Earlier this month, Magic: The Gathering released its latest set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The set has everything fans of the TMNT franchise, created by Kevin Eastman, could want. Whether you're playing the heroes in a half-shell, Shredder and his foot soldiers, mutant animals, or the interdimensional creatures like Krang, there is a lot of variety in the set to build new decks or upgrade ones you already have.
Yes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is mostly about pizza-eating superheroes fighting in the streets and sewers of NYC (or going back in time), but there are some horror-themed cards in the set, and I got to ask Senior Narrative Designer, Crystal Frasier, about them.
The TMNT set is full of monsters, aliens, and bizarre creatures. There are four cards that I specifically want to talk about that relate to the horror genre. First up is the food alien mutant “Dimension X Pizzasaur” from the Commander pre-con. Can you talk a little bit about this artifact creature?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has drawn so much inspiration from indie comics and the horror genre over the years, often distilling them into weirdly kid-friendly versions of itself. One of my favorite examples is the beloved “pizza monsters” from cartoons and video games that pay homage to the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.
The big difference being that instead of clinging to your face, they reproduce by impersonating food. Nickelodeon gave us a lot of flexibility in redesigning characters, and when it came to the pizza monsters, we knew we wanted something that felt more like the Magic house style, so we let our artist get creative.
Xavier Ribeiro was already a horror fan and gave us a gorgeous, twisted design. Narratively, they’re a predator species native to Dimension X—also home to the set’s utroms and neutrinos—who adapt their eggs to resemble the food of prey. If something is dumb enough to eat an egg, well… we all saw Alien.
Also in the Commander deck, there's the “Monster Mashup” card, which looks like a combination of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, The Wolf Man, and The Creature From the Black Lagoon. What was the concept behind this card?
This is Monstrex, a very fun minor character from the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comics from the '90s—a comic series that sometimes took itself very seriously and other times leaned hard into wackiness, ultimately creating much of the lore that later iterations of TMNT would refine.
He’s a send-up of all the classic Universal horror greats: Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Gill-man, the Wolfman, and the Mummy, not made from the monsters themselves, but instead by a “mutating ray” affecting a television playing an all-night monster movie marathon.
He’s sort of the Scream-ification of classic black-and-white horror, where the Turtles ultimately only beat him by understanding the genre conventions and playing by those rules.
There's even a zombie card in the set, called the “Paramecia Coloniex.” What's the story behind this creature?
The famous “resurrection worms.” Back in the days of the original Mirage comics, Eastman and Laird were struggling with how to bring back the Shredder—a really cool villain who the Turtles very much killed in issue #1 (by grenade, no less).
The final solution was so clever in its simplicity: mystics within the Foot ninja clan would use magic and genetic engineering to create swarms of worms that absorbed the knowledge of the corpses they ate, then arranged themselves into a physical replica of that person! What could be simpler?
A swarm of paramecia coloniex becomes an undead version of whoever they eat, with their memories, skills, and personality. They can't differentiate things they’ve eaten, though, and that’s how you wind up with far worse amalgamations like the Shark Shredder, also featured in this set—he's the result of the shredder swarm feeding on a shark after their initial defeat, merging Oroku Saki’s body and memories with a great white shark.
Lastly, there's the one horror creature-type card: the big legendary creature “Armaggon, Future Shark.” It's pretty much game over when this shark horror mutant hits the table. Can you talk about how you created this horror card?
Armaggon is one of the classic TMNT comic villains from the '90s who rarely appear in other media. On the base level, he’s a shark mutant with cybernetic augmentations who is obsessed with being the apex predator.
Depending on which continuity you run with, he’s either a bounty hunter, a warlord obsessed with manipulating the timeline to ensure his unchallenged dominion over the earth, or the pinnacle of mutation from the end of time, existing as a cosmic horror that must “swim” forever against the current back in time, devouring continuity as it passes.
We based our version on the comic-horror idea, creating a time-eating kaiju that can appear out of nowhere to wreak havoc.
Are there any other cards in the set you think fans of the horror genre should keep an eye on?
One of the ways I’ve described the TMNT franchise to folks in the office who only know it through the old ‘87 cartoon is “baby’s first body horror.” At its core, it’s about how gross but adaptable bodies are, and finding ways to thrive when your body isn’t what you want. A lot of the characters presented have tragic or horrific backstories.
Baxter Stockman is the most obvious example of that body horror, and the one whose process we track throughout the set. He begins as a brilliant scientist in his Uncommon Baxter Stockman card, a constant thorn in the Turtles’ side, particularly after he aligns with the Foot Clan.
But then we see his unwilling transformation on the card Ooze Spill, and his final fate in his Rare card, Baxter, Fly in the Ointment. His arc is a familiar story of pride and fall, leaving him transformed into the thing he hates.
My personal favorite of the lot is easily Mutagen Man, a human drenched in so much mutagen that his body discorporates, leaving him as a swarm of sapient protoplasm and organs, trapped in a containment suit and constantly bleeding mutagen. And mutagen is a dangerous but valuable resource in the world of TMNT, so he’s feared and hunted because of this grotesque transformation.
