LGS Owners Continue To Debate Universes Beyond MTG Sets With Prerelease Figures

Published Nov 9, 2026, 10:40 AM EST Niall (pronounced Ny-ul) is a UK-based writer who has been writing about Magic: The Gathering throughout his entire career, with everything from new set breakdowns and individual deck guides to offering his opinions on the state of formats and the general direction of the iconic TCG. Niall also has a rich history covering triple-A releases, sports games, and PC hardware. Despite Magic: The Gathering's creator, Wizards of the Coast, insistingthat Universes Beyond is largely a well-supported and popular part of the game, it's getting hard to ignore the persistent negative narrative around these sets when prerelease comes around. Star Trek officially hit prerelease last Friday, and while I enjoyed my own experience at my LGS, it's impossible to ignore the waves of disparaging comments online, whether it be about attendance, playability, or the fact that stores are reportedly being forced to buy Universes Beyond stock under threat of having in-universe stock limited if they don't. Early online responses to the set and prerelease are bleak, and when you combine that with complaints from players who were willing to buy and invest in the set but couldn't get stock in some cases, it paints a picture of a poor end to 2026. The key, however, is that the negative voices are vocal online players and represent a minority of the game's audience, and this is becoming a consistent trend after the release of Universes Beyond sets that don't fit the typical Venn diagram of Magic players' presumed interests, because the silence after the release of The Hobbit was deafening. Star Trek Prerelease Not Expected To Break Any Records The post that prompted my deeper look at how the Star Trek prerelease was performing overall came from Robert Taylor, in response to a call from Saffron Olive asking how the events were shaping up. The post, which is still live on Twitter / X, has Robert sharing attendance numbers for all of this year's pre-release events at their local store, Mayhem Comics in Iowa. As you can see from the tweet above, Star Trek had the worst attendance of any event held at that store this year, with 62 attendees, while all in-universe sets had figures above 110. This is, of course, meaningless. It's one store's figure with zero context, but it's useful data when combined with the huge wave of other figures shared across social media and Reddit. Players are reporting that Star Trek was the outright worst, or among the worst attended events of the year, with the common phrase I'm seeing in posts being "around half" when comparing Star Trek to Reality Fracture, Secrets of Strixhaven, and even The Hobbit. Personally, my LGS has a capacity of 60, spread across two days: 40 on Friday and 20 on Saturday, while Marvel Super Heroes, Reality Fracture, and The Hobbit were sell-outs; Star Trek wasn't, but it wasn't poorly attended either. Four spaces remained for Friday and four for Saturday, so given the time of year and proximity to other sets, this isn't a bad result. On the belief that store owners are being forced to overstock Universes Beyond products under threat that they will not receive any in-universe stock as a repercussion, the two WPN store owners who I spoke to deny this, with one going so far as to say they felt safe ordering less Star Trek stock based on customer interest and have been given no indications that their Nauctis stock is suffering as a result. Timing Is Everything (And Reality Fracture Was Only Six Weeks Ago!) Wizards of the Coast won't reveal any stats or figures from the prerelease or launch of Star Trek unless they are positive, meaning we'll need to wait until the new year and the next financial update to find out what impact the set had, positive or negative, on sales figures. Despite all the online bickering, a number of players and store owners believe they have identified the biggest reason Star Trek numbers are down in their areas: Reality Fracture was only six weeks ago. Granted, there's an entire payday between the two sets, but given the current state of the world and Magic, players may have had to choose between the two sets and decided to put the larger chunk of their cash and time into the in-universe set. We now have just over two months until the Nauctis: The Sunken Realm prerelease at the end of January, so players have the chance to rest and refresh, ready for a whole new year of Magic. With six sets confirmed on the MTG 2027 calendar, all of which are full-sized and launching with at least four Commander precons, let's just hope that production delays are something we leave behind in 2026, because that's certainly not helping how players are perceiving new sets either. Franchise Magic: The Gathering Original Release Date August 5, 1993 Publisher Wizards of the Coast Designer(s) Richard Garfield