Even if, like me, you're not a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, you probably know that the big green chelonian heroes are crazy about pizza. And Wizards of the Coast's TMNT Magic: The Gathering set draws plenty of reference to this, with the Italian delicacy showing up on card after card. There's even a deluxe Pizza Bundle product filled with cheesy, tomatoey promo cards.
I have just one, big question though: did they have to make them all so disgusting?
Seriously, I don't think pizza has ever looked worse than it does on the worst of these TMNT cards, and I've been to some bad pizza places. Just a skim through the card gallery for the Turtles set is enough to make you lose your appetite.
The full art pizza lands shown off months ago were bad enough. The muted, shadowy palette makes the art look scarier than it should, and there's something genuinely unsettling about the way the reptilian hands are reaching out. The backgrounds are hard to make out, but seem to feature a large amount of haphazardly splattered cheese, and give the impression that these slices are being picked up off the floor or a bare table. In general, this looks like pizza that was discovered behind the sofa a week later - rubbery and inedible.
Things get even worse when we examine the rest of the pizza bundle, with the new cards previewed on February 17.
Here we have a Sword of Hearth and Home, featuring a pizza cutter coated in… well it can't be cheese. Raw dough? Congealed sick? Then a Commander's Plate featuring Leonardo, absolutely covered head to toe in the most rancid looking pizza I've ever seen.
Somehow a copy of Waste Not, featuring a turtle actually fetching out a mouldy bit of pizza from a full bin bag, is not even in the top five most disgusting cards in this set.
But all of that pales into insignificance, next to the reprint of Food Chain. Which I think speaks for itself. Just what in god's green earth is going on here?
Maybe it's lore-accurate to show the turtles eating weird, gross-looking pizzas. I guess that's fine. But I seriously cannot stand to look at it. Please don't play these cards against me.
Do you share my nauseated reaction to these cards, or do you think they're kinda fun? Let me know over on the Wargamer Discord.