The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles debut revealed more details on the new Magic: The Gathering set's single Commander precon deck, Turtle Power, which it turns out has a video game theme. (The Character Select keyword was a clue!)
The deck is filled with cards with names linked to gaming, like High Score, Level Up, and Game Over, many of which look really powerful for +1/+1 counter decks. But it also has several specific references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games, from the arcade game, to Turtles in Time, to the brutal NES game.
Speaking of the NES title, the deck contains a card for its biggest villain, Electric Seaweed. This instant death hazard placed in an early water level, was incredibly frustrating for fans to face, thanks to the game's imprecise controls and dodgy hit boxes.
In this deck, the card appears to be a pinger, but look a little closer and you'll see it's actually a board wipe akin to Massacre Girl, designed to wipe out tokens. It can zap anything for one damage, but when something dies it then does one damage to everything on the field (except walls). So it can quickly start a chain reaction that wipes out everything except itsef.
I'm immediately thinking about how great this would go in an Enrage deck, perhaps with Atla Palani as the commander, so you can pop your eggs. You could very quickly end up with infinite Polyraptors, however, in which case the game ends in a draw pretty quickly, unless you have something like Goblin Bombardment ready.
As for the more generic cards, Game Over seems excellent: a board wipe that will usually cost three mana when you need to use it. High Score looks like a draw engine on par with classics like Garruk's Uprising, assuming you're in a big stompy deck and using +1/+1 counters.
Level Up is also a really fun card. Like Mossborn Hydra it can grow exponentially bigger and creates a must-handle threat for your enemies. But even though you're calling removal down upon you like a metal detector in a thunderstorm, Level Up also draws you cards, making it less risky to play with - in the right deck. Finally, Arcade Cabinet seems a bit less powerful, but there's probably some deadly decks that use counters and tokens which I'm just not thinking of currently.
The good thing about these cards is their generic names mean Wizards won't have to worry about reprinting them in the future. In fact, they could fit right in with any number of video game UB sets down the road.
In a press briefing, the Narrative Set Design lead Crystal Frasier said that Wizards staff had really fond memories of these games, but that the references didn't feel at home in the main set. So they became the inspiration for the EDH deck instead. Frasier said the deck has a backstory is a minor villain, Tempestra, has created video game copies of the turtles' allies and enemies, and the gang has to sort the situation out.
Along with these cards, the deck boasts a Shredder card so cool I thought it deserved its own article. Check that out here. Also come visit the Wargamer Discord!