Wizards of the Coast brought actors from six Star Trek series to a Los Angeles launch party for Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek, with a recreated Enterprise bridge, a Borg Cube and Quark’s Bar. The stores that have to sell the product are now losing money on it. The set reached shelves on November 13, and the signals from retailers, the secondary market and Wizards’ own release schedule all point the same direction.
Magic | Star Trek is a full Universes Beyond release, legal in Standard, built for the franchise’s 60th anniversary. Play Boosters carry a $6.99 MSRP, which puts a 30-pack box at $209.70. Collector Boosters run $37.99, or about $456 a box. Four Commander decks launched alongside the set at $74.99 each, with a $159.99 Collector’s Edition version. Seven headliner cards were hand-signed by Star Trek actors, including William Shatner as Kirk, Patrick Stewart as Picard, Ethan Peck as Spock, Kate Mulgrew as Janeway and Brent Spiner as Data. Wizards puts the print run at fewer than 250 copies of each. The set also reprints all ten shock lands.
The Los Angeles event drew actors from The Next Generation, Voyager, Enterprise, Deep Space Nine, Strange New Worlds, Discovery and Lower Decks. Peck played games at the event. The marketing push ran back to August, when Wizards sponsored the Star Trek Las Vegas convention.
The Prerelease
Prerelease weekend is where a set shows whether players want it, and store owners reported trouble before the events started on November 6.
Sean Johnson of Brute Force Games in San Diego said it was shaping up to be his lowest prerelease attendance in ten years, with more than 50 spots open across the weekend at a point when he is normally sold out. He added that presales were worse. Johnson’s comparison is to his own store’s history, which includes every set since the one a decade ago. A store that normally sells out is not filling.
Phillip Grant of D20 Gaming in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, expected the worst turnout in his store’s nine years, with the lowest preorder count to date. Ryan Horton of Backstage Hobbies & Games in Manistee, Michigan, had nobody signed up days before the event and called the set a “TMNT-level disaster.” That comparison matters, because the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles prerelease earlier this year was itself reported as a poor turnout. A store owner who ranks Star Trek next to Turtles is placing it among the weakest Universes Beyond launches.
The pattern held abroad. Federico Faenza of Jolly Joker Game Café in Turin, Italy, had 17 sign-ups against 160 for the previous set, Reality Fracture. That is roughly ten percent of the turnout. Brian Montez of Game Knight Games in Pueblo, Colorado, had presold four boxes and two Commander decks and called it the lowest interest his store has seen.
Magic personality Saffron Olive asked on X how prerelease turnout looked, and replies described stores down 50 percent or more. The replies are anecdotal, but the volume of them points the same way as the store owners. Players on Reddit went further, calling Star Trek the worst-selling set since Murders at Karlov Manor and saying prerelease attendance was worse than Karlov. The Magic Limited data site 17Lands reportedly saw recorded games drop by almost 50 percent from the usual number for the early Arena release.
Vito, who hosts Rhystic Study Hall and lives in Los Angeles, said his local prerelease was empty and did not fire. That is the same city where Wizards held its star-studded launch event.
One more reaction came from a player on Threads who Vito amplified on X. The player wrote, “I was the only Star Trek fan at the pre-release event I went to.” He said the game was hard to pick up and frustrating, and told Star Trek fans to skip it. Vito’s own takeaway was that a franchise like Trek should have been simple Commander decks instead of a complicated Standard set. The player’s account bears on the whole premise of the set. Wizards was selling to two audiences, and the Trek fans were not at the table.
The Secret Lair “Set Phasers to Superdrop” went on sale November 9. Players reported queue times of minutes instead of hours, and no drop had sold out a full day later. Vito made the same point in his video, noting the Marvel countdown kit sold out while the Star Trek drops sat on the shelf.
The Price Slide
The secondary market tells the same story in numbers. The Play Booster box held between $152.30 and $157.62 from August to early October. It fell to $130.78 in mid-October previews, to $115.92 once full spoilers landed on November 2, and to $107.46 on November 12. That is about half of the $209.70 MSRP, or $3.57 a pack, and a drop of nearly 30 percent in a month. Vito posted a TCGplayer listing at $102 on November 11 and wrote, “This set is so cooked.” The post passed 100,000 views.
The comparison is the worst in the Universes Beyond lineup. Marvel Super Heroes boxes trade near $121, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles near $123.50 and Avatar: The Last Airbender near $150. Star Trek is the cheapest Universes Beyond Play Booster box on the market. Amazon has it at $124.95, a 40 percent discount, before the set was out.
Stores are the ones absorbing it. Retailers say US distributor cost for a Universes Beyond Play Booster box runs $121 to $122 shipped. After TCGplayer’s 12.75 percent fee and $8 to $10 in shipping, a store selling at $107 nets roughly $84 to $86, a loss of about $35 a box. Store owners say distributors tied 2027 set allocations to stores accepting their full Star Trek order, so stores bought the product and are now dumping it. An 83-day release window that opened only 42 days after Reality Fracture adds to the cash squeeze, and stores plan to blow the set out on Black Friday.
The Commander decks are falling too. Klingon Fury sits near $49 and Federation Fleet near $51 against $74.99. The Klingon Fury Collector’s Edition fell from $274.35 in late October to $115.86 against a $159.99 MSRP. Collector boxes sit near $447, and finance analysts on Reddit project a drop below $400 after release.
Vito laid out the problem for collector boxes on November 9, when he posted a price board of the set’s top cards: “only three cards in the entire set breaking the $100 price tag.” His list showed Spock at $159.99 on presale, Picard at $279.99 and Kirk at $168.99. The shock lands Wizards leaned on were cheaper. A Breeding Pool surge foil listed at $85.98, an Overgrown Tomb at $68.97, and a Q showcase at $84.99. His argument was that Wizards added the shock lands and surge foil treatments to prop up a $450 box, and the singles did not carry it. On a 12-pack box with a $456 price, each pack has to return about $38 in value for a buyer to break even.
Where the Money Is
Some Star Trek product is selling. Scott Thorne, who owns Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois, wrote in his ICv2 column that his prerelease numbers matched the Turtles set’s, which he called pretty abysmal. He also said sales were nearly triple what his store saw for the last few in-universe sets, as with other Universes Beyond releases. A store can have a weak prerelease and strong sales when the product is sold as a collectible.
The Beam Me Up Bundle trades at $145 to $150 against a $99.99 MSRP, because Wizards cut retail allocations. Signed cards are moving. A Spock signed by Ethan Peck sold on eBay for $7,500 after a $20,000 asking price, and asking prices for signed Kirk and Picard cards have reached $32,000.
The biggest driver is a death. Patrick Stewart died October 28 at age 86, and the news became public October 29. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov, had died on October 25 at age 90. The Collector Booster box’s TCGplayer market price jumped from $495.34 to $576.02 in a day, and volume spiked on October 29 and 30. The buyers were chasing a signed Picard, which sits in fewer than 250 copies. Prices have cooled, though they remain above where they were before his death. That spike came from collectors of Stewart memorabilia and does not measure players’ interest in the game.
Magic Is Booming. This Set Is Not.
Magic as a business is strong. Hasbro reported record Magic revenue of $616.1 million for the third quarter, up 34 percent, led by The Hobbit, which Hasbro says is already the fourth-best-selling Magic set ever. Hasbro said the Hobbit prerelease was the biggest ever for a Universes Beyond release, and Reality Fracture beat expectations. MagicCon Atlanta sold out, and Star Trek’s release weekend is the event’s centerpiece.
So Magic is not what is failing. Star Trek is the outlier, and the Hobbit comparison shows what a Universes Beyond set looks like when the audience wants it.
The picture is not purely about the brand. Turtles and Spider-Man were also reported as weak, and retailers blame Wizards’ scheduling and delivery problems. Matt Weik of Paper and Pixels in Port Charlotte, Florida, said customers who loved Reality Fracture feel Wizards no longer wants them as players. Scene Boxes and some Commander decks arrived late for the prerelease. Those complaints are real. They also do not explain why Star Trek’s play box is cheaper than Turtles’ or Marvel’s.
What Happened to Star Trek
Our read is that the brand has taken so much damage in recent years that the market for a Star Trek product is a fraction of what Wizards assumed. Discovery, Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy, which Paramount ended after two seasons, left a franchise that Magic players do not see as theirs and that lapsed Trek fans no longer follow.
The business facts line up. Starfleet Academy premiered January 15, and Paramount+ announced its end on March 23, eleven days after the first season finale. Paramount+ is left with 26 episodes of Star Trek in the bank and no new series behind them. TheWrap’s own account of the franchise said it was bogged down by “divisive storytelling that split the fanbase.”
Alex Kurtzman’s overall deal runs through the end of 2026. An industry insider told CosmicBook in August that no Kurtzman involvement is expected if a new series is greenlit, and that Paramount is focused on a new film. Fandom Pulse reported in December 2024 that a contact at CBS said Trek-related merchandise had collapsed and that executives were angry. That report predicted Kurtzman would be out in July 2025. The date passed with no change, and Kurtzman stayed through Starfleet Academy, but the merchandise concern is what Wizards now faces on a shelf.
Vito’s theory is that Star Trek is a franchise of actors from the 70s and 90s, a number of them dead, and Stewart’s death a week before prerelease underlines it. A character like Cloud in Final Fantasy or Bilbo in The Hobbit lives on in a book or a game. A signed Picard card is the product of a man who died before the set released.
Wizards’ own marketing shows the problem. A multi-city convention sponsorship, a star-filled Los Angeles launch and seven signed headliners did not fill prerelease tables. The set’s value rests on Trek fans who play Magic and Magic players who care about Trek, and the evidence is that the overlap is small.
Black Friday is the next test, with stores slated to blow the set out. If a Play Booster box heads under $100 and the Commander decks stay near $50, the question for Wizards is how much of Star Trek’s 2027 allocation it can still push into stores.
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