We have a few card previews for you today that bear a bit of an explanation. If you, like many of us, grew up reading, watching, or playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you were probably pretty familiar with each of the Turtle’s weapons. So, for anyone used to Raphael having a sai, the card previews below might leave you with a few questions.
0091_MTGTMT_Main: Hard-Won Jitte
0019_MTGTMT_PartSM: Umezawa’s Jitte
These cards and others like them are an intentional creative direction that we made hand in hand with Nickelodeon.
Our team was thrilled when Nickelodeon gave us their blessing to create our own uniquely Magic version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe. We are huge fans of the fab four and wanted to share that love, and a huge part of that was identifying what makes TMNT feel so important.
At the core of it all, underneath the cool aliens, ninjutsu, and flying transdimensional bovines, you’ve got the story of this tight little family trying to bond, argue, and survive in extraordinary circumstances. When we designed the look for our Turtles, we asked, “How do these four American kids relate to each other and the culture their father comes from? What did they learn? What do they cling to? What do they reject?”
When it came to visuals, that relationship was front and center by giving the brothers very similar costuming that was still personalized to communicate little elements of their personality—that’s why we very deliberately gave Mikey straps that resemble a backpack (to help make him feel younger than his brothers) and made Raph’s mask distinct (to help him visually communicate how he sees himself as an outsider and different from his family).
In the end, we saw Splinter as very traditionally Japanese, following cues from the original Mirage comics and his various animated incarnations. In that light, it made a lot more sense that he would teach his sons how to use more traditional ninja weapons—Leonardo the ninjatō, Donatello the bō, Raphael the jitte, and Michelangelo the kusarigama—but teenagers are rebellious, and each one would express that through their experience growing up in NYC. Leo might internalize a little too much pop culture about Japan and imagine himself a samurai, for example.
In most incarnations of the TMNT, Raphael and Splinter arguably have the closest emotional relationships—they share a lot of anger. Splinter has mastered that rage and hopes to teach his son how to do the same, while Raph desperately wants his father to be proud of him, and his perceived failure of this is a big source of his sibling rivalry with the “golden boy,” Leonardo. You can’t just throw that away, but we don’t have hours of screentime to explore it, either. So, you think about how you can express these dynamics in visuals and designs.
This ultimately led us to making Raphael’s weapon a jitte instead of the sai he uses in other versions of TMNT. The jitte and sai serve similar combat roles, but the jitte is more traditionally Japanese and hence a weapon Splinter would be more familiar with. Raphael’s insistence on using this weapon his father taught him—this weapon that expresses his father’s patience, even though it’s a weapon that that does not fit his personal fighting style—speaks to how important that father-son relationship is.
As a side note, we also debated making Michelangelo’s weapon something else (and in fact we do see him using a kusarigama in this set) but felt like Mikey using something that is very much not a ninja weapon helped communicate his role as both the “weird” kid and the one with the least connection to his father’s world.
Ultimately, we landed on this version of Raph’s weapon. We’re old-school fans and love that cool way Raph holds a sai, but for this set specifically we felt like the jitte was a better visual for exploring that complex emotional relationship Raph has with his father.
