Exploring Jenova Mutants: A Unique Standard Brew

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! This week, we're heading to Standard to play some Mutant Tribal! While the deck's finishers are a bunch of new TMNT Mutants, the most important card actually comes from Final Fantasy in Jenova, Ancient Calamity! Jenova is the one massive payoff for playing a bunch of Mutants, offering huge amounts of card draw as our other creatures die during our turn. Can Jenova, Ancient Calamity make Mutants a thing in Standard? Let's find out!

The Deck

We're a green deck looking to ramp into expensive stuff, which means we're playing the Badgermole Cub package. I used to feel bad about playing Badgermole Cub since it's so powerful and (at least, in my opinion) not a healthy card to exist in Standard. But for as long as it remains in the format, if you are playing a green mana dork-style deck, you really have to play it just to keep up with the rest of the field. Basically, I've started to think of Badgermole Cub as a Llanowar Elves that just happens to cost $60 a copy, for better or worse. Regardless, the mana dork package is super important because the rest of our deck is super expensive.

With the boring stuff out of the way, next up, we have the most important card in the deck, the reward for overloading our deck with Mutants: Jenova, Ancient Calamity! The four-drop has two abilities. The first is putting a number of +1/+1 counters equal to its power on a creature at the start of combat and turning it into a Mutant. This isn't especially important, but it is nice that we can turn our random mana dorks into Mutants to power up Jenova's second ability: Whenever a Mutant dies during our turn, we draw cards equal to its power! This ability is incredibly powerful. Before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there just weren't enough Mutants in Standard to make it work—it's simply too slow if your primary plan is to use the first ability to turn creatures into Mutants and then have them die to draw cards. But thanks to some new TMNT Mutants, it can now do some crazy things!

The best Mutant in our deck is Bebop & Rocksteady, which is seemingly built to work with Jenova, Ancient Calamity. If we can play Bebop & Rocksteady and then follow up with Jenova, Ancient Calamity the next turn, we can attack with Bebop & Rocksteady, sacrifice it to its own ability, and draw seven cards, which is absurd! Jenova, Ancient Calamity also helps get around the legend rule since if we happen to have a Bebop & Rocksteady and draw a second copy, we can always just play it, have it die to the legend rule, and draw seven cards for just three mana! Of course, we can use Bebop & Rocksteady to sacrifice other Mutants as well, like our mana dorks that we turn into Mutants with Jenova, Ancient Calamity, or other TMNT Mutants to draw even more cards while also mashing in with a very overstatted three-drop!

Rounding out our Mutant package, we've got three new TMNT cards: Groundchuck & Dirtbag gives us an 8/8 trampler for six that also lets our lands tap for an extra green mana, and our deck can never have too much mana. Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers are massive, hasty, and trampling while also putting a random creature from our deck into play tapped and attacking when it attacks. Armaggon, Future Shark gives us a million-for-one (or really more like five-for-one) on a massive body by blowing up three creatures when it enters. And thanks to flash, we can do this during our opponent's turn and potentially eat an attacker as well!

And that's basically the deck, outside of some removal like Requiting Hex, Shoot the Sheriff, and Disruptive Stormbrood. The main goal is to ramp into Jenova, Ancient Calamity, start playing our big TMNT Mutants, and either sacrifice them to Bebop & Rocksteady or legend-rule them to trigger Jenova, Ancient Calamity's ability to draw a ton of cards (in some games, we literally could have drawn our entire deck!), and then eventually win by building a massive Mutant board and beating down!

Wrap-Up

Record-wise, Mutants were actually very good, although the record isn't especially important since we were playing during early access. Instead, I'm mostly looking for how the new cards and the deck itself feel, and Mutants generally felt solid. The biggest issue for the deck isn't its power level; it's that it's probably not as good as Badgermole Cub with card-ref:Ouroboroid. But in a world where three years of cards exist in Standard, the card pool is so big that being the second-, third-, or even fourth-best version of a Badgermole Cub deck still leaves you with a pretty strong deck. Would you choose Mutants over card-ref:Ouroboroid if you were trying to win a Pro Tour? Probably not, but you'll win almost as many games at FNM or on the Arena ladder and get a ton of style points along the way!

Some quick thoughts on the new cards: Bebop & Rocksteady might actually just be a good card. We had some games where we played it on Turn 2 with the help of Llanowar Elves and simply used it to beat our opponent down, and it was pretty effective. While the sacrifice synergies are great with Jenova, Ancient Calamity, I think it could see play even in non-Mutant decks. Groundchuck & Dirtbag felt fine, almost like a watered down Nyxbloom Ancient, although having a massive 8/8 body for six is a bonus. We didn't draw Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers very often, but it felt good when we cast it. But the one TMNT card that impressed me the most, by far, was Armaggon, Future Shark. While it costs a ton of mana, which means most decks won't be able to play it, the card is actually super powerful if you can cast it reliably. We had a bunch of wins that involved using Armaggon, Future Shark to blow up our opponent's board, often at instant speed. It turns out killing your opponent's three best creatures with one card is pretty good. We can also use it to blow up our own creatures to trigger Jenova, Ancient Calamity, which is a cute trick, at least. I think Armaggon, Future Shark might have a role in Standard, either in decks like this that can ramp into it or in reanimator-style decks that can cheat it into play. It was really impressive!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments.