I stared at the card art and felt a small, wrongness crawl up my spine. Raphael’s familiar three-pronged sai had been slimmed to a single hooked tine. Within hours, the internet was split between “glitch” and “design choice.”
I read Wizards of the Coast’s explanation so you don’t have to scroll through every forum. You’ll see the answer is not a typo but a deliberate move that trades a prop for a story beat: Raph is carrying a jitte, not a sai. That swap is a tiny sleight that signals family history, training, and identity—if you know where to look.
At my local game store counter a player tapped the art and said, “That’s not Raph’s sai.”
That simple, blunt observation is exactly how this story detonated. You feel the tug: a character defined by weapons is drawn with something different, and every fan’s instinct is to assume an error.
Wizards of the Coast anticipated that reaction. Their Magic: The Gathering blog post titled “Raphael’s Jitte” explains the choice plainly: this TMNT iteration is its own branch of the franchise tree, borrowing from Mirage comics and Splinter’s traditional Japanese background. The team intentionally swapped some weapons—Leonardo with a ninjatō, Donatello with a bō, Michelangelo trained with a kusarigama—so Raphael carrying a jitte reads as cultural alignment and family respect, not laziness.
Why does Raphael use a jitte instead of sai?
Because the designers wanted an image that matched Splinter’s heritage and a quick visual shorthand for the turtles’ different responses to fatherhood and tradition. The jitte is a blunt tool with a single hooked tine—practical in the hands of someone learning restraint—and it reads as more “traditionally Japanese” inside the set’s storytelling choices.
At a Reddit thread titled “Art mistake?” people pasted classic comic panels for comparison.
That crowd behavior turns art choices into evidence. You can see why: cards reuse line art and splash pages, and when someone re-inks Raph holding what looks like a sai, the brain fills the gap and protests. Wizards admits some reused imagery leads to absurd moments—sai visuals attached to jitte mechanics—and they accepted that tradeoff to keep storytelling consistent across a large set.
Is this an art error?
No. Wizards deliberately reimagined the turtles as a specific version—an American family shaped by a Japanese father figure—and they used weapon changes as shorthand for cultural inheritance and teenage rebellion. The blog’s micro-narrative about Splinter teaching traditional weapons explains the choice: Raph’s jitte is meant to represent respect tangled up with unresolved anger.
At the studio desk the art director explained, “We asked what these kids keep and what they reject.”
That quote from the Wizards post is the creative center: the turtles wear similar costumes personalized for personality beats—Mikey’s backpack straps to sell youth, Raph’s mask to mark alienation. Those are tiny signals that let you read chapters into a single frame.
The design choice also functions as emotional shorthand. Raphael’s jitte signals respect for Splinter and the family’s Japanese roots, while his still-burning fury and rivalry with Leonardo remain intact. It’s a visual sentence: the weapon is the grammar of their relationship.
When does the Magic: The Gathering – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set release?
The set is slated to release on March 6, 2026, and Wizards has been rolling out art and lore through its official blog and social channels. If you follow Gizmodo or Movies & TV, or the Wizards blog itself, you’ve likely seen these explanations and the concept art credited to creators like Kim Sokol and Peter Laird.
At a design meeting someone said the jitte felt “more traditionally Japanese.”
Design talk often looks dry, but here it maps directly to character psychology. Splinter is cast as traditionally Japanese, so the team matched weapons to that lineage. Teenagers, the blog says, are rebellious—so each turtle responds differently to Splinter’s teachings. You get a narrative economy: fewer words, richer visual beats.
This is where the art-versus-canon argument usually forks: collectors want familiar icons; designers want fresh reads. Wizards chose to trade a little iconographic comfort for a coherent, thematic set that ties into Magic: The Gathering’s storytelling ethos.
I don’t pretend this will settle every argument on forums or X, but it does demand we read card art as narrative evidence, not production fluff. The jitte is a small rewrite of Raph’s visual biography—like a family photograph with one frame swapped, and like a veteran boxer changing gloves—and that choice asks you to decide whether fidelity to fandom or fidelity to story matters more. Which side are you on?