Magic: The Gathering‘s newly revealed Star Trek cards are not making fans happy. There is one more set coming out this year for Wizards of the Coast’s storied trading card game, and the company has revealed its plans for the near future already. Between a partial 2027 roadmap and upcoming events, there is a lot more coming to Magic: The Gathering beyond its closing set of 2026, including multiple crossovers and unique Secret Lair reprints.
Star Trek comes at the end of one of the busiest years in the history of the game as the fourth Universes Beyond set of 2026 and the seventh total. While Magic: The Gathering‘s new Star Trek cards can be quite good in terms of gameplay, thanks to the new strategies they enable or by powering up existing ones, they have some shared features that are making the overall reception middling at best among many players. This is not a new problem for Universes Beyond, but it’s reaching new heights with the newly revealed cards from MTG‘s latest set.
Magic: The Gathering Players Are Not Happy With Star Trek Cards
Shared in a Reddit post by user LucianoThePig and seen in community card-reveal posts and videos from renowned content creators, MTG‘s new Star Trek cards aren’t being received well for their theme and art. One of the biggest issues with UB sets is that some of them don’t mesh well with MTG‘s high-fantasy design, and such is the case for Star Trek, which is a pure sci-fi universe. More importantly, as LucianoThePig noted in a post with over 2,200 upvotes, most Star Trek cards feature characters in similar-looking uniforms, standing or sitting in a chair against a hard sci-fi background, making them repetitive and uninteresting for the game. Magic: The Gathering is getting even more Star Trek cards through Secret Lair, but they don’t seem to fix the issue either.
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As such, even more than Magic: The Gathering‘s crossover with Assassin’s Creed and Doctor Who, or even the in-multiverse sci-fi set Edge of Eternities, Star Trek focuses on realistic character art and lots of legendary creatures. This makes sense for Star Trek as an IP, and as pointed out by the original poster on Reddit, it fits the series’ universe to have characters with similar uniforms and have them sit in similar-looking chairs. In MTG, between the overall sci-fi theme and the very samey character designs for multiple cards, the set doesn’t really feel unique and/or interesting to many fans.
One commenter joked that this is a good thing for “people in chairs tribal decks,” and the Star Trek set has enough characters sitting down that one could truly start a dedicated deck archetype for it. On the other hand, WotC has revealed the first-ever “original UB” set for the game. Magic: The Gathering‘s Darkhold Destiny set is an original Marvel set where the setting was made collaboratively by WotC and Marvel, featuring Magic-first character designs.
As for Star Trek, it also features a new Magic: The Gathering type of card, with character-focused headliners having real handwritten signatures from their respective actors. This is yet another polarizing element of the set, with some saying that it will break immersion and make the set even more expensive to collect.
