The 5 Most Powerful Game-Changing Star Trek Magic Cards
Which cards from the newest Universes Beyond set are a worthwhile investment beyond a love for Star Trek?
Since Wizards of the Coast started releasing Universes Beyond expansions back in 2020, the beloved trading card game Magic: The Gathering has visited numerous strange new worlds and adopted a wide variety of new characters. Rick Grimes and the ensemble from The Walking Dead, Ash Williams and the Cabin from the Evil Dead franchise, and even the greatest superheroes and supervillains from the Marvel Universe have crossed over into the world of MtG recently. And while the initiative has its critics amongst players, one thing that cannot be disputed is how immensely lucrative it has been for the company.
Now, another Marvel UB set has arrived: The Star Trek MtG expansion releases on November 13, and it’s coming with plenty of booster packs, four preconstructed Commander decks, brand new game mechanics, and even textless cards signed by actors within the Star Trek franchise.
Like every Universes Beyond set before it, most of the cards are designed for synergy within the set itself. But what about cards you could put in a regular MtG deck outside of just the Star Trek sets?
Here are five cards from the new Star Trek MtG release that will be worthwhile in any deck.
The Borg Queen
Her exile/assimilation combo is more than enough for non-Star Trek MtG fans to understand why the Borg Queen is such a formidable foe.
One of the worst things that can happen to you in a game of MtG is being unable to play the cards in your deck, but watching your opponent play your cards instead is torturous. The Borg Queen does both. A four power/four toughness legendary artifact creature with the ability to give each artifact creature you control (including herself) two +1/+1 counters is already a worthwhile way to spend seven mana, but her secondary ability makes her look like a steal: whenever the Borg Queen enters or attacks, she can force a target opponent to exile the top card of their deck until they exile a creature spell, which she can then steal and make even more dangerous with another +1/+1 counter.
It’s courtesy of the new “Assimilate” mechanic introduced in the Star Trek expansion, a tactic prevalent in the black/white/blue “We Are The Borg” preconstructed Commander deck. Assimilate allows a player to hijack control over their opponent’s creatures and turn them into Borg artifact creatures along with whatever effects they already had, which plays perfectly in a deck that also provides plenty of tribal benefits to each of your Borg creatures. She might not be playable in Standard, but her sheer power as the deck’s face commander is more than evidence of why.
Dr. Beverly Crusher
One of the staple abilities of white as a color in Magic is life gain, which is not only great insurance to have when your opponents are playing massive creatures or dealing direct damage, but it also provides additional value in the form of cards with life gain triggers. Dr. Beverly Crusher should be an instant addition to any decks built around cards with life gain triggers, because her presence doubles any effects that trigger when you gain life. Her ability even works in her own favor, as each time her controller gains life, Dr. Crusher gets a +1/+1 counter.
Crystalline Entity
`Board wipes can often be a necessary (if not despised by your friends) solution if you’re falling behind in a game where everyone else has already built up terrifying board states, and occasionally they can provide the path to a devastating win condition as well.
Crystalline Entity is one such example, an eight-mana seven power/seven toughness colorless artifact creature that instantly destroys every non-artifact creature on the field when it enters. It serves as either a self-serving reset button or a guaranteed victory if you’re playing a deck filled with other artifact creatures, be it the Borg-themed Commander precon or any of Magic’s existing artifact-typal decks.
Genesis Device
Since it was introduced in the 2009 Zendikar expansion, landfall has quickly become a reliable and useful strategy for mono or dual-colored green decks looking to gain additional value from having lands enter the battlefield, and Genesis Device makes it even easier to do that to game-changing ends.
When it enters the battlefield, you automatically get to drop a basic land or planet card onto the field tapped, which gives you a landfall trigger off the bat, but if you tap for five mana and sacrifice the legendary artifact, you can sacrifice any number of lands you control and put that many from your deck onto the battlefield tapped. While it seems like an elaborate way of just replacing any unsavory lands you have on the field, imagine how devastating it could be to sacrifice 12 lands in a deck where Hearthhull, the Worldseed (any time you sacrifice a land, each opponent loses 2 life) is your commander, combo’d with any number of creatures that receive +1/+1 counters or create tokens any time a land enters.
Deep Space 9
One card that translates to four additional cards on the battlefield every turn is a little broken.
When Wizards of the Coast debuted the new spacecraft artifact type in last year’s Edge of Eternities expansion, it was clear that they had immense potential, and what better way to exemplify that than with an IP home to some of the greatest spaceships in fiction? The Star Trek expansion adds numerous recognizable spacecraft to MtG, but arguably the best is Deep Space 9, the titular space station from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although it doesn’t turn into a massive artifact creature when it gets enough charge counters like some other spacecraft, what it does do is even better: for nine mana, whenever DS9 enters and at the beginning of each of your upkeep phases, it allows you to put four permanents of any kind from the top of your library onto the battlefield, and once it receives the nine charge counters needed to crew it, it can also give each of your creatures +3/+3.
Bottom line: There are a host of new mechanics, characters, artifacts, and more dropping with the Star Trek expansion, and the sheer magnitude of it all feels indicative of the ethos behind the franchise’s perpetual mantra of “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Whether it be amassing giant spaceships for an armada, exploring into your deck for card advantage, or assimilating your opponent’s creatures, Magic: The Gathering’s crossover with one of the most beloved pieces of science fiction gives players brand new ways to achieve victory.
