Magic: The Gathering‘s hotly anticipated crossover with Star Trek is launching on November 13, and it’s looking likely to be huge. Both in terms of popularity, and the complexity and detail of its kerbillion cards and their unique interactions. Introducing brand new mechanics like Beam Me Up, Face a Dilemma and Assimilate, it features characters and art from pretty much every incarnation of Star Trek from the 1960s original all the way up to Strange New Worlds, including extraordinarily rare cards signed by the actors depicted, and most importantly, a card entirely dedicated to Data’s cat, Spot. We’ve got a bunch of brand new details, and some first looks at a lot of new card art, below.
Designed to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, this new Universes Beyond set from Wizards of the Coast appears to be going all-out with its scale and complexity, as well as attempting to make absolutely every Trek fan happy in some way. While Lower Decks appears to have been rather underserved with a couple of non-cartoon arts, there’s an incredible spread of versions of the shows and movies included here, including multiple depictions of the same characters played by different actors. And while you’ll have to forgive my relative ignorance when it comes to MtG, a game I’m only just starting to learn, I shall do my best to guide you through a bunch of the interesting new twists being introduced to the wider game. Oh, and Tribbles.
Mechanics
Beam Me Up
This is a new “keyword ability” that’ll let you get instant and sorcery cards out of your graveyard by beaming a creature back into your hand. You can then cast it a second time from the graveyard to re-use “enters” abilities, remove auras, and other bits and bobs.
Face a Dilemma
This is a fun wording for when you pick an option from a bullet point list. This, it seems, is a modal decision, and it counts as your facing a dilemma, which triggers certain cards’ actions. For example, Seven of Nine will let you draw an extra card whenever you pick from modes or spells elsewhere. And one such example of a list is the splendid Kobayashi Maru Scenario enchantment card, which offers you the following to pick from at the beginning of upkeep:
- Hail – Return up to one target creature an opponent controls with mana value 3 or less to its owner’s hand.
- Sensors – Drawn two cards.
- Transport – Create two 1/1 red Officer creature tokens.
- Abandon Ship – You lose the game.
Federation
This is all about having a spread of Star Trek races in your deck, all except for the pesky Borg. Take Captain Jonathan Archer, for instance (yup, even he’s in there!): His Federation ability allows you to target a creature you control and add +X/+X until the end of your turn, where X is the number of non-Borg creatures under your control. It’s about the unity of space races!
Strange New Worlds
While it’s the name of a current Star Trek show, it’s also obviously a crucial term from the opening monologues from pretty much all of them. And in this set it’s an ability based on how many different lands you’re currently playing. Let’s take Captain Pike, Fullness of Time for example. His power and toughness are listed as */*, because they’re defined by your range of “differently named” strange new worlds (lands). If you’ve got a Forest, two Islands, a Federation Outpost and Quark’s Bar all out at once, that sets Pike to 4/4.
Spacecraft and Station
Here’s where things get very complicated, with this feature only having ever appeared previously in Edge of Eternities. Each Spacecraft begins as an artifact, but can convert to artifact creatures. For that you need to “station” it. To do this, you tap untapped creatures, and that creature’s power gets added as counters to the Spacecraft. Once you reach its threshold (for U.S.S. Discovery, at Black Alert, for instance, that’s 6+), which can be reached over a number of turns, it becomes creature-fied and gains its abilities. For that Discovery card, it gains Flying and becomes a 5/5. For the Borg Cube Spacecraft at 12+ station all your other artifact creatures gain flying, and it becomes a 6/6. And the OG Starship Enterprise? At a whopping 16+ station it becomes a 4/6, but you get to draw as many cards as damage it delivers.
Assimilate
Borg were cruelly left out of the Federation mechanic, but worry not. Those soulless bots have their own chicanery, and it’s about getting your opponent’s creatures to join your hive mind! You get to assimilate their card, add a +1/+1 token, and control it.
Pretty Pictures
OK, I can stop pretending to understand everything I just wrote and move on to my expertise: looking at drawings. There’s a wealth of different card art styles in here, and here are only some of them, because there’s a limit to how much Photoshop I’m willing to do in a day.
Signed Headliners
© Wizards of the Coast / Kotaku
Let’s get these signature cards out of the way first. There are to be 250 of each printed, and they’ll only be available in collector boosters, each hand-signed by the actor depicted. So yes, they’re going to be ludicrously sought after and drive scalping of the set in the most irritating ways. But I certainly wouldn’t say no to an Ethan Peck-signed Spock card.
Borderless Stardate
These are all about recognizing pivotal moments in Star Trek history, is the claim. But I think remembering that god-awful Man in the High Castle knockoff plot in Star Trek: Picard is not best practice, as cool as the card might look. All about mirrorworld Spock, though.
LCARS Frame Cards
These are variant arts of cards with the LCARS computer borders, and that’s a good thing. Especially that Replicator card. I think that could become one very expensive banana.
Classic Enterprise
I love the retro design here, and clearly these are going to be popular pulls. But let’s give special attention to that Salt Vampire.
Schematics
These are all Spacecraft cards, but with awesome schematic designs.
On top of all of these, you’ve also got Borderless Lands, Extended Arts, a group of Klingon designs, promos, and Commander cards. Actually, I can’t not include a few of the Commander cards, or we’d be missing out Spot.
The whole lot comes out November 13, and it’ll be interesting to see if it makes it to store shelves as plentifully as Reality Fracture. I really do hope so. Pre-release events start November 6 if you want to be more sure of getting to play.