I don't know if it's any more imbalanced than 'teen' or 'scientist', but I voted no, just because I like to say "damn dirty muties".

Yeah... aren't mutants responsible for the Protocols of the Elders of the Mutants? Those muties want to take over the world. I read The International Mutant... the truth is out their... on YouTube University and Wikipedia.

Do mutants really have to be discriminated against in comics and heroclix? They cant get a break. Lets bring the keyword back.

Not even Captain Marvel, or Captain Marvel Jr, or Mary Marvel? I'm telling the Wizard Shazam on you.

I think all generic keywords should be eliminated, so yeah, keep the muties out of the game.

I will admit, I don't much care to build around generic keywords if I can help it. Even before keywords, I built around teams. Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Justice League, etc.

But I don't think it's at all fair to remove "Mutant" as a keyword. It's no less "unbalancing" a keyword than "Scientist", "Teen", "Martial Artist", "Mystical", etc.

I say reinstate it, not just for theme team purposes, but for character purposes and whatnot. Give a Sentinel a power that works more effectively on Mutants than on non-mutants. Give Forge a special version of Outwit that can switch off all powers on Mutants within four squares. Give Magneto a special Leadership that upon success, can remove an action token from an adjacent Mutant as well as adding an action to the allotment.

Thing is, with there now being Special Powers that are attuned to keywords, there absolutely NEEDS to be a Mutant keyword, because the concept of Mutants is far too important to the Marvel Universe for there to not be one. What would a Sentinel be if it was just as good against humans as it was against mutants? Why would Magneto be as willing to aid humans as he would mutants?

You have to think beyond "Ugh, cheap theme teams" with Keywords now that Keywords play into Special Powers and Traits.

UDE pulling the money from tournaments killed VS tournament play, along with some very shoddy playtesting research, not some ability to team up X-Men and Brotherhood under a Mutants banner. Much like Heroclix, there existed a very florid metagame. A simple response if people insist on freaking out on this game's player base NOT being able to deal with a challenge, just issue a card that nerfs any advantage "Mutant" would give a player.

p.s. Everytime UDE banned or errata'd a card, the metagame found a more functional and efficient abuse. The moral of the story is that the player base will determine an effective response to the ever-morphing meta. Witness the last World's. Did the team fit any vague sense of meta that existed. No. It was tested over and over against archetypical teams so the team could be piloted efficiently.

I voted that I could go either way, but I think I'd like to see it return. I believe that everybody should be able to play Heroclix the way they want, using whatever theme team types they want. Personally, I almost never play non-theme. That's just my choice. And I have played both generic and non-generic theme teams. Not to min-max, but just to play and have fun. I think it's hilarious to play Howard the Duck, Jimmy Woo, Captain America, Indigo-1, Green Arrow, and Deadpool together! I've never seen them in a comic together, but that's okay! It's fun!

I guess the point of my rambling is, I think it would be okay to bring back "mutant" as a keyword. Just make sure it is assigned properly. And if you don't want to play a "mutant" theme team, or generic keywords in general, then don't. It's really that simple.

I think the greater argument here is whether generic keywords should garner bonuses. I don't think it's completely fair to say that there's no reason why a generic team of Mutants would do the same or worse than a completely random team. I do think that the X-Men would do MUCH better than a group of otherwise unrelated mutants.
That said, I do think the Mutant keyword should come back, BUT the generic theme teams should be curbed somewhat (I think the designers tried to do this by making the "one for every 100 points" rule). Maybe generic theme teams could have a cap for map roll bonus, or one bonus PC for every three characters?
However, I feel like keywords shouldn't be errata'd onto older characters because their original point formulae did not include the extra keywords. If all aspects of a character go into the point cost (TA, stats, powers, symbols, traits, experience level, keywords), then putting more keywords after the fact would make the game unbalanced, unless of course, the point values were also errata'd. (Could you imagine if Nightcrawler was more powerful? Yuck) Obviously, Cable should not have the New Warriors keyword, but that's a different.

Having a Mutant keyword is definitely NOT comparable to having a "human," "meta-human," or "extra-terrestrial." A Mutant is much more specific than any of those three, and much less ambiguous than scientist or martial artist.

And if you're not making a themed team, you have the advantage of putting more PC and making a team diverse enough that you won't need to pick the map.

Not to mention with the way mutants are set up now in the Marvel Universe, with pretty much all of them (with the exception of X-Factor and the GLA it seems) living on Utopia, why would it be uncharacteristic for a team built on the "Mutant" word? They all live in the same place.