Tiger Claw put us through a rollercoaster of emotions from the moment we saw him getting super excited to have a tiger figure, to the realization of opening him and finding his limited articulation really bummed us out to taking pictures of him a year or so later for this list to find that he'd really grown on us despite those articulation problems. 
Really it's just that there's no joint or movement on his arms below the shoulders that disappointed us. For a character whose weapons are pistols, it's frustrating to have a limited range of motion on the arms, hindering where he's able to aim them.
But he's a freaking tiger with guns and an eyepatch! That's enough to get him on this list despite any points against him.

Mozar is the only Triceraton offering from the Nick TMNT toy line where the 2003 line had a few. But any Tricertaton is a welcome addition to our Turtles collection. When shown at Toy Fair he had a few more paint apps, most notably the silver boots that were now released  in solid orange. This is easily remedied with a silver Sharpie. So easy that we still haven't done it to our figure.
He didn't come with any accessories, which is kinda lame - but Playmates is all about saving dollars wherever they can so it's no big surprise. Plus if he's supposed to be a General or whatever he might not need to actually use a weapon. 

TO BE FAIR, we never said these would all be figures released by Playmates. Though they hold the license for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, they aren't responsible for #18 on our list - the Kraang robot that was released by Sonic in 2017. 
Sonic had a short-lived TMNT promotion for their kid's meals that included seven figures that all shared this exact same mold, a few non-figure items.
The translucent ice-blue on this figure along with the design of the character (seperate from the mold itself since that's shared between each figure released in this series) really make this the stand-out figure from the Sonic offerings.

Yet another instance when looking a subset of turtles that we decided that Don got the best treatment out of all of them. This Donatello is straight up creepy and if released as it's own figure outside of a TMNT toy line, would stand alone very well. 
The purple is amazing and the weapons (how creepy is rope as an accessory when paired with an ax and a sledgehammer??) make for a very menacing figure. And that's not even touching on the skull mask and hood. Oooooh - someone should do a Skeletor custom with this figure.

Mutagen Man here is actually the only figure in this best of list that we ended up using the repaint of instead of the original and the only reason we did that is because the original was packed away when we were taking photos for this list. This repaint is fun, but we intended the original be shown - though really the figure's sculpt is really what got it into this list. 
The original figure was released with a slight variant where the eyes were not painted, which was most likely just a change in the production run or samples from one factory that got the paint tampos wrong. We actually have the version without the painted eyes, which was kind of a bummer when we realized it - it looks better with the eyes painted on. 
Mutagen Man has a point of articulation that can easily be overlooked if you didn't know it was there, which is the body inside of the container can turn by moving the little knob on top of the container. I'm not sure if it's meant to open or not, but I know we got our original figure to open and were able to pull the inside out - which made for easy access to the container so that you can put ooze/slime inside of it and reseal it. 

Last and definitely not least is everyone's favorite pile of living garbage, Muckman! For a while we were close to not seeing Muckman (character design by the ridiculously talented Jose Garibaldi - who actually designed a bunch of the figures on this list) released as part of Playmates Nick TMNT line - but after some fans became pretty vocal about him being shown at a Toy Fair and then omitted from the line, Playmates eventually added him (albeit ever so briefly) to the line. 
He is, at the time of this entry, the most sought-after figure from the line gaining upwards of $300 on the secondary market.
Though he is still carded here, we have no intentions on keeping him packaged. Our Nick TMNT collection is loose, though some figures we haven't had the time to go through and open yet. And now with this figure hitting such large amounts I couldn't bring myself to open him just for this blog entry. But rest assured, he will eventually be opened to join the rest of the figures in our collection.