Archipelagore

The mutate mechanic usually asks you to treat a spell as an upgrade sticker: paste it onto a creature you already control, keep the stats you like, gain the abilities. This one turns the mechanic's central limitation into an engine. Most mutate payoffs fire once, when the pile is first assembled, and never again unless you keep feeding it. The trigger here scales with a running count: the tap effect grows every time this pile mutates, so the second mutation taps two, the third taps three, and each of those creatures stays tapped through its controller's next untap step. That is a Tangle-style lock built out of a permanent instead of a spell, layered across turns. The design trades immediate impact for accumulation, which is why the body is a plain 7/7 with no evasion: the reward is not the beater, it is the compounding stun that clears a swing lane or freezes a defense while the pile keeps growing. It also quietly rewards playing multiple copies of mutate fodder, since every fresh mutation onto the same pile widens the tap. The awkwardness is real: a seven-mana creature that wants to be cast for its cheaper mutate cost, onto a non-Human creature you own, before the count means anything. But as a repeatable, escalating pseudo-Falter attached to a growing threat, it is one of the more mechanically honest expressions of what mutate was reaching for.