Though the release is still months away, Magic: The Gathering has revealed some new Star Trek creatures from the set’s beginner-friendly Welcome Decks, including a batch of common and uncommon Borg which fit this alien cyborg menace to a tee. While some fans are wincing at the memes and giving a suspicious sidelong glance to the card art, everyone agrees that the Borg are shaping up very nicely indeed.
Magic: The Gathering’s Borg are kind of like artifact creature Slivers, as they apply buffs to all of your artifact creatures, including themselves. Take the very bog-standard Assault Drone, for example.
The card seems normal at first. But it would be a lot more typical nowadays for Wizards to design this card as a 3 power creature, with an ability that gives every other artifact creature +1 power. They’ve deliberately chosen to format the borg like their in-universe slivers for flavor reasons, to create the same feeling of an interconnected hivemind.
Assault Drone ain’t bad for a common, but there are some far more powerful Borg cards here. Like Organic Avulsion Unit, which can give all your artifact creatures menace, helping you get attacks through. Best of all is Hive Mind Processor, which turns every hit by a robot into card draw. It’s pretty rare to get an effect like this in black.
Oh, there’s also Collective Drone. I don’t have anything interesting to say about this card.
You’ll notice that all of these Borg don’t have additional creature types. They’re just Borg. This seems to serve two purposes. It highlights their lack of individuality: none have specific roles in the Borg Collective. And it works with the Federation mechanic: none of them boost Federation cards that care about non-Borg creature types.
It’s quite weird to have a bunch of common and uncommon cards revealed before we’ve seen the vast majority of the rares. They’ve been shown off so early because Wizards of the Coast is giving the Welcome Decks away to attendees of ST:LV, a huge Las Vegas Star Trek convention, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the franchise.
These cards all appear in the black Star Trek Welcome deck, but my understanding is that all of the ones listed here will be in the main set too.
This little teaser has me excited to see some rare and mythic rare, more powerful Borg.
Source: Wargamer
