My Personal Trek

Welcome to the first week of Magic: The Gathering® | Star Trek™ previews. Today's article will look different than most Making Magic preview articles. I didn't lead a design team for this set. I wasn't even on a design team for this set. (I did a little playtesting, which I'll get to below.) So, I'm not going to tell you the story of the set's design or introduce you to the design teams.

Today, I'm going to walk you through my personal history with Star Trek and talk about how this set allowed me to experience Universes Beyond as a fan for the first time. I will also show off a new card from the set. Let's get started.

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My Continuing Mission

Growing up, I was a big fan of science fiction, and I was a voracious reader, so I read a lot of sci-fi short stories and novels. I also saw as many science-fiction films in the theater as possible. I also watched as many science-fiction shows as I could. This was the '70s though, there weren't all that many science-fiction TV shows and movies to watch.

We got cable and our first video recorder in the early '80s, so in my youth, the only way to watch something was to see it when it was actually airing. Our television used an antenna. We lived at the bottom of a hill, so until my teenage years, we only got three television stations. When a station wasn't showing new content (game shows in the morning, soap operas in the afternoon, news and entertainment shows at night), they would show reruns of old television shows.

When I was around eight years old in 1975, one of the three stations used to show Star Trek reruns (I believe it was Saturdays at 3 p.m.). I had a habit of turning on the television when I was bored and flicking through the channels to see which of the three options was the most watchable. The first time I ever saw Star Trek, I just stumbled upon it. Most of the time, I watched things like Bowling for Dollars. A television show about people on a spaceship felt like finding gold in a creek.

This was long before streaming, and there was no way to record episodes. If I wanted to watch Star Trek, I had to tune in at 3 p.m. on a Saturday—and I did. Quite a lot! I don't know how many of the 79 episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series I watched back in the '70s, but it was a lot. I had no control over what was on, nor did I know how many episodes existed. The internet didn't become a household thing until the '90s. Back then, my favorite episode was "Trouble with Tribbles."

In 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released. My dad watched many episodes with me, so he and I went to see the movie. Every couple of years, a new Star Trek movie would release and he and I would go see it. Once we got cable, it became much easier to watch episodes of the original series.

As junior in college, I was still getting to know all the people on the floor of my dorm. One day, I walked into an open door to find about half of my floor watching a brand-new Star Trek television show: Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a two-hour episode, and I watched the whole thing. I really liked it. But I was in college. I had a television, but didn't have a VCR, so I had no way to record episodes. I was busy doing college stuff, so I didn't watch the series.

That is, until I moved to Los Angeles to make it as a television writer. While Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on television, the older episodes were reruns in syndication and aired every night, five nights a week, at 7 p.m. I turned it on one day and quickly recognized it as the show I'd watched in my dorm. After watching one episode, I knew I needed to see them all.

This time I did have a VCR, so I started taping episodes. I even managed to get a full list of episodes, so I made a sheet of them and checked off each episode as I saw it. I can still remember crossing off the final episode from my list. I believe I caught up before the fourth season started. In the age of streaming, it can be hard to appreciate the difficulty of catching up on episodes of an old show, but it truly was a huge effort.

This brings me to 1991. This was the year I started working on Roseanne. (Here's an article on that story.) To tell this next part of the story, I need to explain a few things about being a television writer in the '90s. At the time, to provide work for up-and-coming writers, each show had to have three episodes written by writers who were not on the writing staff. This was something put in place by the Writer's Guild of America, which oversees writing for television and movies.

Each show would bring writers in to pitch ideas, ideally for the show to purchase from the writer. This pitch meeting is how I got my job on Roseanne. (Getting a staff job off a pitch was a very rare occurrence.) After I left Roseanne, I pitched to many other shows, one of which was Star Trek: The Next Generation. I had the opportunity to make three pitches. The fact that I got to go back multiple times showed they liked my pitches, although only once did an idea make it past the pitching stage.

For those that are curious, the story that made it beyond the pitch stage was about the Enterprise having to ferry an important piece of information, which they stored in Data's brain. An attack on Data caused the "finder" of his computer brain to malfunction, meaning he couldn't differentiate pieces of information, which brought back many memories of other people Data had in his brain (a long story from a previous episode in the show). The writer I pitched it to really liked the idea, but the head writer ended up passing on it.

My favorite story I pitched was called "Themata." (I always named each pitch.) It was a story written for Wesley Crusher. (Wil Wheaton would return once a season, so they had asked for Wesley stories in the pitch.) He would find himself in the future with various members of the Enterprise crew, but each was plucked from a different point in time. The big twist in the story was that each of them had taught him an important lesson. When combined, those lessons were the key to solving the problem he was in when he was teleported away.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, I used the core idea of this story to write a short story in Making Magic many years ago, also called "Themata."

In 1992, a new Star Trek show came out: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I was all in. Rather than taking place on a starship that traveled from place to place, this series was set on a space station where things came to visit them. This particular Star Trek series is important to today's article, because my preview card is Deep Space 9.

Then in 1994, another Star Trek show began: Star Trek: Voyager. I started watching that as well. In 1995, I stopped watching all the Star Trek shows. Why? I'll give you all a moment to see if you can guess what happened.

Yes, in October of 1995, I was hired full time at Wizards of the Coast. I threw myself into my new job. I worked a lot of hours. When I wasn't working, I was playing games late into the night with R&D. (This is a story for another article, but all those late nights with Richard Garfield teaching us games from across the globe were very impactful to me as a game designer.) I was barely ever in my apartment, mostly returning just to sleep, so I got way behind on my television watching. Also, the following year, I started dating this lovely lady named Lora who I had met at Wizards, and that also distracted me from my normal television watching.

I still saw all the Star Trek movies when they came out, so I kept my eye on Star Trek, but I never got back into watching any Star Trek television shows. Several are on my list to watch. There's just so many good geeky shows and only so many hours to watch them.

Fast forward to about five years ago. Occasionally, Wizards employees can fill out a form and share how familiar they are with a variety of properties we're considering for Universes Beyond. We have to rate ourselves on a five-point scale. A one means you have no familiarity with the property. A two means you know the property, but just a little. A three means you're familiar with it, but on a surface level. A four means you're a fan, and you know more than the average person. A five means you're a superfan.

I chose to rate myself as a four for Star Trek. I know the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation very well, probably close to a five. I know some things about the other two Star Trek series I watched, especially the earlier seasons. I know the movies. But I don't know the rest of the television shows since Voyager.

R&D uses this scale to help them decide if we have enough designers to make a release based on a franchise and to figure out who to put on the design team if we choose to make it.

R&D had plenty of Star Trek experts, and there was enough other stuff that I needed to deal with, so I didn't get put on the Vision Design team for the Star Trek set. Generally, I work on every Magic Multiverse vision design and have worked on about half of the Universes Beyond vision designs. This set would have been a good fit for me, but it just didn't work out due to the other things going on.

We work on a lot of things simultaneously during design, so when you're not directly working on something, it's quite easy to lose track of it. I sit near Ethan Fleischer who was the vision design lead for Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek, so I would hear him talk about the set on occasion, but I really didn't know too much about it. I was aware of what the named mechanics were as that relates to my job, but I knew next to nothing of any card-by-card executions.

My first time ever playing with the set was actually in a draft during a "play day." For those that haven't heard of play days, they are days where we clear everyone's schedule and spend the whole day playing with a set, usually during set design. There are opportunities to draft it, play Sealed with it, play with any Commander decks, and more based on the products included in the set. Almost everyone in R&D participates in play days and others can join from throughout Wizards. These are the single largest sources of outside information we get for sets, so they are pretty important. Most sets get two play days, one earlier in set design and one later.

My first experience with the set was during this play day. Most of the time, I'm very involved in the making of our sets, so it's hard to have an outsider's view because I just have too much inside knowledge about what our sets have been through. This time, that wasn't true. I'd never played with it. And it was a property I really liked, as I was a self-proclaimed four. I wasn't going to know everything, but I would know a lot, and I would get to see characters, stories, and starships that had emotional weight for me. This was the closest I'd ever been to experiencing a fan's view of a new Universes Beyond set.

Gavin was the lead set designer, so he wrote the ten two-color archetypes on a whiteboard. Reading through them was the first time I'd seen the draft archetypes. White-black was focused on the Borg. Green-blue was about the Doctor subtype and the medical team. White-blue was about the engineers. So much sounded cool, but the Borg stood out. One of my all-time favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation was the two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds," which is probably the best season finale cliffhanger the show had ever done. Playing the Borg for my very first draft sounded like an awesome idea. I decided I was going to try and draft white-black.

I opened my first booster and saw the mythic rare Captain James T. Kirk. I'm not made of stone. Whatever plan I had was thrown out the window. I opened Captain Kirk. And not just any Captain Kirk, the mythic rare Captain Kirk. I did look at the rest of the cards in my booster, but that was just as a meaningless gesture. I was taking the mythic rare. There was no other option.

My second booster had the mythic rare Mr. Spock, Science Officer. I mean, I already had the Captain. The universe had made it clear what my second pick should be. Again, I looked through the rest of the booster, but it was obvious that Spock was going into my hand. Gavin walked up to me (probably because he noticed the giant grin on my face) and asked, "You got a plan?"

I showed him my two picks and said, "I don't know quite what I'm doing yet, but it involves having these two cards in my deck." I went on to draft a blue-red deck. I picked up Data, Worf, and a host of other characters I fondly remembered from all the shows I'd watched. When I got to characters I didn't know, I found out where they were from.

I had such a good play day. I obviously got to play a lot of Magic, so that's always fun, but I'd forgotten how much Star Trek knowledge I had in my brain. Star Trek hadn't been a huge part of my life for many years, but there was a point in time when it was something I'd interacted with constantly. Those feelings, memories, and emotions were all tucked away, ready to be reignited.

That's the power of Universes Beyond. As you grow up, different stories and worlds become passions woven into your life at different times. Even when you move on to other things, the time spent with them sticks with you. These stories become a part of who you are. Star Trek is an amazing collection of stories, one that's occupied many hours of my life. Getting to sit down and play with all these characters and moments made my memories come rushing back, and it reminded me of why I spent so much time with Star Trek. After that play day, those new Star Trek television shows moved up a bit on my watch list.

That's my story of how a simple play day made years of memories flood back. I've written about interacting with Universes Beyond properties that I'm still actively involved with. I've talked about playing with Universes Beyond properties I had no knowledge of. This is the first time I've interacted with a Universes Beyond set for something that I was very passionate about in the past. I got a chance to experience the joy of rediscovering something from my past and relearning why I loved it so much.

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That's all for today. I hope you enjoyed a bit more personal article. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, our Star Trek set, or the Star Trek franchise. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week for more from Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek.

Until then, may you rediscover something you love.