Magic Star Trek Making Magic: Design Starts 4 Years Before Release
Wizards' Making Magic column dated October 27, 2026 explains how Star Trek's huge catalog was turned into a Universes Beyond set, in its week 2 previews. Preliminary design for Universes Beyond sets starts 4 years before release, one year earlier than a standard set, so the licensor can approve content. Designers ranked the property with whiteboards and sticker votes, and the column also shows the new preview card First Contact, Will Riker, a design that expresses exploration flavor in a new way and asks players to find how best to use it.
Star Trek turns 60 this year, with 13 TV series (52 seasons, about 1,000 episodes) and 14 films produced. Watching all of it non-stop, 24 hours a day, would take more than 41 days, not counting books, comics and other media. Long-term planning happens 2–3 years before preliminary design begins, and during the week the column was written the arc planning team discussed which sets to release in 2031, with 2032 also coming up.
On day one of exploratory design, the team does a whiteboard exercise listing everything most important to the property. For a property as large as Star Trek, the first whiteboard captures the brand as a whole, such as space exploration, the Federation, alien races like Klingons and technology like transporters. A second whiteboard lists every Star Trek show and film, ranked by sticker voting: each member gets about 3–5 stickers, and experts get a different color that counts as 2 votes each. Top items then get their own whiteboards, followed by another sticker vote.
Paramount's Star Trek team also supplied data on which shows, episodes and characters are most popular with fans, which helped decide what to make into cards and what to represent with multiple cards.
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