When Wizards of the Coast started lifting the lid on its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover set earlier this week, eagle-eyed fans of the heroes in a half-shell noticed that there was something a bit off with the weapon of choice for one of the brothers. Wherever Raphael was depicted in art for the set, his trademark sai were seemingly missing one of the side prongs. But it wasn’t a mistake—it’s actually a different weapon entirely, and the choice was made by Wizards of the Coast intentionally.
Throughout the TMNT set (and named in a few of the cards), Raph is depicted wielding a pair of jitte rather than sai—a blunt weapon popularized in feudal Japan with a singular hooked tine. But to clear the air, Wizards released a whole blog post explaining the potential confusion to TMNT fans who were unfamiliar with the weapon.
The short answer is twofold: first, the iteration of the Ninja Turtles that star in the Magic set are a unique iteration of the team in their own right, inspired by but distinct from the myriad incarnations of the TMNT universe that have existed over the years, and as well as having their own unique designs, it was decided that another way this new version of the Ninja Turtles could stand out is if some of the teens wielded different weapons. Second? Familial trauma.
Well, kind of. So explains the Wizards of the Coast blog, simply titled “Raphael’s Jitte”:
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.
It was decided, then, that the jitte felt more “traditionally Japanese,” according to Wizards, to match Splinter’s heritage, and Raph’s choice to continue using it instead of favoring another weapon (while the blog notes that the Magic Mikey was trained with a kusarigama, most cards he’s depicted in show him with his usual nunchaku) is meant to convey his respect for his father figure, despite their clashes.
That’s a lot of reasoning to explain a single (and, at the end of the day, relatively minor) art design choice in a whole Magic: The Gathering set filled with them. But it at the very least shows that Wizards has put a lot of thinking into its own stamp on the Ninja Turtles… even if it leads to some very silly moments in the set where classic comic art of Raph with his sai has been reused to flavor cards of his new weapon of choice:
It’s the thought that counts. The Magic: The Gathering – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set releases on March 6.
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