Last time we covered the TCG Exclusive cards in Supreme Darkness, we touched on some of the tools provided to Vendread, a beloved strategy from the VRAINS era. These Zombie Rituals were good, but for the wrong reasons, and always saw play as enablers for combo strategies rather than a cohesive deck. In stark contrast to Vendread, this time I’d like to touch on a few of the tools provided to Myutant in SUDA, and why it might be worth giving these oddities the time of day. Myutant has historically never seen competitive play, as outside of being used alongside other better decks, like Thunder Dragon or most recently Spright, the deck has had some crippling flaws to overcome. Critically, if its initial Normal Summon gets disrupted, the deck does nothing — and that happens frequently. The question then bears asking, what if new cards were printed to alleviate this concern? Would Myutant be worth a second glance in 2025? There’s only one way to find out: Presenting Myutant 2025.
Myutant is broadly divided into two broad categories, its WATER Psychic starters, and its various Maindeck bosses. Each of the starters do something on Summon, or Summon themselves, and then have a way to pivot into a boss by banishing the relevant card type from hand or field; this leaves them brutally weak to Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring, and moreover, cards like Effect Veiler on their initial Summons. If you can manage to start getting the loops going in Myutant, their grind game is quite impressive, but getting started is the hard part. Enter two new cards from Supreme Darkness: Minimalian and Shadow Severing Strike. Minimalian is able to Special Summon itself from the hand by banishing another card from your hand, not unlike a Myutant, and then can pivot itself or another Level 4 or lower monster into another one from Deck, with a couple Levels lower. Because it’s a WATER Psychic, this means it can actually simply turn itself into either Myutant ST-46 or Myutant M-05, two of the best starters here.
Shadow Severing Strike, meanwhile, allows you to activate an effect on the field when a card is banished from it (or hand) to activate a Monster effect. The actual effects are relatively unimportant, but roughly mirror your Myutant Maindeck bosses, but critically no matter what is banished, Strike allows you to ‘chainblock’ for a relevant Myutant. Chainblocking is where you order two or more effects such that the initial is ‘layered’ under the next, preventing direct responses from your opponent. Here, that means you could stop Ash Blossom from being legal to activate vs one of your starters, by chaining the effect of Strike to their Tribute effect. Moreover, Strike also fetches any of your other banished cards when banished to activate an effect, which can lead to some funny interactions. Between these two new pieces, Myutant has been provided protection on the chain, and both extension plus consistency in a single card, which could serve to significantly improve the strategy!
Alongside Emergency Teleport, the deck now has effectively 9 copies of M-05, its best starter, which in turns finds Myutant Mutant, which sits at an effective 9 copies as well, due to being Level 1 (and therefore unable to be directly Summoned by Minimalian). Suddenly, your density of 1-card combos has drastically gone up, and due to this, we’re able to begin increasing the number of non-engine pieces available. Cards like Fuwalos, Dimension Shifter, and Infinite Impermanence all fit snugly here, as well as the Ash Blossom the strategy so often suffers against. Further still, much like Vendread, it’s not unlikely we’ll have spare material on the board to go into Moon of the Closed Heaven, meaning the Fiendsmith engine also slots in nicely, with a simple 2-card package of 1 Engraver & 1 Lacrima. If you do get disrupted, your main line still affords you two bodies, which is all that’s needed for this high-impact subtheme.
The actual bosses are something I’m less fond of in Myutant, now that we’ve covered how accessible your starters are. Historically, Myutant has relied on a core of 2 Myutant Beast and 1 Myutant Arsenal, but because Shadow Severing Strike incentivizes us to play Myutant Mist (as banishing itself or another Spell can allow us to go +3 in terms of card advantage) we’re on a 1:1:1 ratio now. Beast is the clear winner, having a Spell negate, while Arsenal is a reasonable pop of a Monster. Mist, trailing behind, allows you to draw 2 when a Trap card or effect is activated by your opponent, which strikes me as worse than the others — but this meta is surprisingly dense with scenarios including those cards. Both of the Dominus Traps, being Impulse and Purge, trigger Mist, and the second-best deck in the format, Maliss, is chock-full of Traps it intends to activate on its turn 1. Between the printing of Strike, and the meta that currently exists, Mist actually makes a lot more sense in a well-rounded Myutant strategy than it ever has before.
This is a deck intending to open the current idealized ratio of 1-2 engine pieces, and 4-5 non-engine pieces, which means we’re on quite a few handtraps in this list. As mentioned, Fuwalos and the like make their appearance, but we’re also on a small Triple Tactics package, of 1 Thrust & 1 Talent. Thrust is quite commonly going to access our single Myutant Trap, Myutant Cry, which itself is played at 3 because opening it is quite reasonable, and we need something to consistently banish from Deck for Myutant Mutant. ST-46 is usually going to be fetching either of our Spells, being Myutant Evolution Lab or Myutant Fusion, as banishing them with Strike onboard can result in a lot of advantage, but neither are so good that we’d want to always see them in our opening hand. Cry allows us to access the reasonable Fusions available to Myutant, which represent hard-to-shift interaction that floats back into more engine, but it’s not a core component of the strategy in my eyes. Myutant is looking to play extremely low to the ground, and the best way to do that comes in the form of a well-rounded 1-card starting lineup, and a bucketful of handtraps.
There were a great many considerations for this strategy that didn’t end up making the cut. I’m only on a single ST-46 because it doesn’t represent the full combo on its own, and unlike a lot of Myutant players I’ve forgone the inclusion of either Thunder Dragons or Nemeses Corridor, which both enable Thunder Dragon Colossus. Colossus matches up very poorly into the ever present Impermanences in the format, and decks are already prepared to play around Droll & Lock Bird, which practically any Fiendsmith line outing the Fusion before it truly stops them. Further still, I’m not on a Maindeck There Can Be Only One, which was a staple of Myutant back when it was at 3. At only a single copy it strikes me as far less appealing, as its inconsistency likely doesn’t make it worthwhile unless searchable. Searchable in that phrase has a big asterisk, as technically by way of Shadow Severing Strike, it can be fetched from Banishment if it gets there via a Myutant or Gold Sarcophagus, etc, but that’s a bit gimmicky for my tastes. Lastly, one consideration I had was playing a small Ryu-Ge package, with a 1:1:1 ratio of Havka, Wyrm Winds, and Ryu-Ge Rising. These all have immense synergy with both Strike and our Myutants, and searches/recurs itself as an internal package. If there were a better way to access Hakva, I feel this might warrant a slot, but as-is I’m unimpressed.
Myutant is no Vendread, even after the new support, but that’s okay! TCG Exclusive strategies have always been intensely interesting, even if they’re not shaking up the meta, and Myutant excels in that regard. Here, it finally hits its stride as a decently impactful low-to-the-ground control shell with a ton of recursion, and while that’s likely worse than Vendread’s endless combo of Ritual Monsters, it’s still fun, engaging, and better than the deck felt prior to Supreme Darkness. Really, that’s all we can ask for.
How do you feel about SUDA having a decent amount of its power concentrated in its TCG Exclusives? Do you want to see this power level repeated in future sets? What else do you want to see me cover from Supreme Darkness? Let me know in the comments below!
