10 Best MTG: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cards

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Has Big Interactions

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a weak set, all told. As I went through the cards (and yes, I read every main-set card) I was only really impressed by the synergies, not the individual pieces. And while synergies are great for Magic, they don’t work well for a Top 10 list. It leaves us without standouts. Lorwyn Eclipsed had Formidable Speaker. Avatar: The Last Airbender had Badgermole Cub. This set has a +1/+1 counter theme and a light interplay of artifacts. But there are still ten cards that I think will see play in Standard, whether for their raw effectiveness or because of those synergies, and we’ll be going through them from worst to best.

Don & Raph, Hard Science

This is a slow Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card. You have to play it, wait a turn, then attack, hope it survives to get a second use, and have a card in hand worth having the cost reduced. However, being able to give any non-creature in your deck affinity for artifacts is absurd, no matter the hoops. This is a must-kill card in any artifact focused deck.

The Ooze

If Mutagen tokens are going to be as important as I think they’ll be for multiple archetypes, then having a way to keep producing them is super solid. Decks that like when things are sacrificed will especially enjoy how this card works. Sac the big creature, get that payoff, then sac all the little artifacts, too. That second ability is also good for multiple reasons. It’s basically a weaker Scavenging Ooze and can be used in a lot of the same ways.

Cool but Rude

Monument to Endurance is a card that wants you to discard cards—and deals damage when you do. That’s already an established way to destroy people. This Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card makes that even easier and will enable any deck that wants a way to reliably discard cards. I don’t care about that Gamble-like final ability—but it says something that Cool but Rude made the list with me basically ignoring it.

Leatherhead, Swamp Stalker

I love a cheapish green card that can smash into people. Normally, the big problem is that any kill spell can stop matters. But Leatherhead has hexproof, and that makes her really strong. Also, her ability obviously hints at you getting rid of her hexproof to kill a pesky artifact or enchantment, but it doesn’t say it has to be that type of counter. In a deck with Mutagens, you can really mess up certain playstyles.

Lessons from Life

The art is meta; the ability is just plain good. I don’t have a lot to say with this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card. I think it’s good to draw three cards and go up a land, and I think four mana is a low enough cost to make it playable.

Michelangelo, Weirdness to 11

An engine that’s also a creature; this is the core of the Mutagen deck idea—as well as plenty of other “make creature big” plans. Besides the limits of Legendary creature rules, there’s very few reasons not to put this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card in your green decks.

Genghis Frog

This is the card I’m most excited about. I don’t think it’s the best card—but I really want to make it work. Mutant is a broad enough creature type that this creature will get many triggers, and each of those triggers plays into all the strategies I’ve mentioned before. Green-blue (or possibly Bant) is my pick for the best new deck coming out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Mikey & Leo, Chaos & Order

In the decks that want this, you’ll be drawing a card on both you and your opponent’s turns. It’s not flashy—but it’s the type of effective and efficient card that underpins some of the best strategies.

Shark Shredder, Killer Clone

I wish the sneak was a little lower costed, but Shark Shredder will win the game if the opponent isn’t ready (imagine doing this to a reanimation player before they can get their big thing back from the graveyard). The interaction between first strike and on-hit effects is honestly not something I can recall many (or any) cards utilizing, and I think it’s a really cool way to make this work. You also get to keep whatever monster you’ve pulled out of their graveyard, and that alone can snowball matters.

Michelangelo’s Technique

Welcome back, Collected Company. Depending on what you pull out of your deck, it might just effectively end the game on turn four. And even if it doesn’t, it’s such a strong swing in power. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is going to make choosing not to block so tense in most games because of the sheer number of powerful things that can happen to the defender. People might even win games by bluffing this card with their play patterns. That’s how strong it is. You don’t even need to necessarily have it in your hand.

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