Trekking Through Design

Welcome to the bridge!

Very few things I still love today predate my first time playing Magic at 10 years old, but Star Trek is one of them. This series has been a huge part of my life, and it was an honor to bring it to life in Magic as the lead game designer of Magic: The Gathering® | Star Trek™. When I was about eight or so, my family and I caught an episode of The Original Series on our old television. Soon after, I was back day after day trying to find more episodes. It kicked off a lifelong love of the franchise, and a lot of what makes Star Trek great has become embedded in my DNA after watching it for so many years.

The desire to explore and learn. The process of discussing and debating hard decisions. How to listen to others around you.

Speaking of listening to others around you, it really takes a whole crew to design a set like this. Let me first introduce the design team, then I'll tackle how we built the set. Some of these people worked on the vision design, some worked on the set design, and they were never all on the team at once. People rotated on and off the team throughout the design process.

Click to show/hide the Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek Design Crew

Ethan Fleischer

Ethan was the vision design lead for Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek. As a lifelong Star Trek fan, he laid the foundation for what was going to be important to do here. He went on to lead the design of the set's Commander decks and Scene Boxes.

One of the things Ethan contributed that became a huge piece of the set (which I thought was especially brilliant) is that, in borrowing something similar from Wilds of Eldraine, every two-color pair theme has a creative theme in addition to a mechanical one. If you're drafting and see something in that theme, there's a good chance it's for your deck! For all those curious, here are the Limited archetypes.

• White-Blue Spacecraft and Artificers
• Black-Blue Dilemma Control
• Black-Red Klingons and Dies
• Red-Green Away Team Landfall
• Green-White Doctors and Counters
• White-Black Borg Artifact Creatures
• Blue-Red Scientists and Noncreatures
• Black-Green Archaeology Graveyard
• Red-White Command 8+ Total Power
• Green-Blue Strange New Worlds

Sara Mox

Sara is another lifelong Star Trek fan, and we put her on the team early to help make sure this felt like a Star Trek set. One of her claims to fame for this set is that she submitted what is almost exactly the final design for Live Long and Prosper at the very beginning of the process. It's very unusual for a card to survive unchanged for so long, but when you nail it, you nail it! She has since moved on from Wizards, but I really appreciate her contributions here and hope that she enjoys how the set turned out.

Mark Gottlieb

You've probably seen Mark Gottlieb's name before—he's been here for a long time! Fun fact: Mark was my manager when I first joined Magic Design, and he offered me my first lead design role for Commander (2017 Edition)! In addition to being a great mentor and excellent designer who has led many sets, Mark is a huge fan of Star Trek … especially Deep Space Nine. He put his thumb on the scale in the best of ways by consistently submitting sweet new Deep Space Nine-themed cards, which gave that show a larger presence in the set.

Lukas Litzsinger

Lukas was on the team at the very beginning when Ethan was leading vision design. He also helped lead with Ethan during some of his absences. I remember he was particularly interested in figuring out dilemmas and how Spacecraft would work. Lukas is no longer at Wizards, but I hope that he, too, looks at the set and enjoys seeing how it turned out.

Michael Hinderaker

Michael, or as we call him "Hindy," works in Play Design—so the fine tuning and balance portion—and is part of my dream team for any set. When we were all moving desks, my only request was that I could sit next to Hindy because being able to work with him on Limited and run ideas by him made the sets I was working on so much better. He's a master at tuning Limited environments and has improved so many of them. The last Gavin and Hindy collaboration was a little set you may have enjoyed drafting called Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™, and I can't wait for you to try this one out.

Chris Kvartek

Chris is also from Play Design and co-led the Limited design of the set with Hindy. We've been trying to clone Hindy's balance expertise, and what's one of the ways to do that? Have him work with someone else on a set! Chris did a great job working on balancing both Limited and Constructed, putting the cards through their paces. I loved having him on the team.

Dave Humpherys

Dave is an R&D staple and juggernaut, leading many sets among players' all-time favorites, including War of the Spark, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and Dominaria. One thing we often do with seasoned designers is have them join teams for a short amount of time to provide some of their directional help, then rotate them off. Dave joins many teams early on in set design to provide his expertise as they are progressing and ensure things are apace. He helped guide the ship out of the gates and made sure we were heading in a good direction.

Jeremy Geist

Jeremy is an incredible innovator. When it comes to early-stage design and coming up with wild ideas that hit the mark, Jeremy has been crushing it. For example, the empower Jace mechanic from Reality Fracture was pitched by him—making a planeswalker token is wild! Jeremy has many fun leads and wild mechanics coming up in the future, and I can't wait for you to check them out. Jeremy was the vision design lead for the set codenamed "Dublin" coming out in 2028, and it's a real doozy. I can't wait for you to see it.

Jadine Klomparens

Jadine heads up a lot of the Play Design team's decisions and directions, and she is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to balancing the cards. She joined our team at the very end of the process to help make sure it was heading in the right direction as it came in for playtesting. That doesn't mean she didn't make some cards herself. She pitched the current version of Q, Stacking the Deck after we were requested by other teams to "Please get away from a version that used subgames." Yes, I'm serious. (Someday, I'll make subgames return! Someday!)

Eric Engelhard

Eric was on the Vision Design team very briefly at the beginning of the process before being whisked away to work on Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I've worked with Eric on the past two Mystery Booster releases, and his ability to find unique things to do and to color outside the lines is always appreciated.

I also want to call out two people who weren't on the game design team but were beyond critical to making this set.

Crystal Frasier

As a deep, deep Star Trek fan, Crystal was our creative lead for the set. I worked with her a ton to nail down the concepts we wanted to do, the Sagas we wanted to put in the set, the characters we wanted to show … pretty much every element of the set. Shout out to Crystal for doing a great job bringing this set to life.

Matt Tabak

Matt has a deep and rich history with Star Trek. Yeah, a lot of people in the office have watched the show, but how many of them actually worked at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas as a Klingon when that was running in the 2000s? Matt is an incredible editor on Magic, but he also was happy to contribute his ideas and thoughts and made the set a lot better off for it.

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Building Up

There are pieces of Star Trek that line up so well with Magic: the sense of exploration, the incredible characters, and the iconic moments. That's all great. But it also brought some really unique challenges to Magic. Why? Well, Magic is also a game about attacking for 2 and casting direct-damage spells. And while Star Trek has some combat and starships firing at one another, it's often a lot less about fighting and a lot more about moral dilemmas, innovation, and solving problems. How were we going to bring that to a card set? This was immediately a problem to solve.

What I came up with as a north star is what we call "build-up" gameplay. The extreme version of this is Rise of the Eldrazi. A more level take on this is Theros. By making the games be about scaling up and becoming more powerful over time, you could really get the sense of things slowly escalating and resulting in huge moments. And while it was important you could still play normal Magic—Rise of the Eldrazi was a bridge too far for many, and we made sure to build in some classic aggro strategies with archetypes like black-red Klingons—if we could capture that build-up gameplay, it would create a really unique set.

A good example of a mechanic that does this is one that we put in the set very early: Spacecraft. In the very beginning, our take on these cards worked differently than the ones from Edge of Eternities with a mechanic called "battle stations!" where you simply paid a mana cost to turn on your Spacecraft forever. But once Edge of Eternities settled on the station mechanic, we ended up lining them up for consistency. (I do still think we could use a mana cost to permanently turn on your Spacecraft, though!)

In any case, Spacecraft are cards you put down early that have some kind of immediate impact, then over time you turn them on and get a big moment after you've built them up. That fits right into this kind of gameplay.

But what are some others?

Exploring Strange New Worlds

Exploration is a key piece of Star Trek. We had to represent that somehow. And while there are some existing mechanics that do that—we tried literally explore, for example—none of them really hit what we were going for. (One of the big problems with explore is that it eats up most of the text box of your card once you add reminder text, so there's very little room left for flavorful designs!)

Pretty early on, during vision design, we came up with strange new worlds, a mechanic that cares about differently named lands. Edge of Eternities had actually experimented with a tiny bit of this on cards like All-Fates Scroll and Fungal Colossus. It fit Star Trek well! We could make different locations from the show into lands, and as you found more of them, your cards became more powerful.

It started with thresholds. For example, an ability with "strange new worlds 5" turned on once you hit five differently named lands. But eventually, we found that we mostly wanted to do scaling rewards and keep the dream alive, so they just all count up all your lands—though some of the common cards do kind of cap on how much the scaling matters.

This quickly became several people's favorite deck to draft. One novel thing that started happening was people playing some off-color basics just to kick up their strange new worlds count! It's a really unique mechanic to build with in a draft, and of course it works well in Commander, where many mana bases are approaching Singleton, and it does a great job of making the game about building up.

Facing Our Dilemma

Star Trek has moral dilemmas as a core piece of the show, and it was so important to me and others that we represent that in the set. And early on, we came up with modal cards as a great way to do that. Borrowing the flavor word technology to name the modes from sets like Adventures in the Forgotten Realms was a slam dunk.

It was fun to go through moments and episodes—from things as broad as Set Phasers to ... and as specific as Kobayashi Maru Scenario—and make the player face these decisions.

So, I asked a question: given that we wanted to do so many modal choice cards, could we make that matter somehow?

And after some iteration and plenty of conversations with the Rules team, we came up with face a dilemma. These cards give you a reward when you choose one or more modes for a spell or ability. This lets you build up your crew. As you face these choices, they all help you out in whatever way is most fitting for the character. For example, Seven of Nine always wants more information before making decisions. So, she draws you a card when you face a dilemma. Captain Benjamin Sisko often consults his crew, so he makes Officer tokens.

One of the things I really love about this mechanic is that it's so backwards compatible. In a way, it's been here the whole time! You can play with cards from this set, or you can dust off your Vision Charms and Cryptic Commands since those are dilemmas, too. It even works with Seasons from Bloomburrow!

In Limited, the blue-black draft archetype is focused on dilemmas. If you want to make a bunch of decisions and slowly eke out value against your opponent, that's the deck for you!

Finding Federation

As we approached the end of design, things fell into place. The core mechanics were done, and the set drafted well. There was still time to go, but a lot of the tentpoles were in the right place. Yet I couldn't help but feel like the set was missing a little mechanic.

This came at the same time as another problem: the creature types. In Star Trek, nobody is an alien. Everybody is from somewhere. With both internal notes from many other Star Trek fans at Wizards and external notes from our partners at Paramount, we decided the Alien creature type wouldn't show up in our set. Diversity of species is important to Star Trek, and the fans in the office wanted to see that come through.

That made things tricky. Star Trek has a long list of species that look almost identical to humans but aren't. Giving them the Human creature type would be incorrect. But not giving them a species creature type would be very strange (for example, Phlox, Unorthodox Doctor with just "Doctor"). So, after much discussion, we all agreed that Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek would get an exception to add in a bunch of creature types for accuracy. (You should not expect this going forward for other Universes Beyond sets.) The Creative team would pick whatever they felt was most resonant for each card. If there was something that fit, like Elemental for Horta or Dinosaur for Saurian Explorer, we would use that, but otherwise we would write down the proper species.

As a general design rule, if you're doing something unusual, it's nice if there is a design reason for it. It's going to draw focus, and it's a good way to make the set feel more connected. I had tried a couple one-off cards that cared about different creature types, but they weren't really working.

Enter the Professor.

The Professor of Tolarian Community College happened to be near Wizards and had reached out about coming by, and I knew he was a huge Star Trek fan. So, after a number of messages and back-and-forth discussions, I got special permission to show him the set while he was here and ask for his thoughts.

One of his big notes was that, while the existing mechanics felt like Star Trek, one of the cornerstones of that franchise was diversity in your crew. At the time, there was a mechanic called federation that cared about whether your creatures had 8 or more power, which exists in the final set as the red-white draft archetype on cards like La'An Noonien-Singh, Security. He thought it would be great if the mechanic had something to do with diversity.

A lightbulb went off over my head. Bingo! I could work with that. Thanks, Professor!

And so, the federation mechanic as you know it was born.

It's only a light touch in the set because it was added late in the process and would be tough to balance on common cards for Limited. But it sends you on a really unique deck-building quest and lets you look at cards through a lens you've never seen before. Perhaps it's time for Ranger en-Vec to finally shine in your deck as a Human Soldier Archer Ranger! (Okay, more likely not.)

In case you're wondering why it says non-Borg, that's because you need to cut off changelings from working with it somehow by excluding a type. The Borg and the Federation don't really get along, so we made the call for them to be the exclusion.

Power Through Innovation

Star Trek is a universe of innovation, and I know the players who enjoy Star Trek would want some unique build-around cards. While I don't have any data proving this, I would believe that in the classic player psychographics, Star Trek fans trend slightly more toward the Johnny and Jenny archetype, wanting to find unique combinations or synergies and build new decks.

One thing I wanted from the very beginning was an alternate win condition that promoted the peaceful negotiations of Star Trek. So, I came up with Peace in Our Time, a white card-drawing enchantment that rewards all who buy into peace.

This card is a blast to play and led to a few very off-the-wall decks. Opt into peace and be rewarded!

But you'll see this throughout the set. Today, I want to show you a line of text that really blew my mind.

One of the things I love about Magic is how collaborative it is. We all love Magic, and everybody wants to contribute. So, I am always open to hearing ideas from anywhere in the company. You never know what could turn up.

One day, I got a message from Paul Kulander out of the blue. (Paul works on MTG Arena.) I don't work with Paul at all—in fact, this was one of the first messages he ever sent me. But his team ran a design workshop as a team-building activity, and he came up with a really unique line of text and wanted to share it with me.

I saw it and … loved it. And after some vetting with the Rules team and testing, it ended up in this set.

Introducing Kira Nerys, Firebrand!

Even attacking asks some different deck-building questions! How can you make creatures enter during combat? Flash is an easy option, sure. But attack triggers that make creatures is another one. And note that if you flash a creature in after blockers are declared, your opponent can't block!

Have fun with this one! I look forward to seeing what you all build.

To the Stars

While that's not every mechanic in the set, those are the different ways we worked to solve some of the challenges the set provided, and I'm so happy with how we worked to answer them.

This set represents many years of work by so many people. I started on it several years ago, but in many ways, I started on it all the way back in 1998 when I saw my first episode of Star Trek. It's a love letter to 60 years of the series. I want to give a big thank you to everybody at Wizards who worked on the set and poured in their thoughts and time. From those who were involved every day to those who suggested a single line of rules text, it all makes a big difference.

I hope you all enjoy it and give the set a try. The mix of mechanics and gameplay is really special, and I know I'll see you in the MTG Arena queues … probably trying to draft strange new worlds, my favorite archetype in the set.

Have fun and enjoy all the previews. Let's hit it!

—Gavin

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See more from Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek before it releases on November 13, 2026! The set is available for preorder now from your local game store, TCGplayer, Amazon, and elsewhere Magic is sold.