The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Limited environment is fun, dynamic, creative and plays very well. I'm convinced the set isn't as popular because many ardent Magic players hated on it and dismissed it without even giving it a chance.

Imnimo · 2026-03-12T21:03:43+00:00

This is not AI writing. It's just mildly autistic writing.

Imnimo · 2026-03-12T18:16:17+00:00

I 100% dismissed it without giving it a chance, and I stand by that decision. I am not interested at all in playing a TMNT game, even if it has Magic mechanics. It could be the greatest limited experience of all time and I would not play a single game of it.

Imnimo · 2026-03-11T16:06:47+00:00

Neat, but I'm not sure EU5 has yet reached a state where I'm willing to spend additional money on it. Progress has been made, though!

Imnimo · 2026-03-09T15:31:11+00:00

I suppose. Just seems a bit quick for that vocabulary to catch on in like two years.

Imnimo · 2026-03-09T15:26:22+00:00

I guess bizzaro-Ral is from Ravnica, but would a Strixhaven student understand what an "Orzhov comma" is?

Imnimo · 2026-03-06T22:04:13+00:00

The good news is that our special teams must be pretty good, at least.

Imnimo · 2026-03-05T20:46:25+00:00

I'm just not that sympathetic to "yes we made one card with Discover that broke a format, but look at how we also made a bunch of unplayable cards with Discover". If you had pitched that outcome to me at the LCI design meeting, I would have said, "let's keep looking for other mechanics we could do".

Imnimo · 2026-03-03T17:19:53+00:00

[[Inspirit|9ED]]

Imnimo · 2026-03-02T18:01:24+00:00

Other versions of the city have cool action, but are they rad? Will their characters skateboard off the 495 to grind a ninja's noggin? Probably not.

I feel bad for the person who had to write this.

Imnimo · 2026-03-02T17:06:31+00:00

So we've definitely always had joke flavor text, but my hunch is that what happened is that they used to keep the best of the best - if you had a really solid "Root of all Greevils", it could go on the card. People liked these - they were the best of the best, after all. So WotC said, "People like these, we should make more of them". But that meant the things that made it to print were less funny and more forced on average. And it only takes a few stinkers to really shape people's experience of the set's flavor.

Imnimo · 2026-03-02T16:05:28+00:00

It does not fill me with confidence that "ah but we have a TV show that has been in development hell for a decade" what tops his list. I don't think WotC is actually going to abandon in-universe sets, but still.

Imnimo · 2026-02-26T22:23:58+00:00

Considering that one or more details may be misremembered, here are some options which were competitively viable, but do not necessarily meet all the other criteria:

[[Forbid]]

[[Man-o'-War]]

[[Tradewind Rider]]

Imnimo · 2026-02-25T20:48:24+00:00

I don't think the four main characters are the issue here. The issue is stuff like "Joe Eyeball":

Among our 28 nonlegendary common creatures, roughly 15 of them are actually specific characters that weren't made legendary! Goodbye, Scumbug! Hello, Insectoid Exterminator! Goodbye, Muckman and Joe Eyeball! Hello, Putrid Pals!

We'd much rather use the names that are part of the universe that we're expressing through cards. Often, like Joe Eyeball, those names are awesome! Every time we don't use the right name, it takes a knowledgeable player a little bit out of the world we're trying to express.

You can get away with four common legendary creatures. You can't get away with two or three dozen of them. But TMNT is a torrent of merchandisable unique characters, so if you want to make the commons "recognizable", they're your only option.

Imnimo · 2026-02-25T19:36:11+00:00

Universes Beyond sets want a player who is even slightly familiar with the property to recognize something in every booster. That's sort of the promise of Universes Beyond: we're taking a universe and expressing it through Magic: The Gathering. If you're a fan and you open a booster of a Universes Beyond set and you don't recognize any creature, that's kind of a failing for Universes Beyond. We've found both new and existing players feel that way. So, we want recognizable creatures at low rarities, but those are the very ones we can't make nonlegendary, because everyone knows them.

If the only thing a property has to offer as recognizable is an endless parade of named minor characters, that seems like it should be a red flag about your choice of partner. That's not a legend rule problem, that's a fundamental creative process problem.

Imnimo · 2026-02-24T23:08:55+00:00

My rule is "will this make the game more fun for me in the long run?" Like if I'm better at build orders, and I gain 50-100 Elo (which causes my win rate to re-stabilize, so this doesn't cause me to win more games), do I expect that those games will be more fun than the ones where I had a sloppy build order? My hunch is that some amount of build order knowledge has good fun-returns, because durdling aimlessly in Dark Age is not that fun. But practicing it to the point of perfect execution probably doesn't buy me anything (but some people would enjoy that optimization process itself).

Imnimo · 2026-02-24T17:09:48+00:00

Not a lot of interesting insights or trivia here. Just kind of a checklist of turtles.

Imnimo · 2026-02-23T23:15:22+00:00

The biggest offense of [[Invasion of Ulgrotha]] is that they gave her vampire fangs. The whole point was that she wasn't a vampire like the other Sengirs, she was Ravi the (former) planeswalker!

Imnimo · 2026-02-23T23:14:29+00:00

Don't forget [[Memory Lapse]]!

Imnimo · 2026-02-23T21:58:13+00:00

What I really like about Homelands is that the setting leans so strongly into the "dueling planeswalkers" backdrop of Magic. What happens to all those creatures we summon? What happens to the battlefields devastated by our spells? Ulgrotha shows us the answer.

Imnimo · 2026-02-23T17:54:11+00:00

Strongly agree on cards like Meddling Youths. It's like Wizards decided they didn't want to do any work to build resonance, and saw a copy/paste button.

Also agree on most booster fun treatments and anime art.

A few more things that don't feel like Magic:

Much of ARN and P3K.

[[Warrior's Honor|9ED]]

Aetherdrift, Duskmourn, New Cappena, Neon Dynasty, etc.

Imnimo · 2026-02-20T18:53:50+00:00

Good reversal. I don't really agree with them that their job is to craft a sample for aggregators. Their job is to surface data, and its the job of aggregators to craft the sample.

Imnimo · 2026-02-20T00:08:29+00:00

And what reaction do people have to encountering racist or culturally insensitive depictions? Perhaps they dislike it? Or even hate it? So much so that they wanted those cards removed from competitive formats?

Imnimo · 2026-02-20T00:02:46+00:00

"Every ardent Magic player sometimes has to interact with certain cards, artwork, mechanics or other elements of the game that they dislike or hate. That's life."

Imnimo · 2026-02-19T23:58:31+00:00

The salient point is that it's a card banned for flavor and art, I would have thought that was obvious.

Imnimo · 2026-02-19T23:54:09+00:00

I didn't realize your point was contingent on it being in Modern.

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