When a 'Magic' Card's Flavor Hits Just Right

Flavor means a lot of things to Magic: The Gathering. There's flavor text, the iconic little flourishes of nerdy gags or worldbuilding that lay italicized at the bottom of cards, but perhaps more crucially, there's the flavor of the card itself: how, mechanically and aesthetically, it sells the broader feel of a given set to a player.

Flavor has become especially important to the game with the rise of "Universes Beyond," the third-party-crossover series that has basically made Magic: The Gathering reach too-big-to-fail levels of importance to Hasbro in about half a decade. Despite it being here to stay at this point, and despite the sets being some of the most successful Magic releases of the game's entire history on a regular basis, Universes Beyond still faces an uphill battle for Magic fans who want the game's focus to be on original worldbuilding rather than encroaching Fortnite-ification.

The one way to counter that sentiment that Wizards of the Coast can reliably dip into is by giving UB sets really good flavor. It's a win-win scenario: fans of the crossover series can "get" how a given character or thing works in Magic, because the design reflects what they know from elsewhere, and Magic fans get cards with strong identities that can exist and interact with the broader Magic sphere. It's not always worked for the game—for every Final Fantasy or Tales of Middle-earth (and its excellent Hobbit-themed follow-up) set, there's a Spider-Man or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that either stretches the Magic feeling too far beyond what fans are familiar with or doesn't inspire fans of those settings to engage through lackluster design choices.

For a while, I was worried that Star Trek was going to fit into the latter when it comes to UB. When the set was first revealed earlier this year, a lot of the choices I saw in cards (outside of the Borg becoming Magic's new Sliver adjunct) didn't particularly inspire me to want to build decks or play these cards, and as a lifelong Trek fan, I wasn't feeling the characters within these reveals, either. Thankfully, that's started changing now that the set has hit its preview season in earnest ahead of its release next month—and it's a surprising character that really sealed the deal for me.