and trigger Obsessive Pursuit to get even more triggers and likely put our opponent away in just one or two attacks. In a lot of games, we actually play toward building a massive lifelinker, falling behind early as we get things set up, but then stabilize with a massive attack to gain 10 or 20 life out of the blue!
For other Mutagen cards, we have Michelangelo, Weirdness to 11 and The Ooze, both of which were surprisingly impressive. Mikey is basically a Hardened Scales on a stick that also makes a Mutagen when it enters, and it works incredibly well with Mutagen tokens. If we have it on the battlefield, every Mutagen we crack will add two counters instead of one, which helps us build the massive Voltron threats we use to end the game. Meanwhile, The Ooze offers main-deck graveyard hate, which is especially helpful against decks like Sultai Reanimator and Lessons, but it can also make a ton of Mutagen tokens. Its static ability—giving us a Mutagen for each +1/+1 counter that was on one of our creatures when it leaves the battlefield—is super helpful since it allows us to crack all of our Mutagen. Even if our opponent eventually kills our big threat, we'll get all those counters back in the form of Mutagen, which allows us to do it again the next turn.
Super Shredder is our biggest beater, and while it does die a lot, it takes over the game super quickly if it lives, often growing from a two-mana 1/1 to a two-mana 20/20 in just a couple of turns! Triggering whenever any permanent leaves the battlefield is wild. And now that I've gotten a chance to play with Super Shredder, I'm pretty confident that the card is somewhere between very good and downright busted. While we don't need it to win the game, it is our fastest-growing creature with our Mutagen synergies since every Mutagen we crack will add a counter to Super Shredder thanks to Super Shredder's ability. If we target the Super Shredder with the Mutagen, it will get two +1/+1 counters for each one we crack. And if we also happen to have Michelangelo, Weirdness to 11 out, every Mutagen will give Super Shredder a hilarious four +1/+1 counters!
Rounding out the deck are the full four copies of Formidable Speaker, primarily to find Mutagen Man, Living Ooze. But having a tutor in the deck also allows us to play one-ofs like Honest Rutstein to get things back from the graveyard, Mikey and Leo for card draw, and the one Forensic Gadgeteer that I mentioned before for infinite Clue cracking!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Mutagen was surprisingly strong. We went 8-3 with the deck for a 73% win percentage, which is super solid. More importantly, the deck is super fun to play, and it felt powerful and synergistic. Wizards mentioned recently that they have been trying to make a playable Standard deck from each set, like Lessons from Avatar or Elementals from Lorwyn Eclipsed, and I'm starting to wonder if Mutagen might be that archetype from TMNT.
I should also say that I don't think the blue splash is necessary, and if I were building the deck now, I'd just drop Forensic Gadgeteer. The initial idea of this deck was for it to focus on the infinite Clue sacrifice synergy, but the more I brewed and tested the deck, the less important cracking Clues infinitely felt. The Mutagen synergies, especially with Obsessive Pursuit, are strong enough that we don't really need to reduce our consistency by going into a third color to try to crack Clues for free—paying one mana to crack them is already efficient enough.
All in all, I'm really excited for Mutagen tokens. They have a ton of cool synergies, and as good as this deck felt, I think it might just be scratching the surface of what Mutagen tokens have to offer. I wouldn't be surprised if we played more Mutagen brews in the future because the tokens are oddly fun and surprisingly powerful!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
