Cowabunga! I don’t know what was on your bingo card for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Magic: the Gathering set, but a skateboard powerful enough to be viable in Legacy certainly wasn’t on mine. This crossover has already given us a whole sewer stuffed full of legendary creatures, pixel art cards, and some truly disgusting pizzas. Now it’s on track to shake up one of Magic’s most powerful formats.
Legacy is a Magic: the Gathering format where most of the cards printed since the game began in 1993 are legal. The format does enforce some bans, including everything in the infamous Power 9 and other busted cards. Have a read of our guide to the banlists of different MTG formats for more information.
Because of its massive card pool, it’s difficult for new cards to break through and see any play in Legacy. Nevertheless, the Skateboard from the Ninja Turtle expansion has hurtled its way into the format.
Skateboard is a one mana piece of equipment that taps a permanent when it enters play. It can be equipped, also for one mana, granting the creature it is attached to +1/+0 and haste.
Skateboard put up results in a recent Legacy tournament on Magic: the Gathering Online (Magic’s old, but still reliable, digital client before that new whippersnapper Arena upstaged it in 2019). The top eight of this tournament contained two separate decks, that both ran a single copy of the card.
Both of these decks are artifact heavy combo builds that use the skateboard in conjunction with the cards Goblin Welder and fellow Ninja Turtle card Sewer-veillance Cam.
Goblin Welder can be tapped to sacrifice an artifact in order to swap it with another artifact from the graveyard. Sewer-veilance Cam is an artifact that taps or untaps a creature as it enters and leaves play, untapping the Welder and allowing its ability to be looped an infinite number of times.
The skateboard taps a land, or a potentially problematic permanent, down as it enters the battlefield, preventing the opponent from disrupting the plan. It can then grant Goblin Welder haste, allowing the combo to kick off a turn early, or be sacrificed to a Welder that’s already online to fetch a Sewer-veilance Cam that’s already in the graveyard.
There are then a variety of ways to close out the game once Goblin Welder has started up. The opponent’s life can be depleted by repeatedly fetching the burn card Legion Extruder, or infinite mana can be generated by grabbing, tapping, and sacrificing the mana rock Mox Opal over and over again.
What are your thoughts on skateboards entering one of Magic’s most prestigious formats? Is this totally radical, or completely cringe? Let us know your views on the Wargamer Discord.
If you’re looking to learn more about the history of the game, have a browse of our timeline of all MTG sets in order.
Source: Wargamer
