Aeve, Ooze Progenitor is an incredibly cool card. We only have the image for the Spanish language version so far, but we're too excited to wait so we'll translate it!
The text reads as follows:
Storm (When you cast this spell, copy it for each spell cast before it this turn. The copies enter the battlefield as tokens.)
Aeve, Ooze Progenitor isn't legendary if it is a token.
Aeve enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter on it for each other Ooze you control.
How cool is it to have a creature with Storm? We've gotten a bit more used to having "complicated" tokens of full creatures with text and abilities, so why not? The Ooze army obviously scales quickly with the more storm count we can generate (2 copies is 12 total power, 3 copies is already 20 power), so let's see what we can do. We're not used to building around Storm in this color (besides our Thrasta article from yesterday), so let's dive in!
Manamorphose is the obvious starting point as it is as close to free as it gets and can potentially help with any mana issues related to the GGG casting cost. Burning-Tree Emissary may be a key piece for certain builds – it is a card that sometimes leads to busted draws on turn 2 and then weakens every turn after. If simply adding a storm count for free is good enough, that may make it a great card again!
Pyretic Ritual and Desperate Ritual are what we've got in Modern for the Storm mechanic. It's unclear if we'll want to build a Gruul Storm deck that goes all in on Aeve or if we'd rather just build it as more of an aggressive or midrange type of deck that can sometimes storm out a huge board.
Lava Dart and Mutagenic Growth are staples in the Izzet Blitz prowess style deck that has dominated recently, so definitely worth considering. Perhaps we could even be some kind of Temur hybrid of all of these ideas.
Is Search for Tomorrow a potential key piece that we're looking for? The suspend mechanic is a great way to "cheat" on storm count, and we can play reasonable spells that often give us the slight storm count we need. In a deck featuring Thrasta and Aeve, we don't need to generate 8+ storm count to win right away, we're just trying to have one turn that has a small to medium storm count. This novel strategy seems very exciting, so we are excited to see how it plays out!
