You might be shocked to see decades-old trading card game Magic: The Gathering (MTG) on our humble space website, but MTG has been dipping its toes into science fiction sets for a few years now.
After last year's canon Edge of Eternities set, Wizards of the Coast also embraced the space opera angle, so it was only a matter of time before the 'Universes Beyond' crossover series brought in a major sci-fi franchise. Now, just in time for its 60th anniversary, Star Trek is being adapted into a sprawling MTG set that aims to cover the franchise's entire history.
At Gamescom, we had the chance to sit down with principal designer Gavin Verhey to chat about the peculiarities of this set, its sprawling scope, and how the team boldly adapted "Trek" into a compelling addition to the ever-growing card game.
Disclaimer: The following interview has been edited for better flow.
A five-year mission
"We started working on the Star Trek discussion, I think, back in about 2021 or so," Verhey revealed. "I wasn't part of the initial deal, but I started working on the set in 2022. We've been designing it for about four years." His relationship with Star Trek started way before a Magic: The Gathering set was on the table, however: "In many ways, I've been working on it for like 25 years, because I started watching Star Trek when I was eight years old. I fell in love with it right away."
Even if MTG had dabbled in sci-fi before, Edge of Eternities represented a huge swing for Wizards, so how did the experience of making that set (and the reaction to it) shape an even bolder Star Trek expansion? According to Verhey, EoE was its own thing from the beginning: "We weren't doing it to set up for Star Trek or anything. We just thought it'd be a cool thing to do for Magic. But of course, we learned a lot from it for Star Trek, so we did take some notes and lessons."
A key part of that set, which is making a return for Star Trek, was the Spacecraft mechanic, a twist on the familiar concept of vehicle cards. The potentially game-changing spaceships have to be "charged" by other creatures, but they then act one-hundred-percent like powerful artifacts and/or creatures. According to Verhey, it was "a little soft for a lot of players", so we can expect spacecraft to be "amped up" for the new set. "Star Trek builds quite its own thing. It's trying to do a much more different thing."
Report to the ready room
Spearheading the roster of products, there are four "ready-to-play" decks – based on key crews and villains from Trek – for the famous 100-card Commander format. Commander has become MTG's go-to "game mode" over the years because it's welcoming and dynamic, and it lets players use cards from across the game's incredibly long history.
"The Green-White-Blue deck very much follows the aesthetics of the original series and has a large focus on its characters. There's also a Red-White-Blue that's more about the Next Generation and Voyager eras," he explained. Those are meant to celebrate two key timelines of Star Trek, but players looking for a more villainous twist can grab the Red-White-Black Klingon and White-Blue-Black Borg decks, which focus on two of the franchise's most "beloved species."
"We had the agreement to be able to do anything from Star Trek that showed up on the screen. This set contains all 60 years of its history, all the way from the original series to Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and all the stuff from today," Verhey told us. That sounds like an incredibly daunting task, considering all the source material available. It was made much easier by Paramount's flexibility, it seems. "You guys do the research and put in whatever you want" was the overall attitude, the designer recalled. "We have cards from all kinds of deep cuts."
Make it so
Of course, Paramount "gets final say over the artwork", but the game design was guided by Wizards (the company, not actual wizards).
That didn't take much pressure off the team's shoulders, though: "We want to do right by Star Trek. That's really, really, really important to us. So we iterated on a lot of things... Star Trek is a very interesting one to tackle because in many ways it maps onto Magic very well. You have cool characters, incredible creatures, and all the places you want to go and visit from fantastical worlds."
There was one issue, though: Star Trek (at its core) "is not really about fighting as much", so much of the set was built around the ideas of "exploration and moral dilemmas" with unique mechanics that tie into that aspect of the universe, so less aggressive players might be eating well with this one.
On the matter of using actors' likenesses – a major departure from sets like the ones built around Middle-earth, which did their own thing separate from the movies – he explained the goal was to have "only one actor depicted as any one given character" when it came to the main set. "Every version of Kirk is William Shatner."
But fear not, Kelvin timeline fans, as the 'Stardates Bonus Sheet' cards include "all the alternate universes of Star Trek" and have Kirk from the J.J. Abrams movies, among others.
Strange New Lands
Verhey admitted there were some challenges "with figuring out how to make Star Trek feel like Magic", so there's a heavy focus on new mechanics and a game rhythm that's "a little bit slower", building up towards "large things in the late game" (good news for Commander enjoyers).
Verhey wanted to highlight two major mechanics that help make it feel like Trek. The first is "Strange New Worlds", which gives players "a bonus equal to X, where X is the number of differently named lands you control". The cards built around it benefit from and push for a longer, more relaxed game.
Then, there's "Face a Dilemma", where players have to make choices like the characters would in the shows. "We made cards like 'Set phasers to' and then your options are 'stun' or 'kill' and you can choose. There's a card involving the Prime Directive where you can either violate it or observe."
These dilemmas come with rewards that should "inspire you to build a deck full of all these hard choices". Surprisingly, MTG's Star Trek set amps up the roleplay element by throwing players into "What am I doing in this situation?" scenarios very often.
Seeking out strange new life
As always, the art on these new cards looks stunning. Wizards is used to delivering on that front, but Verhey underlined that "making sure all the details were right" was key to success, as "Star Trek fans are very detail-oriented" (we totally agree).
However, the art teams also made the decision to have fun with certain designs, especially those of many monsters and creatures from The Original Series, where they "wanted to show them as their most awesome version" without the "restrictions" of back in the day. He brought up the Salt Vampire as a good example: "It was a little rough around the edges, so we imagined it as the coolest version you could possibly imagine."
There's also art that feels "a little magical" in a way that (hopefully) resonates with MTG players that aren't as familiar with the franchise: "I love art of this card called Crystalline Entity, which looks like it would fit right into Magic and is a huge monster shooting a beam into the landscape... It looks like an Eldrazi, honestly, and I think it's very cool to be able to bring that magic into the world of Star Trek."
Verhey also confirmed this is a large set – unlike the more medium-sized ones like The Hobbit – with four Commander decks, the two scene boxes, a Beginner Box, a "welcome deck", and more. "All those have new parts. I hope we got almost everything you could possibly want in a Star Trek set into this one."
So far, it looks like Wizards has boldly gone where no man has gone before with this set.
Magic: The Gathering's Star Trek set and all its products will be hitting shelves on November 13, 2026. Prerelease events will take place between November 6 and 12.
