Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles releases March 6. Alongside the main set, there’s the Pizza Box, the Team-up Box, and one Commander deck: Turtle Power! These heroes in a half-shell are headlining a five-color Commander deck, and we’re here to get it upgraded.
The Turtle Power! Deck features two five color Commander options in Heroes in a Half Shell and Leonardo, the Balance. What’s more, Leonardo is a Partner Commander, allowing you to use Character Select – a new Partner variant – to chose one of the other turtles or Splinter to lead a deck with him. This gives a wide variety of Commander options for one deck.
Heroes in a Half Shell is the go-to if you just want to have a more “oops, all Turtles and Ninjas and Mutants” kind of deck. It consolidates the Command Zone into one card instead of two, which can be better or worse depending on how you look at it. It’s a solid card, but folks will likely want to brew more with Leonardo and the different Character Select variants a little more.
Leonardo cares about tokens, and when you’re a five color deck, you can run all manner of token synergies. You have all sorts of creature token generators to consider, and all sorts of non-creature tokens too – from Food to Treasure to Junk to Lander tokens, the deck has a lot of directions to take.
Picking a Partner can narrow the focus a little. Donatello pushes you more toward Mutagen tokens and doing blue/artifact things; Splinter pushes more toward an aristocrats or even flicker style build; Raphael is straight up damage amplification, taking advantage of Leonardo’s activated ability for maximum lethality; Michelangelo is the more consistent and budget friendly option, helping curve out and push you more toward green.
For this Precon Upgrade build, we’re going to go with Leonardo and Michelangelo, as being able to curve out is really nice, and being able to dip heavier into green gives us access to some great cards. Even in a five color build, it’s good to focus on certain colors more than others.
SO MANY NEW CARDS
There are a massive 46 new cards in this precon, making it one of the most brand-new design dense Precons to date. Not all of the cards fit the theme we’re going to lean into (tokens and +1/+1 counters), but even still, so many of them are just fantastic. With so many new cards to talk about, we can’t possibly cover them all here. If you want to know about the big hitters, check out our Top 10.
Here’s a few to whet the appetite, though!
Continue is an excellent piece of white reanimator tech. It’s conditional – only being useful in certain circumstances – but when it’s good? It’s great. Bringing four creatures back for two mana is insanely good, and you can totally build your deck around it, with sacrifice outlets galore. I’m most excited to run this one.
Cheap wraths are always good, and a three mana destroy all creatures is a boon to many decks. Wrathing for five mana is sometimes a little much, but when you can get that discount, you’re feeling much better about popping this one off.
Speaking of “wraths”, meet Massacre Kelp. Electric Seaweed is indeed stepping into Massacre Girls electric boots, and provides a tantalizing red version of that most satisfying of effects to watch obliterate a board. Electric Seaweed might actually be better, though, because you can more easily protect your board from it.
Mole Module is such a great vehicle, and it’s not just Kotori and Bello decks that love this one (though it is very, very good). Getting to mill four and return a permanent is sneaky good, and at just Crew cost of 2, it’s very viable. Plenty of Commanders care about reanimation but don’t really get into the red zone very often.
$69 UPGRADES
Turtle Power! is a powerful precon out of the box, but I’d like to fine tune it a little here. We’re going Michelangelo as our Partner Commander, and going deeper toward green white.
The goals for these upgrades are:
- Bring down the curve
- Increase synergy between our strategy and payoffs
- Add some strong repeatable effects
- Add some powerful role-players
Dusk Legion Duelist gives us repeatable card draw and comes down early, which is going to be better than Harmonize most of the time. Similarly, the mana from Faeburrow Elder is going to be better than what we can get out of Exploding Barrel on average, while helping us get more power on the board to swing with. Speaking of repeatable “draw”, Evolution Witness is gonna be fishing things out of the yard quite frequently.
Making more tokens and having that synergize with our go-wide (and a bit tall) strategy is served by adding token producers like Arasta of the Endless Web. Every time this triggers in anyone’s turn, we’re getting a Leonardo trigger. That’s up to four triggers a turn cycle, which is pretty sweet. Michelangelo, Weirdness to 11 comes in at two mana, enhances counters production, and also makes a token when he comes in. That’s a lot for two mana.
Of course, in any deck like this, adding Academy Manufactor, who turns all of our food synergies into extra Clues and Treasure, really keeps the wheels greased.
As usual, cutting some high end cards for impactful two-drops is always good. The OG Ninja Turtle himself, Kappa Tech-Wrecker, is a sweet removal card to slot in. Sphere Grid doles out counters and keywords aplenty.
My “pet” picks for this deck are Uncivil Unrest, which is a sweet damage doubler and haste enabler, and Slippery Bogbonder. Bogbonder helps protect one of our creatures, while potentially hoovering up all the counters onto a lethal attacker. That’s pretty nice utility, especially for Commander damage.
The cards we’re taking out are in the sideboard on Moxfield. They’re either poor synergies, or we have access to better options. Some of them are pretty good cards, but we don’t need them all.
You can view the full list over on Moxfield.
FURTHER UPGRADES
Upgrading this precon further really depends on how you want to go about it. You can add more stuff from the main TMT set, which is based on vibes and flavor – a perfectly fine route – or you can consider other Magic cards too. I don’t need to tell you what turtles to pick, so here’s some commentary on other set cards.
More cheap token production that can happen independently of your turn is going to be great here. Tataru Taru and Lotho are short kings of this arena, and well worth considering.
Token making is super efficient on Adeline, and she remains one of the better options low on the curve – as does Kami of Whispered Hopes when it comes to making mana and adding more counters on things. Adrix and Nev might draw you into their web if you lean into token production on cards like Faerie Artisans, or go deeper on Clues, which is a more UG oriented strategy.
Gamechanger wise in Bracket 3, the three I’d be looking at are Smothering Tithe (for token production), and Fierce Guardianship & Teferi’s Protection for protecting your board state.
At the top end of your budget, there’s Ouroboroid, a card I would love to play here. It amplifies counter production greatly and is overall a real haymaker for four mana.
END STEP
That’s our precon upgrade guide for Turtle Power!. Excited for this precon? Let us know which Commanders you’d choose from the Character Select.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.