Uugguu, the Omniplasm Commander Deck Guide

Uugguu, the Omniplasm | Illustration by Franz Vohwinkel

Mystery Booster Commander Edition covered many angles with its unique commanders, and one of the most prominent was the printing of lords for under-served mechanics or creature types. Of these, Uugguu, the Omniplasm might be the most innovative.

Oozes propagating into tokens is one of the hallmarks of the creature type, so it’s only natural that its commander would reflect that. Green tokens, black sacrifice outlets, and busted blue cards—including a powerful synergy with clones, one of the bluest creature cards—make for a sick commander.

The Deck

Biowaste Blob | Illustration by Simon Dominic

This Bracket 3 deck leans hard into the clone synergy, supplementing that main strategy with other strong oozes so Uugguu has plenty of options to copy. The name of the game is snowballing; once you get the first clone off, the deck starts to roll forward until your opponents are lost beneath a great, slimy mass.

The Commander: Uugguu, the Omniplasm

Uugguu, the Omniplasm plays with token production and the idea of slimes splitting and regrowing into two, smaller creatures. It’s the reason we’re all-in on the clones, and slimes.

The big clone synergy is simple. Since Uugguu only mentions nontoken slimes and not nonlegendary slimes, you can play a Clone and copy Uugguu. Two Uugguus invokes the legend rule and you can sacrifice the clone; this causes Uugguu to make two copies of the clone that died. Since it was an Uugguu when it died, you make two nonlegendary Uugguu tokens, ending the turn with three copies of your commander. Which each trigger independently when you cast the next clone, so you make six tokens, and so on. That’s a pretty good commander to build around.

Oozes

The oozes are the beating heart of the deck, even if they lack the cellular structure to have a heart, or blood, or quite a few other organs. Do they have any?

Scavenging Ooze and Ravenous Slime must have stomachs at least, because they pack away plenty of creatures. These serve as graveyard hate that gets stronger the more creatures they hate on.

Gelatinous Cube and Acidic Slime handle various threats your opponents throw at you. Watch what you do with Acidic Slime, because the right setup could make it into something resembling a one-sided Armageddon.

In case you didn’t think green did enough, Green Slime is a counterspell! Okay, it’s extremely limited but that can still wreck an opponent. Remember that equip abilities use the stack and are activated abilities!

Biowaste Blob, Uchuulon, and Biogenic Ooze all produce additional ooze tokens. These scale fantastically with Uugguu because twice as many of these take over the game twice as fast. The Blob and the Ooze being lords also helps you scale into the late game, making them the board presence and the reward for building your board presence.

Predator Ooze and Mitotic Slime are pet cards, really; I’ve had a fondness for them ever since I started playing the game and assumed they must have been the greatest creatures ever to exist.

The deck also has some honorable oozes with its changelings: Mutable Explorer, Chomping Changeling, and Graveshifter have great enters abilities that make copying them valuable.

Clones

Flesh Duplicate and Phantasmal Image come at a premium due to their low cost. They never stick around for long because a 2-mana clone needs some downside to balance it, but that never matters in this deck since you sacrifice the clone to the legend rule 99% of time, and the other 1% probably involves copying an opponents’ creature with a good enters ability, like Riptide Gearhulk.

Mirror Image and Glasspool Mimic are also a little cheaper than the typical 4 mana, but that 1-mana discount comes at the price of only copying your creatures. That’s what they’re here for, so it hardly matters.

Phyrexian Metamorph is probably the best because it only costs 3 (you virtually always pay 2 life) with no restrictions and the ability to copy artifacts. It just goes very hard.

Undercover Operative and Copycrook are technically clones with upside, but copying Uugguu makes that moot, so they’re often just Clone #2 and #3.

Mirrorhall Mimic and Naga Fleshcrafter have graveyard-related abilities, so legend ruling them is a proper upside because you get to disturb or renew them almost right away.

Clever Impersonator is the clone least likely to copy your commander due to the incredible potential of copying any permanent type. If you have multiple clones, you should play this one last to give yourself as much time as possible to see another juicy target like Portal to Phyrexia or Rhystic Study.

Once you get the Uugguu chain rolling, Omni-Changeling is basically free. It also type-fixes another creature since it gains changeling, so you could copy a non-ooze creature and start pumping.

Stunt Double has flash, which matters greatly when one clone can make 5+ tokens.

Finishers

The finishers predominately make your creatures larger through several means, which is important as the deck focuses on going very wide with its tokens.

March of the World Ooze is very thematic, plus you get a lot out of making non-ooze creatures into oozes. Making your creatures 6/6s is great, and I love how this builds your presence, so you can sit back on it if your board gets wiped.

Coat of Arms rewards your typal efforts with a crazy buff, though it’s a little risky if you come up against another typal deck.

Germination Practicum continuously pumps your board with counters. I’m interested in the repeatability; even if you get board wiped, this continues adding counters after you rebuild.

I’ve come to appreciate Jubilation as a mass pump creature since it comes back for another round, and encore ensures you win if the first cast wasn’t enough.

Ouroboroid felt like a natural inclusion in a deck with so many clones because of how well it scales. Beating one copy is hard, two difficult, and three feels impossible without a sweeper. If you aren’t cloning Uugguu, you should probably clone this.

Interaction

In addition to the slimes that attack your opponents’ boards, the deck has plenty more removal.

Raise the Palisade and Kindred Dominance are excellent board wipes that ignore your slimes while annihilating everything else.

Innocent Blood is extremely handy when you actively want to sacrifice your creatures and has huge potential in the early game when played on turn 1 or 2 after your opponents have played their mana dorks.

Soul Shatter is a removal spell I value highly in Commander because it hits all your opponents at once and, unlike most other edicts, always kills a high-value creature, not a token.

Swan Song, Strix Serenade, and An Offer You Can't Refuse are all critical counterspells to keep you safe or mess with your opponents.

Card Draw

The card draw in this deck is very on-theme, focusing on killing slimes or having lots of them.

Corrupted Conviction, Deadly Dispute, and similar spells are fantastic sacrifice outlets to get rid of creatures cheaply and fast, with excellent upside.

Distant Melody, Pact of the Serpent, and Harmonized Crescendo all translate Uugguu’s ability to go wide into a burst of card draw that outweighs what most of your opponents can do.

Kindred Discovery is slower but also feels more threatening as it draws cards as you make your Uugguu tokens, and the enchantment sticks around to provide additional card draw if your oozes get salted and you need to rebuild.

The Mana Base

Starting with the ramp, it all costs 1 mana to facilitate a quick Uugguu; there’s not much to speak of there. It’s the familiar cards like Exploration and Birds of Paradise.

The land base has quite a bit of utility packed in. At this point, your Commander deck needs an active reason not to run MDFCs like Fell the Profane, Boggart Trawler, and Sink into Stupor, among others. These are joined by the channel lands from Neon Dynasty as honorary spell-lands, though cards like Boseiju, Who Endures and Takenuma, Abandoned Mire are stronger since they don’t put spells on the stack.

High Market, Midgar, City of Mako, and Phyrexian Tower are notable as sacrifice outlets in the mana base.

Mutavault and Soulstone Sanctuary are creature lands that animate into slimes, so you can sacrifice them with Uugguu in play and end up with an extra land. Shifting Woodland pulls of the same trick if you copy a slime.

Cavern of Souls and Three Tree City offer typal payoffs just for making a land drop.

Once you get past the utility lands, it’s all mana fixing. Fetches, shocks, the on-color Triome, etc.

The Strategy

Try to look for a hand with accelerants and a clone, if at all possible. Because all the mana dorks cost 1 mana, it’s pretty easy to have the curve of turn 1 dork, turn 2 Uugguu, turn 3 Clone, start spewing tokens.

If your hand ends up a little slower, I recommend holding off on Uugguu until the last possible moment, unless you have another slime and a sacrifice outlet ready to go to give your opponents the smallest possible window of opportunity to remove Uugguu; if this isn’t treated as a kill-on-sight commander when MBC drops, it’ll only take a few games for your pod to catch on.

Remember, this deck doesn’t really want to grind. Yes, it has plenty of card draw and removal, but it wants to snowball hard and fast and turn a few tokens into a dominant board state into a win. Be proactive at all costs.

Combos and Interactions

The main interaction is between the clones and Uugguu, which I’ve already covered, but there are a few neat tricks you can pull off.

Cauldron of Essence lets you sac one creature to reanimate another, so it’s a continuous sacrifice outlet and source of creatures for Uugguu to copy. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you can loop Biowaste Blob and Uchuulon or something, you’ll pull ahead of your opponents quickly.

If you use Saw in Half on a slime, you get at least four token copies: two from Uugguu and two from Saw. If you use it on Uugguu itself once you’ve created a few token copies with your clones, you get enough slime to host the Kid’s Choice Awards.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck is comfortably within the confines of Bracket 3. You have a very obvious win condition that’s easy to interact with, and a total lack of Game Changers.

Budget Options

The mana base should always be your starting point for budget cuts as lands are criminally expensive and easily swapped around. Start with the expensive utility lands like Cavern of Souls or fetches like Verdant Catacombs, and scale down until you’re happy.

Raise the Palisade and Kindred Dominance are cards in a curious spot price-wise; the original printings are $10+, but there are Marvel Super Heroes printings that cost half as much or better. If you can’t stomach the MSH art, reach for Perplexing Test to keep your tokens or just general removal like Aetherize and Aether Gale.

You can swap out Germination Practicum and Ouroboroid for any of the dozen Overrun effects found in the bulk bin from different Limited formats.

Some clones like Flesh Duplicate are pricey because they’ve only seen one printing but, like the Overrun cards, Clones are a dime a dozen and you can easily scout out a random bulk uncommon or rare from one set or another. Just make sure they’re creatures and don’t make themselves nonlegendary.

Other Builds

Uugguu has to be pretty slime-focused but there are other ways to go about it.

Prime Speaker Vannifar is both an ooze and sacrifice outlet. Uugguu is a great choice for a pod commander since it wants you to sacrifice creatures. It’s also a handy way to get around the low slime count; pack in enough Birthing Pod effects and you can always find the good slimes.

You could also mess around with creature type changing effects. Cards like Maskwood Nexus and Unnatural Selection turn random creatures into oozes so you can have two copies of anything you like. This definitely pushes the deck towards Bracket 2.

Commanding Conclusion

Mitotic Slime | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

Uugguu is a wonderful commander. It captures the idea of a slime commander very well and the clone synergy is a clever way to let players pad out the deck; it saves you from running Draft chaff and random changelings while keeping the focus on oozes. It’s just one of many amazing Mystery Booster Commander Edition commanders, and I can’t wait to mess with more.

How would you build Uugguu? Are you looking forward to seeing more slimes? Let me know in the comments below! If you want more Mystery Booster tips, check out Draftsim’s YouTube channel, The Daily Upkeep!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!