Shadow of a Wicked Foe: Standard Sneak Attack

Note: This article was translated from Chinese by AI and may contain errors. Read the original Chinese version.

Introduction

New sets really are coming fast this year. The latest collaboration set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, introduces sneak, a variant of the ninjutsu ability, and positions it in white-black rather than the blue-black of traditional ninjas. What flavor will ninjas without blue show?

Core Cards

Dark Leo & Shredder
Legendary Creature - Mutant Ninja Turtle Human

Sneak
Ninjas you control that are attacking have deathtouch.
Whenever Dark Leo & Shredder deals combat damage to a player, create a 1/1 black Ninja creature token. Then if you control five or more Ninjas, that player loses half their life, rounded up.

In the offense-focused ninja theme, the passive ability of Dark Leo & Shredder gives all Ninjas the capital to charge into your opponent’s creature lineup. With white’s token-making help, a whole row of Ninjas attacking can force your opponent’s defending creatures to trade by throwing themselves in, or you can use the creatures your opponent lets through unblocked to sneak in new Ninjas. Of course, a Dark Leo sneaked in also acts as a combat trick, sending the opposing creature that blocks a Ninja token straight home.
But for a mythic, Dark Leo’s strength is honestly a bit awkward. A 1/3 body has poor survivability, low solo damage output, and has to connect itself to have any effect, so many times it can only sneak in, connect once to trigger once, and on the following normal attacks your opponent will certainly put creatures up to trade, while Dark Leo’s body can only trade for a single creature. If it were changed to a three-mana 2/4 with sneak kept at two mana it might look more decent, but that’s all hindsight. The sneak deck built around Dark Leo is roughly as follows:

Decklist

Deck Introduction

In principle, this sneak deck’s build continues the key concepts of ninjutsu decks: low-cost evasion and an offensive orientation. Having a one-mana evasive creature in your opening hand is crucial. I chose the one-mana fliers with built-in enter-the-battlefield filtering, Dream Beavers and Faerie Dreamthief, to adjust your draws and optimize your attack tempo, supported by two Cecil, Dark Knight, who is good at forcing through damage, forming the one-drop lineup.

Next is the turn-two curve. Here you can choose between continuing to cast creatures normally or doing a sneak. For the normal casts there is Voice of Victory, which pairs extremely well with sneak: it can mobilize to create tokens for you to sneak with, and it stops your opponent from casting spells to interfere, which just happens to guard the counterable sneak ability. For the sneak side, I chose The Last Ronin’s Technique, which creates three Ninja tokens, and the young Shredder, Oroku Saki, Shredder Rising. The former is an instant-speed token spreader that spreads the risk and a partner card for Dark Leo, while the latter is a card-draw engine like Ninja of the Deep Hours, and both provide Delver of Secrets-level 3 power.

Thanks to a certain badger, the chance of running into a sweeper when playing Standard on MTGA is now much higher than before, so three mana and up focus on protection and rebuilding, making sure your offense can continue. So for the three-mana slot I chose Adept Watershaper, which gives tapped creatures indestructible, disrupting your opponent’s destroy-based sweepers while letting Dark Leo attack without any worries. The four-mana slot is Leonardo, Sewer Samurai, whose passive lets you recast most of this deck’s creatures from the graveyard with no limit on the number of times (though it gives them finality counters), making it possible to rebuild the board within a single turn.

As for the removal lineup, the one worth mentioning is Karai’s Technique, which pumps size and removes at the same time and can also be cast with sneak, often managing a two-for-one in creature combat, or killing one creature while giving your opponent a beating. For the rest I used four one-mana and two two-mana removal spells, which can be adjusted according to the user’s own read of the current environment. My example picks here are a mix of Requiting Hex, Tragic Trajectory, and Get Lost.

Gameplay Demo

Although this deck is configured with only 20 lands, thanks to its low mana curve and eight one-mana filtering creatures that repeatedly enter, there is no big problem with how it runs, and a one-land opening hand can be kept depending on the situation. Compared with NEO’s blue-black version, the Turtles white-black version goes for a wide spread of small creatures, using numbers to make up for the lack of evasion, so how to attack safely with the whole row, or break through your opponent’s defenses at an acceptable loss, is the key challenge. As for points to watch in play, like ninjutsu it comes down to “whether” and “how” to sneak, testing the player’s read of the current situation. I believe it can satisfy players who like ninjutsu decks.

Conclusion

Ninjas are one of this collaboration set’s main themes, and focusing on token board-building is indeed rather clever, but this set’s support for Ninjas and sneak is quite limited, and together with the legendary supertype restriction, lord creatures can’t be cast in multiples to stack buffs, so the Ninja token army can’t fully realize the advantage a wide board should have, which is a real pity in this set’s Ninja design.