Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek: Part II

Intro

A big reason I left Magic: the Gathering was the creation of the Universes Beyond brand imprint. I mean, if I have to say the phrase "brand imprint,' things aren’t going great. I should be able to buy my Magic cards and play Magic and not think about branding, intellectual property, or any of the cursed phrases I’m about to say —

Magic was going to use that brand imprint to create cross-corporate synergy with AMC's The Walking Dead franchise. It was going to be a dozen, maybe two dozen, cards representing the The Walking Dead television series. There’s a lot of reasons not to like that.

As cynics and hypemen predicted, The Walking Dead Magic product was just the beginning. It was immediately followed by Stranger Things, Street Fighter, Warhammer 40K, and, honestly, most of the The Ultimate Showdown (of ultimate destiny).

Not pictured.

And I was unhappy at the time, but I did have to ask myself, "What if they did this with an intellectual property I liked?" I couldn’t think of any at the time because the ones I thought were unthinkable, but late last year Wizards of the Coast revealed they'd broken the genre/taste barrier: Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek.

My response at the time was unenthusiastic, but in the creation of those Universes Beyond and other products in the time since I left Magic, Wizards of the Coast had done some creative work. I kept up to poo-poo the bad ones and ignore the good ones, but I'm a bitch. 

 

I mean, I call those changes "fiddly," "cumbersome," and "way too logistically demanding," for a game I'd want to play, but the fact is they did some interesting stuff.

Stations - Stations are like vehicles but with a higher investment for a permanent activation. Not very "space," but it was something.

Dungeons - Dungeons are a set of prescribed things with sequential nodes that a specific triggered ability–Enter the Dungeon–advanced you through. Sure, unique ability X can move you through a series of pre-defined effects and modal effects. I'm Captain Star-Trek-Is-a-Dungeon-Delving game, so they could use that.

Learn and Lessons - Let's talk about set of cards [Y] which can be pulled down by ability Z. What if Scanning lets you pull a Data (not him) card from outside of play?

Keyword counters - What if we used counters which conferred more complex benefits than a +1/+1 counter? What if our away teams or ships could grow and adapt to challenges?

Party - The senior staff is more diverse and robust than a dungeons and dragons party, but getting a bonus by having a set collection of creatures in play sounds promising. A little Magic and Star Trek at the same time. What if we didn't do the full six or seven person senior staff? What if we just did the four people of an away team?

Shield Counter - Ships have shields. This one isn't very complicated.

I don’t know if the Magic developers particularly like Star Trek, but they’re nerds so I assumed they had some affection for it. Despite all my curmudgeonly doubts and the gulf between Magic: the Gathering and Star Trek, I thought they must have something clever to put in. 

 

I like designing a Magic card or two from time to time, but at the time I just couldn't find a way to make it work.

The Spoilers
And with the previews that have been released, it turns out that neither could Magic: the Gathering. I present to you Jim Kirk: 

Game recognize game, and this guy is lookin' unfamiliar.

Maybe it's just because I'm on record–a whole podcast called 17 to 01–where I talk about James Tiberius Kirk being all five colors, but this is a rich, complex character reduced to a monocolored impulse draw body. I don't like it.

The responses I've selectively tuned into either see Star Trek characters turned into uncompelling Magic: the Gathering cards or an uninspired, branded set of Magic: the Gathering cards. And honestly, this is the only time that "not charting with power creep" shit has ever warmed my heart.

 

Here's an alternative:

Whenever you're on the defensive, he can pull a card, crazy ivan, or just sacrifice himself to stop it. He's always got options when you're under the gun. They change with time, but that's the guy. I can't list all the ways the original misses the mark, but that man who changes over time is one of them.

Look, the Borg are fine. The Borg are actually what I expected the Eldrazi to be. Well maybe they have all little bit less synergy from like cards in graveyards, exile, and hand, but…y'know, generally.

The sagas are pretty good. They seem to capture the events they're describing and…

…it's not the strongest synergy, but I'll take it.

And the preconception of the Federation and Starfleet as being this…lovey-dovey blue-white-green thing also skews the precon decks, which are all white:

The gang's all here, if "the gang" is every white shard. Oh wait. Naya. Well, no one cares about Naya.

(gods, Naya is so cool)

That said, bad design is bad design:

 

If Boimler attacks, Dr. Crusher will get 2 +1/+1 counters twice and be able to punch the Enterprise in half. Boims would be thrilled, but WHAT?!

And we aren't talking about it, but apparently we're doing something baseball cards have been doing a while. Seven Star Trek "legends" wet-ink-signed 200 textless versions of their characters' cards. Those cards will be in…some products shortly before they're on eBay and then some losers' vault.

The signed cards are textless and I hate textless cards because you shouldn't have to google to see what a card does. Reading the card. Should explain the card.

Doing it Better
It doesn't take a long look to think, "I could do better than that." Because this? It's prima facie bad.

But first, an aside:

There are some elitist fans who expect MTG to share their childish hate for Star Trek series X, Y, or Z. Usually Discovery. There are a lot of reasons you don't make decisions like these people or based on what these people want. 

 

The desire to wield power as though your tastes are the ones that matter, that your–bleh–moral high ground is absolute? That's why you're not making those decisions. Because you're burning whatever elevation you have as soon as you have it for the most marginal, petty of self-righteous victories.

Listen up, scrote refugees: If Star Trek: Picard has one hater it's me. If it has zero haters, I am dead. But I will never doubt for one moment that it belongs in the Magic: the Gathering Star Trek set. Not because they're both disappointing, but because it. is. Star. Trek. And some people like it. End of.

But let's do the thing where we assume everyone else is stupid and I can do it better.

Arenas

The idea is "The Savage Curtain," a classic TOS episode of Star Trek where some being captures the Enterprise and makes Kirk and Spock fight versions of good and evil people from across history. It's the one where they team up with Abraham Lincoln . And so we’re just doing a variation on that where somebody’s making these people fight with each other. 

 

 

 

  

So what's the color pie look like, since we don't need WWWWUUUBBRRG?

How about:
WU - Explorers
RG - Away teams & local civilizations
BG - Borg
WR - Klingons & away teams
UB - Romulans & shapeshifters

We don't need to get into the weeds. We don't need to pigeon-hole local civilizations as RG. We can just say those archetypes fit into those broad structures.

Let's Do It Badly
Star Trek isn't a contest of combatants of incredible strength. Let's fuck the color pie and make everyone a 1/1 creature with Explore. Their color is determined by their division in Starfleet. Fuck the non-Starfleet characters.

And then you add in monsters, and non-exploring crew of non-Starfleet ships, and a few interacting abilities. Boom.

And then you’d play like a mission or a mystery or something and like you and the other player have to like work together to fix it. Or like an anomaly where you both put in resources and you both get something out of it.

This is the bad selection because no one wants a 1/1 Miles O' Brien. They want a Miles O'Brien commander deck even if, realistically, only a fraction of commander decks based on Star Trek would be playable because you can't introduce more than 50 playable commanders in one set.

Systems
My other version which is good, well better than the other one, uses artifacts with a subtype of System to represent the ship. In my world a thing can be a place, or it can be a person but it can’t be both. Having ships be a creature is making a place a person . You can’t just punch a ship; it’s too big. So the player is kind of the ship and your systems come online as you play these artifacts.

 

 

Oh hey, look at that: engineers can draw you cards or systems or pull systems out of your graveyard. You can have scientists do card manipulation for, you know, scanning. Security guys can improve ship weapons systems and also attacking.


And look at this! If you attack players, that’s like attacking their ship. So maybe you can have a card that if you take damage, a console explodes and you can destroy a system instead.

What if you could staff systems and make them better? The system does the thing and that’s great, but when you staff it, you lock down a creature behind to get a bonus.

A player puts together these systems which work well on their own, but a little better together. You also have the Explore mechanic and Surveil so you're working that as well.

I just can't help but think that anything would be better than the lukewarm stuff we've seen so far. Maybe they lead with the garbage? I've never seen WotC do that before, but maybe.

As much as I'd like to see the Magic: the Gathering Star Trek product fail, I wanted it to fail for principled reasons and not because the people to make Magic just didn't make good Magic on this one.

I'm not emotionally invested here, I expected very little and I'm still disappointed.

Honorable Mentions