The Heroes in a Half Shell Game

Welcome to Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles week! Eric Engelhard, the lead set designer, has written an article about how this set was designed, so I decided to pull back the camera a bit and talk about the bigger picture of how Universes Beyond makes use of Magic's suite of existing mechanics when we design these sets. Don't worry, I'll still talk about two new cards before I'm done today.

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Let's Start from the Top Down

With any Magic set, offering the best play experience we can is always our main design goal, but Universes Beyond adds an important lens to the design. A good Universes Beyond design captures the essence of the property. If we make a Magic set based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the players aren't just expecting Magic. They're also expecting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This means we, as the designers, have to imbue the set with the property's most beloved and popular elements. When you play a Universes Beyond set, it should feel like an extension of the property. It's why we have subject-matter experts on every design team and do so much research, with help from the licensor, for every Universes Beyond release.

Luckily, Magic has a lot of tools to work with. In 2026, Magic will turn 33 years old. In that time, we've created numerous mechanics and themes. These are the metaphorical paints we have to work with when crafting our masterpiece. Today, I'll walk through the process of how we pick our mechanics and the various options available to us. I will be using Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for all my examples.

For Universes Beyond, we start by walking through what the property is. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT for short) began as an independent comic book created by artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984. It was initially a parody of popular comic books of the time. The comic was an instant hit. Shortly after, they began making TMNT toys, which led to their first (of many) animated television show. The Turtles were eventually featured in movies and video games, becoming a pop culture phenomenon.

In nearly every expression of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there are four turtles—Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo—who get exposed to radioactive ooze as baby turtles and are mutated into humanoids. They were trained in martial arts by Splinter, a mutated rat. They live in New York City, residing in the sewers. They fight evil and in their spare time enjoy doing teenager things like skateboarding, playing video games, and eating pizza.

For Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we could draw from most of the various incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unlike many other Universes Beyond properties, though, there's no single canon source. Every version of TMNT tells its own take on the story. Yes, there's a lot of overlap, and numerous things that run through all or most franchise entries, but each telling of the TMNT story is slightly different. We wanted our set to be a collection of various iterations of TMNT, which meant there would be things hitting different tones, plot points, and visuals.

Once the team has a general sense of the property, the next thing we do is go through Magic's extensive list of mechanics and figure out the best fits. There are six possible outcomes for this search. I'm going to use today's article to walk through each of them.

1. We reuse an existing mechanic exactly as it is.

This is the most exciting thing to find when we're going through our pass. Has Magic done something already which is an exact match for the set? Ideally, you want what we call a "slam-dunk fit." This is when the name lines up perfectly with the property and the mechanics are exactly what you imagine your set wants. When adapting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we thought we had a slam-dunk fit: ninjutsu. The Turtles are ninjas (it's in the name) who have been trained in the art of ninjutsu. The ninjutsu mechanic was designed to capture the feel of ninjas, so the gameplay was exactly the kind of thing we wanted. The team came up with this on day one, and it was in the very first incarnation of the file.

Now, as I'll talk about why in a little bit, ninjutsu didn't end up working out in its original form. Still, it's the type of mechanic you hope to find on your first pass through the existing mechanics. These mechanics make you go, "Now, this has to be in the set."

Interestingly, Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did end up with an existing Magic mechanic with the same name in the set, but it was something the team discovered later in the process. The team had tweaked an old mechanic and given it a new name (which I'll go over in the fourth option), but it hadn't worked out, so they looked for a mechanic to fill the red-white archetype. They needed something that was less combat-centric, as the set already had mechanics doing that, and realized what they wanted was a mechanic that rewarded creatures entering play. Magic had already done that with alliance, which was originally a mechanic for the Cabaretti in Streets of New Capenna. The team played with the mechanic, and it was exactly what they wanted. The name also felt apt for TMNT, so it got to stay.

Not every Universes Beyond set has a mechanic from this category, but we try hard to have at least one if we can. It's nice to take existing mechanics and reuse them in a different context. It does a great job of making the property feel like Magic. And it makes it easier for enfranchised players to learn, as it's something some number of them already know.

2. We use an existing mechanic but rename it.

Sometimes you find the mechanic you want to use, but the name isn't a great fit. For Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that was disappear. The team was looking for something to go into the black-green archetype. It bordered the white-black archetype that uses sneak (the new version of ninjutsu that I'll be talking about below) and the green-blue archetype that uses the new Mutagen token (which I'll also discuss). Sneak exchanged a creature on the battlefield with one in your hand, and the Mutagen token could be sacrificed to put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. What was the overlap between those two things?

The answer was that both cause a permanent to leave the battlefield. Was there a way to mechanically care about that? Yes, there was. Aether Revolt had a mechanic called revolt, which specifically cared about a permanent leaving the battlefield. The team played with revolt, and it was exactly what they needed. The only problem was the name. It wasn't a great fit for TMNT. It's not a property where many characters are revolting.

One of the tools Universes Beyond has access to is the ability to change the name of a mechanic. It's not something we want to do a lot, but we would rather rename a mechanic than make up something slightly different and give it a better name. Sometimes the new name will be something core to the property. There is power in words, and part of capturing the feeling of something is language. In the case of revolt, there wasn't any compelling word from TMNT, so we wanted to pick a word that was a good fit but could have applications elsewhere.

Pizza, dastardly deeds, and ninjas are three themes that run through the black-green archetype. Pizza is always disappearing because the Turtles eat it. Villains often make people disappear by kidnapping them. Ninjas disappear into the shadows. So, disappear made a lot of sense as the mechanic's name. It was general enough to have a lot of applications elsewhere. Disappear is what we call a workhorse mechanic, meaning it's more about being functional than splashy, but it helped us build out the black-green archetype.

3. We use an existing mechanic but tweak it slightly.

Sometimes you find a mechanic that almost does what you want. This is the only category that Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn't have an example for, as it's not something that happens a lot, so I will have to use an example from a different Universes Beyond set. In our very first Universes Beyond draft set, we needed to find a way to capture the flavor of an orc army. It turns out, we had faced a similar problem in the set War of the Spark where we needed to represent a zombie army. Our solution for War of the Spark was the amass mechanic, where instead of making a lot of creature tokens, you make a singular Army creature token and add +1/+1 counters to represent your army getting bigger.

The problem was that the amass mechanic made a black Zombie Army token. But using amass for the orc army was such a perfect fit, and we could see the potential of the amass mechanic. So, we changed the original amass cards to amass Zombies cards, allowing the Universes Beyond set to make amass Orcs cards. This changed the mechanic, but not in a way that fundamentally changed how the original cards worked.

This category is mostly about taking something with a good name and decently good gameplay, then updating it to increase the flexibility of the mechanic. There's a lot of subjectivity about what is a small and intuitive enough change to not cause problems with prior cards, but it's a tool that's available, so I listed it here.

4. We make a new mechanic that is the tweak of an existing mechanic.

Sometimes you have a mechanic that's close to working, but in the end, it doesn't accomplish what you need. The fix here is to tweak the mechanic and give it a new name. These tweaks are usually more substantial than the ones in the last category. This change makes cards work differently in a way that will change functionality enough that it's too much of a stretch to change the old mechanic.

Our example from Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is sneak. As I explained above, the design team thought they had a slam-dunk fit with ninjutsu. They designed some new cards with it and put them into the file. As they worked with it, they started to explore the design space. One of the ideas they came up with was a series of instants and sorceries with ninjutsu that represented ninja skills. You could cast these spells for their ninjutsu cost, which resulted in one of your attacking creatures returning to your hand. They played well, so they went to the Rules team to figure out how to template them.

The response they got was that it wasn't possible (or it would require so much work that it wasn't feasible). But Eric Engelhard, the lead set designer, and the design team really liked them, so they thought about how they could make a new mechanic that would allow them to keep them in the set. That new mechanic would become sneak.

While making sneak, the design team discovered that they could fix some of the weird quirks of ninjutsu. It's an activated ability that works from your hand, which is a bit unintuitive. The wording of ninjutsu allowed you to return multiple creatures to your hand when paying a ninjutsu cost, and it allowed you to activate it after combat damage. These unintended effects were causing balance issues, which was impacting the designs of new ninjutsu cards.

For a while, the set had both ninjutsu and sneak in it, but it felt weird to have two mechanics that were so similar. Because sneak could mostly copy the functionality of ninjutsu, they decided to keep sneak and remove ninjutsu. This wasn't an easy decision as the name ninjutsu was so perfect for the set. But in the end, good gameplay won out.

The change to sneak also solved a few other problems. Ninjutsu was a popular mechanic, but it was hard to use because it could only go on Ninjas, and we don't make a lot of Ninjas outside of a few settings. By creating sneak, we opened up this mechanical space for more sets.

Magic is over 30 years old, so sometimes we run across mechanics that show their age. Design technology is always improving, so you often find ways to update a mechanic to modern standards. Sometimes that can be done with a small change like amass, but most of the time we follow the model of sneak.

The first card from Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I want to talk about today is a sneak card, and it is one of the nonpermanent cards with sneak I mentioned above.

5. We use an unnamed mechanic, mechanical theme, or mechanical component.

So far, I've mostly talked about named keyword mechanics, but those are not the only tools in our toolbox. There are many mechanical themes available to us. For example, there are a number of card types we can build around, such as artifacts. For this set, we wanted to have a lot of Equipment cards. Each of the Turtles are known for using a specific weapon. Many of the villains are scientists that have robots and evil machines. Early on, the design team realized that one of the archetypes (blue-red) could be built around an artifact theme.

Another tool is card subtypes. In TMNT, a lot of the characters, including our heroes, are ninjas, making Ninja typal another theme the design team could tap into. The white-black archetype made use of sneak. Tying that to a Ninja typal theme felt natural and thematic. In fact, my second preview card for today taps into that theme.

As I mentioned above, the Turtles were trained in martial arts by Splinter, a mutated rat. There are a number of legendary Splinter cards in the set. Here's his rare card:

Sometimes we can use supertypes or subtypes as a cycle rather than as an archetypal theme. For example, we introduced Class enchantments in Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms to represent particular Dungeons & Dragons classes. Bloomburrow used Classes as a way to show specific talents of animalfolk. The design team wanted a cycle to represent the roles that each of the Turtles and Splinter played in their group, and Classes were a great choice for a cycle.

6. We make a new mechanic.

Sometimes, we exhaust all our available tools and have to make something new. Universes Beyond sets are free to create new mechanics. We simply ask the design teams to first look at using existing mechanics. Universes Beyond sets don't always need new mechanics. The property should be the most exciting part, so new mechanics are a resource we try to use more in Magic Multiverse sets. But often things that are essential to a property don't have a clear existing Magic mechanic to represent them.

For Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that essential element was mutation. The fact that so many of the characters mutated from normal animals into humanoid versions is core to the series. It's one of the four words in the title. Obviously, we have the Mutant creature type, and the set does support Mutant typal a little, but we really needed a mechanic about the act of changing through mutation.

The obvious first place to look would be the mutate mechanic from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. That's a mechanic called mutate and that is about mutation. The problem is that mutate is one of the most complicated mechanics we've ever made, and we've seen it confuse a lot of players. Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a lot of potential to bring in new players, especially younger players, so we felt that using a mechanic as complex as mutate was a poor fit. In addition, mutate is about two things mutating together, which is not at all what the mutation in TMNT is about, so it was a poor fit for both mechanical and creative reasons.

The design team then tried a mutation mechanic that was a tweak on the champion mechanic from the original Lorwyn set. The flavor wasn't quite right and the mechanic played poorly, so they looked elsewhere. What they ended up with was a mechanic that we have explored many times over the years. Back in Innistrad: Crimson Vow, when we were designing Blood tokens, Vision Design looked into having the token put +1/+1 counters on creatures. This version of Blood tokens played well, but we really wanted to make Vampires that got +1/+1 counters when they sacrificed Blood tokens, so we removed counter-granting from the token itself.

The Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles design team liked the idea of Mutagen tokens representing mutation by making creatures bigger and put those tokens into the file. The mechanic was simple, played well, was flavorful, and did a good job of tying into other mechanical themes of the set.

Magic players always enjoy finding new things, so while we are careful about how many new mechanics we introduce, we usually like to have at least one in a set.

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Turtling Up

That's the story of how we approach each Universes Beyond set and all the different ways we can harness existing Magic mechanics to capture the feel of a property. I believe Eric and his team did a great job capturing the feel of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in all its various incarnations, and I'm eager for you all to get a chance to play with it.

Join me next week for another installment of Making Magic.

Until then, may you find the Turtle that speaks to you.