Disappear, Pizza, and Rats in Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

And we're back with the insects, terrifying Squirrelanoids, and other vermin of the black-green color pair in Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, including characters like Putrid Pals that are literally made out of mutated garbage. We'll try not to touch anything as we dive in!

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Why Black and Green?

We knew pizza was going to play a role in the set, and black and green (along with white) have a long history of Food themes in wider Magic. The pizzas in this set get weird, (some might say they're abominations) and lean more black than white. The creatures in green and black are largely drawn from mutants associated with the Foot Clan, like Bebop and Rocksteady.

All sets need to have some synergy between their adjacent color pairs. This leads to more varied decks in Limited and gives cards different roles to play. With a smaller set size, this was something we thought about a lot while designing the set. We designed the set to have many broad synergies, focusing on cards that worked in as many archetypes as possible. When we were deciding what the black-green color pair should do mechanically, we started with what the adjacent color pairs of the set were doing. We knew that we had sneak in white-black and Mutagen tokens in green-blue. What do those abilities have in common? They both want stuff (attacking creatures, Mutagen tokens) to leave the battlefield during your turn. And we knew black-green was going to have a Food component, and you can also sacrifice Food during your turn. So, we naturally turned to a Magic mechanic that rewards just that: revolt!

Revolt is an ability word, which means we just write out what it does every time. The word revolt is just there to help you find those cards when drafting or searching. We thought about using the word revolt for a hot minute, but while Bebop and Rocksteady do occasionally try and revolt against Shredder in various TMNT media, it's definitely not what they're known for. And while the pizzas the Turtles eat are kind of revolting (unless gummy worm pizzas are your thing), that's not the same thing. We decided to find a different word for the same ability. Because revolt is an ability word, there's no new rules needed to just rename it. We landed on disappear as a nice general word that represents both Bebop, Rocksteady, and the rest of the Foot Clan stealing tech and mutagen and making it disappear, and how when there's pizza anywhere near the Turtles it quickly disappears.

Disappear is what we refer to as a "workhorse mechanic." While we have two rares that use disappear, we didn't try to make a Constructed disappear deck. It fills a useful role in Limited, and we can make individual cards with it that slot into other decks, but it's not the star of the show. It and alliance, the red-white mechanic, are similar in that way. They're mechanics defined by what the other color pairs are doing, and we didn't try to make a cohesive Constructed deck for them, just cool and generally useful rare cards.

Alright, we've done a deep dive into a common and some uncommons, let's check out a rare card with disappear!

Rat King, Verminister

We always knew Rat King was going to be one of our rare disappear cards. Rat King has been making people and things disappear into the sewers for decades. We also started out with the goal of giving him some kind of ability to return things from the graveyard. This fits into his character from the Mirage comics (where he was maybe a ghost) and the IDW comics where he's a god-like avatar that's very hard to kill, and our version of Rat King combines bits of the two.

This first version only lasted for a single playtest, because a Rat King that doesn't make Rats is hardly a Rat King at all.

This was a good start to upping the Rat-ness, but it was a bit too good. We quickly moved him to creating one Rat per turn. We didn't want to incentivize waiting to sacrifice everything in one turn when disappear otherwise only wanted one thing to leave the battlefield a turn.

We played with similar shapes and made a few tweaks until Play Design started testing him. He was just giving out too much power and toughness for too low a cost, and going wide was not the most mono-black shape. So, we moved the counter from "all other Rats" to "target Rat."

The return ability, though flavorful, had a few issues. It wasn't especially strong in Standard. Commander already had a way to get him back on the battlefield (recasting your commander), so players would rarely leave him in the graveyard. Play Design was also open to a two-mana shape for both Standard and Commander.

We made his last ability into a tutor for a while, and the card played fine. But it just had lost some of the ratty feeling. It was in casual play design where someone (I believe Ellie Rice) suggested that he might be a really good Rat commander, with Relentless Rats and others, if his last ability was more functional for that deck.

We tested the Rat King Rats deck, and it seemed fun for dedicated Rat players and in the right spot power-wise. We simplified him by having the counter just go on him, partly as a small power balance now that he was two mana. And that's how the Rat King got his ratiness back!

Pizza Face, Gastromancer

Pizza Face actually started as a toy way back in 1990. Yep, we were allowed to draw inspiration from the toys in addition to everything else. All crazy ideas were on the table if they were resonant, looked cool, or could make a compelling Magic card.

This was also one of the most controversial cards in the set. The reason may be surprising to you! He originally didn't have the crazy line ", , Sacrifice Pizza Face: You gain 15 life." Without it, some designers felt he absolutely should not have the Food type.

We discussed the meaning of "being a Food" in the Design Pit. We got into some kind of honestly deep philosophical debates about "What exactly is Food, anyway?" In the end we decided he clearly had to have the Food type—he's literally made of mutated pizza, after all. But we didn't really want you to sacrifice your signpost uncommon for a mere two mana to gain 3 life, so we didn't put that line of text on him, though some designers thought we should. The fact that he made a Food token felt enough for us on the Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles design team to let him be a Food himself. In the rules of Magic, giving an artifact the Food type doesn't mean anything in particular. It's just that we obviously want it to be associated with sacrificing to gain life so that there's consistency on what "Food" means in Magic.

In the end, we agreed to compromise by putting on the absurd but kind of awesome final line that lets you gain 15 life for ten mana. He's not just "food," he's all of the food. How often did this come up in our testing? Well, not even once (that I recall), but I'm looking forward to hearing the stories about how this crazy line of text that got added to "make him a proper Food" saved someone's game.

Death in the Family

I really love that our Creative team here went for a different, more nuanced view of Shredder, the Turtles' main villain. Don't worry; he's depicted in full villain mode on other cards like Shredder, Unrelenting and Shredder's Technique. It would have been easy to show Shredder as the cackling villain gloating about Splinter's demise, but in a lot of TMNT iterations, they knew each other and trained together. While Shredder always opposes the Turtles (and perhaps is partially responsible for what happened to Splinter depicted here), it's a somber, mournful moment. It's also a nice companion to Shredder's Revenge, which depicts a similar scene that feels very different.

Why are we discussing this card here? This card had the disappear mechanic for 90% of its design lifetime. It was a nice, clean, bigger version of Fatal Push.

I think this is a cool card that we could make someday. Death in the Family went into the file like this and kept this shape until near the end of play design. As they were testing the Constructed packages and looking for what holes they had, they realized they wanted a two-mana black removal spell that exiles for Standard, specifically to replace Anoint with Affliction. They wanted a clean version with a name they could reprint again in the future. And this card was in a similar space and had a reprintable name already, so we negotiated a bit and this became the clean card you see above, and Shredder's Technique gained the ability to kill enchantments; that way we had added utility on one of our two uncommon black removal spells. Though I do like the "Fatal Push +1" card, I also like that we got to make a clean simple card for the rest of Magic to use.

Anyway, before I disappear, I just wanted to say thanks for reading! I hope you're enjoying these deep dives into Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card design. Join me next time as we cover the last archetype: blue-red artifacts!

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Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles releases on March 6, 2026, and you can preorder cards now from your local game store, TCGplayer, Amazon, and elsewhere Magic is sold.