Magic: The Gathering had its Star Trek prereleases last week, and many fans and game stores have reported surprisingly low turnout, with events condensed down into fewer days or cancelled altogether.
While it’s all anecdotes and there’s a lack of any hard data to go off, it seems to be widely believed among the community that something went wrong with the Star Trek prerelease, and I’ve seen severalcreators comment on this.
I’ve also seen fans jumping to some absolutely wild conclusions off the back of this idea, saying that it proves Universes Beyond was a mistake all along, or that Wizards of the Coast will surely pivot away from third-party tie-ins right away. And, of course, it doesn’t and won’t.
First of all, and I doubt this is breaking news to many of you, one bad Universes Beyond set is not going to make Wizards of the Coast give up on the idea. Not when smash-hits like Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings have shown they can milk popular IPs to make more money than God. You don’t slay your golden goose because it lays one normal egg.
Pulling back on Universes Beyond due to a single failure would be incredibly reactionary and just downright foolish, like stopping all Standard sets altogether after a dud, or responding to Nadu being broken by scrapping all Simic cards (Well hold on, we might have something there.).
Crucially, Magic: The Gathering sets take a lot of time to make, and at any one time Wizards has a few year’s worth of releases in the pipeline. That means it naturally responds to customer trends slowly. This is why we saw so many smaller sets like Assassin’s Creed after March of the Machine: Aftermath rotted on store shelves. Even if Wizards decided to stop tie-ins today, we’d still get Universes Beyond sets for roughly the next three years.
So, no, Wizards won’t be pulling back the intensity of UB releases. What it might do, if MTG Star Trek does indeed turn out to be a flop, is think a little differently about which franchises it takes on for a tentpole set. Perhaps it isn’t enough for an IP to be a huge household name and have sufficient concepts to fill out the different colors and required cards for a Magic set. You also need to think about audience demographics, and (since Star Trek means different things to different people) how cohesive an IP is.
However, it is far too early to call MTG Star Trek a failure. Firstly, there’s only anecdotal evidence that interest is low, and obviously that’s pretty weak. How many times have we been surprised by WotC revealing that a supposed flop actually outperformed expectations?
Secondly, even if prerelease numbers were down, this doesn’t necessarily mean Star Trek will sell badly. This set’s audience will naturally skew older and my assumption is that often this older demographic is usually not the one attending in-store events. While Star Trek may not be very good for stores, there could still be a sizable enough fan base purchasing packs for it to be considered a success.
I particularly think the Star Trek precons will do well. This franchise, like Doctor Who, is very fragmented, with different groups of fans caring greatly about some eras of the show, and entirely cold on the rest. Just like Doctor Who, while the main set has everything mashed up together, the Star Trek precons allow you to only engage with the parts of the franchise that you particularly enjoy. TOS fans have their own box, and fans of the other classic series are well catered to with Federation Fleet, while regular Magic players can be seduced by all the artifact synergies within the Borg.
We need to wait until we have some actual information to draw any conclusions about how Star Trek has performed. And even if this were the worst set in the history of Magic (which I highly doubt) that won’t suddenly outweigh Universes Beyond’s many successes. Like it or not, UB is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Come join the conversation over on the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
