Talking Turtles with Magic Design

It's finally time to talk Turtles!

I've got a lot to say about designing Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was one of the coolest experiences of my life, and I want to share some of that with you! Over the next several articles, we're going to dive deep into the nuts and bolts of how the cardboard sausage gets made! I hope you like your metaphors mixed, by the way.

I'm in a unique position to write these articles, as I was the lead designer of Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the entirety of the set's design, all the way from exploratory design through the end of play design. That's unusual for a modern Magic set, but me being Wizards of the Coast's resident Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or TMNT) expert helped. Also, this is a medium-size set of 190 cards, so it was like a whole third easier to make, much like it's easy to hold the peanut butter on your tuna, peanut butter, and grape jelly pizza.

We had a full sixteen months to make this set, from August 2023 through November 2024, and we knew exactly what kind of set we were making the whole time. We knew what size it would be, and that it would support four-player Pick-Two Draft (and the usual eight-player pick-one style of draft). We applied a whole lot of our learnings about medium-size sets here to make this set as fun and awesome as possible.

But first! Let me introduce you to our own group of heroes who brought this set to life. Much like the Turtles, we all had our roles to fill on the design team, and we each have a TMNT character to represent us.

And though that's already a stacked team, we also had a number of game design guest stars! Though each of them was on the team for two months or less, their contributions all improved the set.

My love for TMNT started early. I started watching the 1987 animated series at the perfect age, and that Christmas was filled with many TMNT toys. A few years later, around the time the first TMNT movie released, my stepbrother let me borrow his reprints of the original Mirage black-and-white TMNT comic run. These comics kind of blew my tween mind (though the word "tween" didn't exist yet, and I'm not really sure if it even exists now) with their very serious take on the Turtles and their world. It showed me a side of the Turtles I didn't know existed, and it was totally awesome! Though it is a more mature depiction of the Turtles, it did work to turn me into a life-long TMNT fan. My favorite character was always Raphael. I liked to think that I was the cool and rude one, but anyone who has spent more than five seconds with me at that age would see what a huge Donatello I was and still am. Maybe someday I'll be cool and rude … That's one of the awesome things about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There's a diverse array of characters and viewpoints that people can identify with. Each generation has its own version of TMNT that they grew up with, and all of them count. Unlike almost every other franchise, there's no "central canon" of books or movies for TMNT. Whether it's through comics, animated series entries, movies, or video games, people become casual or serious TMNT fans through their own unique path.

As a first step in any Universes Beyond design, we try to understand the unique challenges and advantages of the property we're adapting. Our understanding of these elements helped shape the set into what it is.

Advantage: A huge portion of people across the globe recognize Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Through 40 years of comics, multiple TV shows and films, thousands of toys, and several fan-favorite video games, the Turtles have reach that rivals the biggest franchises in the world.

Challenge: Many fans don't know the C-tier characters.

Everyone knows Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo, Splinter, Shredder, and April. There's a solid number of B-tier characters like Casey Jones, Baxter Stockman, Krang, the mouser robots, Bebop, and Rocksteady. After that, character awareness drops off. There are amazing characters! They're just not as widely known. The Turtles are a phenomenon, but their other characters aren't as famous.

Even if you're a diehard shell-head, I guarantee that you'll be surprised and delighted by some of the characters you'll discover in this set. You may ask, "How did they choose that character?" And the reason is almost always, "We think that character is cool." We chose ones that we had a cool mechanical design for, or whose visual design is cool and told a story. And more so than almost any other franchise, TMNT has some awesome designs for characters that tell you exactly what they're about. A hermit crab with a dumpster for a shell? Check. A triceratops with a ray gun in space armor? Also check.

Challenge: We wanted to cover the main characters multiple times in the set. There's a conundrum that all Universes Beyond sets face, and it goes something like this: You want every booster to have recognizable characters from the franchise. You don't want someone who likes those characters to open a few boosters and find no characters that excite them. But you also want to make really cool cards featuring those characters that are relevant in Standard and/or Commander and make for sweet game pieces. So, what rarity do you put your premiere characters at?

The obvious answer is all of them! You want low-rarity versions at common or uncommon that will show up more frequently in boosters and Limited and high-rarity versions at rare or mythic rare. TMNT has a smaller character roster, and we quickly realized we wanted the Turtles at each rarity—which is a lot. We discovered two advantages to offset this.

Advantage: Each Turtle is very much a monocolor character.

Leonardo is definitely aligned with white mana. He's the leader, spends the most time practicing his martial skills, and cares about the team, rules, and honor more than anyone else.

Donatello is about as blue as a character as you can get, being the resident science genius whose exploration and tinkering sometimes goes too far.

Raphael is the only character whose mask color is identical to his color in Magic, and that's no accident. Red is the universal color of rage and impulsivity, and the Magic color red also includes those, uh, "virtues" I guess? Raph's temper and quick action are some of his defining traits.

Michelangelo is the heart of the team, the youngest one whose journey is the most about growth. He also has a special bond with cats and other animals. And, oh yeah, he's also the one who loves pizza the most. The other Turtles love pizza, but Mikey dreams in pizza.

We stuck to these monocolor identities across the set. Doing this really helped to keep the Turtles separate and identifiable. I can say "uncommon Raphael," and you know exactly what color it is and you won't get it confused with any other Raph in the set.

As part of their monocolor identities, the next trick was finding connective tissue for them that made them feel different than the other Turtles but connected to themselves. After all, their ninja skills are pretty similar. It's hard to capture the difference between "ninja skills using sticks" and "ninja skills using pointy metal" on a bunch of cards. We wanted each to have a theme that felt true to the character and worked in the set.

• Leo is about sneak and being a ninja.
• Don is about artifacts.
• Raph is about attacking and dealing damage to your opponents.
• Mikey is the most diverse but has several synergies among his versions. Food and Mutagen tokens support disappear. Disappear and Mutagen tokens support +1/+1 counters, which feed into the growth at the heart of Mikey.

And the black member of the cycle? Well, in Magic, both Rats and Ninjas are connected to black mana, and that reminds me of someone in the TMNT universe …

Advantage: We implemented a "Turtle slot" in each Play Booster. What this means is that there's a set slot in the Play Booster where you will get one of the seventeen main Turtle cards—one of their common, uncommon, rare, or mythic rare versions. And you are guaranteed* to get a Turtle in every booster!

*Not a legal guarantee; as soon as I started typing those words, Bob our lawyer came over and stood right behind me and harumped to remind me that designers aren't allowed to make legal guarantees—and what did you have for lunch, Bob? Is that sushi?

This makes it so you don't open four copies of Raphael all in the same pack—apart from the traditional foil slot doing its own thing, you shouldn't see more than one. This helps the set to feel a little more diverse and not overwhelmed with Turtles but nonetheless balanced so that all the commons, uncommons, rares, and mythic rares all appear at the same rate, regardless of being a bodacious Turtle or not. And rather than letting some packs go Turtle-less, you'll always have one!

Forgive me for geeking out about a collation trick; I'm the design representative for collation and love what we were able to do with this set to improve both gameplay (it helps a bit with the legend rule) and the pack-cracking experience.

Challenge: TMNT doesn't have many characters that can fly.

This is a challenge we face for many Universes Beyond sets: most of them don't have enough characters that can naturally fly. Magic needs a decent spread of flying creatures of all sizes for Limited.

Advantage: We were able to use (almost) all iterations of the TMNT universe.

This was a really unique opportunity that we don't have with most other franchises. Often, we can only access one version of the property. Here, we had access to practically everything—TV series entries, movies, video games, comics, and beyond. That really helped us solve problems like the one above. We have cool-looking flyers from the 1980s comics, the 2012 TV series, and the 2011 comic run. And we could tweak existing designs or redesign their look as needed to best express the character in our own version of TMNT. So, much like Foot Clan ninjas, it ended up not being much of a challenge at all.

Challenge: The tone of TMNT leans more humorous than the typical Magic set.

Advantage: We leaned into one of the key elements of the Turtles: They themselves are not jokes. They look unusual and live in a weird world of mutants and monsters, but they're just teenagers trying to survive, man. Pretty much everyone's teenage years are a weird time; they just turn that up to 11. They aren't just cartoon sketches of characters; they have real conflicts and emotions despite their, um, unusual appearances. They make jokes, but their absurd four-word premise isn't the joke—it's just a weird world and they're living in it. So with access to the entire franchise, we balanced the humor (and there definitely is some in the set!) with some more serious moments from the original Mirage comics run and more. While there are many recognizable things from more humorous media like the original cartoon, we generally took the character designs in a more serious direction.

Challenge: The modern urban setting is unusual for a Magic set.

Advantage: The Turtles' New York is a weird, weird place where a borough called Mutant Town exists, the mayor is a half-human, half-fly creature who builds killer robots, the sewer has many nice places to live, and every building is covered in neon lights at night. We leaned into that weirdness in both the visuals and the card designs. We also leaned away from including "mundane" items or vehicles. The only one we thought was worth doing was including a skateboard as an iconic part of Turtles lore. And while there are plenty of pizzas in the set, believe me, they are not in any way mundane. That's just a taste of some of what we had to consider across the sixteen months of making this set. More articles are coming where we'll dive even deeper into what we did for each Limited archetype and look at a few cards all the way from the beginning to the end of the design process. Each of the 190 cards in the set went through many, many iterations—even the common dual lands went through three or four versions—except one. There's exactly one card in the set that I put into the file that didn't change at all for sixteen months. Its concept didn't even change—it went into the file as "Shredder's Ultimatum" and ended up as Shredder's Revenge.

I always liked the old card Consult the Necrosages, but hey, mono-black can do all that, so I always wanted a mono-black version to exist. So, I put it in the file right at the beginning of exploratory design, and through many months of playtesting, we never found a version that did its job in Limited any better. This version gives some additional reach to black decks. I beat at least two designers in testing with the "lose 2 life" mode. It's a flexible card for a set with a whole lot of flexible ninjas and ninja moves!

And it was the perfect place to deploy one of the all-time classic TMNT quotes. I can't wait for you all to dip into this set. Enjoy your turtle soup!