Common Play Learning · Card game guides
Two to four players. One shared life total. Six bosses, and nobody sitting across the table from you.
A complete guide to the co-op box — setup, both halves of the turn, all three stages, every rule the booklet assumes you already know, and all four 60-card decklists. Written for the person who has never shuffled a Magic deck, and useful to the person teaching them.
Turtle Team-Up is a co-operative Magic product: everyone at the table is on the same side, and the other side of the table is a stack of cards that plays itself. It’s the first co-op Magic release since 2017.
You do not need to own any Magic cards to play this. You do not need to know how to play Magic to play this. The box is a complete, self-contained game that happens to be teaching you Magic while you play it — which is the stated design goal. Lead designer Corey Bowen described the purpose as being “a decent onboarding tool for an enfranchised player to teach a new player, or even a parent to teach their child.”
Contents, as printed on the components page
| 4 | 60-card Turtle decks — Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo — plus 5 double-sided tokens† |
|---|---|
| 11 | Boss cards |
| 38 | Event cards |
| 4 | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Play Boosters |
| 20 | Punchout +1/+1 counters |
| 4 | Life trackers, with 4 life tracker pointers |
| 1 | Boss life tracker |
† The components page reads “4 x 60-card Turtle decks and 5 double-sided tokens,” which could mean five tokens in the box. Setup settles it the other way: each player “removes the five double-sided tokens from” their own deck. Five per deck, twenty in the box.
One number we can’t reconcile
The booklet’s components page says 38 Event cards. The reveal coverage that listed the contents card by card describes a 27-card Event deck — 17 Event cards and 10 Ninja creatures — and names every one of them. Those two counts don’t agree, and we can’t tell from the outside whether the reveal list omitted extra copies or the components page is counting something else.
Nothing in this guide depends on the answer. Count your own Event deck when you open the box; the rules work the same either way, and the Event deck is designed never to run out (see the villains).
Twenty-nine of the card designs in this box are exclusive to Turtle Team-Up. A subset of those are legal outside it — specifically in Commander, Legacy and Vintage — which matters if you already play Magic and were wondering whether the box is worth cracking for more than the co-op mode. That statement is about the new cards in the Turtle decks; the Boss and Event cards are the automated opponent and exist only inside this box.
Turtle Team-Up was led by designer Corey Bowen, with Eric Engelhard leading design on the wider TMNT set and Crystal Frasier leading narrative design. Two of their stated intentions are worth knowing before you sit down, because they explain rules that otherwise look arbitrary:
Read the cards
This is a co-op game with a stack of cards for an opponent, so almost every exception lives in a text box rather than in the booklet. Bowen put it plainly: the team wanted “as many of the rules on the cards as possible and as little of the rules in the booklet as possible.” When a card and this guide seem to disagree, the card wins.
Skip this if you already play. If you don’t, this is everything the rest of the guide assumes — and it’s less than you think.
Every Magic card puts the same information in the same place, which is the single most useful thing about the game once it clicks.
| Region | Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Card name | Top left | Its identity. Most decks may run at most four copies of a name; basic lands are the exception and are unlimited. |
| Mana cost | Top right | What you pay to cast it. A number means mana of any kind; a coloured symbol means that specific colour. |
| Type line | Middle band | What kind of card it is, plus its subtypes. Six types appear in this kit: land, creature, artifact, enchantment, sorcery and instant. |
| Expansion symbol | Right of the type line | Which set it came from. Cosmetic. |
| Text box | Lower half | What it does. Rules text first; italic flavour text after the line is story, and never affects play. Reminder text in parentheses is a restatement, not a new rule. |
| Power / toughness | Bottom right, creatures only | Damage it deals / damage needed to destroy it in a single turn. |
The one that catches everybody
Summoning sickness. A creature can’t attack, and can’t use abilities with the tap symbol, until it has started a turn under your control. It can block the moment it hits the battlefield. Creatures with haste ignore this. Every creature the Boss team plays is subject to this too, which is exactly the breathing room the first turn after a new Ninja arrives gives you.
Every turn runs the same sequence. In each new phase the active player gets the chance to cast spells and use abilities first, then everyone else does, in turn order. When nobody wants to do anything more, the turn moves on. Instants can be cast in any of these windows, on anybody’s turn.
Two ways to lose that aren’t combat
Your team loses if the shared life total hits 0. You also lose if you are required to draw a card and your library is empty. Nothing in the base co-op rules resets your library, so on a very long game, keep half an eye on how thick your deck still is.
Three moves, and one of them is the step everybody skips: pull the tokens out of your deck before you shuffle.
Tokens are not deck cards
The five double-sided tokens are packed inside the deck and are not part of the 60. Shuffling them in is the single most common setup mistake — and because they’re the same size and finish as everything else, you will not notice until you draw one.
Two clear halves. Everything the Boss team owns lives above the line; your battlefields live below it.
Enemy play area
Hero team play area
Life is shared. Everything else isn’t.
There is one life total for your whole side, but each player keeps their own library, hand, battlefield, graveyard and exile. Your creatures are yours; you can’t block with a teammate’s. What you can do is talk, freely and constantly — see the FAQ on open hands.
The Hero team always goes first, and takes its turn together — one shared turn, not a turn each.
This is the ordinary Magic turn from Magic 101, with three co-op adjustments layered on top. Everyone untaps, everyone draws, everyone gets a land, and you decide as a group what order to cast things in.
The three co-op adjustments
Because you share a turn, casting order is a group decision and it genuinely matters. Two habits worth forming from game one:
Then walk the phases in order. The stepper in the next chapter covers both halves of the cycle — yours and theirs — one step at a time.
Three steps, no decisions, no bluffing. One player runs it on the Boss team’s behalf, and the whole thing takes about forty seconds once you’ve done it twice.
The Boss turn is deliberately shorter than yours. It has three steps and they always happen in this order.
Resolve the first Event completely before you flip the second
Order matters, because Events interact. If the first Event makes a Ninja and the second one pumps Ninjas, the new one gets pumped. If you flip both at once and read them together, you will get this wrong in the Boss team’s favour about half the time.
Both halves of the cycle, in order. Your turn always comes first.
Cards the Boss team can’t obey
The Boss team has no hand and makes no choices, so some card text is physically impossible for it to follow — anything that would move a card to the Boss team’s hand, for instance. When that happens, nothing happens; you don’t improvise a substitute. If a card the Boss team owns would go to its hand, it goes to the Boss graveyard instead.
Separately: if a card asks the Boss team to make a choice, the players make it. The booklet is blunt about the consequence — it’s best to avoid adding cards like that when you customise decks, because you’ll be choosing how hard to punch yourself.
For every rules purpose, the Boss team counts as a single player. An effect that hits “each opponent” hits the Boss team once, not once per active Boss. This is worth saying out loud at the table the first time a card like that shows up, because with three Bosses face up the instinct is to count three.
One Boss, then two at once, then three at once. Each stage is a fresh Boss life total; your life total is not fresh at all.
You reveal the top card of the Boss deck to create the stage-one Boss team. When the Boss team’s life total hits 0 or less, you immediately move to the next stage — mid-turn, mid-combat, whenever it happens.
Reveal the top Boss card. One passive ability is running against you.
Remove the defeated Boss card, then reveal the next two Boss cards together.
Same again, but reveal three. Beat these and you’ve won the game.
One plus two plus three is six, which is why you set aside exactly six Boss cards at setup.
What carries over, and what doesn’t
The booklet offers a self-scoring ladder based on how many turns it took you to clear all three stages. It’s not a rule; it’s a reason to play again.
Reproduced as printed. Note that the ladder counts turns, not rounds — and with a Boss team that only has 20 life a stage, a fast Raphael or Michelangelo draw can genuinely reach the top rung.
The automated opponent can’t block, and when you block it, it always assigns damage the same way. Both facts are exploitable.
Every Ninja creature carries the same line of text: this creature can’t block. That’s not a quirk of one card, it’s on all of them, and it is the single most important thing to internalise about attacking in this game. Whatever you send at the Bosses gets through unless a Boss ability or an Event says otherwise.
This was a deliberate concession. “Blocking has too many decision points, and in an autonomous system, how do you determine its decisions every time?” Bowen said. “Imagine you attack with two creatures. How is the autonomous system supposed to decide how it’s going to block? … We would have preferred the system to be able to block, so you learn how to attack into a block, but it’s just too much overhead.”
The practical consequence: your attacks are never blocked, so attacking costs you only what the tapped creature would have done on defence. That trade is the whole tactical game — with one card-shaped exception. Chrome Dome’s Overload reads “each hero sacrifices a tapped creature they control,” so a turn where everyone swings with everything is also a turn where that Event costs the team a creature each. One copy in the deck, and it shuffles back.
Blocking works normally on your side — only untapped creatures can block, blocking doesn’t tap them, and a creature can block regardless of how long it’s been on the battlefield. What’s automated is how the attacker assigns its damage:
The damage-assignment rule
When a Boss team attacker is blocked by two or more creatures, it assigns its damage so that the greatest number of creatures die. If more than one way of assigning damage kills that same number of creatures, the players choose which of them die.
Read that carefully, because it inverts the usual instinct. Chump-blocking a big attacker with several small creatures does not spread the damage — it hands the attacker a body count. A 5-power Ninja blocked by three 1/1s kills all three. Blocked by a single creature it kills at most one, whatever that creature’s toughness — and if the blocker has 6 toughness it kills nothing at all.
The damage-assignment rule above is real, but it only ever comes up against one of the three Ninja types, because the other two carry evasion:
Full text for all three, and for every Boss and Event, is in Issue 10. Read it before your second game; it changes how you build a board.
More players means more life, and a Boss team that acts more often. Pick a count and the numbers below rewrite themselves.
Everything else is unchanged. The Hero team still shares one life total, still takes one shared turn, and still faces one Boss, then two, then three.
Where the third Event card at four players comes from
The booklet lists the extra Event card only under Three Player Co-Op. Its four-player bullets cover life totals and the extra Bosses and say nothing about Events at all. The reveal coverage states it plainly for both — “in three-player or four-player games, Bosses will use three Event cards per Action phase” — and playing four players on two Events makes the Boss team weaker than it is at three, which is clearly not the intent. We follow the reveal, and flag it because it isn’t printed in the box.
What the booklet doesn’t spell out at four players
The four-player rules say to add an additional four Bosses to the Boss deck at setup, which makes it ten cards rather than six. The booklet doesn’t restate how many Bosses each stage reveals, and the objective is still written as defeating all six Bosses across three stages. Read literally, the extra four are there so the Boss deck can absorb effects that dig into it — the stages still reveal one, then two, then three.
If your table reads it the other way and wants the extra Bosses to actually show up, that’s effectively the Everyone’s Here! challenge modifier, and it’s a legitimate way to play. Just agree which reading you’re using before you start, not at stage three.
The booklet takes no position on difficulty. All it says about bigger games is that “these experiences will be more complicated and take longer to complete.”
The arithmetic, though, leans your way. Four players bring four full 60-card decks and four land drops a turn, and the Hero team goes from 20 life to 40 while each Boss stage goes from 20 to 30. Doubling your resources against a fifty-percent bump in theirs is a good trade, and one extra Event flip a turn doesn’t close it. What four players does cost you is time and co-ordination, which is exactly what the booklet warns about.
Two players is the tight version. If your first game is a two-hander and it feels punishing, that’s the intended shape of it, not a sign you’re playing wrong.
One turtle, one colour, one 60-card deck with 24 lands. Full lists below, plus what each one is trying to do.
Every deck is mono-coloured, which is the kindest possible thing a teaching product can do: you will never have a turn where you hold a castable spell and the wrong mana. Every list is 36 cards plus 24 basic lands — the standard shape for a 60-card deck, and all four reconcile to exactly 60.
How much of this is card text, and how much is us
The decklists are exact, and all four reconcile to 60. Each deck also gets a cards worth knowing table with printed text for the five that most change how the deck plays — but that is five out of thirty-six, so the prose around each list is still a reading: built from the deck’s colour, its creature-to-spell split, and those five cards. Where a deck surprises you at the table, believe the deck.
White in Magic is the colour of small efficient creatures that get better together, of protecting what you’ve already committed, and of Equipment — and all three show up here. Twenty-two creatures and fourteen other cards — the second-most even split of the four, behind Raphael. Its deepest stacks are three Triceraton Regenta and three Hamato Ninpō; no deck in the box runs more than four copies of anything except basic lands.
It also holds the one card in the box whose full text is printed in the booklet, and it’s a good one: Leonardo, Worldly Warrior, a 5/5 with double strike that costs {1} less to cast for each creature you control. That is a card that rewards exactly what the rest of the deck is doing.
If you’re teaching someone their first game of Magic, hand them this one. Play creatures, attack with creatures, occasionally protect a creature. There is no trick to miss.
Creatures22
Spells & Equipment14
Lands24
Cards worth knowingprinted text
| Card | Cost | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Hamato Ninpō ×3 | {1}{W} | Instant. Deals 4 damage to target attacking or blocking creature. Dead on your own turn; always live on theirs, because every able Ninja attacks every turn. |
| Triceraton Regenta ×3 | {2}{W} | 2/3 with vigilance. Whenever it attacks, untap up to one other target creature. |
| Leo’s Guidance ×2 | {2}{W} | Instant. Put a +1/+1 counter on each of up to three target creatures. Untap them. |
| Quintessential Katana | {W} | Equipment. Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and “whenever this creature deals combat damage, untap it and you gain 2 life.” Equip {2}. |
| Splinter & Leo, Father & Son | {2}{W} | 2/2. On entry choose one or both modes — a 2/2 Mutant token, or +1/+1 counters on another player’s creatures. Each mode must target a different player, so it is built for a teammate. |
Notice the pattern: vigilance, untap, untap, untap. Leonardo is the deck that gets to attack and keep blockers — which is the exact tension the rest of this guide keeps describing, and the reason it also shrugs off Chrome Dome’s Overload, the Event that sacrifices a tapped creature.
Twenty-five creatures — the most in the box — and the fewest non-creature spells, but the ones it has are concentrated: four copies of Containment Protocol is the largest stack of any non-land card in any of the four decks. Whatever that card does, this deck wants to do it constantly, and the name points at answering something rather than building something.
Blue is the colour of machines, card selection, and defensive bodies that buy time. The bots and Utroms here read as a deck that survives the early Ninjas and out-values the Boss team later. Crustacean Commando is the archetype in miniature: a 0/3 that makes a Mutagen token when it enters — a wall that pays you.
Remember the damage-assignment rule from Issue 07: a 0/3 is a far better blocker than three 1/1s. This deck is built to sit in front of things.
Creatures25
Spells & artifacts11
Lands24
Cards worth knowingprinted text
| Card | Cost | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Containment Protocol ×4 | {2}{U} | Aura. Taps the enchanted creature, and it doesn’t untap during its controller’s untap step. A Ninja under this is switched off permanently — and it never dies, so it never triggers Shredder. |
| Utrom Monitor ×3 | {4}{U} | 3/3 artifact creature with flying, and affinity for artifacts. The box’s cleanest answer to Foot Skirmisher, which is otherwise unblockable. |
| Donatello, Rad Scientist | {5}{U} | 5/6 with vigilance. On entry, tap up to three creatures your opponents control and put a stun counter on each. |
| Manhole Cover ×2 | {2} | Artifact with flash. On entry, target creature gains indestructible until end of turn. {2}, sacrifice: target player draws a card. |
| Mind Transfer Protocol ×2 | {2}{U} | Instant. Until end of turn, target artifact or creature becomes a 4/5 artifact creature. Draw a card. |
Donatello is the only deck that can neutralise a Ninja without killing it, which matters enormously when Shredder is out charging you a life for every death. It is also the only deck with reliable flying. The four Containment Protocols are the real reason to hand this deck to whoever has played Magic before.
The fewest creatures (21) and the most non-creature spells (15) of the four. Red in Magic is direct damage and speed, and this list is stacked with things that read like damage: three Manhole Missile, two Mouser Attack!, two Storm of Steel, two Ticked Off. Against an opponent whose creatures cannot block, a deck that can point damage wherever it likes is doing something none of the others can — it can spend a turn killing Ninjas without giving up an attack.
It also has two of the best-named artifacts in the box: a Skateboard ({1} Equipment, +1/+0 and haste, and it taps a permanent when it lands) and a Spicy Oatmeal Pizza, a Food that deals 4 damage to any target and 3 to you on the way in. Casey Jones shows up in two versions plus a team-up card with Raph, which is a lot of dedicated support for one non-turtle.
The obvious plan: race. Boss life totals are only 20 (30 at four players), and a stage ends the instant it hits zero — mid-combat, mid-turn. Raphael is the deck most likely to end a stage two turns before anyone expected it to.
Creatures21
Spells & artifacts15
Lands24
Cards worth knowingprinted text
| Card | Cost | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Manhole Missile ×3 | {1}{R} | Instant. Deals 3 damage to target creature, then you may bottom a card and draw. Kills a Foot Disciple or a Foot Enforcer outright. |
| Monster Mashup ×3 | {3}{R} | 4/3 Werewolf Fish Zombie Vampire with reach and menace. The reach is the point: it blocks Foot Skirmisher. |
| Null Group Biological Assets ×3 | {2}{R} | 3/1. Has first strike during your turn. Whenever it attacks, you may discard a card to draw one. |
| Raphael, Most Attitude | {3}{R} | 4/3 with menace. Exiles cards off the top as your creatures enter, and lets you play them on the turn he attacks. |
| Skateboard | {1} | Equipment. Taps target permanent when it enters. Equipped creature gets +1/+0 and has haste. Equip {1}. |
Raphael’s damage points at creatures, not at the Boss life total — so “the burn deck” is the wrong mental model. It is the Ninja-clearing deck, and it is the only one of the four with no cards that use +1/+1 counters at all, which is a clean statement of intent.
Green is the colour of large creatures and creatures that grow, and the names here are not being coy about it: Prehistoric Turtlesaurus, Primordial Pachyderm, Ragamuffin Raptor, Zoo Escapees. Twenty-three creatures, with its three-ofs spread across the curve rather than piled at the top — Frog Butler and Zoo Escapees are both two-mana, Prehistoric Turtlesaurus is the expensive one — plus three copies of Cowabunga! and three Turtle Tracks.
This is also the deck with the box’s best piece of design trivia. Mona Lisa appears three times — twice solo and once teamed with Mikey — and on the team-up card she’s typed as a Lizard rather than a Salamander. “Technically she’s a salamander, and the creature type Salamander does exist in Magic,” Eric Engelhard explained, “but because salamander is such a long word, for the Mikey And Mona card, ‘Mutant Ninja Turtle Salamander’ would not fit at all, so we did a tiny hand wave there and made her a Lizard, because she does look like a lizard.” The hand wave stuck across all three printings: both solo cards read Legendary Creature — Lizard Mutant, and the team-up reads Legendary Creature — Mutant Ninja Turtle Lizard.
The obvious plan: be bigger than the Ninjas. Twenty +1/+1 counters come in the box, and green is where they usually end up. A single enormous creature is the best blocker in the game against the Boss team’s damage-assignment rule, and the best attacker against an opponent that can’t block.
Creatures23
Spells & artifacts13
Lands24
Cards worth knowingprinted text
| Card | Cost | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| Frog Butler ×3 | {1}{G} | 1/1 with deathtouch. {T}: add one mana of any colour. {2}: gains reach until end of turn. A one-mana blocker that kills any Ninja it blocks, and can reach up to catch a Skirmisher. |
| Prehistoric Turtlesaurus ×3 | {4}{G} | 4/5 with vigilance, and costs {1} less if you control a creature with a +1/+1 counter on it. |
| Zoo Escapees ×3 | {1}{G} | 2/2. When it leaves the battlefield, create a Mutagen token — so it pays you even when Villain Mayhem takes it. |
| Cowabunga! ×3 | {G} | Sorcery. Look at the top four, reveal a Mutant, Ninja, Turtle or land card and put it in your hand. |
| Mona Lisa, Ever Adaptable | {3}{G} | 4/4. Whenever a player casts a creature spell — anyone at the table — create a Mutagen token. |
Ten cards in this deck mention +1/+1 counters, against five in Leonardo, four in Donatello and none in Raphael. The Mutagen token is the engine: {1}, {T}, sacrifice: put a +1/+1 counter on target creature, sorcery speed only. Frog Butler is quietly the best one-mana card in the box — but note that first strike beats a deathtouch blocker, so it stops trading the moment Slash is face up.
Three names appear in more than one list, which is a nice tell about what the designers considered load-bearing:
| Deck | Creatures / spells | Give it to |
|---|---|---|
| Leonardo | 22 / 14 | The person who has never played. Play creature, attack with creature, repeat. |
| Michelangelo | 23 / 13 | The person who wants their turn to feel good. Big things, few decisions. |
| Raphael | 21 / 15 | The person who wants to be doing something on the boss’s turn too. |
| Donatello | 25 / 11 | The person already comfortable with Magic. The most timing-sensitive of the four. |
Eleven Bosses, seventeen Events, ten Ninjas — every one of them reproduced below with its printed text, because knowing what’s in the deck is most of how you beat it.
Six come out per game, chosen blind, so any given table sees a bit over half of them. Each Boss carries a single line of text — Krang is the one exception, with two — and it was written to resemble an effect a Magic player would already recognise, deliberately. Most are passives that run while the Boss is face up; Leatherhead’s is a one-shot trigger when it enters. “We felt that all we needed is one thing that flavourfully feels like the Boss,” Engelhard said, “and we just let the Event cards themselves do all the other variants.”
| Boss | Passive ability |
|---|---|
| Baxter, Exzzperimental Zzientist | Creatures named Foot Disciple have flying. |
| Bebop, Porcine Punk | Whenever the bosses attack, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature named Foot Disciple. |
| Chrome Dome, Cyber-Ninja | Ninjas the bosses control get +1/+0 for each boss in play. |
| Karai, Shadow Warrior | Whenever a creature the heroes control dies, the heroes lose 1 life. |
| Krang, Dimension X Overlord | The bosses play an additional card each turn. At the start of the Boss turn, the bosses lose 2 life. |
| Leatherhead, Sewer Gator | When this boss enters, the bosses gain 5 life for each boss in play. |
| Rat King, the Chaosbringer | Ninjas the bosses control have deathtouch. |
| Rocksteady, Rowdy Rhino | Whenever the bosses attack, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature named Foot Disciple. |
| Savanti Romero, Temporal Rogue | Whenever one or more Ninjas the bosses control deal combat damage to the heroes, the bosses play a card. |
| Shredder, Foot Clan Overlord | Whenever a creature the bosses control dies, the heroes lose 1 life. |
| Slash, the Dark Mirror | Attacking creatures the bosses control have first strike. |
Ten creatures across three types. They all share one line — this creature can’t block — but they are otherwise not interchangeable, and two of the three have evasion that changes how you defend.
| Ninja | Copies | P/T | Text |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foot Disciple | 5 | 3/3 | This creature can’t block. |
| Foot Skirmisher | 3 | 2/1 | Flying. This creature can’t block. |
| Foot Enforcer | 2 | 6/3 | This creature can’t block. This creature can’t be blocked by more than one creature. |
Read those three lines together before you plan your blocks
Seventeen Event cards and ten Ninjas, shuffled together into one pile — that’s the reveal’s itemised count, which doesn’t match the components page (see Issue 01). Eleven Events are tied by name to a specific Boss — and because setup says to shuffle all the Event cards together, all eleven are in the deck no matter which six Bosses you drew. You will flip Karai’s Planning in a game with no Karai in it. That’s expected, and it still resolves.
| Event | Copies | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Villain Mayhem! | 3 | As a team, the heroes choose three creatures they control. Destroy each other creature the heroes control. |
| Villain Infiltration | 2 | As a team, the heroes choose a creature with the greatest power among creatures they control. Destroy it. |
| Villain Scheme! | 1 | Shuffle this card and the boss graveyard into the boss library. |
| Baxter’s Experiments | 1 | Copy the next event the bosses play. |
| Bebop’s Rampage | 1 | Bebop’s Rampage deals 2 damage to each creature the heroes control. |
| Chrome Dome’s Overload | 1 | Each hero sacrifices a tapped creature they control. |
| Karai’s Planning | 1 | The heroes lose 3 life and the bosses gain 3 life. |
| Krang’s Stratagem | 1 | As a team, the heroes discard a total of two cards. |
| Leatherhead’s Smackdown | 1 | As a team, the heroes choose a creature with the greatest power among creatures they control. Destroy it. The bosses lose life equal to that creature’s power. |
| Rat King’s Revolution | 1 | Each hero taps a creature they control and puts X stun counters on it, where X is the number of bosses. |
| Rocksteady’s Beatdown | 1 | Destroy all creatures with flying the heroes control. |
| Savanti Romero’s Curse | 1 | Each hero returns X creatures they control to their owners’ hands, where X is the number of bosses. |
| Shredder’s Challenge | 1 | Return two Ninja cards at random from the boss graveyard to the battlefield under the Boss team’s control. |
| Slash’s Smash | 1 | Destroy all Turtles. |
| Foot Disciple | 5 | Ninja creature — see the table above. |
| Foot Skirmisher | 3 | Ninja creature — see the table above. |
| Foot Enforcer | 2 | Ninja creature — see the table above. |
The four cards that will actually beat you
Villain Mayhem! is the most common non-Ninja card in the deck at three copies, and it is a board wipe: you keep three creatures and lose everything else. Villain Infiltration, at two copies, kills your biggest thing. Add Leatherhead’s Smackdown and Chrome Dome’s Overload and that’s seven of the seventeen Events taking creatures off your board, before you count the two that only kill fliers or Turtles.
The lesson is one every co-op board game teaches eventually and this one teaches with a 3-of: do not build a board you can’t afford to lose. Committing a fourth creature to an empty board is often worse than holding it, because the fourth is the one Villain Mayhem takes.
The other two to fear are Chrome Dome’s Overload — each hero sacrifices a tapped creature, which is a direct tax on attacking with everything — and Slash’s Smash, which destroys all Turtles and can take three of your best creatures in one card if you’ve been playing the named characters.
The deck never runs out
Villain Scheme! shuffles itself and the boss graveyard back into the boss library. One copy, and it is the only thing standing between this game and a rules edge case. Bowen: “it was a very elegant solution to have this one card that shuffles everything back. It’s always gonna be shuffling back.”
Practical upshot: every Event you have already seen will come round again, and so will every Ninja you killed. If Villain Mayhem wiped you on turn four, it is coming back for the board you rebuild.
Two piles, and two names for one of them
The setup diagram gives the Boss side two separate discard piles: one beside the Boss deck “where Bosses go when defeated,” and one beside the Event deck “where Events go when used or destroyed.” The card text then calls that second pile by two different names — Baxter’s Experiments says “the event discard pile,” while Villain Scheme! and Shredder’s Challenge both say “the boss graveyard.”
They mean the same pile: spent Events and dead Ninjas. Defeated Boss cards are in the other pile and stay out of the game. Agree on that at the table before Villain Scheme! turns up, because reading it the other way would shuffle beaten Bosses back into the deck you’re drawing Events from.
A quiet boss turn is normal — and now you can see why
Bowen designed Events to whiff: “It was important to me that many of them can miss in a sense … This gives some more variance to the format, and it gives players more time to avoid the early pressure.”
The printed text bears that out exactly. Chrome Dome’s Overload does nothing if you have no tapped creature. Rocksteady’s Beatdown does nothing if you have no fliers. Slash’s Smash does nothing if you have no Turtles out. Shredder’s Challenge does nothing early, when no Ninjas have died yet. Four of the seventeen Events are blanks against a careful board — and against an empty one, most of the rest are too. That is most of why the opening turns feel gentle.
Four difficulty dials, a competitive mode hiding in the same box, and the boosters.
Four modifiers, printed in the booklet. Use any one, or stack them. They are not balanced against each other — the first is a much bigger jump than the others.
| Modifier | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Not Defeated Yet! | When a new stage begins, the previous Bosses stay in play. By stage three you’re facing six passive abilities at once instead of three. This is the heaviest of the four by a distance. |
| Relentless Attack! | All Ninjas the Boss team controls get haste. You lose the free turn every new Ninja currently gives you, which is where most of your breathing room comes from. |
| Bigger & Badder! | Whenever you defeat a Boss team stage, either increase the next Boss team’s life total by 4, or reveal and play an extra Event card. Pick one per stage. |
| Everyone’s Here! | During setup, add an additional four Bosses to the Boss deck. |
Bored of co-operating. Two, three or four players each pick a Turtle deck and play against each other instead. The booklet’s free-for-all rules never mention the Bosses or Events, and none of the four rules below reference them — so the villain half of the box sits this mode out.
This is a genuinely different game rather than a footnote — four mono-colour 60-card decks of roughly equal power is a perfectly reasonable evening, and it’s the mode that teaches blocking, since here your opponents can and will block.
The box includes four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Play Boosters, and you’re encouraged to fold what you open into your decks. Two constraints are printed in the booklet; the first one below isn’t, but follows from the decks themselves:
Bowen’s advice on custom decks is worth quoting straight: “I promise you though, if you build your own deck, it’ll be weird, and some of your decisions won’t make sense, so if you’re building out a deck, my recommendation is to put your sight on having a fun experience and not demolishing it as quickly as possible.”
Turtle Team-Up got a wave of how-to-play coverage before most people had the box in hand. Several of the same errors are circulating. Here they are against the printed rules.
1 · “The Boss flips one Event card per turn”
It’s two. The Boss turn’s Action step plays two cards from the Event deck at two players, and three at three or four. Running it as one card roughly halves the pressure and makes the game feel much easier than it is.
Worth noting that at least one walkthrough says one card while its own demonstration flips two — so if you learned from a video, check what the hands did rather than what the voiceover said.
2 · “Round one is one Boss, round two is two Bosses, round three is three”
Stages advance when you defeat a Boss team, not when a round ends. If it takes you six turns to kill the stage-one Boss, you face exactly one Boss for six turns. The counter is Boss life, not the turn count.
3 · “When you beat a Boss, everything resets to 20”
The new Boss team gets a fresh life total. You do not. Your life carries across all three stages, and the booklet says outright not to change anything else on the board as the stage changes. This one turns a hard game into an easy one, and it’s the error most likely to survive a whole play group unnoticed.
4 · “More players means more Bosses”
Not at three players, which is where this usually gets said. A three-player game changes two things and neither is the Boss deck: the Hero team starts at 30 life, and the Boss team plays a third Event card each turn. The stated objective — defeat all six Bosses across three stages — is the same at every count.
Four players is the one that genuinely adds Bosses: four extra cards go into the Boss deck at setup, making it ten. Whether those extra Bosses ever get revealed is the ambiguity we flag in Issue 08; what’s not ambiguous is that nothing changes at three.
5 · Skipping the first draw, out of habit
This one isn’t coming from the videos — it comes from anyone who already plays Magic, where the player who goes first skips their first draw step. This box overrides that rule. The Boss Rules page says it in one sentence: the Hero team goes first and each Hero player draws a card on their first turn. Playing it the normal way costs your team one card per player before the game has started.
6 · “Reshuffle your opening hand until you have two or three lands”
That’s house advice, not a printed rule — and it’s reasonable house advice for teaching a first game. Just know that you’re house-ruling: the booklet contains no mulligan rule of any kind, so this box ships with no printed way to fix a bad opening hand.
Tournament Magic’s mechanism, if you want to import it, is the London mulligan — draw a fresh seven, then put one card from your hand on the bottom of your library for each mulligan you’ve taken. For teaching, free reshuffles until the new player has two or three lands is kinder and costs nothing. For a True Turtles run, agree which one you’re using before you deal.
None of this is a knock on the people who made those videos. They were filming a co-op product on release week, and the rules that get compressed are always the ones that seem obvious. But if your group learned the game from a video and it felt too easy, start with 1 and 3 — those two together can turn a hard game into a walk.
The five printed in the booklet, plus the ones this guide has been building toward.
No. Creatures can only attack players, never other creatures. Creatures deal combat damage to one another only when the defending side blocks. In co-op, your creatures attack the Boss team in place of a player — and since Ninjas can’t block, your damage goes to the Boss team’s life total.
No. You pay to cast it once. After that it stays on the battlefield until it’s destroyed or otherwise removed by a spell or ability.
Normally your hand is yours alone. During a co-op game, players may freely share information about what’s in their hands — and you should, constantly. Your library is still off limits: you can’t look through it unless a spell or ability tells you to search it for something specific.
They have an effect — whatever is written in the text box — and then you put them into your graveyard. They don’t stay on the battlefield the way creatures, artifacts and enchantments do.
No. Blocking never taps a creature. Only an untapped creature can block, which is why attacking with everything is a real cost — an attacker is tapped and unavailable on the way back.
Nothing happens. The Boss team has no hand and makes no choices, so instructions it can’t follow simply don’t resolve. And if a card the Boss team owns would go to its hand, it goes to the Boss graveyard instead.
No. The Boss team counts as a single player for all rules purposes, so “each opponent” affects it exactly once no matter how many Boss cards are face up.
Yes. The moment the Boss team’s life hits 0 or less you immediately build the next Boss team — remove the defeated Boss card, reveal the next two (or three) — and then carry on with the turn you were in. Nothing else on the board changes.
No. You share a life total and a turn, not permanents or mana. Each player has their own battlefield, their own library, their own graveyard and exile, and taps their own lands for their own spells. What you share is the conversation.
Yes. Each player may play one land during the team’s turn. That’s four land drops a turn at four players, which is a large part of why more players is easier.
Twenty-nine card designs are exclusive to Turtle Team-Up, and the reveal says some of those are legal in Commander, Legacy and Vintage. It doesn’t itemise which. The Boss and Event cards are the automated opponent and only exist inside this box.
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