Heroes in a Half Shell Commander Deck Guide

Heroes in a Half Shell | Illustration by Victor Maury

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was never my jam. It was the show that was on before the show I wanted to watch on Saturday mornings (probably Justice League Unlimited reruns), so I’ve seen the last 5 minutes of a bunch of whatever series ran on TV, but that’s about it. The movie franchises that have come out didn’t appeal to me either until a few summers ago, when I went to watch Mutant Mayhem in theaters. I had so much fun with the movie, and the animation was gorgeous. Made me feel old for getting the O’Jays “Back Stabbers” reference during the climax, but I digress. I’m not going grey, you are.

So, despite my personal product fatigue, I’ve done my utmost to find joy in the TMNT Magic set. I’ve found some turtle commanders that are doing more interesting things than I thought when I first looked over the spoilers; I got a bit of a giggle when I saw that the precon’s Sol Ring is a sign for a pizza parlor, and I’ve put together a Commander deck for none other than this set’s 5-color typal commander, Heroes in a Half Shell.

Which theme did I lean into: mutants, ninjas, or turtles? Come with me and find out!

The Deck

Heroes in a Half Shell | Illustration by Kirokaze

You can build Heroes in a Half Shell in a few different directions, and I chose to go with the sneak/ninjutsu ninja build. I didn’t want this to feel too much like I was rebuilding the precon or upgrading it, although this list does lean heavily on Turtle Power! for its mana base.

Since the deck is more focused than your average precon, if barely, and also uses a few tutors, I’d list this as a strong Bracket 2 or light Bracket 3 deck with ample room for improvement to its power, explosiveness, and consistency.

The Commander: Heroes in a Half Shell

Love it or hate it (I have a foot in both camps), Heroes in a Half Shell does a decent job as a lord that enables all three of its creature types. It’s a simple saboteur trigger that grows your creatures and restocks your hand, hopefully with the next creature that you’re going to cheat or ninjutsu out onto the battlefield.

Ninjas

Let’s start with the lords: Silver-Fur Master is the classic, while Splinter, Hamato Yoshi joins from the TMNT set. Silver-Fur Master also adds cost reduction to ninjutsu abilities, which helps, but doesn’t always matter.

Satoru Umezawa gives all your creatures ninjutsu. It’ll enable some of your combat damage triggers that are on creatures with neither ninjutsu nor sneak, but remember that ninjutsu is an activated ability, not an alternate casting cost, so it won’t fire off cast triggers or get cost reduction from Herald's Horn.

Definitely Not a Turtle’s death trigger is virtually guaranteed to hit; it isn’t limited to basic lands, which is incredible.

Ingenious Infiltrator adds extra card draw, always welcome. Turncoat Kunoichi can be an expensive removal spell, but the value comes if you can return it to hand to reuse it.

Donatello, Gadget Master only has 10 artifacts to copy in this deck besides Treasure tokens, and one of them is legendary. I’d still copy most of them except Maskwood Nexus, though (unless I know I’ll have 6 mana to burn every turn to pump out shapeshifter tokens, in which case things are going really, really bad). Leonardo, Cutting Edge doesn’t have much lifegain to make it huge, but it helps bring the curve down a hair.

Dark Leo & Shredder is very punishing in this deck. You can sneak it onto your board once it’s already developed to get that combat damage trigger in on one player, though it likely eats removal after that. Shredder, Shadow Master and Shredder, Unrelenting are backups to eat a chunk of players life totals and enable deathtouch.

Prosperous Thief adds Treasure tokens to the mix, which can be important, especially early, since this deck doesn’t have many mana rocks or other ramp spells.

I envision using Michelangelo, Improviser more as ramp than to cheat creatures onto the battlefield in this deck, though there are a few that don’t totally need you to use ninjutsu or sneak. But since the deck doesn’t have haste enablers, it’s a good way to get an extra creature out if that’s what you need most in the moment.

Raphael, Tag Team Tough isn’t a bad one to play that way; it doesn’t have its own sneak ability, so the only way it’ll deal combat damage is if it attacks or Satoru Umezawa has given it ninjutsu .

Raph & Mikey, Troublemakers might be a bit of a reach; its attack trigger negates the surprise element that you’d get from a ninjutsu or sneak ability. There are some cards that could get around that, though, and I like that it’s a 7-drop for Yuriko’s ability.

Karai, Future of the Foot gives you reanimation the turn that you sneak it in, and any damage it deals to a player after that adds recursion. What’s especially good is that there’s no limit in terms of mana value or power/toughness; Karai grabs anything.

While we’re in the business of grabbing cards from graveyards, Shark Shredder, Killer Clone steals creatures from your opponents’ graveyards and recruits them to deal damage.

I never thought I’d describe one of the common legends from TMT as a potential win condition, but, uh, yeah, Leonardo, Big Brother can be that if you sneak it in when you already have a bunch of creatures on board. Especially if one of them is Raphael, the Nightwatcher, the deck’s double strike enabler. Leonardo, Leader in Blue can also act as a win condition if your board is wide enough or the right creatures aren’t blocked.

Speaking of Leonardos, Leonardo, Sewer Samurai can’t grab all your creatures, but the ones it does grab are important. With it, you can recast your unblockable creatures and your other Leonardos, as well as Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow. You can then get your ninjutsu/sneak trains rolling again, bouncing those creatures to hand so that they lose the finality counter.

Yuffie, Materia Hunter’s impact depends on what there is to steal; if you play it early, there may not be much besides mana rocks, but a match against a Voltron deck could have some interesting pieces. I don’t like that this might encourage me never to return Yuffie to my hand to sneak something else out, but you could always steal and use utility tokens if, like me, you sometimes need to save yourself from yourself.

While not an individual creature, Endless Foot Assault potentially represents lots of tokens over the course of the game. Five or 7 mana are probably the sweet spots for it to come down in multiples and still matter, depending on the speed of your meta.

Unblockable Creatures and Enablers

To get the sneak train going, this deck has three 1-mana unblockable creatures: Changeling Outcast, Mist-Cloaked Herald, and Triton Shorestalker. Fang of Shigeki is a 1-mana deathtouch ninja, so it serves a similar role.

Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive adds to your unblockable creature count; unless your lords and anthems are online, it gives most of your Leonardos and your tokens unblockable, and even then, it’ll always be unblockable itself (unless Maskwood Nexus is out, but we’re talking 2 cards out of 99).

Higure, the Still Wind, Taeko, the Patient Avalanche, and Splinter, Radical Rat are your creature-based unblockable enablers, and each has additional upsides. Tutor, scry, double triggers… it’s a full suite of extra goodies.

The mana base also features a bunch of unblockable enablers: Rogue's Passage, Escape Tunnel, and Access Tunnel are the familiar ones, but say hello to Turtle Lair!

Typal Payoffs and Glue Cards

If you’re playing a typal deck, type-based sweepers are always a thematic inclusion. I went for Crippling Fear and Kindred Dominance; one advantage with running a ninja deck is that you should kill almost all of your opponents’ creatures since there shouldn’t be as much overlap.

This deck runs some of the best generic typal support artifacts around: Chronicle of Victory, Vanquisher's Banner, and Herald's Horn.

Kindred Discovery adds even more card draw to the mix, while Black Market Connections lets you pay life for resources. Be careful though, because this deck doesn’t have much lifegain to stabilize if you’re too greedy too early. Maskwood Nexus may be redundant, but it gives you a mana sink for mana flood, it saves your non-ninjas from your typal sweepers, and it lets Higure tutor for any creature in the deck.

The deck sports some spot removal (Path to Exile, Generous Gift, Swords to Plowshares, Beast Within) and countermagic (Counterspell, Negate. Vandalblast answers problematic artifacts.

Splinter's Technique has the upside of a 2-mana tutor if you can sneak it. Ninja Teen turns every creature you return to pay for sneak or activate ninjutsu into life drain. You can level it up into an anthem and again so that you can sneak your creatures back from the graveyard.

Unbury (a functional reprint of Raise the Draugr) can help you to cheat on command tax, save some creatures from a Bojuka Bog, or reuse your unblockable creatures. You should almost always be able to grab two ninjas or two turtles with this.

It feels a shame to call it a “glue card”, but Archelos, Lagoon Mystic’s main job here is to help accelerate the mana base. The only way you have to tap it in this build is to attack, though.

The Mana Base

Most of this mana base comes from the Turtle Power! precon; the rest is mainly a full cycle of budget tri-lands. Definitely not the best or the most fetchable mana base, but it won’t break the bank if you use the precon as a starting point. If you adjust the deck to add more cards that grab cards with specific land types, you’ll want to make some changes here, too.

There’s a few standard mana rocks, but this deck relies on its card draw abilities to see the lands that it needs.

This deck doesn’t have a lot of explosive card draw, though Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow and Heroes in a Half Shell can both stuff your hand quickly if your opponents can’t block much. Thought Vessel and Reliquary Tower are here as emergency stopgaps in case your card draw goes off.

The Strategy

This deck wins through combat, pure and simple. Early turns are when you can strike best. An ideal opening hand has a basic land or other land that enters untapped (preferably two), one of your 1-mana unblockable creatures, and a creature with a sneak or ninjutsu ability that costs 2 or less (slightly less than a third of the creatures in this deck). There isn’t much haste in this deck, so you need to plan out your moves.

Once your opponents see what’s going on, the more controlling among them are going to remove or burn their counterspells on your unblockable creatures. You’ve got some recursion and reanimation abilities to recover from that. Don’t stay passive for too long, either. There’s some token generation here, but not enough to race with a true go-wide deck. Once your commander is on board, you need to get in and smack your opponents and dig toward your more impactful ninjas.

This deck has a few ways to polish off an opponent, and it’ll likely have to do so one at a time. Dark Leo & Shredder and Shredder, Shadow Master each take massive chunks out of your opponents’ life totals. Taeko, the Patient Avalanche can grow large, and it costs just 1 mana to make it unblockable. Yuriko can drain your opponents more the wider you go. Leonardo, Leader in Blue, Leonardo, Big Brother, and Raphael, the Nightwatcher each pay you off for going wide, and Raphael, Tag Team Tough adds an extra combat phase.

None of these cards win the game on their own, but teamwork makes this dream work.

Combos and Interactions

This deck doesn’t have any infinite combos; I could have included The World Tree to combo with Maskwood Nexus and pull all your creatures out of your library, but that would break how the deck works with sneak, ninjutsu, and combat damage triggers that refill your hand.

Instead, let’s take a moment to refresh our knowledge on the differences between sneak and ninjutsu. This is the part of the deck that I think makes it more of an intermediate difficulty deck to pilot; you need to have a plan for what you’re doing during combat. Your unblockable creatures guarantee that you can sneak a creature in or activate its ninjutsu ability, but your other creatures are essentially going on a fishing expedition to see if your opponent blocks them.

Let’s start with ninjutsu. It's an activated ability that has you return an unblocked attacker to your hand, then you place the ninjutsu creature on the battlefield tapped and attacking. For example, Changeling Outcast attacks and can’t be blocked. You activate Ingenious Infiltrator’s ninjutsu ability and bounce the shapeshifter to your hand; the vedalken ninja takes its place and punches your opponent for 2 and triggers its own combat damage trigger.

An added wrinkle shows up when first strike joins the mix; that won’t happen much in this deck, though watch out for the likes of Leonardo, Sewer Samurai, Raphael, the Nightwatcher, Shark Shredder, Killer Clone, and Chronicle of Victory. Let’s use Raphael, the Nightwatcher to expand the example.

Changeling Outcast attacks again, but this time, it has double strike. You activate Ingenious Infiltrator’s ninjutsu, and it enters before first strike damage is dealt. Before normal combat damage is dealt, you activate Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow’s ninjutsu ability, returning the unblocked vedalken, and Yuriko takes its place. Not the most efficient way to chain these, but you get the picture.

Sneak is an alternate cost that you can pay only during the declare blockers step. Same idea: You have to return an unblocked attacker to your hand, but this time, you cast a spell, so your opponents can counterspell it. Because the interaction window is wider, you can’t run the same chains that you would with ninjutsu.

It’s important to note that ninjutsu is an activated ability, not an alternate casting cost, so you won’t trigger cast triggers or benefit from cost reduction like Herald's Horn. Sneak abilities are alternate costs, so you do cast the creature, which sets off cast triggers and benefits from cost reduction.

This deck has a high creature count, perhaps to its detriment, but that also means you have a silly number of possible interactions. Imagine that Raphael, the Nightwatcher is on the battlefield and you can ninjutsu out Yuffie, Materia Hunter against someone with a Colossus Hammer for you to steal. Without any lords or anthems, that’s 13/13 double striking damage. One can dream!

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck should be fine for almost any mildly seasoned playgroup; if your opponents won’t get upset that you interact during combat a bunch, then it should be all systems go.

Budget Options

The first place to cut a deck’s budget is usually the mana base. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you use the Turtle Power! precon as a starting point, but if not, you can replace any duals that are out of reach with something that’s already in your collection. City of Brass, Fabled Passage, and Grand Coliseum can swap out for Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse, and Vibrant Cityscape, or you could opt for Modern Horizons 3 landscapes and more basics.

Kindred Discovery can sub out for a Coastal Piracy, especially since you do combat damage to players anyway. Trading Post is a poor brewer’s Black Market Connections; the tokens aren’t shapeshifters, but 0/1 goats can chump block and might be left unblocked to help with your ninjutsu/sneak package. The only issue is that you don’t have a whole lot of artifacts in this deck to sacrifice to get the card draw.

Chronicle of Victory is still pretty pricey because Lorwyn Eclipsed has been released for (checks notes) about a month. You won’t get the exact value elsewhere, but I’d sub in another ninja or something useful from the precon if that’s your starting point. Speaking of, the precon cards can replace the main TMNT set ninjas and vice versa; I didn’t put Chromatic Lantern in this list, but it’ll make your mana more consistent.

Taeko, the Patient Avalanche and Higure, the Still Wind are your most expensive non-TMNT creatures. Makes sense; new set hype has an inflation effect on cards that play well with that set’s themes, and it’s not like either card is printed as frequently as Zetalpa, Primal Dawn. If you’re going to splurge on anything, I’d keep these two since they’re key, typal parts of your unblockable package.

Other Builds

I focused on ninjas, but you could totally build Heroes in a Half Shell as a turtle deck or a mutant deck.

The mutant deck will lean on cards from Fallout’s Mutant Menace precon, so I’d include a lot of +1/+1 counter support and proliferation in that build.

The pure “turtle” build is going to use some combination of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cards and in-universe cards; you could focus more on toughness and on card draw, especially with a card like The Pride of Hull Clade.

And of course, there’s lots of other ways you could configure the ninja build of this deck. I didn’t even think about Felix Five-Boots until I was putting the finishing touches on this, but you could also do some kind of 5-color combat trigger soup deck (saboteur tribal?) with Toski, Bearer of Secrets, Kotis, the Fangkeeper, and whatever else you can think of.

Cowabunga!

Turtles Forever | Illustration by Devin Elle Kurtz

This was frankly more fun than I expected, and I could probably spend days tweaking this build. It’s extremely creature-heavy for a 5-color deck, so it won’t win any consistency awards, but it should be the soupy fun that a 5-color Universes Beyond card demands.

Which cards would you use in a Heroes in a Half Shell ninja build? What other themes and subthemes would you explore with this commander? Let me know in the comments below or over on the Draftsim Discord.

Later days! Wait, wrong quartet of pizza-loving teenagers….