Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1321: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Eric Engelhard

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

For this week's podcast, I sit down with Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Lead Designer Eric Engelhard to talk about the set's design. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive-to-work at-home edition. So normally I use my at-home times to do interviews, which in today is no exception. So I have Eric Englehard, who was the lead designer, the lead set designer, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Hey, Eric. Hi, Mark. Very excited to be on this podcast for the first time.
Starting point is 00:00:26 Okay, so let's get from the very beginning. how did you end up leading teenage mutant ninja turtles? Well, I was a game designer at my previous company, which was WizKids working on HeroClicks, and there I designed four teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sets. I've always been a big fan of the turtles, and when I came to Wizards, they knew that that was one of the fandoms that I had. and so yeah, they tapped me to lead turtles,
Starting point is 00:01:00 and I got to lead it all the way from the beginning of exploratory to the end of play design, which is pretty unusual for a modern set, but I was the turtles expert in the office, so that helped. Yeah, you and I are both comics fans, although you know turtles, I mean, I know turtles a little bit, but you know turtles much, much better than I do. Yeah, I mean, I'm a huge comic book fan.
Starting point is 00:01:23 I have, you know, I have about 60 long box. of Marvel Comics in the basement there, and I've written for the Marvel Handbooks and, you know, and yeah, I did a bunch of Marvel and DC superhero sets when I was at working on HeroClicks, and
Starting point is 00:01:43 yeah, I'm just a huge comics fan. I still read like 20 or 30 comics a week, even now. Okay, so Teenage Me Ninja Turtle started many years ago, originally as a parody. It was parodying a lot of comic, you know, current things in comics. But it quickly sort of took a life on its own.
Starting point is 00:02:02 It has been, there's been numerous animated shows and movies and video games. So, for starters, let's talk a little bit about you weren't doing any one thing, right? Oh, right. Yeah, this set in Teenish Meet Ninja Turtles is a really unique IP and that unlike pretty much every other franchise that we work with, there's no central canon. There's no like, this is the main story and everything else sort of like branches off from it. There's a bunch of different versions of turtles. They all count. They're all cool in their own different ways and they're all, they're always a lot of fun. But yeah, it started with the Mirage comics, which were black and white
Starting point is 00:02:47 back in the mid-80s, and then became the animated series that a lot of us grew up with. And that's where I first encountered it was the animated series when I was growing up. But by the time I was around 10 or 11, my stepbrother actually loaned me his reprints of the original Mirage comics. And so I got to read the original comics and discover a whole different aspect of turtles that was much more gritty and dark and violent. And I wouldn't recommend that is the first read for kids necessarily, but that really got me into turtle fandom because I realized there was so much more than the Saturday morning. cartoon to the turtles. Yeah, Eastman and Laird, who were the original creators, like they,
Starting point is 00:03:29 there's been a lot of different versions of them, but the original source material is actually quite fun, and so if you're really into teen, if you're really into Teen Mutant and Turtles, I hardly recommend going back to the original source and seeing some of those comics. Okay, so let's get into making a magic set. So, okay, you're tasked with making a
Starting point is 00:03:47 teenage mutant Ninja Turtle's magic set. What is the first thing you do? Like, how did you, how did you, How did you tackle the property? Yeah. We wrote a list. We started a list of the things that we absolutely have to see in a teenage Mutagener Ninja Turtle set.
Starting point is 00:04:06 And number one on that list was ninjitsu, the mechanic. It is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after all. And so we're like, yep, this is what we're going to build the whole set around, is sort of making ninjitsu work. And number two, I believe, was Sputon. was making sure that pizzas and food were represented in the sets. And, you know, a lot of other things were on the list, mutants and mutant typal. And we also wanted to get art, we thought it's quite likely we'd want artifacts.
Starting point is 00:04:40 There's a lot of evil robots and machines that the turtles fight and a lot of weird signs that goes on. And yeah, those were some of our top things when we started drafting this. set. Okay, so let's start with Njitsu, because obviously the published set does not have Nyingitsu in it. So let's walk through the sort of evolution of starting with Njitsu and then ending up with sneak. So let's walk through that. Yeah, yeah. So Nynjitsu is in the set, and of course, it was the very first thing. And one thing we knew that we wanted was we wanted, like, signature moves for each of the turtles. We wanted like to represent their ninja moves in combat and ordinary combat tricks weren't going to cut it. Like we wanted something special there. And on the very first
Starting point is 00:05:31 homework, one of our vision designers, or Daniel Shue submitted homework for this assignment of making the ninja moves. And it was just putting ninjitsu on spells. It was basically putting Niditsu on spells so you could cast them for reduced cost if you returned a creature from an attacking unblocked creature to your hand. And we started testing that, and it was great. It was novel, it was fun, it made combat really exciting. You'd have no idea what was going to happen in combat, more so than almost any magic set. Anything can happen in combat at this set, because other creatures can pop in, spells can pop in suddenly. Yeah. So we really liked it. And play design liked it too when we showed it to them.
Starting point is 00:06:24 It was very popular at the Vision Summit. There was one problem. And the problem was we went to rules and say, hey, everyone loves this. How can we make this work? And they took one look at it and they said, you absolutely cannot do that. There is no way that you could put ninjitsu on a spell. That is not the way ninjitsu works. You're going to need a new mechanic for that. And so we're like, okay, well, we think this is worth doing. So yeah, let's make a new mechanic for it. And that mechanic ended up sneak. And for a while there, the set had both ninjitsu on creatures and sneak on the instance and sorcery spells.
Starting point is 00:07:01 But that was not going to be a great place for the final set to land, having two mechanics that were extremely similar, but actually functioned a little bit differently in certain ways. And Sneak could handle creatures sneaking in just fine. We built it built it to handle creatures sneaking in just fine. So even though we were very sad to lose the word ninjitsu, because it's obviously great, great for the set, great flavor. We were, we in the end combined them and just had sneak go on all the creatures and spells. And sneak, we kind of positioned now moving forward as something that, other magic sets can use in the future
Starting point is 00:07:46 because it can go on things that aren't ninjas for the first time. We could put this mechanic on creatures that aren't ninjas and you can put it on spells and other types of cards as well. Yeah, let me talk to that real quick. So, ninjitia's been very interesting. It's a mechanic we originally did in Champs of Kamagawa. At fact, one of the most popular mechanics from Champs of Kamagawa. And we've wanted to bring it back, but numerous times we've tried to bring it back and we're told there aren't ninjas in the set.
Starting point is 00:08:13 You cannot have Njitsu if you don't have ninjas. And it was this very useful, flexible mechanic, and we were kind of flavor locked, as it would. And so one of the things that obviously went into this is it was very helpful for us if we had a mechanic that we liked, that we weren't so tied to a very, very specific flavor. And so that's another big thing about sneak is it allows us to now use it in more places,
Starting point is 00:08:36 in places that Nizitsu we just weren't allowed to put it. Yeah. And also, we did take the opportunity to clean up a few bugs with ninjitsu. Ninjitsu being an activated ability from your hand, it just functions very differently than any other magic mechanic, where it puts things from your hand onto the battlefield, but it doesn't cast them. And yeah, so we took the opportunity to clean up some bugs. It now works correctly from the command zone. And, you know, you can't do some of the weird tricks that you could do before.
Starting point is 00:09:10 up multiple people, multiple attackers with a single ninja and, and things like that. There were some weird tricks you could do. Yeah, but it wasn't intended real, real quickly, as the creator of ninjitsu. We were in betrayers of Kamagawa. We saved ninjas and didn't put them in champions of Kamagawa and saved them for betrayers Kamagawa. It's now with ninjas. And so I made a ninja mechanic just so we'd have something for ninjas.
Starting point is 00:09:34 And I think at the time, like, it was very specific flavor I were trying to get. We named a ninjitsu because we were trying to. the ninja mechanic, but I don't think I realized how popular it was going to be evidenced by the fact that we named it ninjitsu. Okay, so you did, we have Sneak. So there's another mechanic in the set that had it, is us taking an old mechanic and sort of more renaming it than changing. I guess it's not quite, sneak is fundamentally changing it in some ways. So let's talk a little bit about how Disappear came to me.
Starting point is 00:10:08 Yeah, so disappear was a mechanic that sort of came about. It was one of the mechanics where we wanted to find something to synergize with both of the other color pairs that it's next to, essentially. Like we had sneak as pillar one and mutagen tokens were pillar number two. And we're like, okay, black and green is going to overlap Sneak and in black and black and it's it's going to overlap mutagen tokens in green. So what mechanic can we do that synergizes flavorfully with those things? And also green black, we knew was gonna have food.
Starting point is 00:10:49 That was gonna be where our food went. Our weird pizzas, you know, pizzas are food tokens really only go in white, green, and black. And the ones in turtles were weird. And so we definitely were leaning more black and green as the pair to put the, put the food in. So we're like, okay, what is, we can work with food, mutagen, and ninjitsu. And the things that they have in common is that something leaves the battlefield, uh, during your
Starting point is 00:11:19 turn. Something, uh, the mutagen tokens are sorcery speed, uh, ninjitsu happens during your combat, not sneak, sneak happens during your combat. And, you know, you can sacrifice a food token whenever. So we went back to magic's, uh, history, because there's one mechanic that works really well with things leaving during your turn. And that's the revolt mechanic from either revolt. And we talked briefly about having revolt be the word, but we're like, but it didn't, it didn't fit very well. Revolt did not fit. And because it's an ability word, it doesn't really add anything to the rules to just rename it and give it a different name here. So that's what we did. And we talked about disappear in context of like the bad guys, Bebop and Rocksteady are some of the
Starting point is 00:12:04 the commons in this color pair, you know, they're often like stealing technology and, you know, taking the turtles or one of their allies hostages and making them disappear for a while. And also, the turtles love making food disappear. They make the pizzas disappear very rapidly. So we wanted a nice general word that kind of could cover a lot of flavor here. And, yeah, and disappear was the one that we came up with. Okay. Well, you talked about mutagen.
Starting point is 00:12:34 tokens. So let's get into mutagen tokens. So real quickly, explain what mutagen tokens are. Yeah. So mutagen tokens, they're a token that has one tap, sacrifice this token, put a plus one, plus one counter on target creature you control, and it's activated only as a sorcery. And so in some ways, they're similar to map tokens, but you always know what you're getting. You're always getting the counter from them, unlike math tokens. And this was a mechanic that actually Eric Lauer suggested, the Mutergen tokens, one of his last contributions on what ended up being his final set team across his career at magic. His last set team was on Teenage Mead Ninja Turtles.
Starting point is 00:13:24 So he was the splinter of our group and the wise mentor and let us along. But yeah, he suggested that mechanic. We previously had a mechanic that was somewhat in the champion space, the champion mechanic, which we just sort of brought back in ECL. It was somewhat in the mutate space, but simpler, but it still wasn't simple enough, and it wasn't playing that well. And we knew we wanted to put the classic ooze, those green cylinders of ooze on cards. And we had a rare for it, but we wanted to get it into set more than that. because it's so iconic. And it all just came together to make the mutagen tokens be these like ooze canisters, and then the mutagen can spill out. Once you break them, then you're exposed to the mutagen,
Starting point is 00:14:17 you know, and so the flavor actually fits really, really well. And yeah, and what mutagen does generally when you're exposed to is it makes you better. It makes you stronger, it makes you smarter. It merges you with another animal that makes you, you know, better. So, just Just a simple plus one plus one counter really actually captures the flavor pretty well, we feel. So a little background here. I love filling in some gaps. We had actually tried this before. I'm not sure if you're aware that we tried this before.
Starting point is 00:14:47 So when we were making blood tokens in Estrade Crimson Vow, one of the earliest things we tried was, oh, well, maybe getting blood strengthens you. And so we tried plus one plus one counters. The reason we veered off, it actually played really well. The reason we veered off it was that part of what we wanted to do with having blood counters is have the vampires eat the blood counters rather than you use them. And the vampire just wanted to get stronger when you fed them the counter. So, like, them eating them had to be what gave them plus one plus one counters.
Starting point is 00:15:18 And so it duplicated things too much. And so we moved off. We ended up making it rummage rather than plus one plus one counters. But anyway, we had been there once before. I don't even know if your team was aware of that or not, but we had played in that space. Maybe Eric Lauer was aware of that. I don't think the rest of us were aware of that, but yeah. But yeah, that was Mutagen, and that also the Blue Green Pair has some of the mutant typal stuff at a low level.
Starting point is 00:15:47 It has some mutant typal, which synergizes well with some of the other sets in Standard. Okay, another piece of trivia for the audience. So Mutant and Ninja and Turtle are all creature types. I actually got some pressure back in the day to make a teenage creature type, which I almost did in Unhinged. There's a card that's actually a teenager, and I actually had it on the card, and then they changed the rules that all the creature types were official creature types,
Starting point is 00:16:17 and so I pulled back a little bit on how much strange stuff I did, and so I took teenage off. But teenage was very close to being a creature type once upon a time. It might have been teenager rather than teenage, but anyway, It's interesting that, obviously you care about mutants. You care a little bit about turtles. And let's talk a little bit about the ninja. You have a little bit of a ninja theme, too.
Starting point is 00:16:38 Yeah, yeah. The ninjas here are in white and black for the first time. Traditionally in magic, they're in blue and black. Those are the ninja colors. But here, we had a lot of, for the first time, a lot of, like, very heroic ninjas, as well as we have the evil foot clan that are also ninjas. And we wanted the ninja deck to be able to sort of play both of them. You want the ninja deck to be able to play all of the ninjas.
Starting point is 00:17:05 So, yeah, we went with white-black here. We do have Splinter Radical Rat. Oh, here, hold on. I can read just Splinter. Splinter Radical Rat. Where is he? Okay, so he's one, white-black hybrid. So three mana total, two of which is White-Black Hydrid. He's a legendary creature, mutant ninja rat, 2-4. If an ability of a ninja creature you control triggers, that ability triggers an additional time.
Starting point is 00:17:35 And then he's an activated ability, one in a blue. Target ninja can't be blocked in his turn. Yeah, so he, we knew we wanted to be able to let players play all three colors of ninjas together. So we made Splinter as sort of the commander that you can use to be able to unify sort of the white black ninjas and the blue black ninjas of. of magic that already exists. And yeah, and he's also very strongly limited, a splinter. So yeah, that we also, though, we didn't want to leave the other turtles out.
Starting point is 00:18:08 Like each turtle in this set is very monocolor, and that really helped us like focus on their identity. They all each naturally just like lean very much into one color. Leonardo leans very white. He's the leader, he's the teacher, he's the one who, practice is the most. Raphael is all about red. He's the most, you know, he has the most rage issues and is the most impulsive. Michelangelo is very green. He cares about food the most. He cares about small animals the most and is the most compassionate sort of towards others. And he's often
Starting point is 00:18:46 described as the heart of the team. And Donatello, who does machines, is very blue, all about science and knowledge. So, and we stuck with that identity throughout the whole set and the commander set and the turtle team up box, like, those are their colors. But we wanted to make sure they all got in the ninja action. So each of them at either rare or mythic, the other turtles do have a sneak version. They do have a sneak version of rare or mythic. So you can still get your ninjas in red, green, and blue a little bit. Oh, just to answer a question that I've gotten a lot.
Starting point is 00:19:21 Some people have asked me why we don't have heroes on the Teenage Mutian Ninja Turtles. And the answer is, legendary creature mutant ninja turtle takes all the space. There's no space left. And if you couldn't put Hero on the, obviously the heroes, it didn't make sense. So that's why Hero and villain got left off. There wasn't space. Yeah, there wasn't space. That also it was, these are just very long typelines all over this set.
Starting point is 00:19:50 Yes, yes. It's not just the Mutant Ninja Turtles. And we occasionally got a little bit more than Mutant Ninja Turtles. on a mythic. We got a fourth one on one of the mythics, but the, the typelines are very, very, extremely long in this. Very full. And yeah, it just wasn't, it wasn't something we were going to reference at all. We wanted to stick with mutants, ninjas, and turtles as the three, like, typal things that we cared about in this set. And, yeah, they all go into broader magic. You know, I actually really care about turtles without the others on one single card.
Starting point is 00:20:26 for fun, but that is turtle power. Yeah. Oh, turtle power. Sorry. That's your thing for me to read turtle power. Okay, turtle power. That's the only one that cares about
Starting point is 00:20:40 turtles without caring about ninjas or mutants. Okay, so turtle power is turtle power two in a green, enchantment. Flash, turtles you control get plus two plus two. Yeah, it's just, hey, go turtles. All your changelings, you know, you want to build an awesome turtle deck with all of these characters together.
Starting point is 00:20:58 And, yeah, and to facilitate that, one of the things we have in this set is we have a cycle of 10 hybrid rairs. And six of those rairs are the team-ups between the turtles themselves. It's like Leonardo and Donatello and, you know, Michelangelo and Raphael team together in a red-green hybrid card. And those cards, one of the reasons we did that. There's a couple of reasons. But one of the reasons we did that is so you could get all four turtles in your deck on only two colors. So you could use, you know, have a two-color deck but still have all four turtles represented if you wanted to just go and build an awesome deck with all of the turtles. Okay, so another mechanic we've not talked about yet.
Starting point is 00:21:42 So we've talked a lot about you tweaking existing mechanics, changing them, renaming them. But there actually is a mechanic you did not, you used and you did not rename. So let's talk a little bit about using a lion. Yeah, alliance was the last mechanic locked down for the set, happened in sort of midset design. And yeah, it started out as a really weird mechanic called Quick Study that when a creature entered, its power became equal to the greatest power among other creatures you controlled. And then it would have an effect that sort of scaled off that. And, you know, some of them had haste, some of them, use, you know, use, you. that power in other ways. But it was an awkward mechanic. And it didn't, it didn't last all that long
Starting point is 00:22:29 in the set. But it was one of our things that we're trying. So the red-white mechanic, we really wanted flavor-wise to capture sort of like sensei student, the teenage part of teenage meat ninja turtles. We wanted to make sure we captured that. And so we started out with mechanics that were kind of like, um, Sensei student related and Cook Study was one of them. We started with training, the very first play test, but that was just more filler because we had to get something in the file before we started a lot of work. And then we, for a lot of vision design and the first half a set design, the mechanic was called together. And this was a mechanic that was very similar to battalion, but you only needed to attack with one other creature rather than two other creatures.
Starting point is 00:23:16 It was basically battalion, but easier to trigger. And so the rewards were a little bit smaller than the battalion rewards. And together played okay, and we might use it again someday, but here the problem was that together and sneak both really need you to be able to attack to get your triggers. You need to be able to attack with two things for together to trigger, and you need to be able to attack unblocked for sneak to trigger. And having like two of the five color pairs be so aggressive and be so all in on attacking was just, making limited really awkward and too aggressive.
Starting point is 00:23:55 So that's when we pivoted away from together to Alliance. Alliance was great. It fit into the set really well. Because Sneak has things like entering during combat, you can get triggers at unexpected times, and also Sneak sort of lets you reuse creatures and get more inters from creatures. So it actually integrates pretty well, the sneak and Alliance. And yeah, we, you know, obviously, Alliance was a known quantity. It was from streets of New Copena. And yeah, we, so we took it and changed the cards from together over to Alliance. And the whole red, white deck started playing a lot better. And, yeah, so we were very happy with
Starting point is 00:24:39 that change. So one more mechanic. This is a cycle, and this is a subtype rather than a mechanic, I guess technically, but you guys brought classes back. How did that come up? Yeah. So yeah, so actually one thing that, uh, get the sort of, I think the end of vision design, beginning of set design, when more eyes were on the set. And, uh, Jdeen and play design, uh, came to me and said, look, you don't have enough non-creature stuff going on in your set. Like, you need more rars or mythics that are non-creatures. So that's, you know, something that I, there was no specific, prescribed like, you know, limits or goal in that area. So I, you know, filled it up with other creature concepts, sort of. I just filled up the set with some other creature concepts. But she's like, you need to, you know, we really think that the set needs some more non-creature things going on at Rare and Mythic. So we cut five creatures from Rare and Mythic. We cut five of our creatures from Rare and Mythic. And we shuffled stuff around to make sure, like, that the
Starting point is 00:25:46 best concepts ended up at uncommon or, you know, we didn't, we didn't, you know, lose anything good. Anything that was like high profile. They're all good. They're all good characters. We didn't lose anything high profile. But yeah, so, and we're like, okay, what is the cycle going to be? And yeah, I had the idea that we could do the theme song. We hadn't used the classic 80s theme song anywhere. We hadn't really used it. We were like, oh, maybe we'll put it in the flavor text of some cards. But we haven't really used it. And I just had this vision of like, okay, they each have a role on the team. Each of the turtles has their like role, which is, you know, like a class. They have their role on the team. And that role is pretty well described by the theme song. The role in the team is pretty well described by the theme song. And yeah, so we, we added classes. And they, Blueboro had come out. So we knew that classes were pretty popular at that moment as well. So, yeah, we change over the classes and there's a lot of tweaking, a lot of tweaking with play design to get them in the right places.
Starting point is 00:27:01 But they ended up great and we're very, very excited for the, for players to get to play with these classes and to be able to say, yes, I am cool but rude, you know. The one that was a little awkward was in the theme song, it says Leonardo Leeds, but having a card that was just a little awkward, was in the theme song, it says Leonardo Leeds, but having a card that was just, called Leeds. No one, especially creative was not really happy with that idea. Creative was not on board with having just like leads is the name of a card.
Starting point is 00:27:34 So we changed that to be leader's talent, and then it kind of fits in, the naming scheme fits in a little more with the Bloomberg cards. But but yeah, that's how the classes came about. Okay, so the final theme, we've talked
Starting point is 00:27:49 about a lot of the archetypal themes. You mentioned early on there there was an artifact theme. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you sort of consolidated around that? Yeah, so the artifact theme is one of the three things that were like pushed for constructed essentially. So, I mean, we knew at the very beginning that EOE had a blue-red artifact theme and looking at our set and the characters that were very artifact focused like Baxter Stockman and Crang, they were also very blue and red. And, And yeah, so we thought that blue and red trying an artifact theme would be great.
Starting point is 00:28:27 And we tried that basically from the beginning. And that theme never changed. And, yeah, we have a lot of really cool constructed artifact shots, like ravenous robots is one. Hold on, ravenous robots. This is where the Mousers got their premiere card in the set. Though they're on some commons and other cards. Okay, let me read this. Yeah, Mouser card.
Starting point is 00:28:51 Ravenous robots, one in a red for an artifact creature robot, 2-1. Whenever you cast an artifact spell, create a one-one-collis robot artifact creature token. Red and tap, creature tokens you control gain haste until end of turn. Yeah, so you can really swarm your opponents with the mousers here, which is what we wanted. We wanted the ability to like swarm, swarm with the mousers. And this was our card to do it. Another card that is really important for the artifact theme and constructed is the improvised arsenal. This is Casey Jones' like bag of hockey sticks and golf clubs and basically...
Starting point is 00:29:34 Let me read what it does, and then we can talk about it. Improvised arsenal, one in a red, artifact equipment, equipped creature gets plus one plus o for each artifact you control. Four in a red, create a token that's a copy of this equipment. Equip red. Yeah, so this is cranial plating is a classic artifact from way
Starting point is 00:29:54 way back in the day from the original Mirrodin block. I made it. Yeah, Mark made it. Yeah, well, this is our homage to that card. We're putting cranial plating back in standard in a color that it makes sense
Starting point is 00:30:08 for, which is red. It's definitely a very red effect. Red makes more sense. And yeah, so you can you can, you know, make creatures very large with the improvised arsenal. And yeah, this was Casey who Casey just puts a bunch of like basically junk and garbage together to make weapons out of and he stores them all in a golf bag on his back. And this was our sort of, you know, homage to that aspect of Casey Jones, who's the
Starting point is 00:30:34 hockey mask meal, hockey mask wearing ally of the turtles. Yeah. So one, we're almost out of time here. But the one thing that I really appreciate is there's a lot of. We talked a lot about mechanics, but there's a lot of top-down one-of-card designs. There's a bunch of cameos in the set. There's a lot of things you're doing to really capture, like, the Teenage Mutant Turtles has all sorts of fun characters and events and things.
Starting point is 00:31:00 You really did a great job of, for fans of the turtles, I think you did a lot to hit all the different cool things within the property. Yeah, we tried hard. You know, we, as well as my... Crystal Frazier, who is our narrative designer, is also a huge Turtles fan, maybe even a bigger fan than myself. And so we talked together through every aspect of Turtles lore, and we constantly check with each other that everything, like, you know, had great turtle flavor and that there weren't any awesome concepts that we were missing. I think one of the cards that I'm most proud of is Turtles Forever. Okay, Turtles Forever, hold on second.
Starting point is 00:31:49 Yep. Turtles Forever is three in a white, instant. Search your library and or outside the game for exactly four legendary creature cards you own with different names, then reveal those cards. An opponent chooses two of them. Put the chosen cards in your hand and shuffle the rest into your library. Yeah, this is a vision that I had for the set was that there'd be a rare that basically acknowledged the turtles like crossing over with a lot of different things, crossing over with themselves, you know, crossing over with other games like magic. And this card really came together, I think, in a fun way.
Starting point is 00:32:30 It's kind of a rift on gifts ungiven, but it lets you get all four turtles with a single card. You get to pick all four turtles if you want with a single card. And the artwork that has the movie turtles, the original animated series turtles, the original Mirage Turtles, and our own version of the turtles, all on the card together is just one of my favorite things. I'm so happy that this concept came together. And, you know, this card got some pushback during the design process. Like, is this going to be cool? Is it going to be fun? and I'm really happy that we stuck with it and found the right spot for this card.
Starting point is 00:33:10 Well, anyway, I can see my desk from here, so I'm almost at work. Any last thoughts on the making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? We had a blast, and I know you're going to have a blast too playing this set. You know, the turtles are fun. Sneak is a really fun mechanic to play around with and limited, and yeah, I think you're going to have a great time with this set. So, yeah, I hope to see you at the pre-releases and at the tables. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Eric.
Starting point is 00:33:45 It was so fun to talk about Teenade Mutin Turtles with you. Yeah, Mark, thanks for having me. I'm super excited. And, yeah, I can't wait for players to get their hands on this set. So anyway, guys, I now can see my desk. So we all know what that means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time.
Starting point is 00:34:07 Bye-bye.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.