Hi, everyone! My name is Melissa DeTora. I'm a senior game designer for Magic and lead the Casual Play Design team. A big part of my job involves playtesting Commander cards to make them as fun as they can be. I was on the Set Design team for Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and was the lead designer of the Turtle Power! Commander deck.

My love for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or TMNT) goes back to my childhood. My younger brother and I were really into the cartoon in the late '80s and early '90s, and we collected any TMNT merch we could find, including action figures, t-shirts, books, lunch boxes, you name it.

The TMNT video games hold a special place in my heart. When I look back at those games, I have a lot of great childhood memories: Playing the 8-bit game that is definitely too hard for ten-year-olds. The anxiety of trying to get through the water level within the (too short) 2-minute-and-20-second time limit while also avoiding the instant-kill seaweed. Going to the local bowling alley with my brother and spending all of our allowance on the TMNT arcade game instead of actually bowling.

Our lead product architect, Athena Froehlich, really wanted a Commander deck for this set, but there was no easy way to divide up the franchise into multiple decks—we didn't want the Turtles fighting each other as the primary way to play with the decks. We had to figure out how to represent the entire TMNT universe in a single deck! Given the constraints we had, a five-color deck made the most sense and we locked that in right away. We gave each Turtle and Splinter their own monocolor identity, and we knew we wanted to include a host of other characters with a wide spread of color identities.

We wanted to give the Commander deck a memorable hook to differentiate it from the main set. One aspect of TMNT we lightly touched on in the main set was TMNT video games. Many fans of the Turtles grew up playing these games, and the games were often the first thing that came to mind when they thought of TMNT.

On the first day of Commander design, we brainstormed tropes from the games that we thought were important to represent on cards.

  • Instant-kill electric seaweed (This was the first thing I wrote down!)
  • Roadkill Rodneys everywhere
  • Lots of Foot Clan soldiers
  • Bosses that show up in every game, like Bepop and Rocksteady, Baxter, Shredder, and Krang
  • "Pizza time!"
  • Shell shock (or that moment when you see a Turtle skeleton when they're hit with electricity)
  • Mousers
  • Sewer surfing on skateboards, or auto-scrolling levels
  • Saving April or Splinter
  • A Shredder boss fight
  • Turtle van shooting missiles
  • Weapons and items, like ninja stars, boomerangs, and scrolls
  • Chasing the helicopter
  • Turtle blimp
  • Inside the Technodrome
0023_MTGTMT_CmrNew: Electric Seaweed

We also wrote down video game tropes that were not exclusive to TMNT.

  • Insert coin
  • Continue?
  • Select character
  • Bosses flashing red when at low health
  • Game over
  • Combo attacks (hitting the attack and jump buttons at the same time)
  • High score
  • Level up
  • Arcade cabinets
  • Stacks of quarters
0029_MTGTMT_CmrNew: High Score

The next step of the process was to decide the mechanical theme of the deck. Having a bunch of flavorful top-down cards is nice, but since this would be a Commander deck you can play right out of the box, we wanted it to be a fun and functional play experience. So, we began our brainstorm of potential mechanical themes.

Our first question: which mechanics from the main set would make for a fun Commander deck? Here are some of the main set themes and my thought process on how likely they were to be the theme of the deck.

  • Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle Typal: Typal is fun and popular. The main set touches on it but doesn't fully flesh it out. It was an option, but with the flavor of the deck being video games, doing a typal theme didn't make a lot of sense. Additionally, there were not very many existing Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle payoff cards in existing Magic, so the reprint pool would be low. We ended up doing a light touch of typal in the deck, but it wasn't a main theme.
  • Artifacts matter: Donatello does machines, but artifacts are not a major theme for all the Turtles, so this was ruled out pretty quickly.
  • Sneak (ninjutsu) and disappear: This theme is extremely resonant for the Turtles, but Ninja decks are difficult to design and play with and not very new-player friendly. You need a high density of one- and two-mana evasive creatures, a high density of cards with sneak or ninjutsu, and payoffs for using the mechanic. Given the amount of new cards we had access to, the low reprint pool, and the fact that we would make all these top-down video game cards, we knew this theme would be too difficult to execute.
  • Mutagen tokens and +1/+1 counters: Video games are often about accomplishing something, like gaining experience, leveling up, and/or gaining new powers. For Magic, +1/+1 counters represent the act of leveling up and getting stronger quite well. It's a broad theme which helps to tie in the top-down video game cards. Additionally, +1/+1 counters can go in every color, so we wouldn't have issues making cards for a five-color deck. So, +1/+1 counters it is!

The next question: who would be the commander for the deck? There are four main Turtles, all equally important. One option was to represent them all on one card, but that had risks, as five-color cards are inherently powerful in the broader Commander format. We liked tying in the action of choosing a character, something that was related to the TMNT arcade games, so we made a new mechanic that represented selecting your character.

Here was our first stab at character select:

Character Select (Reveal up to five cards with this ability before the game begins. Their combined color identity is your commander's color identity. Then select two of them. They are your commanders. Shuffle the rest into your library.)

There were several things we liked about this mechanic. We expected fans of TMNT to want to play with their favorite Turtles, and this mechanic allowed them to choose which commanders to play while making the deck five colors. It also felt resonant and flavorful, representing selecting your character in the arcade game.

After playtesting and iterating on this mechanic, we found several major problems with it. First, it would need major rules support, both in the Magic Comprehensive Rules and in digital Magic. Second, it was bending the Commander color identity rule, something that we take seriously. A single Commander deck didn't feel like the right place to bend the rules this way. The third and the major deciding factor was that this ability was quite wordy and ate up a lot of space on the card. Each card we made with this ability would have to be quite short, meaning that we couldn't make the coolest cards possible.

0001_MTGTMT_CmdrFace: Leonardo, the Balance

We scrapped this mechanic and decided to go with a partner variant and put a ability on one of the Turtles to give the deck the five-color identity. Rest in peace, to the old version of character select. Who knows, maybe something like it will show up some day?

The final step of the design process was to fill out the file! In addition to video game tropes, we also included characters, bosses, enemies, and items you'll find in the video games. Here are a few of my favorites.

0012_MTGTMT_CmrNew: Irma, Part-Time Mutant

Irma is a friend of April who is always getting mutated into various things, like a rat, a robot, an Utrom, and more. It was fun to design this top-down card while also tying into the +1/+1 counter theme of the deck.

0015_MTGTMT_CmrNew: Bebop, Skull & Crossbones 0033_MTGTMT_CmrNew: Rocksteady, Mutant Marauder

Designing a Commander deck gives us the opportunity to make cards that don't really fit in a draftable set, such as a partner pair. Bebop and Rocksteady are always together, so it made perfect sense to give them the partner treatment here. For the creative treatment, we showcased them from the game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, where they appeared in pirate costumes.

0039_MTGTMT_CmrNew: Exploding Barrel

This is a common effect in beat-'em-up arcade games: an object (in this case, a barrel) that explodes when you hit it, damaging anything near it (often also the player's character).

Well folks, my time here is up. Thanks for reading about the design process of the Turtle Power! Commander deck! You can see the complete decklist here and browse the cards in the Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Card Image Gallery. I hope you enjoy playing with the deck.

Until next time,
Melissa DeTora