Magic: the Gathering‘s best Universes Beyond sets aren’t just built by talented designers. They’re built by fans. Wizards of the Coast has said as much before, claiming that the guiding principle behind these crossover projects was to produce them for fans, by fans. When Magic tackled Final Fantasy, the result was a set fueled by shared obsessions and memories — developers swapping favorite boss fights and iconic lines to make sure every card felt right.
After seeing the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover in action as part of an hour-long video preview, it’s clear that the same philosophy is alive and well in the sewers of New York. The set oozes with love for the Turtles and covers more than 40 years of comics, cartoons, video games, and live-action movies. Rather than picking one version of the Turtles, the team instead worked with Nickelodeon and drew inspiration from across the franchise to develop a unique vision for the set. Throughout, it looks to be full of clever little design choices that might make it the best UB set since Final Fantasy. Here’s a look at all my favorites.
A unique vision of New York
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have always called New York their home, but it’s a very different vision of the city compared to what Magic showcased with last year’s Spider-Man set. According to the set’s narrative design lead, Crystal Frasier, the team was conscious of that overlap. “We came up with this idea of the New York you visit, versus the New York you are from, or the New York you live in,” Frasier said during the preview. “Spider-Man and our superhero sets in general are iconic. They’re very beautiful and inspiring. Then our TMNT set is the New York that is very homey and lived-in.”
The set presents a grittier version of NYC, with neon rooftops, sewer lairs, and glowing green ooze. “It’s a darker and more neon take,” set design lead Eric Engelhard said of the art for TMNT. “I loved watching the art come in. A lot of the set takes place at night, and it really has a different vibe.”
The art direction leans heavily into night scenes and practical lighting: “We were deliberate about the light sources we used and how they colored scenes, because New York is a city that never sleeps — to borrow the phrase,” Frasier said. “And at night, it’s streetlights and traffic signals, car lights, neon signs from windows. We thought about how all of those sort of paint this surreal version of New York.”
Even the lands tell a story
Most basic lands are, frankly, really boring. Why bother using them at all if you have full-art versions? The TMNT set takes an interesting approach by hinting at an iconic gimmick with the Turtles. Imagine rounding a corner. You hear something clattering, then you turn and see a manhole cover pop into place. “It’s various locations in New York City where you’re stumbling across someplace the Turtles were just hanging out, and then they vanished into the night when they heard you coming,” Frasier said. Almost all of them show half-eaten pizzas quickly abandoned.
Then the full art “Rooftop Lands” show the four Turtles dashing across city rooftops. But it’s all NYC, so how do you emphasize the different mana colors? A sunrise for Plains, a rainstorm for Island, and a lush rooftop garden for Forest.
The Pizza Bundle lands are even better: five sloppy, cheesy slices of pizza where the mana color is represented in the toppings. Broccoli for Forest, anchovies for Island, and pepperoni for Mountain. Delicious.
Emphasis on the “Teenager” in TMNT
Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo are highly skilled mutant turtles trained as ninjas by a big talking rat, but deep down they’re still teenagers.
“Cowabunga is one of my favorite cards,” Frasier admitted, “because one of the things we really wanted to hit in this set that helped give it its own vibe is the sense that these are a bunch of teenagers. They go on these cool, over-the-top adventures to alien dimensions or to fight dinosaurs from outer space. But also, they hang out with each other, and pick on each other, and share meals, and find fun things to do.”
Cowabunga is a one-cost green card that lets you look at the top four cards of your library and reveal a Mutant, Ninja, Turtle, or land card and put it into your hand — it’s a typical mechanic that pops up a lot and is hugely effective in this set. The art shows the four brothers sewer surfing, and, of course, Mikey has a piece of pizza in his hand.
Each Turtle gets four cards
When talking about the Final Fantasy set, Magic’s principal game designer Gavin Verhey described what he calls the snapshot method that the team uses when adapting crossover characters. You essentially take a snapshot of a character at a moment in time and design a card around that. Final Fantasy features dozens of heroes from the franchise, each capturing that character at an iconic moment in their journey. With TMNT’s core four, Frasier said the team took a similar approach with even more depth and structure to it.
Frasier confirmed that each individual Turtle — Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo — gets four different iterations across common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rarities, meant to represent their growth over time and the different aspects of their identities. “That kind of charts their personality across those four alignment trackers that are Teenage and Mutant and Ninja and Turtle,” Frasier said. “The basic idea is the common version of the Turtles shows them sort of turtling up at home, in the lair, training. Then from there, we develop them as adventurous little teenagers and as kick-butt ninjas, and then finally emphasize the high weirdness of their lives as mutants.”
Team-Up cards emphasize brotherhood
“Team-Up” cards were a huge focus of 2023’s March of the Machine, and it’s an underutilized design structure in UB so far. The idea is simple: combine two legendary creatures on one card and combine their powers. Final Fantasy put FF12’s Balthier and Fran on a single card with great vehicle synergies, which makes sense for a couple of sky pirates. (I wish we had more team-up cards in that set!)
TMNT goes all-in on team-ups. “Every Turtle gets a team-up card with each of their brothers, so we got to drill down on the relationships between them,” Frasier said. “Part of capturing the vibe of the set was making sure we really felt them as brothers, as family.” She described Donatello and Leonardo as the two more serious, studious brothers whereas Raph and Mikey are the troublemakers.
Don & Leo, Problem Solvers is a 5-cost 4/6 with vigilance that blinks an artifact and a creature you control off the board and back at the beginning of your end step. Vigilance lets them attack but still defend on your opponent’s turn, and the blink effect is a great way to protect some of your cards. Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers is a powerful 7-cost 7/7 with trample and haste. Whenever it attacks, you reveal cards until you draw a creature, then you put that creature onto the battlefield tapped and attacking. That is, quite frankly, causing a LOT of trouble for your opponents.
Plenty of villainous duos get team-up cards as well, like Krang & Shredder and, of course, Bebop & Rocksteady. It’s an economical way to keep a set tighter while still representing many of the characters and dynamics TMNT fans want to see.
Sneak is a better version of ninjutsu
Wizards of the Coast could have just slapped the preexisting ninjutsu ability on plenty of TMNT cards and called it a day, but instead the team developed a new mechanic in the form of sneak.
“We really relied on Crystal and the creative team to capture that teenage energy and that youth and vibrance in the art and in the flavor text,” Engelhard said, adding that the set uses sneak for the ninja aspect and typal synergies with turtle as a creature subtype to cover the full scope of TMNT.
Sneak functions like a streamlined evolution of ninjutsu: during the declare blockers step, you can return an unblocked attacker you control to your hand to cast a sneak spell for an alternate cost. Unlike ninjutsu, sneak appears on instants and sorceries in addition to creatures, making combat far less predictable. “Anything can happen during combat in this set,” Engelhard said.
Cards like Michelangelo, Improviser use sneak to enter combat tapped and attacking, while spells such as Shredder’s Technique and The Last Ronin’s Technique can be deployed mid-combat for discounted costs, turning what looks like a safe block into a blowout. Sneak was also designed to function cleanly from the command zone, smoothing over some of the edge cases that limited ninjutsu in Commander.
The Secret of the Ooze
To represent the mutant core of TMNT, the team built Mutagen tokens as artifact tokens that can be sacrificed to put a +1/+1 counter on a creature. “You crack a canister of ooze, you get exposed to that glowing green mutagen, and you mutate into something stronger,” Engelhard said. Mechanically, that means the ooze isn’t just flavor. It’s a repeatable way to power up your board over time.
Mutagen tokens also fuel one of the set’s renamed mechanics. Disappear — the TMNT version of revolt — checks whether a permanent you controlled left the battlefield during your turn to trigger an effect. That also works when you bounce an attacker with sneak or when you lose something in combat. It’s a simple but elegant loop. The ooze makes your creatures bigger, then sacrificing the ooze triggers disappear, so it rewards you for the kind of scrappy, hit-and-run style that defines the Turtles.
Turtles in Time inspired the Commander deck
Rather than multiple Commander precons, TMNT gets one with 43 new cards, which is a lot more than most Universes Beyond Commander releases. It puts special emphasis on arcade and video game nostalgia, and is named after the iconic cry: “Turtle Power!” The strategy labeled on the box art is “partner with allies” and “buff your team.”
“We know so many people come to TMNT through arcade games, and we only touched it just a tiny bit in the main set,” Engelhard said. “So we wanted to have a deck dedicated to that.” This deck’s new approach to the Partner mechanic allows you to have two Commanders if they both have the Partner ability. In this case, there are the four Turtles, Splinter, and one other potential Commander with Partner that’s yet to be officially revealed (though it seems like it’s almost certainly a version of April O’Neill), each with a single color. The deck also includes Heroes in the Half Shell as a five-color back-up Commander.
Engelhard explained that the deck leans heavily on video game tropes and mechanics with cards like Level Up, Arcade Cabinet, High Score, and even Game Over. Frasier also said the team’s whiteboard brainstorming session leaned heavily into shared memories of arcade cabinets and Turtles in Time.
Turtle Team-Up introduces co-op Magic
The most experimental product in the lineup is Turtle Team-Up, a new cooperative Magic experience. Most recent UB sets have included some kind of starter kit that’s ready-to-play right out of the box, and this one feels even more experimental than the Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box. Designed for two to four players, Turtle Team-Up includes four 60-card decks and a 38-card boss deck. Instead of facing each other, players team up against villains in escalating difficulty modes. And rather than playing siloed, there are cards that let you help other players by giving them rewards. It’s functionally similar to Two-Headed Giant in some ways, and it’ll be interesting to see how some of the more collaborative cards featured in Team-Up function in that game format or even in Commander, where it might behoove you to help out an opponent to take down another.
Engelhard did confirm that each Turtle Team-Up deck is also playable as a normal 60-card Magic deck, including the 29 brand-new, Legacy-legal cards included. He also noted that Wizards R&D has wanted to attempt a product like this for years, and the brotherly vibe of TMNT finally gave the team the perfect opportunity to do so.
Magic: The Gathering – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles prerelease events begin on Feb. 27, with a global launch on March 6.
💸 Earn Instantly With This Task
No fees, no waiting — your earnings could be 1 click away.
Start Earning
