This set decided to mirror Spoderman in having five enemy pairs archetypes instead. The two I won’t talk about here are Izzet artifacts and Boros alliance (yes, that New Capenna keyword). And did you know that there could have been mutate in this set?
Apparently, the designers actually have thought of bringing in ninjutsu. But then, they also wished for other card types to be able to pull the same trick (Duskmourn Kaito anyone?). And Ninjutsu being an activated ability kinda hinders that. So let’s just make a new variant, one that makes it an alternative cost instead. So, things like Yuriko wouldn’t happen anymore, and for everyone that also means you can counter these things. Ultimately, we really have to overlap with Spoderman in terms of a mechanic that casts a spell for bouncing a tapped creature.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | E | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TMT-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | |||
| TMT-R | 3* | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 11 | |
| TMT-U | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 10 |
| TMT-C | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | |||
| Total | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 27 |
Cards selection wise, in a big reflection of the set as a whole, most of the creatures doing this are legendary. We can skip them, not like there’s a single full cycle of them in the whole set, but at least there’s a rare quad in Breya.
There are instead two cycles of magecrafts (instants and sorceries) at uncommon and rare, to really rub in ninjutsu. These are the techniques, named after various characters where one main character got put down to uncommon while the other three are rares. The uncommons lean more to obvious staple effects, where you’ll get a discount of 2 in Breya monocoloreds and just 1 otherwise. Only two of these is an instant to sneak in other times, one of them still prefer you sneaking (like 3 other cards) for that mobilization. At rare, there’s a big focus on getting stuff from the deck or onto the board and this is also where you can get deeper discount of 3 and 4, albeit Green has proven to be the stingiest color in this regard, because well it gives you the mana to suck it up. Art wise, I would say these are probably the standout pieces in this set.
What else is there to note? There’s a normal Fox at rare that asks for Orzhov mana to sneak, this feels like a tradition at this point and it took this long for me to catch because I guess white mana stands out better on black. Meanwhile, in black, there’s a class card that can eventually give cards sneak. Great, it isn’t a commander that do it for once.
Another one to add onto the Morbid / Revolt / Void Venn diagram, this time we’re more literally on Revolt’s side. Ultimately, you probably don’t want to use the word Revolt here either, because I don’t think there’s even as much perspective of the normal people here as in Spoderman.
| Set | B | G | M | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TMT-R | 1 | 1 | UB | 3 |
| TMT-U | 1 | 1 | BG | 3 |
| TMT-C | 2 | BG | 3 | |
| Total | 4 | 2 | 3 | 9 |
Cards selection wise, all of these cards are creatures played at sorcery speed so we ain’t getting a Fatal Push here. Four of the cards offers sacrifice outlets to trigger disappear themselves, which is kind of impressive considering how much text this condition requires.
Mutagen is a chemical that is supposed to be contained in a vial just like Blood in Crimson Vow, this is what became of that set’s scrapped idea for Blood: Be a +1/+1 counter instead. And here’s a dilemma that I wonder if anyone has ever thought about: So, you tend to put a card down as the token right? When you sacrifice it and put the counter, that’s a lot of interaction cost right:
| Set | U | B | R | G | C | GU | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TMT-R | 2 | 1 | 3 | ||||
| TMT-U | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |||
| TMT-C | 2 | 2 | 1 | 5 | |||
| TMC-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | |||
| TMC-R | T | D | T | D | 4 | ||
| Total | 6 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 19 |
Get the counter, put on the creature, put the token away. Or well, you freak could just put a die on the token to represent the further copies, then you still need more dies to split the counters. I wonder if we could have transform this thing into a Role token instead...
Cards selection wise, in the draft set, only three cards can create more than one token and five cards can interact with either the token themselves (1) or the +1/+1 counters that come off them (4). Likewise, in the commander set, there’s only one card that can’t creature multiples, but at least it have a benefit for the counters.
At this point in time, I think the designers have just chosen to embrace the fact that the popular characters does get multiple cards and the niche ones get as much slots as they do.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | C | A | E | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TMT-M | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 | |
| TMT-R | 3 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5* | 30 | |
| TMT-U\* | 3 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 23 | ||
| TMT-C | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 11 | |||
| TMC-D-M | 1* | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 7 | ||
| TMC-D-R | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 12 | ||||
| TMC-T-M | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | ||||
| TMC-T-R | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 8 | ||||
| Total | 14 | 22 | 15 | 18 | 16 | 2 | 5 | 11 | 103 |
So you know what, one turtle per pack, the other commanders are still like any UB card, not in their own slots. You freak may want infinite possibilities but if the casuals open their few packs they’ll ever have at that $7 a piece price and never finding a turtle due to binominal distribution, they’ll surely be sad and not touch Magic ever again, which is exactly what UB sets isn’t meant to do.
Here’s a list of the top most used characters, found through an alphabetical sorting of all the new designs of both the draft set and the eternal set. Which raises a few problems. First off which is that I still do this manually, so expect errors somewhere. For instance, I will not know all the nicknames of some characters.
| Who? | #? | C | U | R | M | Major | Minor | TMT | TMC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Donatello | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Blue | Naya | 5.5 | 2.5 |
| Leonardo | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | White | Temur* | 5.5 | 2.5 |
| **Mi(key)**chelangelo | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Green | Jeskai | 5.5 | 2.5 |
| Raphael | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Red | Bant | 5.5 | 2.5 |
| April O'Neil | 5.5 | 1 | 1 | 2.5 | 1 | Blue | White | 3 | 2.5 |
| Shredder | 5 | 1 | 2.5 | 1.5 | Black | Azorius | 4 | 1 | |
| Casey Jones | 4.5 | 1 | 3.5 | Red | 2 | 2.5 | |||
| Splinter | 4.5 | 1 | 2.5 | 1 | Orzhov* | 2 | 2.5 | ||
| Krang | 3.5 | 2.5 | 1 | Blue | Black | 2.5 | 1 | ||
| Bebop | 2.5 | 1 | 1.5 | Black | Green | 1.5 | 1 | ||
| Mona Lisa | 2.5 | 1 | 1.5 | Green | 1 | 1.5 | |||
| Rocksteady | 2.5 | 1 | 1.5 | Green | Black | 1.5 | 1 | ||
| Baxter | 2 | 1 | 1 | Blue | Red | 1 | 1 | ||
| Leatherhead | 2 | 2 | Green | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Rat King | 2 | 2 | Black | 1 | 1 | ||||
| Ray Fillet | 2 | 1 | 1 | Blue | 1 | 1 | |||
| Rahzar | 1 | 1 | Red | Black | 0.5 | 0.5 | |||
| Tokka | 1 | 1 | Red | Black | 0.5 | 0.5 |
I have mad respect for the fact that the four main characters get to share their far ahead first place that equally. Mad disrespect however, it’s still 1 card higher than Aang got last time. And if you change the team up counting method, that result will change a lot.
(I decided to hold back eternal set analysis for each respective box’s problem.)
Each main character gets one card per rarity. Which is about as much as Aang got, but we now trade a second rare for more common appearance.