Sneak Into Design with Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Welcome back! We're going to dive deep into more Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles design stories. Across the next few articles, I'll go through each mechanic and color pair in the set. I wanted to start with the most important one in the set, ninjutsu! No, wait, ninjutsu approached this article and then threw off its disguise. It's really sneak we're going to talk about!

Why White and Black for Sneak?

Ninjas are generally found in blue and black in wider Magic, but in this set we have many heroic Ninjas for the first time. And Leonardo, the Turtle who cares most about the art of ninjutsu (four-time winner of the Sewer Ninja Warrior championship) is definitely a white mana-aligned character. It made a lot of sense to go with white-black to capture both heroic Ninja Turtles and the evil Foot Clan (and Karai who sits between them) and allow you to play all the Ninjas in the same deck.

The very earliest note I have about the potential mechanics is from the beginning of the sixteen-month process for this set:

Pillars of set:

• Ninjutsu
• Food and pizza
• A mutation mechanic
  • Evolve or adapt?
• A student/master training mechanic
  • Training?
• Equipment, a few Vehicles, and other artifacts?
• Ninja (and Turtle) typal, Mutant typal

Tokens:

• 2/2 Red Mutant
• X/1 Colorless artifact Robot Mouse

Probably not:

• Treasure, Clue, and Blood tokens
• Mutate

You can see it right at the top of that list: ninjutsu! That was the very first thing we put into the set. It is all about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, after all, and we wanted to use Magic's existing ninjutsu mechanic, and we knew players would want it, too.

(We did briefly think about basing the set around teenagers, but a set filled with keywords like "bad poetry," "ennui," and "talkback" seemed somewhat less appealing to us.)

Basing a set around making ninjutsu work was a bit risky. Ninjutsu constrains what kinds of cards we can include and push the power of, particularly for cheap evasive creatures and cheap defensive creatures. We want to make ninjutsu effective, but not so good that every game rapidly snowballs out of control. We also needed to be mindful that, when the ninjutsu player can't attack unblocked, ninjutsu doesn't do anything. Their cards need to have some fallback uses that can help them turn the game around.

Ninjutsu also adds a lot of complexity to attacking and blocking decisions. We wanted this set to have strategic depth (which ninjutsu does; you can't learn to be a ninja in a day!) but also not overwhelm players with paralyzing decisions that can backfire. Ninjutsu eats up most of a set's "complexity points" (not an actual point measurement; that's R&D lingo for "you shouldn't have a bunch of complicated mechanics in the same set"). Including ninjutsu put some strict constraints on the complexity of our other mechanics. But we were confident we could pull this all off. Magic had focused on ninjutsu in Limited three times before, and each time was more fun than the last, with Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty being regarded as one of the best Limited sets of all time. No pressure!

You may have noticed by this point that the set doesn't have ninjutsu at all! We created an updated version of ninjutsu called sneak. I'm going to talk about the reasons for the change, but Mark Rosewater's article also covers this from a different angle.

We knew we wanted a mechanic to represent the Turtle's "ninja moves." We wanted combat to be very dynamic and fluid. It should feel like you're attacking as a ninja that can pull amazing surprise moves out of nowhere. Ordinary combat tricks weren't going to cut it. We (Daniel Xu was the first to suggest this in the very first round of design homework) created a mechanic that put ninjutsu on instant and sorcery spells! We asked our Rules team about it, but they thought about it for a minute and told us, "No, absolutely not. In no conceivable way can you do that. You have to cast the spell. That's a new mechanic."

And we started testing that, and it played quite well and made for some exciting cards. So, for most of vision design, sneak and ninjutsu were both in the set, but it became clear that having two mechanics that functioned almost (but not quite) the same was not going to be an awesome landing spot for the set. That'd be like a ninja missing the manhole and splatting on the street.

Sneak can handle creatures being "snuck in" just fine, so we decided to change the whole set over to sneak. R&D has thought about updating ninjutsu before. The mechanic is just very different than how we'd execute on it today. As an activated ability of a card in your hand that puts the card onto the battlefield (like it was cast, but not), it just wasn't the way any other mechanic in Magic functioned. There were several weird unintended corner cases about returning multiple creatures with a single ninjutsu creature, returning them during the end of combat step, abusing the first strike step, and more. We were very sad to lose the word ninjutsu, but we were less sad to lose some of the very unintuitive things that the mechanic can get up to. Things that you will have to call a judge over to explain every single time, because there's no way your opponent is going to believe it works that way.

For a while we called the sneak mechanic "ninpō" to try and preserve the ninja flavor of the word, but in the end we wanted to have the option for future Magic sets to use the mechanic on creatures that were very sneaky but not actually ninjas, so sneak was the best choice. (Its other playtest name was "feint," but the first time I heard a playtester say aloud, "Leonardo fainted twice this game," I knew that wasn't going to work.)

Now, by design, sneak does work a bit differently than ninjutsu. Instead of being countered by Stifle effects, sneak can be countered with normal counterspells (and that's the reason our common counterspell is Negate, which can't hit creatures). But using sneak to cast a spell means it works with cost reducers and abilities that trigger when you cast a spell. It also works properly from the command zone.

April O'Neil, Kunoichi Trainee

Alright, let's get into some cards! For this article, where we cover every major iteration of the card from start to finish across sixteen months, we're going to look at April O'Neil, Kunoichi Trainee.

We always intended to have three cards for April in the set, showcasing three major aspects of her depictions over the years: April as a scientist and hacker, April as a reporter, and April as a ninja trainee (from the 2012 animated series and her video game depictions). We decided her common card would be the one focused on her time as a ninja, and that meant it should be a mono-white card (April's a white-blue character overall).

We started with this:

That was a totally fine starting place and established some parameters for her. She would have synergy with sneak but not have sneak herself. Some of that synergy would come from her having an enters and/or leaves ability.

But vision design is about trying crazy stuff to see what's fun, so we tried some of our crazier ideas on this card. We had a red-white mechanic named "quick study," which had two iterations. Our red-white pair was initially focused on the relationship between a sensei and student, so putting that on April's card made a lot of sense while maintaining her synergy with sneak.

"Quick study" was a weird mechanic, and didn't end up playing that well, but we'll talk more about that when we talk about the set's red-white mechanics. After that, we went back to a simple sneak enabler.

After a few months, this card had become an even better enabler. White nonfliers don't have a ton of evasion options, but we found the one that worked:

This card played really, really well because, uh, it's insanely strong, especially in this set. A month or two later, when Play Design joined us vision designers, April was immediately identified as one of the cards that was over the line. Play Design is very careful with the power level of cantrip creatures (especially two-mana ones), so they always get a ton of scrutiny and testing. We changed April's enters ability to a leaves ability.

We were content with that for a few months. Then we got into focused Limited testing with the entire Play Design team, and even with that change the card draw was still playing too strongly in the sneak deck. We were able to dial in the power level of as we refined and balanced Limited. She functioned as a kind of draw-two effect, sometimes even a draw-three effect for a cheap cost.

After some debate about how to keep the sneak archetype in the right spot, we dialed back the card-drawing effect back to scry 2 and made it an enters ability again. We also made her a 2/2 creature to compensate. And that's not even every single iteration, that's just her different major text boxes. If we count every stat change and tweak, she changed about 20 times.

The most awkward part of this card (and we know it) is her being a two-mana common legend. Most legends at common are four or more mana to lessen legend rule problems, but this slot needed to cost two or three mana to be a good sneak enabler. See Alopex—I mean, Turncoat Kunoichi, at the end of this article for a more detailed discussion of some of the issues around legendary permanents.

As long as we're here, your word for the day is "kunoichi," which is a Japanese term that means "female ninja."

Action News Crew

We put this joke into the set and never looked back. At common, we generally don't do keywords as a cameo (where they only appear one or two times in the set), but we're much looser with ability words that are just labels for certain text that already explains itself (like all good text should).

This card spent time as both Irma and Vernon before we decided we wanted the whole (nonlegendary) Channel 6 Action News team on the card.

Pigeon Pete

This card's art was always going to be Pigeon Pete, one of the more fun recent additions to the TMNT universe who, among other things, is an absolutely terrible chef. The card was originally a common 1/1 creature. Playtesting showed that, to get the sneak deck to the right power level, we needed the one-mana fliers to be uncommon creatures, so we moved him up. More testing showed that we didn't want both uncommon fliers to be 1-power creatures and that Dream Beavers was the Constructed card, so Pete should change. Pete, who in both the comics and the 2012 animated series is extremely useless in combat, ended up with 0 power but an extra toughness.

If you look at the hybrid rare cycle in Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you'll notice that nine of the ten cards are team-ups between two characters. The one that isn't is Splinter, Radical Rat. We did not arbitrarily count Splinter and his stick as a team-up, something else happened.

Originally, Dark Leo & Shredder was our team-up hybrid rare for white-black and Splinter was a white-black mythic rare. But we struggled for a long time to find a satisfying design for Dark Leo & Shredder (one of the coolest storylines of the 2011 comics run, in my opinion) that stayed within the color pie. We liked versions of the card with deathtouch, but those weren't in white's color pie. Also, we needed to explore three-mana designs, because in general you can't put as much power on hybrid cards as normal two-color cards.

Once Play Design started testing the sneak deck, they wanted Dark Leo & Shredder to be one of the key cards and wanted to find a two-mana design for it. The solution was to make it a white-black mythic rare, which meant moving Splinter down. Splinter was always our white-blue-black Ninjas commander so you could play the new white Ninja cards with the existing blue-black Ninjas. We talked to the Council of Colors about having Splinter's trigger-doubling ability be a white-black hybrid activated ability, and it made it through. White can always do that, and black is the primary Ninja color.

While having tight cycles where every hybrid card is a team-up would be nice, it's more important to make sure every card finds the right home, which is how we ended up here.

Alopex

We love Alopex! She's a great character from the 2011 comics run who has become an indispensable part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lore. She's a smart and dedicated Foot Clan ninja who betrayed Shredder and has been both a rival and love interest for Raphael.

So why is this card not called Alopex? Well, Play Design worked on three Standard decks for this set, and the most prominent one was a white-black sneak deck featuring many of the characters I've discussed today. Alopex was a crucial piece of that deck, but having your main removal creature be a legendary creature was really making the gameplay awkward as the deck wanted four copies of the card. It was so awkward, and the legend rule was so detrimental, that Play Design came to me and asked if there was any way we could make the card a nonlegendary creature. I talked to Creative, and they agreed that we could do so here. We all love Alopex, but we feel she's not so well-known (yet) that her name absolutely has to be on her card. Other factors we considered were that this card was explicitly designed for 60-card play and likely wouldn't be that fun as a commander anyway, and that there were other characters working for the Foot Clan in a similar role.

Making a Creature Nonlegendary

There are several factors at work when we decide to make a nonlegendary card for a specific creature or remove the legendary supertype from a character's card. Note that this has all been the subject of huge debates in R&D over the past few years, and other designers have different perspectives.

Universes Beyond sets want a player who is even slightly familiar with the property to recognize something in every booster. That's sort of the promise of Universes Beyond: we're taking a universe and expressing it through Magic: The Gathering. If you're a fan and you open a booster of a Universes Beyond set and you don't recognize any creature, that's kind of a failing for Universes Beyond. We've found both new and existing players feel that way. So, we want recognizable creatures at low rarities, but those are the very ones we can't make nonlegendary, because everyone knows them. We couldn't put a picture of Leonardo on a creature card and call it "Youthful Altered Stealth-Inclined Tortoise."

Magic sets need a lot of common creatures. Most sets have about 50 common creatures, and this one has 39. While some franchises have plenty of interesting generic concepts that players know, many don't, and TMNT is one of them. Among our 28 nonlegendary common creatures, roughly 15 of them are actually specific characters that weren't made legendary! Goodbye, Scumbug! Hello, Insectoid Exterminator! Goodbye, Muckman and Joe Eyeball! Hello, Putrid Pals!

We'd much rather use the names that are part of the universe that we're expressing through cards. Often, like Joe Eyeball, those names are awesome! Every time we don't use the right name, it takes a knowledgeable player a little bit out of the world we're trying to express.

But we also can't have 26 legendary commons, because the legend rule would come up way too frequently and make both drafting, building, and playing decks much more difficult.

The legendary supertype is really three completely separate things that have coalesced in a single item across Magic's history without intentional planning.

1. You can't have more than one copy of a legendary creature on the battlefield.
2. If a card includes the name of a specific character, it has to be legendary.
3. A legendary creature can be a commander and lead a Commander deck.

Mark Rosewater and I have argued for some kind of adjustment to be made, but removing the legendary status of some characters who aren’t the focus of their universe and using as many generic creature concepts as possible was the way the majority of R&D wanted to handle the issue. And they have good points too!

• We can make legendary creatures (even at common) slightly more powerful than normal because you can't (usually) have multiple copiess of them in play.
• The existing system works very well for Magic Multiverse sets with their lower legendary counts.
• The existing system is familiar and functional, and the cost of re-educating everyone if we changed or added to it is pretty high.

For the record, Mark and I both favor either removing the second rule (so we could put a common Leonardo in a set and have him not be legendary, as the commons generally don't make for exciting commanders anyway) or creating a new term or symbol that means "I'm a specific character and can lead a Commander deck, but I don't trigger the legend rule." Our quest continues, but for now we'll continue to evaluate characters based on their recognizability and remove legendary from a few where there's any kind of plausible "they're not the only one" status that justifies us changing their name.

Just like the best Turtle storylines, these articles sometimes take crazy turns! Bet you didn't expect an in-depth examination of a few of the legend rule's issues in an article about sneak. Guess I just disguised this article as something else and snuck it in there … 'til next time!

---

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.