Iconic Mutant Joins the X-Men For First Time In 46 Years

Published Sep 14, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT

Robert Wood is a writer and editor based out of Cheshire, England. He is the author of 'The False Elephant: and 99 Other Unreasonably Short Stories' - 100 stories, each told in exactly 100 words.

Rob got into comics via Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man and the UK anthology 'The Mighty World of Marvel,' which was running Frank Miller's Daredevil, Classic Hulk and Contest of Champions II.

Prior to journalism, he worked in copywriting and copyedited for Oxford University Press. He is on X as @PinchTwigs and Instagram as roobwoodjourno.

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Forty-six years after their debut, a powerful Marvel mutant has finally joined the X-Men for the first time. Here's everything you need to know about this historic recruitment, and how this mutant powerhouse's abilities actually work.

Across X-Men history, they've been opposed by the group known as the Brotherhood, aka the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Founded by Magneto, the team took on a life of its own, later led by Mystique, Exodus, Wolverine's evil son Daken and even - at a particularly low ebb - the amphibian malcontent Toad.

Across its existence, several mutants have acted as recurring Brotherhood stalwarts, few of them as loyal to the group or as incredibly powerful as the mutant once known as Irene Adler...

Destiny Joins Cassandra Nova's X-Men

In the recent What If...? X-Men #1 - from Ashley Allen, Sumit Kumar, Sonia Oback and Clayton Cowles - the precognitive mutant Destiny finally joins the X-Men, albeit under the darkest circumstances possible. The story asks what the Marvel Universe would look like if Cassandra Nova had killed and replaced Charles Xavier in the womb, becoming the corrupt 'leader' of mutantkind.

In this world, Nova has methodically captured and experimented on telepaths, hoping to use them to cause an apocalyptic event that will grant her omnipotent power and convert humanity into psychic parasites known as Mummundrai (Cassandra's actual species, before she stole Xavier's DNA to create her mutant body.)

When this reality's Jean Grey and Emma Frost escape, Nova unleashes her X-Men to catch them, fielding a team made up of Cyclops, Wolverine, Psylocke, Rogue and Destiny, who uses her future visions to fire deadly crossbow bolts where her targets are going to be.

The story ends with Jean unlocking her full potential as the Phoenix while Cassandra Nova becomes a gigantic psionic dragon, setting up a clash for the ages. Hopefully, Marvel continues this oneshot comic to keep the story going.

How Destiny's Powers Actually Work In X-Men Lore

One of the most influential villains in Marvel lore, Destiny is a powerful precognitive, capable of seeing and changing the future at both long and short range. Destiny has stated many times that there is no singular future waiting out there - just a sea of possibilities that she's particularly expert at navigating.

Destiny outlined how her powers work in Immortal X-Men #3 (Kieron Gillen and Lucas Werneck), explaining that because she can see every possible future at once, she is forced to search for huge events that take place across multiple realities and use them as waypoints, steering events towards or away from her desired outcome.

Ultimately, Destiny is more hero than villain, and she and her wife Mystique have prevented the end of the world countless times. However, Destiny's motivations are often impossible to understand, and she's done truly evil things - including burning people alive - to ensure her desired outcome. Sometimes she acts to save the world, sometimes just to keep Mystique alive at any cost.

Destiny Never Joined The X-Men, But She's Influenced Them Again And Again

While this is the first time Destiny has joined an X-Men team, she could be considered one of their greatest allies from a certain point of view. Not only have her diaries been a powerful artifact in X-Men lore that have helped ward off disaster, but she engineered events so that both Rogue and Nightcrawler would join the X-Men.

This came at immense personal cost, with Destiny persuading Mystique to abandon their biological son Nightcrawler only because he needed to eventually join the X-Men and prevent a demonic invasion led by his false-father Azrael. Destiny took the decision so hard, she begged Xavier to suppress her love for her son, subconsciously resenting him for decades after.

A longtime X-Men enemy and easily the franchise's most enigmatic character, it turns out that all it takes to get Destiny to join the team is an evil parasite killing Xavier and plunging the world into armageddon - an armageddon which will hopefully continue in a future series set in this compelling alternate reality.

What If...? X-Men #1 is available now from Marvel Comics.