MTG x TMNT is out today, and while the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles make for a middling Limited experience, the Commander deck will do wonders for people building decks and despairing over the secondary market. Check out our first review of a Magic: The Gathering set here.
Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (MTG x TMNT) is officially out today, and we were able to play and dissect the game for a full week now. As such, I am very happy to be able to write the first Magic: The Gathering set review here on GamesMarkt. And while for me, as for many players, the TMNT cooperation certainly isn’t the one set to rule them all this year (look, it’s a Tolkien reference, I wonder what that could be about), I can say that there’s not all bad about TMNT. In fact, there is real gem shining here, just maybe not in the Limited formats I usually buy packs for.
MTG x TMNT is not only the first Universes Beyond set of 2026, meaning those sets that cooperate with a different franchise, but also the first small set of the year. Small sets, such as last year’s MTG x Spider-Man mishap and the upcoming The Hobbit cooperation (ah, there’s the payoff), consist of much less cards, at least in their draftable play booster pool, than the usual big sets such as 2026’s first Lorwyn Eclised. Taking out art variations and the cards from the Commander deck, MTG X TMNT features 190 cards that can show up in Play Boosters. For comparison: Lorwyn Eclipsed features 273 cards.
Wizards of the Coast of course knows what that does to the Draft format (nothing good), and as such has tried to introduce a smaller, faster Draft format in the form of Pick-2 Draft for four instead of eight persons. Pick-2 Draft, introduced with Spider-Man, is unsurprisingly relatively unpopular, and without getting into it too much, I think that’s fair: Pick-2 takes out most of the strategy as well as a significant part of the social deceit and interaction out of the format, which hurts drafting immensely.
Like Spider-Man, MTG x TMNT also has the very similar problem of too many Legendary creatures. All Universes Beyond sets suffer from this possibility, but both the Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender set solved this nicely by including regular monsters from the franchises on the Common level and only started introducing Legendaries at Uncommon rarity and above. But of course they had almost a hundred cards more to work with each, not being small sets. Spider-Man was filled with bad, Common Legendaries, and TMNT is no exception: This time, Wizards even tried to make it a selling point, with “a turtle in every pack”, and one variation for each of the four main Turtles in every rarity. It works about as well as expected in Limited. But I can’t be completely negative about the set, because I was pleasantly surprised that at least the Draft Archetypes, the five ideas that make up ideal decks in the set through good synergies, work well. They are not very creative, with one, Sneak, being a variation on the Ninjutsu mechanic that many players would have loved to see in a Kamigawa set I’m sure, and another introducing a new Token type (Mutagen), which is an additional way to work with +1/+1 counters. It’s neat. It’s fine. It’s fun for an evening. I’ll be interested to see drop-off rates in my local game stores here, which were so drained of players after two weeks of Spider-Man draft that they switched to old sets, any old set really (I played a very neat game of Foundations Draft last October because of that).
Now, the highlight of this set is definitely the preconstructed Commander Deck called Turtle Power!. Very differently from other sets who either got no Commander precons (like Spider-Man and Avatar) oder get four to five curated precons like most Universes Within sets, TMNT only got one deck that spans all five colours. It makes up for this lack of variety by itself offering varied playstyles: Center of the deck is the five-coloured commander Leonardo, the Balance, who can partner up with one of five other mono-colour cards from the deck in the Command Zone: One for each other turtle, one for Master Splinter and one for April O’Neill. Each of these Commander partners adjusts the overall strategy a bit into a specific direction, so players can choose their favourite or just switch through between games.
Talking about the general strategy of the deck, it is a bit of a chimera, because it tries to marry three strategies into one: Token generation, putting +1/+1 counters on creatures, and a slight Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle kindred strategy (fortunately, all three are specific creature types, to most cards fit quite well into existing Magic’s creature selection, if you take out the pizza focus). These three strategies on one deck are why I wouldn’t recommend to run the back-up commander Heroes in a Half Shell, but instead keep with Leonardo plus a partner, because Leonardo itself is the only real bridge between the token and counter strategy.
Unsurprisingly tough, the gameplay isn’t always smooth with this three different pieces. While the kindred strategy is more of an afterthought, some cards are very reliant on it. That makes other, in itself strong cards a bit out of place in the deck, such as Ooze creatures like Acidic Slime (reskinned as Marauding Mutagen) and Biogenic Ooze. Other cards I would take out first when upgrading the deck would be the more death-oriented ones that would be much better in a Sacrifice deck, especially those that exclude tokens. Tokka & Rahzar, Unsupervised for example and even one of the Partner Commanders, Splinter, the Mentor, really aren’t that useful in the precon and should probably be in another deck. These inefficienscies combined with a distinct lack of mana ramp – there are really only Cultivate, Sol Ring, Arcane Signet and the new Ninja Pizza enchantment as well as one mana dork in here – make the deck quite a bit of a bumpy ride. However, it has to be said that the mana base is absolutely fantastic for a five-colour precon, including two of the very expensive battle lands, several of the check lands, Fabled Passage, City of Brass and a new strong Command Tower variant in Hidden Hideout. The landbase alone almost makes up for the monetary value that the deck asks.
This landbase in particular is also the main reason why I would call Turtle Power! an even better Commander deck building kit that an actual deck. With the lands provided, not only could you start off any five-colour deck, but easily any three-colour combination. In terms of two-colour combos, Black-Green and Red-Green are the best supported, since those are the ones that come with the battle lands and check lands, i.e. Undergrowth Stadium, Vernal Fen, Spire Garden and Cinder Glade.
Additionally, several of the creatures newly introduced in the deck would make for amazing Commanders or support a wide range of existing Commander decks. My favourite is the combination of two new creatures that partner together, Bebop, Skull & Crossbones and Rocksteady, Mutant Marauder, for a counter and lifeloss Black-Green strategy. Several mono-colour cards introduced such as Rat King, Pale Piper and Irma, Part-Time Mutant would make for frighteningly strong mono-colour Commanders or centerpieces in double- and triple-colour decks themselves (and unsurprisingly, go around for quite a buck on the secondary market).
Turtle Power! is not a bad deck, but should maybe not be the first Commander precon a person buys and tries to get into Magic: The Gathering, by virtue of its slightly confused gameplan and by being as complicated to play as any five-colour deck is. It is, however, an absurdly good jumping-off point to build your first selfmade Commander deck, and an incredibly good ressource for established deck builders.
