Magic: The Gathering Devs Were Fighting to Get Onto the Star Trek Design Team

Magic: The Gathering held an incredible release event for the new Star Trek$TREK set, turning the Audrey Irmas Pavilion into the U.S.S. Gathering, complete with a full bridge set, a transporter room, Quark’s bar from Deep Space Nine, and a chance to talk directly with the designers about exactly what went into bringing the Star Trek$TREK universe into Magic: The Gathering. And while the actual event was truly incredible, with fantastic art displays and installations that looked like they were ripped straight off the set of the various Star Trek$TREK series, the thing$FF4 that caught our interest the most was the Q & A session with many of the set’s lead designers, including Gavin Verhey, who showed up in full blue makeup as an Andorian, antennas and all. A big focus of this Q & A was on just how much care and time went into bringing the Star Trek$TREK universe, and its 60 years of lore, to life in Magic, with the designers all talking about the challenge of working that much history into each card so that it feels true to the characters and places from the shows. A great example of this is the new black and green Nog card, who can chance between rogue and scout keywords to help represent his growth on Deep Space 9 from an annoying, mischievous sidekick to the fan favorite, reliable Starfleet cadet and officer we saw on the Defiant at the end of the show. It’s a great example of the attention to detail when it comes to bringing all that history into the actual cards. The other major challenge the design team talked about was the concept of non-violent solutions, as Star Trek$TREK often revolved around diplomacy and exploration over what Verhey called “just punching someone in the face.” This led the Magic: The Gathering team to not only create the new dilemma system, where cards like “Set Phasers To…” offer choices to the player that represent the option of a non-violent or less lethal approach, but the creation of several win conditions that didn’t involve just smashing your opponent down to zero life. Despite all these challenges, the Star Trek$TREK set was incredibly popular inside the Magic: The Gathering studio, with vision design lead Ethan Fleischer saying that staff members fought to get onto the design team since the day it was announced at Wizards of the Coast. As for what iconic Star Trek$TREK characters, ships, and moments didn’t make the cut, we found out from Star Trek$TREK Enterprise star Dominic Keating that his Armory officer, Malcolm Reed didn’t get a card. As he pointed out, “I don’t actually have a card in this game…but the dog does,” hilariously revealing that Captain Archer’s beagle Artemis got a card instead of Malcolm. Senior Narrative designer Crystal Frasier also mentioned that the Akira Class federation starship just barely missed the cut for the new set. Perhaps the strangest near miss was from Gavin Verhey himself, who said that, “I could easily have made every card in this set a starship,” before adding that he had to choose between the deceptively deadly Moops