Insatiable Hemophage

Mutate usually pays its dividend once: fold a body into the pile, resolve the enters-or-mutates trigger, and the stack is just a bigger threat from there. This design inverts that incentive by scaling the drain to how many times the pile has mutated, which turns a mechanic built around a single dramatic merge into a repeatable engine. The first mutate drains one, the second drains two, the third drains three, and because the count lives on the physical creature rather than resetting, every additional body you fold in compounds the swing on both ends of the board. That structure quietly changes what a mutate pile is for. Instead of assembling one oversized threat and swinging, the incentive becomes churning creatures onto the stack, each fresh mutation buying life. Deathtouch is the practical glue: it keeps the pile relevant in combat regardless of what sits on top, so the drain engine does not force you to trade away your board to keep feeding the stack. Where most drain effects ask you to sacrifice or attrition your way to incremental life loss, this asks you to keep building, and the build itself is the drain. It reads as a deliberate answer to mutate's coronation problem, rewarding the mechanic's iterative nature rather than treating the merge as a one-time event.