MCU Phase 4: How And When We'll See Mutants

For those of you who missed it, Kevin Feige okayed the release of a canonized book called The Wakanda Files back in October of this year.

Although officially written by Troy Benjamin, the lore behind The Wakanda Files is that it's an in-world book written and compiled by Shuri for the purpose of bettering all of mankind. It thus gives us access to the papers, articles, blueprints, and notes amassed by Wakanda's own War Dogs throughout the history of the secretive society. In reality, however, this is Marvel's attempt to clarify some burning questions we might have had before moving on to Phase 4.

In a chapter entitled 'Hydra Personal Files and Observational Notes' we find a short passage on the Maximoff twins aimed at bringing them in line with what we already know about mutants outside of the MCU.

While explaining that a prolonged exposure to the Mind Stone was what caused Wanda's nervous system to ionize, Shuri mentions that both Maximoff twins were selected from Sokovia for a reason. According to Wakanda's sources, Sokovians were prone to genetic anomalies that made them the perfect test subjects for Hydra's Mind Stone experiments.

In other words, the powers displayed by both Wanda and Pietro were not purely the resultant of their exposure to the gamma radiation of the Mind Stone as we were previously led to believe. What is more likely is that the Mind Stone acted as a catalyst, triggering the genetic code that lay dormant in their bodies from their very birth. If this isn't the perfect introduction to the X-gene, I don't know what is.