You know it. I know it. Let's talk about it. Who would have thought there would be more than one Magic: The Gathering set in New York?

The jokes write themselves. As a former city-dweller, I made more than a few comments about the MTA being blue aligned because of all the interruptions. We are keenly aware of how often our sets are visiting the city that never sleeps, and that was—despite all my brilliant humor—a serious consideration as we began planning our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set. Ideally, every set feels unique, and a lot of that comes from how we treat the worlds and backgrounds around the characters.

TMNT has the advantage of their world being deeply weird and far-reaching; they may live in the city, but they're friends with transdimensional cows and time wizards and aliens, so TMNT can show far more magical locales than other versions of the city. But ultimately the Turtles call NYC home, and we want that home to feel distinctly Turtles …

0134_MTGTMT_Main: Transdimensional Bovine 0069_MTGTMT_CmdrRep: Hinterland Harbor

Creative Guidelines

Let's pull back the curtain to reveal how Magic sets get made: Part of developing the vibe of every Magic set involves establishing some basic creative guidelines. These guidelines are short and sweet; flexible enough to be applied by artists and writers while being strict enough to keep a set's flavor distinct.

A lot of creative professionals intuitively develop their own creative guidelines for projects; they're the tonal rails the rest of your project runs on; they help you feel out how much humor is too much and decide whether a character seems out of place. Identifying those aspects of a set early and spending some serious time understanding them goes a long way when it comes time to solve tricky problems.

Let's take a look at the creative guidelines we established for Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and see how they play out on cards themselves.

Rad Action

The TMNT are cool teens doing ninja things. Their energy is over the top and wild; they aren't stoic or reserved (sorry, Leo). We wanted the art to showcase characters constantly in motion, looking animated or unbalanced, and the card titles to sound active and strange.

But "rad action" has a darker side. To emphasize how cool the heroes are, they need truly dangerous foes to play against. Beating a joke of an opponent doesn't make you a cool hero, so we opted whenever possible to show the foes of the TMNT as dire threats. Even characters the franchise may have treated as comical in the past, like Bebop and Rocksteady, enter Magic as dangerous adversaries. And fights against these deadly foes can have dire consequences.

0140_MTGTMT_Main: Bebop & Rocksteady

Teenage Fun

Every TMNT incarnation exists somewhere along the spectrum between "teenage" and "ninja," and it was important to help this set stand out by showing our fearsome four just hanging out being teenage brothers together. The franchise has always balanced its grim fights and body horror with plenty of sarcasm and absurdist humor, so showcasing moments of levity and friendship reflects the source material and helps remind us all that these are still kids going on wild and dangerous adventures.

0113_MTGTMT_Main: Cowabunga! 0051_MTGTMT_CmdrRep: Harmonize 0149_MTGTMT_Main: Go Ninja Go

Out After Curfew

The final leg of the set's creative chair was the idea of being "out after curfew," or keeping scenes dark and making familiar locations feel eerie or forbidden because of how we're seeing them. Late at night in the city, light isn't an omnipresent element; a thousand individual sources—signs and traffic signals and headlights and windows—all blend into a rainbow of sources that can color normal characters and locations into weird, intense wonderlands.

0021_MTGTMT_Main: Mighty Mutanimals 0010_MTGTMT_Main: Jennika, Bad Apple Big Sister 0026_MTGTMT_Main: Turncoat Kunoichi

The New York You're From

What do these creative guidelines have to do with New York City and helping the NYC of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feel distinct from our other depictions of NYC?

While the bones of this setting stay the same—New York is a real city any of us can visit, move to, or learn about—the perspective of it can change your entire experience.

Now think about our guidelines for Turtles:

  • Rad Action: Other versions of the city have cool action, but are they rad? Will their characters skateboard off the 495 to grind a ninja's noggin? Probably not. The places for that frenetic movement are tight and at hand, not in the open air of web-slinging or a backdrop to power armor. Rad action needs crates to leap off and pipes to swing from. Rad action happens in warehouses and sewer tunnels and other forgotten, cluttered corners.
  • Teenage Fun: Teenagers don't generally hang out in the touristy parts of NYC, and when they do, it's usually for a field trip. But where do they go to have fun? Teenage fun happens in those places that are accessible: homes, on the street, in the park, at the local game store, and other places teenagers can access—and the less they're supposed to be there, the more fun it is.
  • Out After Curfew: Remember this push isn't just about lighting; it's about making things feel different depending on your perspective and how they're used. A fire escape becomes a balcony; a rooftop becomes a garden; an alley becomes a dance hall.

Altogether, this gives off a particular vibe: the Turtles inhabit "the New York you're from." It isn't the most picture-perfect version of New York—it's dirty and patched up and old—but it's a place you know and love, where the inhabitants have made the space into more than it was ever intended to be. It's a New York with graffiti and trash, but also the best damn food you'll ever eat.

The result is a New York City that looks and feels dramatically different from what we've seen from other sets while still being identifiably New York. I think the best possible example of that aesthetic are the basic lands we created for the main set. Affectionately nicknamed the "vanish" lands, the assumption for each was that the Turtle were just hanging out here and bolted when they heard you coming. Each one is messy and feels lived in.

0315_MTGTMT_BasicLnd: Plains 0316_MTGTMT_BasicLnd: Island 0317_MTGTMT_BasicLnd: Swamp 0318_MTGTMT_BasicLnd: Mountain 0319_MTGTMT_BasicLnd: Forest

In the end, this set was a love letter to the messy New York City we love; the only city in the world where mutated teenage turtles really feel like they belong!

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.