Captain Kirk, Boldly Going | Illustration by Josh Newton
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of Magic: The Gathering. It’s 30-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. Well, um, until now, when it’s time to boldly go where other IPs have gone before in
Universes Beyond!
Clearly there will be more MTG fan unease at yet another non-fantasy UB product, but for the
Star Trek faithful, who bought the soon-doomed
Star Trek TCG in 1994, this is a long time dream fulfilled.
As Captain Kirk says at the end of
The Wrath of Khan: “There are always… possibilities.” What should we expect? Here’s what we know, coupled with a bit of reasoned speculation (and isn't that a reasonable definition of science fiction anyway?).
About the Set: The Story
Crystalline Entity | Illustration by David Alvarez
There’s 60 years of story to pull from, as
Star Trek (commonly referred to as “The Original Series” or TOS in
Trek fandom),
premiered in September 1966. There have been various sequels, remakes, and reboots over the years, with novels, video games, board games, and toys. Of course, there’s also
Star Trek conventions
dating back to 1972, which arguably set up modern fandom for what it is today. You can consult Camille Bacon-Smith’s 1992 study,
Enterprising Women, a book-length ethnography which
helped to kickstart fan studies as an academic pursuit, if you’d like to trace the origins of TV-focused fanzines and fanfiction as we think of it today. I got my PhD studying this stuff, so if you want to toss some comments below or on
the Draftsim Discord, I can go deep on this stuff.
That said,
the preview video gives us some clues as to how the set might limit the story. Perhaps.
The first sight in the video is of the TOS
Enterprise. The
nacelle’s design has the kind of spinning color on the front tips that they used in the 1960s series, which is different from the newer designed version of that era’s ship in recent spinoffs,
Star Trek: Discovery and
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The next sight is Captain Kirk on the original bridge played by original actor, William Shatner. There are no designs so far that look like the aesthetic shift of the sequel films for that series.
All well and good, but the third image is of the
Crystalline Entity, a key part of Data’s origin story in
Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), the sequel or sorts that premiered in 1987. That’s kind of a deep cut, and it’s followed by another, Klingon Chancellor Gowron, also from TNG, and then that show’s
Enterprise as the final piece of art.
They could have more easily showed things like Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard, or Data himself, and that likely would provide a bit more pop of recognition for folks with only a passing familiarity of
Trek. The choice seems to indicate some pretty deep story detail from TNG. Given that TNG comes like 70 years after TOS in the
Trek timeline, my prediction for the set is that it includes
Star Trek’s classic trope, time travel, which undergirded so many episodes and films.
Perhaps we’ll see an
original, abandoned concept for 1994’s
Generations film, which united Kirk and Picard, which was to see the two ships locked in combat. We nerds can dream.
Star Trek Mechanics
Warp Speed | Illustration by Raymond Swanland
We don’t know anything yet, but
Edge of Eternities gives us some possibilities.
Star Trek is about
spacecraft which get to where they’re going at
warp speed, so we already have some mechanics to draw from, although warping is different in the universes of each set.
If the set is going to need to use time travel of some kind to build a coherent story, we might see some of the ways the
Doctor Who cards did that, including using older mechanics like
suspend.
In terms of the
Trek universe, there are a lot of things on fans’ wish lists, but the only thing that seems like a must-have is the
transporter, which gives us the “Beam Me Up, Scotty” line that has percolated into everyday life.
Structurally, there will have to be legends, as there are in so many UB sets, to represent the main characters. We have
villains and
robots as
creature types in MTG now, and given that Starfleet officers don’t consider themselves
soldiers, I imagine some kind of “officer” might be incoming.
My wild guess is that we’ll have a
tribble. This seems like a perfect blend of a goofy part of
Trek and Magic mechanics, as these pests multiply rapidly. I can see either
tokens or a
Squadron Hawk sort of thing.
Speculation
I’d have expected, like they did with the
Lord of the Rings set, that they would focus on one time period, which would allow Magic to follow up with later
Trek properties, just like the MTG release of
The Hobbit follows LTR years later. If the set (ahem) takes off, TNG is always waiting. Perhaps there’s some concern about the depth of interest in
Trek across multiple sets? Perhaps the rights situation is precarious? Perhaps we’ll get another space set in Universes Beyond in the future, so
Trek will be a one off (
Star Wars, anyone?).
I’d anticipate, like they did with
Doctor Who, that there will be
Commander decks focused in eras. I could see one set in the maroon-uniformed era of the 1980s films, one in the expanded sequels universe of TNG in
Voyager and
Deep Space Nine, and one in the contemporary TV era of
Discovery and
Strange New Worlds if they’re going to blast through the entirety of the IP in one release. But it’s also possible that Wizards will abandon story entirely,
Final Fantasy style, and just give us the greatest hits from the expansive history, no story at all. But
Star Trek fans are more similar to
Doctor Who fans, and there’s no coherent overall universe to
Final Fantasy anyway, so I predict the
Who treatment.
