Magic: The Gathering's TMNT Set Nails The Feeling Of Getting Pummeled By Combat Cold Cuts

The opening scene of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze illustrates one of the things that’s so fun about the movie. After the first TMNT film in 1990, parents reportedly pushed back against the heroes’ use of weapons like katana, sais, and nunchuks. As a result, when the sequel rolled around in 1991, the titular turtles spent the whole movie not using their signature gear.

It’s a restraint that’s pretty dumb in hindsight, undercutting a major element of what makes the turtles cool, but it did lead the movie to find some creative solutions. In the opening fight when the turtles break up a robbery in a mall, they use anything they can find that’s not a conventional weapon to beat on the giant group of thieves. That includes toys, such as yo-yos. At one point, Michelangelo grabs some sausage links and uses them as nunchuks–“Combat cold cuts!”

Jumping into the day-long preview of the new TMNT set in Magic: The Gathering Arena, one of the things I liked most about the new cards is how they capture the vibe of that scene. There are a lot of inspirations for the turtles, ranging from the movies to the comics to the video games, and the cards can be dark and lethal. But they can also be goofy in a way that feels quintessentially turtles, not just in their concepts and art, but in the way they interact.

The most memorable game I played during the preview came up as I was playing sealed matches, a format in which players get six fresh packs of cards and have to build a 40-card deck with whatever they find there. The hope is to notch seven wins before racking up three total losses, and if you lose too much (or win too much), you scrap the deck and try again.

My white-and-blue deck mostly focused on throwing out creatures, ideally a few flyers, who could get boosted by some artifacts to gain a little extra power and go over opponents’ blockers to score some hits. The opponent who was driving me nuts, however, was running a blue-and-red artifact deck with an overwhelming number of robots. We each spent a lot of the game picking away at one another, without making too much headway.

Then the enemy decided to start bonking me on the head with a stick.

The combo that was my bane for the rest of the match was a combination of Bespoke Bo, a blue uncommon artifact, and Chrome Dome, a 1/3 artifact robot ninja. For five mana, Chrome Dome can create a token copy of any artifact, which gets sacrificed at the end of the turn, while Bespoke Bo sends target creature back to its owner’s hand when it enters. You can probably see where this is going.

I had started to get out to a lead with a flying Donatello, Way With Machines zipping in and landing some damage, when Bespoke Bo sent him back to my hand. Each turn I’d try to bring Donnie back, and each turn he’d get bounced. Bonk. Bonk. Bonk.

Exactly like getting hit in the face over and over again with a yo-yo or a set of sausage nunchucks.

There are some powerful cards in the TMNT set, but it’s those flavorful interactions that I most enjoyed during the preview event–although less so when they were used against me. The set includes a bunch of different special “pizza” cards with weird combinations of toppings, like Guac & Marshmallow Pizza, which gives a creature +2/+2 when it enters, or Anchovy & Banana Pizza, which is so gross it destroys a creature when it enters. Tainted Treats is a direct, fun callback to The Secret of the Ooze: it’s a box of donuts filled with anti-mutagen, and it also destroys a creature (or artifact) when it enters, making it great for taking out some scary monstrosity like it does in the movie. And there are artifacts like Skateboard, which gives +1/+0, but has the fun interaction of tapping a permanent when it enters, like you just ran them over while sewer surfing.

TMNT has its scary and powerful cards that will overrun you with artifact creatures or sneak ninjas onto the board to hit you with a bunch of enter and damage-player effects that can cascade into a serious problem, and those cards are exciting. But it’s the littler, funnier cards and effects that I had the most fun with. The Sewer-veillance Cams that can tap or untap a permanent when they enter and leave the battlefield that you can endlessly copy and sacrifice. The Improvised Arsenals that copy artifacts, giving the sense of grabbing a random golf club, Casey Jones-style, and using it to belt somebody into next week. The waves of mutant creatures that also create Mutagen tokens that you can use to suddenly drop a bunch of +1/+1 counters on a creature and turn it into some kind of hulking catastrophe.

There are also a whole lot of excellent references throughout the set that are translated into cards in fun ways. A particular favorite of mine is Go Ninja Go, simultaneously a reference to the Vanilla Ice song showcased in The Secret of the Ooze, and to the best aspect of the arcade game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, which was that you could occasionally bodily throw one of the game’s foot clan ninjas straight at the screen. It’s a handy card, too, blinking one of your creatures and dealing damage to another creature, like you just used somebody as a projectile.

Capturing a comedic vibe can be tough to do in a card game. And while the lightheartedness isn’t the only aspect of the Ninja Turtle identity or of the set itself, it’s one of the things that makes Magic’s take on TMNT endearing. It’s also a big reason why I’m jumping back in on Arena now that TMNT is fully launched.

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