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Mutate Is A Weird Mechanic
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2022
- Mutate has a bad habit of creating game-states that would give Richard Garfield a heart attack. Let's talk about it.
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Song is Delfino Plaza - Super Mario Sunshine OST
Shout out to Mike from the LGS. You know who you are
Oh shit, that's me! Look mom, I'm internet famous now.
Oh, another planeswalker you can do it with is the 6-mana Oko, when he uses his 0 ability to become a copy of another creature on the battlefield.
Don't worry, nobody else remembers 6-mana Oko, either.
Did this come about because of Ivy?
You can crew a vehicle.
Then mutate it.
TURNING IT INTO A MONSTER TRUCK.
This should not have made me laugh as much as it did. I need to try that out for sh!ts and giggles.
Organic crewable truck hype!
“The top card won’t be a creature, and it probably won’t be an enchantment either”
This fact is driving me up the wall, it’s just… a permanent
LOL ikr, favorite part
I don't think it works that way.
Mutate keeps the ability of the cards in the stack as is, so the creature white a mutate Heliod god of the sun under it gain " as long as heliod god of the sun..." but it isn't Heliod god of the sun so it isn't affected by it. So the top card will be a creature, except if you can change its name
@@comlitbeta7532 Apparently, it does work that way.
"Some cards, like Bristling Boar, refer to themselves in their oracle text. While it may be your first thought that those abilities wouldn’t work if the creature’s name changes because of a mutation, it actually does.
When a card refers to itself by name it’s really just saying “me” or “this exact card,” not cards with that name. The Comprehensive Rules also say:
'… text that refers to the object it’s on by name means just that particular object and not any other objects with that name.'"
@@christian5256 ho, so two cards referring to themselves on the battlefield wouldn't be able to interact with one another. I get the idea
You could actually already do this well before mutate; If you have a non-creature artifact become a creature with March of the Machines and then target it with Neurok Transmuter's second ability ("U: Until end of turn, target artifact creature becomes blue and isn't an artifact."), it stops being an artifact, and, because it's only a creature because it was an artifact, it stops being a creature as well.
I started playing MtG just as Ikoria released, and the jankiness and Timmy-ness revolving around this awful mechanic never get old to me. I love seeing combos that do weird, useless crap like "move your whole deck into the command zone". Also, scutate!
I got into magic around Return to Ravnica, phased out of it as I graduated around Tarkir block, and came back in around MH2/Midnight Hunt. Mutate looks like a mess I don't even wanna touch. I get cool things happen, but I have chronic smooth brain, it's too much to me.
I played just after ikoria and mutate remains my favourite mechanic just because of how cool it can be. Having a massive stack of abilities, triggering like 20 mutates at once is just so much fun
@@bye1551 4 triggers of whenever this creature mutates draw a card... then your opponent plays Mindslaver, copies it and then controls your every turn, from now on, forcefully decking you. With all of the Looting and Draw mutations...
I understand the fun of that, but mechanics like this are why I won't even try it again, and I haven't played since the first ravinica block. Things being not thought out, and making the game a volatile mess ruined it for me.
im always amazed at how literally worthless my ikoria cards are. even my gihdorah, the rarest and most expensive card in the set, is only worth about $30. ive got standard rares from crimson vow that are worth more than that.
You forgot the best interaction-if a mutated creature pile has undying, it brings each creature in the pile back separated, and each gets a +1/+1! So much fun!
That one is pretty cool (but I'd say it's not the best, because the Old-Growth Troll mentioned in the video left me agape)
Yep, blinking a pile brings them back all separated.
Still not worth it
Actually that’s not right.
Mutate is how my favorite rule 0 jank deck works. It's called 52 card pickup. I turn a chaos orb into a creature then mutate as much onto it as possible. Due to the rule that the mutate stack counts as the same card, i activate my chaos orb then just launch the pile into the air
i just discovered chaos orb. shit's wild. I can't believe it's not an unglued.
@@francescofavro8890 it's also banned and very expensive so definitely check with your table beforehand and proxy if possible.
About your last point, the thing that always “angers” me about mutate is that you can’t mutate on humans, but you can on elves or dwarves. Come on, elves are just hippy humans with pointy ears, what makes them so mutable?
It's a flavor fail but probably a very intentional design decision. Ikoria and Throne of Eldraine were released in the first year after WotC abandoned the Block design format and they both had a theme of humans vs everything else on the plane. They were obviously designed to fit together mechanically in Standard.
But if it's a 1/1 soldier, or knight, it is fair game. Definitely not a human.
It's not really a flavor fail if you think about it. On Ikoria humans are the only humanoid race and everything that's not a human is capable of mutating. I believe it was stated that other races like elves went extinct.
IMO a bigger flavor fail is the fact that you can mutate an artifact creature
@@DarkeLourd The entire set with Mutate in it had a Humans vs Everyone Else theme to it. The entire world was against the Humans and mutating rapidly to try to defeat them, it makes perfect thematic and flavor sense that it has that restriction, it's more weird from a mechanical sense than anything.
Have you seen how many different, random variants of elves there are in fantasy stuff? Given there are 17 squintillion kinds of random different elves it makes perfect sense that elves can mutate.
My personal favourite mutate shenanigans is that if you were to reanimate a phage with the lose the game trigger on the stack you can flash in a mutate creature onto phage and as long as the mutate creature was cast from hand you won't lose the game
Don't forget, you can't mutate a changling, because they are human. You know, the creatures that can change their from, and got a bunch of support and new cards 2 sets after Ikoria. That being said, I love it. Such a weird mechanic.
Should've made an exception that, while Humans can't mutate, Human Shapeshifters can.
I think Amoeboid Changeling is the only exception, as it has a T ability to _remove_ all creature types from a target, including itself.
I didn't fully understand the absolute rules Nightmare that is Mutate until an Arena opponent Mutated onto a Scute Swarm, and then played a land, creating a whole new Mutate pile, copying all the cards attached.
That was actually an Arena bug, that got fixed.
I also just realised, you can also mutate vehicles and Neon Dynasty's "reconfigure" equipments.
More rules shenanigans about crewing or equiping there.
Let alone the lore implications of a Smugglers Copter erupting into a Sea Dashed Octopus mid-flight, or The Reality Chip you just detached from the back of your head spontaneously catching fire as it gestates into an Everquill Phoenix.
Have you written anything? Looks like you are a good writer
Ensoul artifact=> mutate thing onto it.
Now your sword of ABSOLUTE FUCK YOU not only gained sentience, but it's also sprouting some weird appendages from all sides.
Maybe even better, mutate ensouled thing onto something. Like, runechanter's pike onto some creature.
I once ran a Modular/Graft deck with similar imagery in mind. Shit was messed up in my mind a few bodies in.
The most relevant thing you need to know about mutate is that for Oko it's still just a 3/3 with no abilities
Save you can't actually play the Oko, so there's that.. :P
@@AngelusNielson only seen mutate played in commander where oko is unfortunately legal
@@eliasmecham8502 Because he's banned pretty much everywhere else. That was my point.
Not if my bottom card is a Theros god and I don't have devotion. It's not a creature or an artifact... Where's your god now? (At the bottom of my stack)
@@flaetsbnort thanks mate, my godzilla deck keeps getting Oko'd. I will try this. I will fail.
I love how you used Flbthp in so many of these mutate piles, even though it's near impossible to mutate onto one.
It always grinded my gears how changelings arent able to mutate. Like from a rules perspective I get it, but from a lore/flavor perspective COME OOOOOOON MAN
I swear I am one of a dozen people who are very comfortable with Mutate. Most of the weird interactions are pretty intuitive to me. I hope one day WotC prints more Mutate cards :)
Based
Where are the cards underneath the mutate pile? Everything has a location.
1:29 dont forget that there is one card you can take out of the command zone if you put it in there with leadership vaccum+mutate. Yuriko. Commander ninjitsu still functions normally, so yuriko can come out of the command zone if she is in your 99. Even more funny, you can steal someone else's yuriko who IS a commander and put their commander in your command zone.
I'm pretty sure technically the command zone is a single shared zone like exile and if you place their commander in the command zone they would then have access to it as if you killed it and they sent it back normally
everything refers to it as "the command zone", not "your command zone" and im pretty sure only your deck, your hand and your graveyard are personal zones
@@Eon_TAS I don't think that's the case, but either way you won't be casting an opponent's commander any time soon. When a commander leaves the battlefield, it goes to whatever zone the rules state it goes to, then the next time state-based actions are checked, the owner of that commander may decide to put it in their command zone or leave it. So if you try to Leadership Vacuum an enemy Yuriko, it enters your command zone, then the owner may put it in theirs before you have the option to do anything with it.
*cough cough* Derevi wants to have a word with you....
also Leadership Vaccum just makes that player it targets to put their commander into their command zone
Leadership Vacuum returns each commander that player controls to the command zone. If you gain control of an opponents commander and cast Leadership Vacuum on yourself, you could theoretically put an opponent's commander in your command zone.
This is assuming that the command zone isn't a shared zone however. As the other person mentioned, every card that references it says "the" command zone, not "[player]'s* command zone. I do think technically each player has a different command zone though.
afaik the command zone is the same for everyone, same thing as exile
You forgot about the fun interaction of mutating onto a cosima, god of the voyage. The entire stack of creatures all get exiled with the god’s ability and whenever you play a land, they ALL get voyage counters and all will draw cards when they return to the battlefield.
Then there’s mutating onto vehicles.
I'm assuming they all return as separate creatures?
@@Yentz4 correct. They all gain cosima’s ability and return as separate creatures, getting all the triggers.
They don’t return.
Having built Vadrok recently, I can confirm that it’s a wildly fun but very confusing mechanic, especially with mutating onto clones of mutated creatures. The copy will keep all mutate triggers of the original and they can stack. Madness ensues.
Awesome video! Love your stuff!
What's funny is that while mutate changes copiable values, "number of times mutated" is not among those copiable values. So, a clone of a mutate stack hasn't mutated at all.
Karn's touch is a nice addition, turn artifacts into creatures and mutate them
And this is why I love the chaotic complexity of Mutate, try mutating an animated land, you'll be laughing yourself to sleep
One of my favorite mutate interaction is Vadrik+Double Major. Apparently you can.... Mutate as a token on the stack, and then if it's Vadrok you can recast Double Major while the original is on the stack. This results into an endless stack of mutations that casts an increasing number of spells, which can result into a win if one spell deals damage to face.
Vadrok is so much fun.
This is officially my new 4c non-black deck, thank you
This is also now in my mutate deck thank you
What?! You can target creatures you own that were stolen?! That's something new I learned.
Why would you do that, you still won't control them
I love Mutate so much. It is, unironically, my favorite ability ever.
No matter how much of a rule’s headache mutate is, I can never let it go as one of my favourite mechanics. I did start playing around when Eldraine came out and started commander with the Otrimi precon so I do have bias towards Ikoria as a set but I’ll never stop playing Brokkos mutate at my LGS at least once every commander night
Another fun interaction with mutate is when you flicker the mutate stack. When the stack goes into exile and comes back the whole stack will actually be separated into individual permanents and not the whole stack
Mutate also works on Scute swarm, so when it’s landfall ability happens, instead of a 1/1 insect it could be a 3/4 beast
BRB, off to make a mutate scute swarm deck
I've lost to that exact mutation. What an awful sonuvabitch that combo was.
@@CLove511 same. Still cool but terrifying
@@beerycolton oh no what have I done
DUDE that one gideon not being a human is so fun. I always talk about him when piloting my gideon or mutate decks.
Yes. This is exactly the kind of niche interactions I need to build combos that nobody will counter because they don't know.
Mutate may be weird, but at least it doesn't need reminder tokens like dungeons or the new werewolves.
Can't believe I found a channel that poses as my favourite card explaining my favourite mechanic
"hey guys lets make something more nightmarish than banding"
not to be confused with the stack
The crab raving Kiki-mutate combo was fuckin' 13/10. Absolutely perfect.
If you mutate under a transformed Warewolf, then it transforms back, you now have a mutated human
And you can't mutate onto it anymore
We made Alchemy in Arena because only there can we make cards that only make sense in a digital format.
Meanwhile, mutate exists and is still working, albeit strangely, in paper.
Hearthstone has a similar mechanic called magnetic that’s almost identical. When you attach a minion with magnetic, you give the target the stats and effects of the magnetic one. It’s like a buff spell. In every situation I’m aware of it works how you think it does. It’s kind of interesting because it illustrates the differences of a paper game.
In magic, you need to keep track of who owns which piece of paper and which stack of paper you put it in when it dies, so you get all these rules about ownership and zones that digital games simply don’t have. Plus, people sitting at a kitchen table need to be able to figure them out, and tournaments need judges when players disagree. There has to be a system and a rule book that outlines every single edge case. In a digital game, the engine is the judge. It’s gonna work how it works and if it’s not overtly buggy it’ll stay that way. Just an interesting thought.
Magnetic has actually more similarities with bestow than mutate. The card essentially becomes a buff that says 'This creature gets +X/+Y and this ability' and it happens in a pretty controlled way. The minion you buff is always the one already on the battlefield and the other ones just stop existing: you couldn't have an etrata or troll interaction because the magnetic cards are treated as enchantments, not minions (and an enchantment in hs is not a permanent, just a reminder on a card). Even on paper it would be much less of a headache and could be tracked with mostly just counters.
Which proves the excellency of the game designers and rules writers. Mechanics that are way easier in warhammer break more often than the most complex mechanics in magic.
Imagine making a deck all about one-shotting someone with Etrata.
My Nethroi deck is my proudest creation. I've learned a few of these rulings the hard way.
Mutate is the best MTG mechanic ever and I hope they make more (They won't.) It's so fun!
This but unironically. It's mostly because I like the aesthetic of the set and it'd be fun to get new cards for more effect variety for casual play.
@@yoso378 aesthetic of ikoria was great but mutate to me is like one of the most overcomplicated mechanics in the game.
More likely than more stickers...
Great to have a new video, your content is fast paced, funny, and informative
I flippin love this mechanic. Feels like something straight from an unset.
My favorite part of mutate is how it works with another favorite of mine Volo, Guide to Monsters. Basically I can get three gemrazer mutate triggers for the price of one (if I don't have a beast on field or in yard), and any subsequent mutate blows up two artifacts.
An auspicious starrix gets you 5 permanents off the top. 14 if you have a twinning staff out.
@@AnonymousAnonymous-ht4cm It is powerful but I found I didn't really like Starrix because I wasn't casting those permanents and therefore not doubling them with Volo
Mutate is my all-time favorite mechanic in Magic. It's so gloriously silly and easy to underestimate, but only has enough support to be casual-playable in most cases. It hits the sweet spot for me!
And it's the mechanic that dies the most to removal
I absolutely love Mutate. It's not too hard to understand once you get the hang of it.. Yes, there are plenty of moments where mutate is wierd but it's not hard to understand on the surface. You combine the text on the cards, choosing one of their stats to keep.
Super weird, fun mechanic.
Another mechanic I really wish they'd bring back is Bloodrush. I loved that mechanic themeatically.
there are 2 kinds of people in this world.
those who will never understand mutate
and those who knew everything about it always
I told people the etatra interaction the day mutate came out, only to have the whole store scream at me about how wrong I was.......
As a mutate player I will save this video as "reasons to love mutate"
WoTC - "regenerate is too complex so we replaced it with UET indestructible"
Also WoTC - "haha mutate goes brrrr"
Did ‘mutate’ come from the me(n)talworks of the silverborderland that was ‘augment’ by chance? I think it came from there. With that said, mutate is far more complicated and headache inducing.
My understanding is that Mutate is actually the latest of a long(-ish) line of attempts to make a satisfactory card-combining mechanic. While all the others were silver-bordered, by that point they had enough confidence in it to put it in black-border.
Remember that we also had bestow before this
Mutate is wonderful precisely because it is headache inducing.
@@Eagle0600 Meld was black border and predates Ikoria by a few years. Only had 6 cards with the mechanic in Eldritch Moon.
Thank you for the correction.
Mutate is the Panglacial wurm of mechanics
First of all,I MISSED YOU SO MUCH DUDE.
and yes, mutate is mess and I love it for that
Mutating a stack with a hexproof in it is how you lose friends
The joke with the "cant mutate onto humans" is you can literally mutate onto any other humanoid creature, elfs, dwarfs, halflings, you name it.
Thank goodness you said it. Everyone says it’s not complicated, because they’ve only ever played it on Arena. In Paper it’s a memory nightmare. And when I ask specific questions, people don’t really known what would happen.
I do enjoy mutate. I think it's cool but man is it janky
honestly, seeing the planeswalker one actually work is cool. Gotta go try that sometime.
Cover the Mill mechanic and how it has evolved over time. Might be fun to see how Mill, discard, draw cards differ in interaction with one’s library.
I never used or seen mutate being used IRL so I never realized how messed up and confusing mutate is.
Haha, I quite like the energy and content of this. Specially @0:47, it just speaks to me. I'll keep an eye on you.
This video has strong jan Misali energy, and I mean that as a compliment.
Thank you CZcams for recommending me this
Clone army of non-legendary creatures with planewaker ability's mutate can do that.
In trying to communicate the weirdness and complexity of the Mutate mechanic... you have explained far better than anyone, ever.
And now Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief is a thing. Copying mutate spells was already possible, but now it can be your commander.
My favourite thing to do in commander is mutate parcelbeast onto a land, and then progenitor mimic the land to get a bunch of lands that can tap and draw a card.
Super glad to see you uploading again! Content's fire, keep it up!
I’m glad I’m not the only one who knew mutate made stuff unlegendary
That’s why I run mutate in my tatsunari deck
1:40 You mention mutating underneath tokens, but I'd just like to mention that if you mutate on top of a token then it's no longer a token. So, if you have something like Progenitor Mimic, then you can mutate on top of the tokens created by Progenitor Mimic and then those no-longer-a-token-mutate-stacks will be able to copy themselves at the beginning of your upkeep.
Pretty sure the PM's ability makes the copies token regardless of the nature of the thing copied.
Edit : I missed what you meant. You meant making one of the copies a replicating one, not making self-replicating copies.
the planeswalker thing is the basis of an entire deck I'm working on
Man, now there's Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief to think about too with mutate. And if a mutates stack is blinked it comes back as each individual creature on the battlefield and no longer as one big stack. This is why I love this mechanic.
Ok, NOW I need to make a mutate deck
Once I learned about bestow, I thought, “oh it’s like mutate, but kinda better?” and I knew that was how I could explain it to others lol
Which is doubly amusing since bestow predates mutate by years.
This was most definitely a mechanic that was designed with Arena in mind.
Mutate is emrakul trying to get us to comprehend her gifts
I was that guy that played mutate when Ikoria released, mostly it was just the most competent deck I could put Godzilla cards in. I once had a guy concede because he got annoyed at how mutate worked. So at his end step I flash mutate the octopus, he kills the creature I targeted in response. I say ok, and put that creature in the yard and the octopus on the field. He immediately starts going that the octopus is also dead and I tell him it's not as that's not how mutate works. Well he calls a judge over and the judge goes yeah that's how mutate works. He scoops the entire set in game 1 over it lol.
Well now. That's how I keep my planeswalker alive is by making it a creature with a flash mutate
That mechanic is basically Splice onto Creature. One of those things you were not supposed to make for complexity issues and they still did it.
There’s a reason why Splice was only with Arcane so you could control the amount of possible interactions between them instead of this mutate Mess.
Tbh though Mutate made it easier for me to learn the Digimon TCG
0:44 I made an entire edh deck around mutating and copying that jellybean, and it does wonders
Illuna is my favorite commander. I love mutate in all its jank and shenanigans and brokenness.
I have seriously been trying to figure this out for 2 years now, our playgroup was so confused about the rulings surrounding this we figured it be smarter to open pandora's box than hit the gatherer again trying to make sense of this
Honestly while there are weird interactions that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to account for if you started playing at any point after eldritch moon and hadn’t opened a single pack before that set and (were assuming ikoria is the most recent set) you just got it besides Gideon the chances you will encounter a weird interaction is very unlikely even now that’s still unlikely unless your willing to spend $2 or more on cards because i understand the general concept obviously I never thought about flip or transform cards but those are semi difficult to figure out how to add unless your making a wolves werewolves deck anyways like if you were to ask me how it works I could probably explain it to you
"You can't mutate onto humans."
Unless that human is Gideon.
Um...no...? When he enters combat, he's a Human; he's ALWAYS a Human. You could mutate onto Sarkhan or Bahamut - they're both Dragons when they enter the fray - but every form of Gideon is Human. He ain't getting mutated without an extra step.
EDIT: There IS one Gideon, "Gideon, the Oathsworn", that is apparently *just* a Soldier and not a Human. The one exception.
WotC: "banding and regenerate are too complicated for standard"
Also WotC:
Building a tatsunari deck got so much more fun when I realized how mutate works with legendary creatures omg😁
My new goal in life is to mutate onto a planeswalker. thank u fish for the inspiration
If you mutate onto a creature and have ivy, gleeful spellthief, you can also mutate onto her
"You can't mutate on to humans"
[Sad Simic Noises]
This reminds me of how fun my mutate commander deck is
I fucking love Mutate
You actually can mutate onto humans. The easiest way is have a werewolf on top of the stack in it's non-human form. Then let it transform back. You now have a mutated human that can't be further mutated, because its a human.
best rules video i've seen so far! learning with fun. nice dude!! more plz. :)
Etrata, the hard-counter to Mutate. Also, Mutate is so complicated, it's high on the Storm Scale.
i love this mechanic, fun to hear about some of the weirder aspects of it
More confusing than banding, but people, including me, like it.
Now with Unfinity, there's also the prospect of animating and mutating an Attraction, using Animate Object and mutating the object you put onto the field, using the photocopy card that requires a device to represent your copy token to mutate your phone, and "best" of all, use Form of the Approach of the Second Sun to put yourself into your library, then do something to put _yourself_ into play ("you" are a planeswalker card in this instance; it's confirmed) then animate yourself, _and you can now induce mutations within YOURSELF._
I love how they took mutate and turned into the Digimon TCG.
"No catgirls allowed"
That meme needs to become a playmat.
THE RETURN OF THE KING
I bet rule conflicts over mutate have ruined many a tabletop night
They could simply mixed the cards: supertypes, subtypes, text, cmc, colors, stats, etc. And balance it throught this idea...mutate cost being higher than normal cmc, things that actually care about the result rather than the trigger itself like "as long this creature has 4 or more power it can't be blocked by creatures power 2 or less" or "as long as this creature has 3 types of more, creatures of these types get +1/+1 for each of these types it has" or "as long as this creature have 3 or more keywords it gets +2/+0" and evergreen keywords.
But in fear of it being busted they overcomplicated it. Shame because ikoria was my most hyped set in years that I couldn't get a hold of because of quarentine. Also I would like a return to Ikoria or more mutates.