While its impact was dulled slightly by the early promo bus spotted a couple of days ago, today’s announcement of the Magic: The Gathering x Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set was still fantastic. We got to see a ton of great Commander cards, for a start, as well as some interesting new products as well. Naturally, this big reveal announcement also included some MTG spoilers from the main TMNT set too, and some of these are doozies.
Power level in Universes Beyond is a big talking point right now. After the near-universal disappointment that was Spider-Man, this is hardly surprising. So far, TMNT looks leagues better with designs that could easily make an impact in multiple formats. If the last few months have put you on the ‘UB Hater’ bandwagon, perhaps these cards will take you off again.
Krang, Master Mind
- Mana Value: 6UU
- Type: Legendary Artifact Creature – Utrom Warrior
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: Affinity for artifacts (This spell costs 1 less to cast for each artifact you control.)
When Krang enters, if you have fewer than four cards in hand, draw cards equal to the difference.
Krang gets +1/+0 for each other artifact you control.- Stats: 1/4
The big star of today’s MTG TMNT spoilers is undoubtedly Krang, Master Mind. This is a truly ridiculous-looking card, even by the standards of a format like Modern. Thanks to Affinity, you can easily drop this for just two blue mana. When you do, it’ll refill your hand up to four, which likely means you’ll be drawing two to three cards total.
This kind of draw power is absurd in Modern Affinity. It’s a deck with a ton of explosive potential, balanced out by a relative lack of card draw options. Krang gives you a new option alongside Thoughtcast and Thought Monitor, meaning you’ll be able to keep the momentum going even easier now. That’s not even factoring in Krang’s substantial body, either, which can easily be swinging for eight if you have enough artifacts out to cast him for two mana.
In current Modern, Affinity is one of the best decks going. The unbanning of Mox Opal and the printing of Pinnacle Emissary have really taken it to the next level recently. Krang is the kind of card that could easily push it to be the best deck in the format. We’ll need to keep a very close eye on this one.
Turtles Forever
- Mana Value: 3W
- Type: Instant
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: Search your library and/or outside the game for exactly four legendary creatures you own with different names, then reveal those cards. An opponent chooses two of them. Put the chosen cards into your hand and shuffle the rest into your library.
Long-time Magic players will be very familiar with Gifts Ungiven. It’s a card that, until recently, was banned in Commander for making certain blue decks too consistent. Now, Wizards has seen fit to print a brand-new version of the effect in Turtles Forever.
In some ways, this card is actually better than Gifts Ungiven. Rather than just searching your library, this one can also pick from cards you own “outside the game.” In practice, this means you can grab cards from your sideboard as well. This only applies to constructed formats, mind you. Commander doesn’t support sideboards, so this only searches your deck in that format.
Beyond this, the card is unfortunately a lot worse than Gifts. It can only target legendary creatures, for one thing, which is a huge downgrade over ‘any cards at all.’ It also puts the cards you don’t get into your deck instead of your graveyard, which is much less abusable.
That said, this is still four mana to draw two cards at instant speed, if your deck is built right. Since it hits your sideboard, you can even include a bundle of legends there specifically for use with this card. At first glance, it seems a bit clunky, but the potential here is huge.
Super Shredder
- Mana Value: 1B
- Type: Legendary Creature – Mutant Ninja Human
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: Menace.
Whenever another permanent leaves the battlefield, put a +1/+1 counter on Super Shredder.- Stats: 1/1
Super Shredder feels like an MTG concept taken to the absolute extreme. We’ve seen plenty of creatures over the years that gain counters when other creatures die, or even when creatures are exiled. We’ve never seen this kind of ability stretch as far as Shredder’s does here, mind you.
Whenever any permanent leaves the battlefield, for any reason at all, Shredder gets a counter. This means Shredder will grow as players sacrifice creatures, crack Fetchlands, use removal of any kind, etc. It also works with exile, so blink and bounce effects will get you value too.
While it might be too vulnerable initially to be worth playing in constructed formats, Shredder seems excellent in Commander. Even outside of a dedicated deck, you can expect to get a few tokens every turn cycle. In something like Aristocrats, that number goes way up, and it becomes a legitimate threat thanks to Menace. You can also use it as a finisher for combos that generate infinite leaves triggers, of which there are many. Of all the MTG TMNT spoilers we got today, this one likely has the most potential in Commander and could have a shot in constructed.
Bebop & Rocksteady
- Mana Value: 1 B/G B/G
- Type: Legendary Creature – Boar Rhino Mutant
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: Whenever Bebop & Rocksteady attack or block, sacrifice a permanent unless you discard a card.
- Stats: 7/5
Speaking of Aristocrats decks, TMNT provides another great tool for them in Bebop & Rocksteady. The sacrifice-on-attack-or-block text here looks like a downside at first, but in Aristocrats decks, it’s actually an asset. The fact that it lets you sacrifice any permanent is great too, since it lets you make use of all the incidental artifact tokens we see these days.
Of course, if you’re not in the mood to sacrifice permanents, Bebop and Rocksteady is also a great discard outlet. It’s not on-demand like the classics of the genre, but it is attached to a 7/5 body for just three mana, which is a considerable upside. We’ve seen some decks dabble in Monument to Endurance in Standard recently, and this card could be a considerable boost to such strategies.
Overall, this card looks better suited to Standard than Commander. A single big body is much more impactful in 60-card Magic, and there’s still plenty of room to get value from the sacrifice/discard triggers. Perhaps the Orzhov Sacrifice decks that have been drifting in and out of the format for a while now will finally take off with something like this.
April O’Neil, Hacktivist
- Mana Value: 3U
- Type: Legendary Creature – Human Scientist
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: At the beginning of your end step, draw a card for each card type among spells you’ve cast this turn.
- Stats: 1/5
April O’Neil is a bit of a strange card. On the surface, it looks like a potent draw engine. There are eight castable card types in the game, after all, which means it could theoretically draw you eight cards in a single turn. The chances of that are extremely low, however, and the card also has a number of other drawbacks that restrict its potential.
For starters, the ability only triggering on your end step is a bit disappointing. Expanding it to each would allow you to draw after playing instants on your opponents’ turns in Commander, but no such luck. This means you have to go all-in on your turn to really reap the rewards with April. The fact that it only triggers on your end step also gives your opponents ample room to remove April on the turns where you do pop off.
That said, there is still potential here in Commander. April has a very solid five toughness, so it’ll survive a lot of damage-based removal. It’s also the kind of card that can easily fly under the radar when it’s only drawing you one or two cards a turn, which will often be the case. This seems like a decent card for casual Commander tables, but not one to bring out when you go above bracket two.
Casey Jones, Jury-Rig Justiciar
- Mana Value: 1R
- Type: Legendary Creature – Human Berserker
- Rarity: Uncommon
- Card Text: Haste.
When Casey Jones enters, look at the top four cards of your library. You may reveal an artifact card from among them and put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.- Stats: 2/1
Rounding out the main set spoilers for MTG TMNT today, we have the most evil-looking hero of all time. Casey Jones may resemble a ’70s serial killer, but he’s actually an ally of the Turtles for the most part. His card adaptation is considerably less interesting than his appearance, but not everything can be a splashy rare, after all.
We’ve seen effects like this before in other colors, such as Glint-Nest Crane and Ingenious Smith. Casey brings the effect to red, giving you a way to dig for artifacts in red decks that need them. Right now, no real homes spring to mind for such an effect. Standard’s red decks aren’t particularly artifact-heavy, and Casey is too slow for the likes of Modern Affinity. In Commander, the card is too low-impact even for artifact decks, especially since it can whiff.
With all of this in mind, Casey will likely end up as a synergy piece for TMNT Limited decks. While not massively exciting, it is at least better than most pack filler cards in that it’s doing something new for its color.
Source Material Doubling Season
- Mana Value: 4G
- Type: Enchantment
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: If an effect would create one or more tokens under your control, it creates twice that many of those tokens instead.
If an effect would put one or more counters on a permanent you control, it puts twice that many of those counters on that permanent instead.
In addition to the MTG TMNT main set cards, we also got the first of the set’s Bonus Sheet cards in today’s spoilers. Like Spider-Man, these will be Source Material cards, featuring artwork from the TMNT comics and other media. Wizards got things off to an excellent start by spoiling Doubling Season as the very first of these.
This is a card that needs little introduction. It’s an absolute staple in Commander decks of many kinds, be they Counters-Matter or Superfriends. It’s also notoriously expensive. Even after several reprints, including one in last year’s Foundations, it’s still sitting at around $30 on the low end.
This new version is unlikely to move the needle much in that regard. According to the official collecting article for the set, Source Material cards will only show up in one out of every 28 Play Booster packs. That’s only one per Play Booster box on average. With 20 cards in the Source Material pool, your chances of opening a Doubling Season are very slim indeed. You get a guaranteed Source Material card in very Collector Booster, but those aren’t really opened enough to push down prices.
In any case, Doubling Season is a great reprint to see. It’s a card that casual players in particular love, so any chance to get more copies out there is welcome.
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