Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek arrives Friday, Nov. 13. Here is a short tour of what is coming: the dates, the four Commander decks, and a few fine-print details we liked finding.
The dates
Prerelease week runs Nov 6 to 12, and the set is released everywhere on Friday, Nov 13. Magic Arena gets it a few days earlier, on Tuesday, Nov 10. Our own prerelease weekend is Friday, Nov 6 through Sunday, Nov 8, and Your First Magic Prerelease walks through how it works.
Star Trek turned 60 in September, and Wizards says the set draws on 60 years of TV and film. It is a Universes Beyond set, Wizards' term for Magic built on someone else's world.
Four Commander decks
Wizards is releasing four ready-to-play Commander decks. Each has 100 cards, a foil, a borderless commander, and 32 cards new to Magic.
- Federation Fleet (blue, red, white). Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Janeway lead it. Picard powers up your creatures and charges Spacecraft, and Janeway is the aggressive pick, attacking with Officer tokens.
- Landing Party (green, white, blue). Commander Spock and Captain Kirk lead it. Spock draws cards based on how many differently named lands you control, so this deck wants mana variety. Tribble tokens come in the box.
- Klingon Fury (red, white, black). Worf and Kor lead it. Kor lets you sacrifice creatures to power up your Klingons and Warriors.
- We Are the Borg (white, blue, black). The Borg Queen and Locutus of Borg lead it. The Queen pulls creatures out of opponents' graveyards and turns them into Borg.
New to Commander? Pick the deck whose commander you would enjoy saying out loud. Then read Commander for Beginners, and bring it to Wednesday night.
Details we liked
- Signed cards. Seven cards in the set are signed by the actors who play the characters, with fewer than 250 copies of each, hidden in Collector Boosters. Wizards lists Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Data, Seven of Nine and Geordi La Forge among them.
- Cards in Klingon. Collector Boosters also include foil versions of the Klingon-frame cards, translated into Klingon.
- Scenes. Twenty-five borderless cards build four scenes: Showdown at Sector 001, Mirror, Mirror, Unimatrix Zero and Deep Space Find. The two Scene Boxes, Enterprise-Q and Divergent Timeline, each hold six scene cards, six art cards, three Play Boosters and a display easel.
- Bundle exclusives. The Beam Me Up Bundle includes two of eight possible foil Spacecraft cards that exist only in the bundle, drawn in a Starfleet schematic style.
Come see it
We are open 10 AM to 10 PM every day, including release day. We cannot promise how many of any product we will have, so ask at the counter what is on the shelf. We are a little batty about this set, so expect us to be hanging around the counter all week. Commander Night is every Wednesday, 6 to 10 PM.