Will Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Be a Repeat of Marvel’s Spider-Man?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is set to release on March 6th, and right now we’re in the midst of preview season. The community’s general sentiment about this set is not especially positive.

Over on my YouTube channel, I ran a poll checking to see how people were feeling about the set, and the results indicate that the vast majority of Magic players intend to skip the set. Now, it should be noted that my YouTube audience isn’t necessarily reflective of the community as a whole, but I do think it’s still an interesting data point.

Many players are worried that TMNT will be like last year’s Spider-Man, a set that wasn’t very well received by most of the community. In this article, I’m going to break down the similarities and differences between the two sets, and you can decide for yourself whether or not TMNT is a repeat of Spider-Man.

Let’s start with the similarities.

SIMILARITY #1: UNIVERSES BEYOND

The most obvious similarity between the two sets is that they are both Universes Beyond releases. In other words, they are sets that are based on a non-Magic intellectual property. There’s a fair bit of negative sentiment around these products, especially since they became legal in Standard starting in 2025.

To be clear, I’m not personally in the anti-UB camp. Wizards of the Coast has already shown us several times that they can design excellent UB sets. Just last year, Avatar: the Last Airbender and Final Fantasy showcased just how good a UB set can be. It’s very clear that these sets can be designed just as well as in-universe Magic sets, and they can feel just like regular Magic sets.

In other words, I don’t think the fact these two sets are both UB is enough for us to conclude that TMNT isn’t going to be good. However, I think there is an adjacent similarity at play that makes this kind of set feel a lot less like Magic.

SIMILARITY #2: JARRING “NEW YORK” SETTING

While being a UB release alone isn’t enough to make a set feel out of place, the setting and tone of that IP can certainly make a set feel that way. Both Spider-Man and TMNT are set in fictional versions of New York City. This results in us having things on Magic cards that feel incredibly strange – like hot dogs and bagels.

While we haven’t seen very many Commons in TMNT as of this writing, I feel pretty confident in saying that we’re going to see some similarly jarring cards. Heck, they could even just reprints Bagel and Schmear and Hot Dog Cart! Even if we don’t get something like that, we do already know about the pizza lands, which are certainly unique.

I think when sets stray too far away from Magic’s fantasy setting, it invites a lot of criticism because we’re just not used to seeing such mundane things on Magic cards.

In short, the UB releases that have felt like good Magic sets have been fantasy settings like Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and Final Fantasy. These aren’t sets where we have to worry about a bagel or pizza showing up on a Magic card (although to be fair, FF did have Instant Ramen).

Still, I don’t think this issue alone is enough to make a set bad. Even if cards seem strange in terms of flavor and art, if they are fun to play with in multiple formats, that’s good enough for me.

SIMILARITY #3: THEY ARE BOTH SMALL SETS

For me, this is the most alarming similarity. Most Standard-release Magic sets have 280+ cards. Spider-Man had 191, and TMNT will have 190. Not only does this mean that the set literally contributes less to Magic, it also results in some serious issues.

In an article kind of like this one before Spider-Man released, I voiced my concerns about it being a much smaller set than your typical Magic release. Unfortunately, those concerns came to pass. It was an underwhelming Limited format at best, and very few cards from the set have made a major impact on 60-card formats.

In that article, I go pretty deep on discussing why designing a successful small set is so difficult, but suffice it to say that the main problem is that Limited formats quickly become stale and uninteresting. This is a result of seeing the same cards far more regularly and only having a handful of viable draft archetypes.

This means Wizards of the Coast is now 0-for-2 on designing small sets that are legal in Standard and have their own Limited formats (2006’s Coldsnap was the other one), and that’s the beginnings of a pattern. 

While Wizards of the Coast implemented Pick Two Draft as a way to salvage Spider-Man as a Limited format, it didn’t work. In fact, the general consensus was that Pick Two Draft just made things worse. Despite this, they’re trying the same thing with TMNT, and it’s hard to have very much confidence that it will work this time.

Because of all of these similarities, I’m currently leaning towards TMNT being a sub-par Limited format, but I hope I’m wrong. 

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the similarities out of the way, let’s look at some differences that should give us a little bit of hope that TMNT will be better than Spider-Man.

DIFFERENCE #1: NO THROUGH THE OMENPATHS DEBACLE

There is a lot of ridiculous stuff about Spider-Man, but perhaps the most ridiculous thing about it is that paper cards and mechanics have different names than the digital ones, with the digital release of the set called Through the Omenpaths. These cards also all feature different art. This was necessary because Wizards of the Coast didn’t get the license for Magic Online or Magic Arena, likely because Marvel SNAP has the license for a digital card game.

This creates a massive headache for anyone who plays both in paper and online (which I would guess is the majority of players), and also makes it way more challenging than it should be to simply talk about Magic cards.

Luckily, TMNT doesn’t have the same problem, as the cards will have the same name art, and mechanic names in both digital and paper. 

The bad news is we probably have to deal with Through the Omenpaths again with the release of Marvel Super Heroes later this year.

DIFFERENCE #2: MORE VARIETY

Spider-Man was already a small set, but it felt even smaller since 31 of its 191 cards depicted some version of Spider-Man. While most of these feature different characters from different universes, it still got really old seeing lots of artwork depicting Spider-people.

Part of the reason this happened is that Wizards of the Coast was extremely restricted in what characters they could use with a Spider-Man license. While the Spider-verse and the rogues gallery are pretty big, it still made the set feel even more claustrophobic to see “Spider-Man” or some variant of that over and over again.

This problem partly stemmed from the fact that the Spider-Man set was originally going to be a small set akin to Warhammer or Fallout, that wasn’t a Standard-release or draftable set. But this changed late in design, so they had to hastily expand the set. 

A Spider-Man license would have worked great for an even smaller set, but when you have to print 191 cards all featuring something covered by a Spider-Man license, your options are going to be limited. This resulted in repetitive art, names, and flavor that really made the set seem uninteresting.

Luckily, TMNT doesn’t have quite as pronounced of a problem in this regard. For one thing, the Ninja Turtles are a team instead of an individual, so it’s a set that inherently will have an easier time printing more unique cards without the same kind of repetitive names and designs. Additionally, it was designed to be a 190-card set from the beginning, so it’s less likely to be filled out with uninteresting designs.

DIFFERENCE #3: MORE BUZZWORTHY CARDS ALREADY

TMNT has lots of cards to be excited about. With Spider-Man, it seemed like apart from The Infinity Stone, there wasn’t a card that captured the imagination of players in a big way.

We’ve already seen all the Rares and Mythics for Spider-Man revealed, and the power level and designs of them look to be much better. There are three two-drops in particular that feel super pushed. Michelangelo, Weirdness to 11 is one of the best +1/+1 counter payoffs and enablers we’ve ever seen, Super Shredder can grow like crazy, and Ravenous Robots is going to churn out tons of Artifact tokens – I think it’s even likely to be powerful enough for the Eternal formats.

Those are just a few examples, too.  

SO, WILL IT BE BETTER THAN SPIDER-MAN?

While there are certainly some similarities between these two UB sets, and TMNT certainly may have some problems, I don’t think TMNT will be a repeat of Spider-Man.  I think the area where it might be the most comparable is Limited – but the set’s designs look good enough to make much more of an impact on 100-card and 60-card formats than Spider-Man did.

I think TMNT will successfully avoid being as poorly received as Spider-Man. However, I am skeptical that it can achieve the same heights as excellent UB sets have in the past. In short, I neither expect it to be terrible or excellent. It’ll probably fall somewhere in the middle.

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What do you think? Does this set look better than Spider-Man? Let me know your take over on X or Bluesky.