Scute Swarm – Zendikar Rising MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

Scute Swarm has pretty much all the standard advantages and disadvantages of permanents that generate a huge swarm of tokens over time, but with the feature that landfall is surprisingly easy for you to control. Older formats have fetchlands, Ravnica Allegiance has Growth Spiral, and everyone – everyone – has Uro. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if something emerges to combine all those types of effects in Standard; anything without a Flame Sweep or Shatter the Sky handy might just get overrun.

Constructed: 3/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 4/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
Commander; 3/5

It wouldn’t be Zendikar without landfall, right? A cute homage to the infamous Scute Mob from Zendikar, Scute Swarm is one of those creatures that can snowball hard in the right set-up. The body is underwhelming, but if you have enough lands when landfall happens, Scute Swarm copies itself (though a vanilla 1/1 is still okay enough). One goes to two, which goes to four, which goes into a massive headache if you have plenty of ways to enable landfall, and one resolution makes it hard to kill the entire swarm outside of mass removal. I’d say Scute Swarm is more cute than good, but there are definitely ways to make a mass of bugs work for you.

Constructed: 2.5
Casual: 4
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 2.5
Commander: 3