MTG Star Trek Set Guide: Mechanics, Boosters, Release Date

Seven signed cards, fewer than 250 copies of each, carrying the signatures of the actors on them. That is item one on Wizards' own list of what to know about collecting Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek. The numbers that decide what you buy are smaller: 32 new cards in each Commander deck, one Play Booster in 25 with a stardates reprint in it, and a guaranteed foil that this set still has and 2027's packs will not.

Previews started on October 20 and run through October 29. Wizards has already published the set's mechanics, its full product list and its pack odds, so a lot is fixed even though the card list is not complete. This guide covers what is confirmed as of October 23, what is still blank, and two dates on which Wizards' own pages disagree. The sources, all checked today:

• Wizards' October 20 articles: Star Trek Mechanics, Collecting Star Trek, the Buyer's Guide and the Commander Decklists page.
• The October 16 preview schedule and the MTG Arena event schedule.
• Two Wizards Play Network notices: Dates and Details and the Beginner Box cancellation.
• The Comprehensive Rules effective September 25, 2026, and Scryfall's card data for card text.

The dates, and the two that disagree

Two dates conflict between Wizards' own pages:

• The complete gallery. The preview schedule says the complete card image gallery arrives on October 30, and the Arena event schedule says previews end that day. The Important Dates list in Collecting Star Trek says "Full Card Image Gallery: November 30." That is two pages against one. Expect October 30.
• Commander Party, round 2. Collecting Star Trek says December 11–17. WPN's Dates and Details page, published August 18, says January 15–21, 2027. Ask your store which one it has scheduled.

The set's first big competitive outing lands on release day. World Championship 32's competitor fact sheet opens both Friday and Saturday with three rounds of Star Trek Booster Draft, followed by four rounds of Standard. Our MagicCon: Atlanta preview covers the event itself.

Three set codes, three sets of legality

Star Trek is a Universes Beyond set, and it ships under three set codes. Where a card is legal depends on its code:

Play Boosters hold TRK and SDS cards, and both are playable in Star Trek Draft and Sealed. TRC cards do not come in Play Boosters. They come in the Commander decks, Welcome Decks and Scene Boxes, and in one guaranteed slot in every Collector Booster. That last route is the trap. The TRC card you open in a Collector Booster may be a new design that is illegal in Standard, Pioneer and Modern. The Hobbit set the same trap with its HOC cards, and our Universes Beyond explainer walks through it. Read the set code before you sleeve it.

One more thing about Scryfall: right now it shows TRK cards as not legal in Standard. That is because the set has not released yet, not a ruling. Wizards' Collecting article gives the legality directly.

Standard runway. The October 12 banned and restricted announcement says the release of Nauctis: The Sunken Realm will trigger the next rotation. That set is "two sets from now", meaning the next one after Star Trek. Seven sets leave: Wilds of Eldraine, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, The Big Score, Bloomburrow and Duskmourn. Star Trek is not on that list. It enters Standard in November and stays through the 2027 rotation. Our Standard guide covers how rotation works.

New main-set mechanics

Beam me up

Beam me up is a new keyword ability on some instants and sorceries. It lets you cast the card from your graveyard by paying the listed cost and returning a creature you control to its owner's hand. Open Communications is the cleanest example. It costs {U} to draw a card, and its beam me up cost is {2}{U}.

The rulings that matter:

• Returning the creature is part of the cost. Once you announce the cast, it is too late for anyone to respond by removing that creature.
• Mana value always uses the printed mana cost. Open Communications has mana value 1 even when you pay {2}{U} for it.
• The spell is exiled afterward, whatever happens. That covers resolving, being countered, or fizzling on illegal targets.
• Timing still applies. A sorcery with beam me up is still main-phase-only from the graveyard.

The upside Wizards points out: the creature you return comes back down later, so its "enters" abilities fire again and any unwanted Auras fall off.

Face a dilemma

Face a dilemma is a new rules term, not a keyword. You face a dilemma whenever you choose one or more modes for a modal spell or ability, which means anything with "Choose one" or similar. Command Decision, a two-mana white common, is a modal sorcery: destroy a creature with power 4 or greater, or draw a card.

Three rulings decide how the payoffs count:

• Choosing the mode is the whole requirement. Captain Benjamin Sisko makes a 1/1 Officer at your end step for each dilemma you faced that turn. It counts modal spells that were countered, and ones that fizzled, as long as you chose a mode.
• Choosing several modes is still one dilemma. That includes picking the same mode more than once on cards that allow it.
• No legal mode means no dilemma. If a modal trigger has no mode you can legally choose, usually because there are no targets, nothing counts.

Federation

Federation is an ability word for abilities that count the number of creature types among the non-Borg creatures you control. Wizards' example: Hoshi Sato, Exolinguist (Human Scientist) plus Captain Benjamin Sisko (Human Officer) is three types, because Human only counts once. Hoshi's ability looks at that many cards from the top of your library when she enters.

The Borg exception matters, because of the next mechanic. A Borg creature contributes none of its creature types to your federation count. The one exception is a type that also appears on one of your non-Borg creatures, which still counts from that creature.

Strange new worlds

Strange new worlds is an ability word for abilities that count your differently named lands. Each name counts once. Wizards' example: three Forests, an Island and a Breeding Pool is 3. The Traveler, a {G}{U} legendary Scout, has power equal to that number. Deep Space Scan draws that many cards.

In Limited, the land slot is where this mechanic gets fed, and the next section on boosters has the numbers.

Spacecraft return, and some can be your commander

Spacecraft and station first appeared in Edge of Eternities, which Scryfall dates to August 1, 2025, and they return here. The CR's version of station (702.184a) reads: "Tap another untapped creature you control: Put a number of charge counters on this permanent equal to the tapped creature's power. Activate only as a sorcery." A Spacecraft gets the abilities in each striation once it has that many charge counters. If the striation has a power/toughness box, the Spacecraft also becomes an artifact creature.

Two rulings from Wizards' mechanics article are worth knowing at a Prerelease table:

• The creature you tap can be one that just came under your control this turn. A freshly cast creature can station on the turn it lands.
• Station is sorcery speed. It is main phase only, with an empty stack.

None of Wizards' three Star Trek feature articles says whether a Spacecraft can lead a Commander deck. The rules do. Under CR 903.3, a commander must be legendary and be a creature card, a Vehicle card, or "a Spacecraft card with one or more power/toughness boxes." Brawl's rule, 903.12c, adds planeswalkers to the same list. That makes U.S.S. Enterprise-D, Galaxy-Class, the {3} legendary Spacecraft at the top of this page, a legal commander. Its 7+ striation carries a 4/5 box.

Deep Space 9 is the counterexample. It is a legendary Spacecraft whose only striation has no power/toughness box, so station never turns it into a creature, and it cannot be your commander.

Before you build a deck around the Enterprise-D, check its color identity. It is colorless, and rule 903.5c lets a deck include a card only if every color in that card's identity is in the commander's. An Enterprise-D deck is therefore a colorless deck. Among the cards revealed so far, other legendary Spacecraft with a power/toughness box include:

• U.S.S. Enterprise-A, Free Spirit (white)
• U.S.S. Reliant, From Hell's Heart (black)
• U.S.S. Discovery, at Black Alert (green)
• Starship Enterprise (colorless), a new card from the Commander decks

Assimilate and the Borg

Assimilate is a new keyword action. It steals creatures, and it works one of two ways depending on where the creature is.

• A card that is not on the battlefield goes onto the battlefield under your control with a +1/+1 counter.
• A creature already on the battlefield comes under your control, then gets a +1/+1 counter.

Either way, it becomes a Borg artifact creature and loses its other creature types. It keeps any supertypes, card types and non-creature subtypes it had, so a legendary creature stays legendary.

Borg Cube is the main-set example. It is a seven-mana Spacecraft with affinity for artifact creatures. When it enters or attacks, it assimilates a creature card it exiled, and if it cannot, it exiles up to one target creature. Its 12+ striation is a 6/6 that gives your artifact creatures flying.

Put assimilate next to federation and the two pull in opposite directions. Say you assimilate an opponent's Human Officer. It turns into a Borg and loses its creature types, so it adds nothing to your federation count. If your deck wants both mechanics, count before you steal.

The four Commander decks

Each deck has an MSRP of $74.99. It holds 100 cards: a traditional foil borderless face commander and 99 non-foil cards, 32 of them new to Magic, plus 10 double-sided tokens. The Collector's Edition versions have the same lists with every card in surge foil, at $159.99.

Two ability words appear only in the Commander decks:

• Battlefront counts the opponents you attacked this turn. Creatures that enter the battlefield attacking do not count. The count remembers earlier combats in the same turn, and an opponent you attacked twice counts once. Wizards' example: Worf exiles one card if you attack one opponent. If you then attack the other two in an extra combat, he exiles three cards on that second trigger.
• Seek out triggers whenever you draw your second card each turn. It triggers even if the permanent was not under your control when you drew the first card. That includes drawing on opponents' turns.

The decklists are not out yet. As of October 23, Wizards' decklist page says "We'll reveal the contents of this Commander deck in the future" for each of the four. The Commander preview slots run October 26 (We Are the Borg), October 27 (Federation Fleet), October 28 (Klingon Fury) and October 29 (Landing Party). Until then, the card image gallery shows the four commanders and some of the new cards, such as Christine Chapel, Combat Medic and Starship Enterprise, but not the full 100-card lists. Once you have a deck, our precon upgrade guide covers what to change first.

What is in a Play Booster

A Play Booster costs $6.99, the same Universes Beyond tier our Reality Fracture price guide laid out. A box holds 30. Per Collecting Star Trek, each pack has 14 Magic cards plus a non-foil double-sided token:

What that works out to:

• A second rare is about a one-in-five shot. The wildcard is a main-set rare or mythic 19.3% of the time.
• Stardates cards average 1.2 per 30-pack box, at one pack in 25.
• LCARS shock lands average 0.42 per box from the rare slot alone. That is 1.4% across 30 packs. The wildcard and foil slots add sub-1% chances on top.
• The foil is still guaranteed. The 2027 booster changes that remove it start with Nauctis in February, so Star Trek is one of the last sets with a foil in every pack.

The land slot is where strange new worlds gets fed. All 10 common duals are Planets with different names, from Andoria and Bajor to Qo'noS and Vulcan. Each one enters tapped, gains you 1 life and taps for two colors. A two-color Sealed deck running only basics has just two differently named lands. Each different Planet you add raises the count by one. At 50% per pack, a six-pack Prerelease pool averages three duals from the land slot. Some of them may share a name.

Collector Boosters and the signed cards

A Collector Booster is $37.99 for 15 cards, about $2.53 a card, and a box holds 12. The chase list, from Collecting Star Trek:

• Signed headliners. There are 7 different cards and fewer than 250 copies of each, so fewer than 1,750 in total. Each was physically signed by the actor it depicts and inserted at random into Collector Boosters of any language. The signed card itself is always in English. Wizards' articles have shown six of the seven: Captain James T. Kirk, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Captain Kathryn Janeway, Lieutenant Commander Data, Seven of Nine, Unassimilated, and Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge. Kirk's carries collector number 1701.
• LCARS shock lands. All ten shock lands get the LCARS frame, which is modelled on the Enterprise computer interface, with planet art. Non-foil and traditional foil versions appear in both booster types, and the surge foil versions only in Collector Boosters. A Collector Booster has two rare-or-mythic Booster Fun slots, and each is a non-foil LCARS shock land 7.7% of the time. Its separate foil Booster Fun slot is one 13.5% of the time (8.9% traditional foil, 4.6% surge foil).
• Klingon script cards. These are the Klingon frame cards translated into Klingon. They come only in Collector Boosters, only in traditional foil, and always in Klingon, whatever language the pack is in.
• Stardates cards fill each of those two rare-or-mythic Booster Fun slots 28.1% of the time: 23.1% non-foil and 5% traditional foil. Wizards' example is Kenrith, the Returned King reprinted as "General Picard, Earth Warlord." Scryfall shows others, among them Sheoldred, the Apocalypse as "Khan, Engineered Evil" and Bristly Bill, Spine Sower as "Leonard McCoy, Country Doctor."
• The guaranteed TRC slot. Every Collector Booster has one non-foil rare or mythic Star Trek Commander Booster Fun card. 93.1% of the time it is one of 197 rare extended-art cards: 145 new-to-Magic cards and 52 reprints. The rest of the slot is mythic extended-art reprints (2.1%), the four borderless commanders (1%) and other borderless new-to-Magic Commander cards (3.8%). The new-to-Magic cards in this slot, the borderless commanders included, are not legal in Standard, Pioneer or Modern.

Among the other treatments, classic Enterprise cards are styled on vintage movie posters, and scene cards spread one piece of art across several cards. The four scenes cover 4, 6, 6 and 9 cards.

The product lineup, and the cancelled Beginner Box

The MSRPs and contents below are from Collecting Star Trek. "Packs at MSRP" adds up the boosters inside at $6.99 per Play Booster and $37.99 per Collector Booster.

Of the four boxed products above with boosters inside, Draft Night is the only one whose packs add up to more than its sticker price. Its packs total $121.87 against a $119.99 MSRP. It is built for a four-player Pick-Two Draft, which our draft guide covers. The Scene Box sits at the other end: about $21 of packs, with the other $21 paying for the six foil scene cards, the art cards and the easel. For how these product types relate to each other in general, see our booster types guide.

Not on that list: the Star Trek Beginner Box. Wizards' WPN notice of September 11 says it "has been canceled for all regions." It was in the Collecting article's price list in August at $34.99. By late September, an editor's note on that article said the Beginner Box details had been removed "as of the product's cancellation," and the October 20 version does not mention it at all. Some retailer product pages for it are still online, so read the listing before you pay. If you are buying for a new player, WPN's own replacement suggestion for learn-to-play events is Welcome Decks, Jumpstart or Play Boosters. Star Trek has five 40-card mono-color Welcome Decks built from TRK and TRC cards. Collecting Star Trek gives them no MSRP.

Prerelease, store events and Arena

Prerelease, November 6–12. A Prerelease Pack holds six Play Boosters, one traditional foil rare or mythic, a deck box and a spindown die. WPN also lets stores start selling the whole product line during Prerelease week, under its Prerelease Early Sales Policy.

The store season, November 13 to January 28, 2027, per WPN's Dates and Details:

• Standard Showdown, one per week. The winner gets a Burst Lightning promo, with a second promo still listed as "Coming Soon!"
• Magic Presents: To Boldly Go, a casual Sealed league. You buy six Play Boosters to start. You play three games at Starfleet Academy, then three matches in each of four quadrants, each with its own themed rules. That is 15 signatures, enough to reach Captain, which earns a Solemn Simulacrum promo. You can buy an extra Play Booster at each promotion.
• Two-Headed Giant Commander Night, once a month. Each player brings their own 100-card deck, and the team shares 60 life. It has the same participation promos as Commander Party, Munitions Enthusiast and Highly Illogical: foil at WPN Premium stores, non-foil elsewhere.

MTG Arena, November 10. The free Set Mastery track pays out up to 36 Star Trek packs and 5 Mastery Orbs. Premier, Pick-Two and Traditional Draft all run from November 10 to February 2. An Arena Direct for Star Trek Collector Booster boxes runs November 13–22. The November Arena Championship Qualifier format is Star Trek Sealed, with its Qualifier Weekend on November 21–22. How packs turn into wildcards is in our Arena wildcards guide.

Quick Action Checklist

• Star Trek releases November 13, 2026. Prerelease is November 6–12 and Arena gets it on November 10. Previews run through October 29, and the full gallery is due October 30, whatever the Collecting article's "November 30" says.
• TRK is legal everywhere, Standard included, and it stays through the Nauctis rotation. TRC's new cards are Commander, Legacy and Vintage only. Reprints, including every stardates card, keep their usual legality.
• Every Collector Booster has a TRC card, and most of the cards on that slot's list are new designs that are not Standard-legal. Check the set code.
• Beam me up recasts a spell from your graveyard by returning a creature as part of the cost. The spell is always exiled afterward.
• Face a dilemma counts the moment you choose a mode, even if the spell is countered. Several modes on one spell are still one dilemma.
• Federation ignores Borg creatures, and an assimilated creature is a Borg. Stealing an Officer does not raise your count.
• A legendary Spacecraft with a power/toughness box can be your commander under CR 903.3. Enterprise-D qualifies and leads a colorless deck. Deep Space 9 does not qualify.
• Commander decks are $74.99 with 32 new cards in each 99. The lists are previewed October 26–29.
• Play Boosters still guarantee a foil. Stardates cards average 1.2 per box, and LCARS shock lands 0.42 per box from the rare slot.
• Draft Night is the one booster-filled box whose packs add up to more than its price at MSRP: $121.87 against $119.99.
• Do not preorder the Beginner Box. A WPN notice dated September 11 confirms it is cancelled for all regions.