"What Does It Mean To Have Diplomacy Win?" Magic: The Gathering Producers Tease How Star Trek Reinvents The Iconic Card Game

Published Nov 10, 2026, 11:07 AM EST Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com "Universes Beyond" has been a great evolution for Magic: The Gathering, with the incoming Star Trek set showcasing how the different approaches to the game can fuse innovation with fandom. The various "Universes Beyond" expansions invite experimentation from the game designers in terms of mechanics and a full-throated love for the source material that inspired them. It's perhaps never felt clearer than in the Star Trek expansion, which Wizards of the Coast showed off in Los Angeles during a star-studded preview event. Screen Rant was in attendance at the event and got to take part in a Q&A with some of the creatives behind the set, who explained their inspirations for the set and how it plays with the underlying mechanics of the game. Star Trek Reinvents How Magic: The Gathering Works One of the more intriguing elements of the new expansion is the way it embraces Star Trek's legacy of non-violence. While there are definitely ways to win through combat and spells, fun alternative mechanics like "Peace In Our Time" and "Kobayashi Maru Scenario" can come into play to earn a victory in unique ways with the set's various commander decks and strategies. This was a concept at play in the underlying design of the mechanics, something that Game Designer Gavin Verhey explained was central to the team's approach to the set. "This thing was so interesting because one of the big challenges we had to solve was how do we make it feel like Star Trek. Star Trek is a show that has sights sometimes, but it's also about a lot of things that are not fighting." "We designed the mechanics to really tie into that. Strange new worlds, dilemmas, even bringing back spacecraft. Those are all what I call 'build-up mechanics.' They take time to get rolling and do things other than attack and block. Building those in was the cornerstone of the set. Once you had those, the rest fell into place." Senior Game Producer Nicolette Dunks noted that "One of the things that we did really early on... was just brainstorming ways to not have the win condition be to get your opponent to zero. What does it mean to have a diplomacy win? What does it mean to be like bartering or trading for goods or services? Looking into that really early on meant that the iteration that we could do just within the teams [was impressive]. You got to see it get fine-tuned in ways that made the game feel meaningful without it needing to be attacked." Going Boldly With Magic The Gathering Star Trek has been an enduring hit for six decades, with the expansive franchise covering different corners of the cosmos. It's inspired and influenced countless creatives over the years, with that passion bleeding over into the Universe Beyond set. There are deep cuts to the larger lore of the franchise, iconic characters all over the set. There's a clear love for the source material with the design team, with Narrative Lead Crystal Frasier recounting how they approached different iterations of the show and tropes from it for card inspiration. "From a creative standpoint, we put in a lot of work to try and make the set feel very much like Star Trek, reflecting the nonviolent approach." "There's plenty of phaser blasts, but when it came to the art, we wanted to showcase a lot of negotiation, a lot of study, a lot of cooking, which is weirdly a huge subsidy at Star Trek. I was told early on I could not make this a Deep Space Nine exclusive set, much to my chagrin. There's a lot that got left on the cutting room floor. There are only so many hundreds of cards in a Magic set, and we have 60 years of material. I was a lead heritage designer, so I got everything in that I could." We really wanted to make sure that no matter what show that you were in love with, there was something for you to come and really say, "Yeah, that was the moment where I fell in love with Star Trek.'" "Universes Beyond is sometimes a collection of kind of moments and memories," Principal Game Experience Designer Matt Tabak explained. "If you're a big Star Trek fan, we want you to be able to look at the set and see episodes and scenes and parts of movies that you've seen before and have it be very evocative. You can see this in things like the sagas, which sort of encapsulate entire episodes. "You can see this in characters being portrayed in iconic moments from their journeys. Universes Beyond is really a great extension of this franchise? We really wanted to make sure that no matter what show that you were in love with, there was something for you to come and really say, "Yeah, that was the moment where I fell in love with Star Trek.'" Reflecting on finding ways to bring personal favorite elements of the franchise to the forefront, Principal Game Designer Ethan Fleischer's fandom for Star Trek was clear from the onset of the interviews, noting that the franchise was always a big fandom. "I have a giant collection of family blueprints from the 1980s, the golden age of fan-made Star Trek blueprints, back before all these fancy digital tools came out." "If I could just have anything just totally self-indulgent in there, it would be one of the spaceships from Francis Joseph's Star Trek Technical Manual. That's just a piece of ancillary media. The thing that I really wanted to show off in the sort of deep underbelly of the lore was this animated series from the early 1970s to the shows coming out now." This is best showcased perhaps in the art for the set, which finds a great balance in the typical Magic: The Gathering attention to detail. As Fleischer explained, "What if all of a sudden, the Star Trek creators were freed from certain types of budgetary constraints regarding makeup and character designs? What if they could make these weird aliens that would have been prohibitively expensive in the original series?" Video Game(s) Magic: The Gathering, Magic the Gathering Commander, Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers, Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014, Magic: The Gathering Arena Created by Richard Garfield Main Genre Fantasy Release Date August 5, 1993