Blue and Red Artifacts in Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

For my last Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles design article, I'm covering mad scientists, killer robots, and giant doomsday machines! Let's get started.

Why Blue and Red Artifacts?

Something that all expressions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles share is their fight against amoral scientists like Baxter Stockman and mechanical monstrosities created by him and Krang, the utrom brain from Dimension X. In addition, we knew the set would want some Equipment, as the Turtle's weapons are so iconic, so our artifact count was already high. That all perfectly fit into an artifact theme in blue and red, which hooked right into the blue-red artifact theme in Edge of Eternities.

As I'm wrapping up this series on the color pairs of Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I've talked about why each of these two-color pairs fits the set. No one forced this to be an enemy-color set. We were open to mixing ally- and enemy-color pairs in the way Magic has done before (most recently in Lorwyn Eclipsed), as long as it was balanced. But it worked out pretty cleanly to stick to enemy-color pairs, as you've seen across these articles. I'll also note that it's definitely possible to draft sweet decks in the ally-color pairs—we saw it come together more than a few times in testing. There are only two (non-hybrid) multicolor cards for each of the enemy-color pairs at uncommon and none at common or rare, so feel free to experiment!

Artifacts as the blue-red archetype was there from the very beginning and never left. We started with the traditional "have as many artifacts as possible" strategy, but in draft that left it pretty siloed, meaning the archetype didn't want many cards that weren't explicitly designed for it and the cards that we designed for that archetype don't often go in any other deck. Basically, we wanted other blue and red decks to be able to play some of the artifact cards, and we wanted the artifact deck to consider nonartifact cards some of the time. We moved several common and uncommon cards from "have as many artifacts as possible" to "have at least one other artifact" to broaden the appeal and use of the cards. At rare, you'll definitely find some cards that want you to go all in on artifacts, and that's a great place for that to live.

Mouser Foundry

This card was always pegged as the premiere artifact common in red. It started out as a sorcery that made a very different kind of mouser.

This was in vision design, where we experiment and try crazier things. We wanted to get across the swarming nature of the mousers and tried a scaling token. It was kind of ridiculous, these tokens could kill opponents very quickly out of nowhere. The fact that similar scaling artifact tokens are almost exclusively made on rares (often mythic rares) was a bit of a red flag, I mean red bandana—thanks, Raph.

To get that "swarm" feeling, we made the mousers unable to block. (They are very aggressive! They bite!) That allowed us to make more of them, and we tried a shape similar to Gleeful Demolition. We knew that was a strong card that saw play in Pauper, so we kept that in mind as we tried to find the best card for this slot. After more testing we decided that we did want the mousers to block, so we shifted away from this design.

To make an artifact theme work in Limited, we have to include as many artifacts as possible. We had understandably been finding it awkward to fit sorceries that involved artifacts into the artifact deck. Even if we scaled back from "collect them all" to "have at least one artifact" at the lower rarities, we still needed a lot of artifacts. So, we tweaked the concept a bit from a sorcery that made a bunch of mousers to an artifact that actually makes mousers.

The above card was fine, and while there was some artifact sacrifice, it wasn't a major theme, so we added a way for it to sacrifice itself. We also tweaked the card draw effect from "rummaging" to "bottling."

This card was supposed to be a slightly weaker version of Experimental Synthesizer (which sounds exactly like an instrument Donnie would create for Mikey; see Mikey & Don, Party Planners). That card is also just very strong (it sees play in Pioneer!), and a weaker version wasn't actually weak in any way. Once we focused on Limited testing, we realized it was definitely too much.

We shifted around our common removal a bit and found a spot for this to become one of the removal spells. This version lasted a few months and was functional but didn't really capture the feeling of a foundry very well. Also, the sacrifice ability doing nothing looked weird to new players (and was also kind of weird to existing players like myself).

The secret pizza sauce for this card came during play design, when we tried inverting the modes. Suddenly, it was more about getting the mousers, which went much better in the artifact deck and was still interesting in the alliance deck. The damage went in at a much lower rate. It's still a strong Limited card, though perhaps not quite as strong as some of the previous versions, which probably wouldn't have made it all the way through play design anyway.

(Also, are the mouser robot cats? Kanagroos? Mice themselves that have gone traitor? We all had different takes on it. I believe the answer is that they're just mousers with that classic design that debuted in the second-ever issue of TMNT, but feel free to continue the debate yourself!)

Here are some more quick, ninja-like hits from the artifact deck!

Improvised Arsenal

Yep, this card was our attempt at "Let's try Cranial Plating in Standard again," but this time in its proper color, red. It started at uncommon, but the power level was high enough in Limited that we would have had to weaken the blue-red artifact theme considerably to keep it uncommon. So, we moved it to rare and added the nifty ability to copy itself.

Flavor-wise, the concept was always "Casey's Golf Bag," which contains numerous improvised weapons that he mostly assembled from junk, including modified golf clubs and hockey sticks. The flavor of him building stronger weapons from the "junk" artifacts you have lying around fit the concept well. And he always kept extra weapons in there to arm his allies, which is what the copy ability hooks into, flavor-wise. We liked the card enough to think we might want to reprint it someday, so we gave it a more generic name that can be used in the future.

Krang, Master Mind

We knew Krang would be one of the characters most involved with artifacts. He lives in an adorable mechanical "bubble walker" and invents all kinds of deadly machines like the Weather Maker, culminating in the exo-suit featured on Krang, Utrom Warlord. That card features him at his most dangerous physically, but like any good archvillain he also tries to hatch complicated schemes to entrap the Turtles, and that's what we went with here.

We felt that Thought Monitor would be a good shape for a Standard artifact deck, but we wanted to make our own version of it. Why does he draw up to four cards? He needs to have a plan for each of the Turtles! He also incentivizes you to recklessly throw away your previous plans (cards in your hand), which felt pretty Krang to us.

Ravenous Robots

Did we put Ravenous Robots in a deck with Pinnacle Emissary from Edge of Eternities? Yes, we did. And you can give it a try, too. See how fast you can run out of Robot tokens! This was another card that started out as something like "Mouser Swarm" for the name, but we gave it a more generic name for the future of Magic.

Donatello, Gadget Master

While Shredder's Revenge was the only card to make it through unchanged from exploratory design, our rare version of Donatello is close! We put in the file at the beginning of vision design as soon as we filled out the rares. It started as a 2/3, but within a week or two it became a 3/2, and not a single other thing changed for the next thirteen months throughout all the testing. Sometimes you hit the bullseye!

There're so many more design stories to tell! For those of you that are still into the nitty-gritty of Magic design after these 10,000 words of Magic design articles, there are stories about:

• The design of the Classes from the classic theme song, including how Ninja Teen almost wasn't Ninja Teen
• The cycle of North, South, East, and West Wind Avatars, which is one of the very few common to mythic rare vertical cycles Magic has ever done
• How we changed a card designed for Constructed because of the flavor of The Last Ronin
• Leonardo, Cutting Edge's journey from "hate bear" to Pridemate, and his Technique's journey from Helping Hand to, uh, helping with both hands
• How we developed each of the hybrid rares (Short answer: it took a lot of work, both in Play Design and with the color pie.)
• How we designed the pizzas in the set and chose which gross ingredients would be on them (whiteboard!)
• How Turtles Forever caused consternation in the most constructive way
• How we designed the Turtle's signature weapons
• How the "off-color activation" cycle (Metalhead and company) came about
• Flying dinosaurs!
• How we designed the Turtle Team-Up cards and play experience together
• How Turtle Power! was completely redesigned because of an uncommon Lorwyn Eclipsed card, which later was changed away from the colliding design. (I absolutely love where we ended with the simple Turtle anthem, so thanks Lorwyn Eclipsed! For, uh, many things, as it turned out.)

What I've learned over many years of leading sets, both for Magic and other games, is that being the set lead boils down to one thing: you need to advocate for every single card in the set to make sure that it's the best card filling its role and that its role is the best one for the set overall. No one else is going to do that, so you need to treat every card like it's a child trying out a bunch of different hobbies, and you're there to help it find what it loves to do. And then you need to go even beyond that and make sure the cards are in the best spot for the game of Magic overall, like Death in the Family, which we talked about last article.

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I hope these articles have given you a glimpse at how much passion our design team snuck into Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The set is available now at your local game store, TCGplayer, Amazon, and elsewhere Magic is sold. I can't wait to see what amazing shenanigans you all get up to with these cards! I'll see you all out at the tables and on MTG Arena. Cowabunga!