MTG News Nov 2 to 8: Star Trek Tribble Variants, Maya Hawke Cast, Modern Horizons 4 Doubts

⚡ SparkMTG — MTG News Nov 2 to 8: Star Trek Tribble Variants, Maya Hawke Cast, Modern Horizons 4 Doubts

Week of November 2 to 8, 2026

Prerelease weekend came and went, and the biggest Star Trek story of the week came out of the packs rather than the preview stream. Players cracking Play Boosters surfaced five borderless Tribble cards that Wizards never previewed and never put in its own collecting article. Maya Hawke became the first major name attached to the Magic movie, and Mark Rosewater put a ceiling on Universes Beyond and a question mark on Modern Horizons 4.

In This Issue

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Five Star Trek cards have borderless Tribble variants that nobody outside Wizards knew about until packs started opening, Draftsim reports. The five are Nyota Uhura, Communications, Scotty, Miracle Worker, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Kirk, Commanding Officer and Spock, Always Your Friend, which works out to one mythic, two rares and two uncommons. Draftsim says they were not spoiled or previewed or leaked, and that they were left out of the Collecting Star Trek article that normally lists every treatment in a set alongside its odds. The only official acknowledgment Wizards has given is uploading all five cards to Gatherer. Everything else known about them comes from players and collectors comparing pack-openings on Reddit, which Draftsim says are not hard numbers, and its own advice is to keep a salt shaker handy.

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The Magic movie has its first big name, Star City Games reports from Deadline: Maya Hawke, best known for Stranger Things and Inside Out 2. Star City Games says the film looks to have landed its lead, though her role has not been announced, and that Deadline reported Hawke was made a priority for the part. Matt Johnson, who made BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, directs and co-writes with Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald, with Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro Entertainment behind the film. Johnson had ambitions of playing Magic professionally before he moved into film, and he has pushed back on rumours the project was scrapped by saying it is very much happening. Fan guesses on who Hawke plays are landing mostly on Chandra and Elspeth.

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Asked on Blogatog whether Magic will ever run out of suitable Universes Beyond properties, Mark Rosewater answered that "the number of viable Universes Beyond properties is much more finite," MTG Rocks reports. The comparison is the article's own, and it is the part worth holding onto: finite here means finite next to Magic's own multiverse sets, where Wizards controls the whole canvas and nothing but its own creativity limits what gets made. Universes Beyond needs a franchise big enough to carry a full set, and that list has an end. For anyone still sorting out where these sets sit in the story, what actually counts as canon in MTG lore covers the distinction.

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Wargamer reports that Rosewater has more or less confirmed no new Modern Horizons set is currently in the works, pointing at a blog answer where he called a fourth one an "If, not a When." Modern Horizons has arrived on a reliable cadence for years, so Modern players have come to treat the next power injection as a scheduling question rather than an open one. Wargamer reads the shift as hesitancy rather than cancellation, and argues Standard-legal Universes Beyond sets have more or less filled the space the Horizons sets used to occupy. Nothing in the answer rules the set out, but it does move it off the calendar.

Read more → For what is actually dated rather than rumoured, the release calendar has every set Wizards has confirmed.

Wizards is crossing Magic over with Mythical Meats on a line of flavored beef sticks, Star City Games reports, following earlier food team-ups with Hot Pockets and IHOP. Fifteen flavors map to the five basic lands and the ten Ravnica guilds: Original for Plains, Teriyaki for Island, Peppered for Swamp, Habanero for Mountain and Garlic Parmesan for Forest, then Apple Cheddar for Azorius, Bloody Mary for Dimir, Smoky Cherry for Rakdos, Mango Jalapeño for Gruul, Honey Brown Sugar for Selesnya, Landjaeger for Orzhov, Sriracha Honey for Izzet, Spicy Jerk for Simic, Chipotle Lime for Boros and Spicy Dill Pickle for Golgari. A ten-flavor variety pack runs $30, a basic land combo pack runs $15, and singles run $3.50. Mythical Meats has worked with Wizards before on a Dungeons & Dragons snack stick class pack. Dexerto broke the product on Monday, and no release date has been announced.

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EDHREC gives Landing Party a solid A minus and calls it great for new players, easy enough to pilot right out of the box. The deck is Bant, Commander Spock is the face commander with Captain Kirk, Boldly Going as the back-up option, and the engine is Spock's strange new worlds trigger, which reveals the top card whenever he enters or attacks: a spell costing no more than your number of differently named lands is cast for free, a land goes in tapped, and anything else draws a card. That condition is why the deck wants lands, and Chief Kyle, Transporter Tech blinks Spock or Kirk to trigger it again, with Ancient Greenwarden replaying lands from the graveyard and doubling landfall and Sol Ring doing what it always does. Planet Killer is what the guide reaches for when you want inevitability. The reprints come to about $120 by EDHREC's count, which is worth holding next to Draftsim's $84 for the same deck in Market Watch below: Draftsim counts only base printings worth $5 or more, so the two numbers measure different things rather than contradicting each other. The complaint is the landbase, five basics against sixteen always-tapped lands, which EDHREC calls dicey and cannot quite get over at this price. If this is the one you are picking up on November 13, the Landing Party upgrade guide covers the cards worth adding.

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Pavel Chekov, First Posting is Abundance on a stick, MTG Rocks reports, which makes it a tutor as soon as deck construction gets deliberate about it. Run Cultivator Colossus as the only nonland card alongside 97 lands and choosing nonland is guaranteed to find it, after which Colossus and Chekov loop: Colossus puts a land from your hand onto the battlefield and draws, Chekov turns that draw into another guaranteed land, and the deck empties itself onto the table. MTG Rocks calls the line incredibly flimsy all the same, because Colossus has no protection and the kill needs three uninterrupted turns, and it recommends a normal Commander or landfall build instead. It is a construction curiosity rather than a competitive result, and it is the second land-heavy commander Star Trek has shipped after Q, Stacking the Deck.

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Lonis, Cryptozoologist put up a top 32 finish in a 923-player Duel Commander main event at Relic Fest in France, MTG Rocks reports, on a Clue-and-mana engine rather than a combat plan. Arbor Elf, Elvish Mystic and Badgermole Cub get the mana moving early, and the article has Urza, Lord High Artificer tapping the spare artifacts for mana, with Academy Manufactor named as the piece the deck wants to line up alongside it. A field that size is the useful part of this result: the shell held up across a long Duel Commander weekend, not one lucky pod.

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Cards from a Borg-themed Secret Lair surfaced on Reddit ahead of any announcement, and MTG Rocks puts the total value of the drop at roughly $12.60 against the $29.99 asking price. Hive Mind carries most of it at around $8.20 for the cheapest copies, which is the awkward part, because its one previous Secret Lair printing goes for almost $14. Suture Priest is the next most expensive card in the drop at about $1.40. The drop name has not been announced, and MTG Rocks notes none of the cards do anything for a We Are The Borg precon. Worth knowing before the queues: MTG Price has Set Phasers to Superdrop going live Monday the 9th with a third drop premiering the Monday after that, which makes three consecutive Secret Lair Mondays, and the Set Phasers to Superdrop breakdown has that drop's contents and prices.

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Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh has more than tripled in recent months, MTG Rocks reports, and Star Trek has nothing to do with it. The article puts the Hour of Devastation printing at $10.24 against around $3.11 in mid-September, which it calls a 229% increase in about six weeks, and it is not explicit that those two figures describe the same printing, so treat the pair as the shape of the move rather than a precise before and after. The driver is Reality Fracture, which MTG Rocks says continues to move the markets while this set's early impact has been negligible: Jace, Multiverse Architect and Tam, the Possibility together account for around 3,500 new Commander decks running Bolas. Even after that surge he appears in only around 31,000 Commander decks, and MTG Rocks is not sure the spike lasts, since a ceiling on his play rate puts a cap on the price.

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Draftsim ranked the four Star Trek precons on reprint value using TCGplayer prices from November 2 and counting only base printings worth $5 or more. Landing Party tops the ranking at $84 and Federation Fleet lands fourth at roughly $29, with Alhammarret's Archive reskinned as Orb of the Emissary claiming a $10 price tag, Command Beacon at $9, and Training Center called the only winner in the deck and worth $10 to it. The method is worth more than the ranking here. These are Universes Beyond decks, so they ship more new cards than average at higher price points and the value concentrates in two or three reprints per box. Read a number like $29 as a floor under the deck rather than a verdict on it, then weigh it against the new cards you actually want to play.

Read more → For the four put in order rather than priced, which Star Trek precon to buy ranks them.

Senior Narrative Designer Crystal Frasier wrote up how the Star Trek set came together, opening on her first episode, Devil in the Dark, and her father watching it with her. Her case is that Star Trek was as much about the shared experience of watching it as about the episodes themselves, and the design problem that follows is the one worth reading: a set filled with nothing but deep cuts is unapproachable for casual fans, so the team studied what makes good Star Trek and did it themselves rather than reaching for references. Fan spaces were the check on that, used to find what came up again and again, alongside narrative rules like finding cool actions for characters beyond combat.

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Mark Rosewater brought Gavin Verhey, the set's lead designer, onto Drive to Work episode 1395 to talk through how Star Trek was built. It landed the week before release, with prerelease weekend running as it went out, which makes it the closest thing to a designer's commentary track on cards most people have not opened yet.

Listen → If you would rather read the keywords than listen to them, the guide to every Star Trek mechanic covers all nine.

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The prize is one sealed Star Trek Commander precon, and the winner picks the deck: Federation Fleet, Landing Party, Klingon Fury or We Are the Borg. If you are subscribed, you are already entered with 1 entry.

Entries close November 13, 2026 at 11:59 PM ET, and the winner is drawn November 14. You need to still be subscribed when entries close, and a referred friend counts only if they are still subscribed then too. US only, 18+, no purchase necessary. Read the full giveaway rules.

If you joined SparkMTG recently, welcome. These three guides are the best place to start, covering precon upgrades, the release calendar and every Secret Lair drop left this year.

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Star Trek hits shelves Friday, so tell us which precon you are starting with and whether anyone in your pod has cracked a Tribble yet. Reply to this email, or forward it to the friend in your pod who still has not subscribed.

That's the week.

— The SparkMTG Team

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