IGN praises Turtle Power! Commander precon as TMNT homage; full decklist revealed

Update: Wizards of the Coast has revealed the full decklist for the Turtle Power deck," Lloyd Coombes wrote while covering the Turtle Power Commander precon, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set is slated to launch on March 6 with preorders already available for the precon. IGN ran a first-impressions column that, in the captured copy, frames the precon as "a successful blend of TMNT video-game nostalgia and Magic design, praising the deck’s distinct personality, the multiple comm", that sentence is truncated in the excerpt but sets the tone for coverage that leans into nostalgia and flavor.

Hands-on coverage and a company design memo together sketch what players can expect inside the box. A YouTube transcript of a preview walkthrough reads, "Now, the pixel promo art, I want to be clear, is not in the precons. You can get that in collector boosters..." and proceeds to read a partial card list aloud: Arcane Signant, Ash Barons, Assassin's Trophy, Biogenic ooze, Blasphemous Act, Chromatic lantern. The transcript also flags the deck's headline creature: "the lead singer of the deck is Heroes in a Half Shell," and details that card as "So, a white, a blue, a black, a red, and a green, five mana for a five five mutant ninja turtle with vigilance, trample, menace, and haste." The triggered text in the preview reads, "It says, whenever one or more mutants, ninjas, andor turtles you control, deal combat damage to a player, put a one-1 counter on each of those creatures and draw a card."

IGN emphasizes the modular commander approach as a package-level selling point: "There’s nothing truly revolutionary about this modular approach (swapping Commander precons to use other Legendary Creatures within them as their leader is part of the fun of the format), but having five options for Turtles means that no one is left behind." The same excerpt lists potential leaders by name: "Splinter (who has the Partner mechanic, too), but also members of the TMNT’s rogues gallery like Baxter, Fly in the Ointment, Leatherhead, Iron Gator, and, of course, Shredder, Shadow Master." A preview segment, more conversational, even suggests there might be "six seven almost" options, a discrepancy between outlets that underlines the need to check the official commander roster when WotC's full materials are posted.

Wizards design commentary sheds light on how the team built that modularity. "We scrapped this mechanic and decided to go with a partner variant and put a ability on one of the Turtles to give the deck the five-color identity. Rest in peace, to the old version of character select. Who knows, maybe something like it will show up some day?" designers wrote, and they flagged playtesting problems with the scrapped idea: "[...] After playtesting and iterating on this mechanic, we found several major problems with it. First, it would need major rules support, both in the Magic Comprehensive Rules and in digital Magic. Second, it was bending the Commander color identity rule, something that we take seriously. A single Commander deck didn't feel like the right place to bend the rules this way. The third and the major deciding factor was that this ability was quite wordy and ate up a lot of space on the card. Each card we made with this ability would have to be quite short, meaning that we couldn't make the coolest cards possible."

Designers also leaned into video-game easter eggs and top-down creations. "Irma is a friend of April who is always getting mutated into various things, like a rat, a robot, an Utrom, and more. It was fun to design this top-down card while also tying into the +1/+1 counter theme of the deck," one file notes, while IGN points to nods like "Electric Seaweed from the hard-as-nails NES game" and cards called "High Score" and "Arcade Cabinet." As Lloyd Coombes summed up the preview, "Will the deck play well? We’ll have to wait to find out, but in terms of cramming as much personality into a single precon as possible, I think Wizards of the Coast may have just nailed the assignment." Players will get to test that claim when the TMNT set launches March 6 and Turtle Power preorders move from storefronts into game rooms.