Edge of Eternities was never a Star Trek test run, Magic designer says

Principal designer Gavin Verhey talks about the development of Magic's sci-fi sets

When Wizards of the Coast announced at MagicCon: Atlanta 2025 last September that a Star Trek Universes Beyond set would be released in 2026 for Magic: The Gathering, the easy assumption was that the game’s then-recent sci-fi set, Edge of Eternities, was something of a test run. While Aetherdrift dabbled in science-fiction elements, Edge of Eternities could easily be classified as hard sci-fi, with spaceships, alien worlds, and powerful planet lands. Did Magic: The Gathering push outside the boundaries of classic fantasy in 2025 specifically so that the game could boldly go where no man has gone before?

According to Magic principal designer Gavin Verhey, that’s not the case. During an interview at MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026 earlier this month, Verhey briefly discussed development on both sets.

“I'm going to tell you something right now that might blow you and your readers’ minds,” Verhey said. “I know Edge of Eternities came out last year, and Star Trek will come out at the end of this year, but we were working on them at exactly the same time, because that's how timelines work.”

Universes Beyond sets are often developed with insight from creatives associated with the other IP, so Wizards of the Coast has to begin development on crossover sets far earlier than typical Magic sets. In a vision design blog about the Final Fantasy set, for example, lead vision designer Yoni Skolnik revealed early development began in 2021, when he was tasked with leading a discussion about what the set could look like. That set was announced in 2023 and released in June 2025. Final Fantasy creative director Tetsuya Nomura only recently revealed that he personally reviewed several hundred pieces of art for the set over the course of three or four years.

“It takes a lot of review time, et cetera,” Verhey said. “So we were working on these two sets basically in parallel with each other for a lot of it. We did get to look at what Edge of Eternities was doing, and of course I talked plenty with that team because I didn't want to do anything that felt like it was counter to what was happening in Edge.” In other words, player feedback related to Edge of Eternities will have no influence on the development of Star Trek.

“We learned some lessons from it, but I think a lot of people out there have this impression that we intentionally did Edge of Eternities to kickstart being able to do Star Trek,” Verhey said. “That wasn't really the case at all.” Edge of Eternities was already part of the roadmap, and then the collaboration with Star Trek emerged. Verhey did confirm, however, that we’ll see some things that are similar — but plenty of other things are different.

In July 2025, Magic’s head designer Mark Rosewater and Edge of Eternities’ vision design lead Ethan Fleischer published a blog post about that set’s design. Internally, Edge of Eternities was codenamed “Volleyball.”

“As a top-down, genre-inspired set, ‘Volleyball’ wants to include cards representing a variety of science fiction tropes, as well as allusions to specific pieces of science-fiction media,” Fleischer wrote. “However, we want to avoid eating the lunch of possible future Universes Beyond and space Magic sets.” Again, this was published just a few short months before Star Trek was announced, when both sets had already been in development for quite some time.

Edge of Eternities instead focused on space opera as a targeted subgenre: big spaceships, space battles, and faster-than-light travel. Another design document points to both Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy as sources of inspiration. It’s also noted that the design team actively avoided any allusions to specific sci-fi properties in favor of a more generalized approach. Edge of Eternities also avoided tropes related to space horror and space exploration, since those were pinpointed as distinct subgenres that might be the focus of future sets. In retrospect, pinpointing “space exploration” as a viable subgenre for a Magic set is particularly interesting, given the fact that space exploration is pretty much Star Trek in a nutshell.

Does that also mean that Wizards already has a space horror set in the pipeline? Could that be a Universes Beyond set that focuses on Alien? Or, more broadly, something that feels like Duskmourn: House of Horror, but in space?

That same design document also implies that the Spacecraft mechanic will indeed return in future sets: “So, in ‘Volleyball’ (and in future space Magic sets), a spacecraft controlled by a single pilot is an artifact creature, while a spacecraft that requires multiple crew members is a Vehicle, and a huge spacecraft with multiple floors is a cosmic artifact.” Planets appear as a land subtype in Edge, but Asteroid, Black Hole, Moon, and even Star were all considered at one point as well.

As a Trekkie himself, Verhey could hardly contain his enthusiasm for Magic’s Star Trek set.

“I'm a lifelong Star Trek fan and getting to encapsulate all the years of Star Trek's history in all kinds of different ways into one Magic set — so cool,” he said. “I cannot wait to show off those cards.”

Magic’s Star Trek set is currently scheduled for release on Nov. 13, 2026, the same day that MagicCon: Atlanta begins. Between now and then, Wizards of the Coast will release Marvel Super Heroes in June and Reality Fracture in October. In all likelihood, we’ll finally learn more about this set at MagicCon: Amsterdam in July.