Star Trek turns 60 this year, and while the franchise's screen future is stuck in Paramount limbo, the anniversary is getting a celebration from an unexpected direction. Wizards of the Coast just revealed its Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek set, and the crown jewels are trading cards hand-signed by William Shatner and Kate Mulgrew themselves.
The set arrives worldwide on November 13th, and its chase cards are something Magic has never done before. Seven Star Trek actors individually signed the set's Headliner cards, portraits set against a cosmic background, with roughly 250 copies of each signature in existence. Wizards calls them "a chance to bring a piece of galactic history to their collections."
Only two of the seven signers are confirmed so far. Captain James T. Kirk carries Shatner's signature, and Captain Kathryn Janeway carries Mulgrew's. The other five remain under wraps, and Wizards is being coy about whether they're all captains. Trekkies get a guessing game to play between now and November!
I've been playing and collecting Magic since the 90s, long before crossovers were a thing, and the licensing sprawl still catches me off guard. Fantasy fits like Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings made sense. Then came the Turtles, Deadpool, Spider-Man, and the Marvel set. Now the Enterprise is warping in, and I have to wonder what's next... Star Wars? Halo? The Chronicles of Narnia? I'm honestly not sure whether to be excited or worried at this point.
The faction fan-service runs deep. Four preconstructed Commander decks launch alongside the set, and the names tell you exactly who each one is for: "Federation Fleet", "Landing Party", "Klingon Fury", and "We Are the Borg". Standard versions run $74.99, with Collector's Editions at $159.99.
The early card previews read like a tour of the franchise's greatest hits. "Borg Queen, Perfection Manifest" debuts a brand-new assimilate mechanic, because of course the Borg get a mechanic about absorbing everything they touch. "U.S.S. Enterprise-D, Galaxy-Class" warps in as a spacecraft card. "Crystalline Entity" shows up looking like the planet-scouring menace it was in The Next Generation, built to wipe entire boards, with its full rules still under preview-stage wraps. There's even a mechanic called face a dilemma, which any fan of away missions will recognize as the franchise's entire dramatic engine in card form.
For Trek fans who have never sleeved up a Magic deck, this is part of the game's "Universes Beyond" line, which pulls licensed universes into Magic's rules. The Lord of the Rings got the treatment in 2023 and became one of the game's biggest sets ever, and Marvel's crossover set is dominating the game right now. Trek is stepping into a very hot lane.
The set also packs 30 stardates cards, reprints of powerful Magic staples redrawn with Star Trek artwork. Entry points range from $6.99 Play Boosters up to a $99.99 "Beam Me Up Bundle", with the signed cards appearing only in $37.99 Collector Boosters.
As for what a hand-signed Kirk will be worth, nobody knows yet. The supply math says a lot, at roughly 1,750 signed cards across all seven actors for the entire planet. Sports cards built an industry on pack-pulled autographs at print runs like that, and when Wizards printed a one-of-one "The One Ring" card for the Lord of the Rings set, Post Malone reportedly paid over $2 million for it. A Shatner-signed Kirk in Star Trek's 60th anniversary year sits squarely in memorabilia territory, and memorabilia prices track the fandom. Our sister site GameFragger has the full collector's breakdown, including every product price and what the autograph market usually does with numbers like these.
The timing is hard to ignore. The original series premiered in September 1966, and 60 years later the franchise's television slate is thinner than it has been in a decade, with Starfleet Academy cancelled and the next movie still finding its feet. Yet the universe keeps expanding everywhere else: games, comics, and now one of the biggest tabletop games on Earth. Somebody at the negotiating table clearly still believes in the final frontier.
Which five actors do you think round out the seven signatures? Is a hand-signed Kirk the ultimate piece of Star Trek memorabilia, or does your money stay on props and screen-used gear?
Sound off in the comments below!
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