After accidentally loading several Ninja Turtle rares into Lorwyn Eclipsed prerelease kits last week, Wizards of the Coast offered an apology to Magic: the Gathering players and revealed every rare and mythic card from the currently unreleased turtle-themed expansion. With all of these new ninjas dropping at the same time, the community has had their focus split trying to analyze them all. Here's a currently unnoticed card that caught my eye.
The Cloning of Shredder is a saga that, unsurprisingly given its name, has a powerful cloning effect. Its first chapter exiles a creature from your graveyard and creates a token copy of it that's no longer legendary (if it was legendary before) but is now a mutant. Both of the remaining chapters then make an additional nonlegendary clone of the exiled card.
The ability to clone legendary creatures and have them not immediately die due to the legend rule is rare, particularly outside of blue. Being able to do this three times allows you stack up multiple copies of abilities that the game never intended for you to duplicate.
Since The Cloning of Shredder exiles a card from the graveyard, you never have to worry about paying the mana cost of the creature that you're cloning. You just need to discard or mill them, and then you're ready to go.
Whether you're trebling the damage dealt by the ability of a creature like The Lord of Pain. Going even more all in on cloning by replicating copies of a card with myriad like The Master, Multiplied, or you're brutally sapping the resources of your opponents by copying Lord Xander, the Collector, there are all sorts of creative choices of creatures to copy.
With a mana value of six, The Cloning of Shredder is too costly to see much play outside of Commander, but in that format, you will definitely be able to get away with all sorts of cloning chaos.
Have any of the newly revealed Ninja Turtle cards caught your eye? Let us know about the strategies that you've been cooking up by joining the Wargamer Discord.