Turtle Team-Up Is A Great New Way To Teach Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering is on a pretty big run, riding high off the massive sales of the Final Fantasy mashup set. A lot of Worlds Beyond awaits us in 2026, much to the excitement and chagrin of fans everywhere.

But right now, I'm hyper-focused on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) set for one reason. The Turtle Team-Up box has been a breath of fresh air for Magic: The Gathering, and there's an obvious reason why.

Turtle Team-Up Has Four-Player Co-Op Out Of The Box

Plus An Option For PVP

For $50, you get four themed decks (one each for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo), a 38-card "enemy deck," punch-out tokens, four deck boxes, and a tutorial booklet.

The four pre-made Turtle decks are spread across multiple colors, each with a different playstyle that complements the others. If you want, you can play them against each other like an old-fashioned Magic session, or you can play the Turtle Team-Up scenario against an automated villain deck.

The gist is that you'll flip over a villain card, which provides some sort of passive buff for the villain's board. Think of things like losing life if you eliminate a minion. Then there's the enemy deck, which has sorceries and minions that automatically cast against the players when drawn (or remain on the board until they're dealt with).

The enemy side has its own health counter, which you need to deplete, which calls out another wave of new villains. After that, defeat a third wave of villains, and you've won the match (or modify it to make it tougher or easier). That's really it, which has a certain simplistic elegance to its design.

From opening the box until I was playing and really felt like I knew what I was doing, it was around five minutes. While I've had prior Magic knowledge going back to the '90s, it's reasonable to say that pretty much anyone who knows the basics of Magic could get a Turtle Team-Up game running in around 30 minutes.

It's as simple as asking someone who their favorite turtle is, handing them a deck, and proctoring the encounter side of things with minimal effort. The modularity of the set is also very helpful if your teammates want to make the experience easier or harder, depending on their comfort level. When testing these various rule sets (namely, card frequency and more simultaneous villains), it was easy to adjust.

This whole process essentially emulates "goldfishing," where card game players play out a faux game to test their decks. It was popularized in the 2010s when Fantasy Flight Games released The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, which centered on taking on "quests" with 1-4 players. They later expanded their co-op lines to Arkham Horror and the Marvel universe with Marvel Champions.

Wizards Of The Coast Needs To Create More Co-Op Experiences

It Only Helps The Game

I'm a huge fan of co-op and/or solo-oriented experiences in pretty much any card game that has the resources to make one. They provide an excellent way to get more play out of your existing decks, and help provide an alternative way to play if you don't have any friends available (or they move on to a new CCG).

Games like Lorcana have already experimented with multiple co-op sets (a third is on the way later this year), and now, Magic: The Gathering is experimenting with the concept in earnest. I just hope there's more to come, especially when a theme warrants it as much as TMNT.