We’re past the midway point on Bloomburrow spoilers now, and the full set is beginning to come into focus. The cute animal protagonists are a joy to behold, of course, but perhaps even more interesting are the villains of the piece: the Calamity Beasts. These fearsome Elemental monsters are some of the most experimental designs in the set. Whether it’s Maha, Its Feathers Night shrinking every creature in play, Ygra, Eater of All turning them all into Food, or Sunspine Lynx crushing the life out of lifegain decks. Today, another MTG powerhouse joins their ranks: the mighty Rottenmouth Viper.
Rottenmouth Viper MTG
Rottenmouth Viper is a 6/6 Elemental Snake for six mana. But not really. The card’s first ability lets you reduce that cost by sacrificing nonland permanents in lieu of paying mana. Not dissimilar to the way in which cards like Torgaar, Famine Incarnate have functioned in the past.
Typically, sacrificing a creature for one mana isn’t worth it. Even if the creature is just a humble 1/1 token. The fact that Rottenmouth Viper specifies nonland permanents, however, means you can use Food and Clues here as well, which gives it an extra edge.
Once Rottenmouth Viper is in play, it gets spicier still. When it enters and attacks, you place a Blight counter on it, then your opponent must make a difficult choice. They either lose four life, discard a card, or sacrifice a nonland permanent. They do this once for each Blight counter, which can quickly get out of hand if left unanswered.
Punisher effects like this, where your opponent can pick the best option for their current situation, are generally not great in Magic. Rottenmouth Viper has the potential to subvert this standard through sheer efficiency, however. Sure, the enters trigger probably won’t do much, but if it gets to attack even once your opponent is in a bit of a rough spot. Losing resources isn’t great, but four to the face is no joke either.
Slithering Into Standard
Based on this raw power, I could easily see Rottenmouth Viper making its way into MTG Standard in the coming season. Specifically, as a black splash in Boros Convoke. This is one of the big meta players at the moment, and it loses very few cards going into rotation. It’s a deck all about going wide on the board and capitalizing on that, and Rottenmouth Viper provides a new way to do so.
As I mentioned above, sacrificing creatures to bring out a Rottenmouth Viper won’t feel great. That said, it’ll feel significantly better if you tapped those creatures first to Convoke a Knight-Errant of Eos into play. That’s a play you can easily pull off around turn 3-4 in Boros Convoke, and it’ll likely set you up for the win. The deck already wants to run cards that generate multiple permanents on the cheap, like Novice Inspector and Gleeful Demolition, so including a powerhouse card that takes advantage of that seems like a no-brainer.
Of course, there is the question of color. Boros Convoke doesn’t run any black sources at present, and would therefore need to adjust its manabase to accommodate Rottenmouth Viper. With the New Capenna Triomes and sac lands rotating out, we’re not off to a great start in that respect. Thankfully, Bloomburrow has some nice fixing options we can turn to.
Fabled Passage is making a return, allowing you to grab a Swamp from your deck on demand. We also just saw Fountainport Bell spoiled, which pulls double duty as a way to grab a black source and a cheap nonland permanent you can sacrifice to bring Rottenmouth out later. The fact that Rottenmouth only has a single black pip in its cost makes this splash feasible, even for a streamlined list like Boros Convoke.
Coiling Around Commander
Whether that plan works out or not, Rottenmouth Viper will almost definitely wind its way into many, many black Commander decks. Its ability has that magic phrase, ‘each opponent,’ in it, which makes it scale incredibly well into four-player games. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to Torment of Hailfire, one of the very best black finishers in the entire format.
It’s not a 1:1 comparison, of course. Hailfire works so well because you can simply sink all of the mana from an Urborg, Tomb of Yagmoth/Cabal Coffers combination into it in the late game, and likely win on the spot. Rottenmouth is much fairer, asking you to keep a 6/6 creature alive for multiple combat steps to reap the same benefits.
Being a creature does give Rottenmouth some advantages, however. You can lean into cards that grant multiple combat steps, cards that Proliferate to quickly scale up the Blight counters, and cards that double attack triggers to really maximize its effectiveness. Commander decks also tend to play at least a few pieces of protective Equipment to shield their Commanders, so keeping Rottenmouth alive is certainly possible.
On top of that, it’s trivially easy to cast Rottenmouth Viper for just one mana in Commander. Token, Aristocrat, and Artifact decks are ten-a-penny, and they can all go wide enough to bring the card out for basically nothing. You may even get some additional benefits from the sacrifices, such as Grave Pact triggers.
Basically, the card is a cheap, powerful finisher that can spiral out of hand fast, doubly so with the additional synergies Commander allows for. Any deck playing black will want to seriously consider adding Rottenmouth Viper to its 99.
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