Earlier this month, pre-order pages for an unannounced Magic: The Gathering and Star Trek crossover project made its way to a small MTG online store. Buried in the thousands of pages of the store, fans found it and assumed it was a leak - an accidental release of information tied to real projects about to be announced. Word of this took over MTG communities during the July 4 weekend, and allegedly, some fans even bought into it by placing pre-orders for this 'leaked' MTG x Star Trek deck.
The problem is, none of it was true. It wasn't a leak, or even a rumor. It was a Ferengi-style approach to selling Magic: The Gathering cards on the internet.
The MTG x Star Trek deck leak that wasn't
A New Jersey-based tabletop collectible card (TCG) store named Saga Concepts has an online store. While only a small portion of its revenue comes from online sales, it saw a chance to increase that by tricking the Google search algorithm to prioritize its products over other businesses if a MTG x Star Trek card series were ever to be made. Talk of a MTG x Star Trek card series is something that comes up often around MTG tables, and has been subject to rampant speculation over the years online - the point that a purported 'test card' for the never-confirmed series was created and posted online as if it was the real thing.about 12 months ago.
Riding high, apparently, on the record-breaking success of the Final Fantasy x MTG cards that came out just a few weeks prior, Saga Concepts began creating real listings for fake products on its online storefront in an effort for the Google algorithm to believe they were among the first to know about these products, and list them higher in search rankings that they normally would. And according to one of Saga Concepts' owners, this isn't the first time they've done this.
"We paused the preorders- didn't expect you guys to buy these so fast!" Saga Concepts' co-owner Teghjaran 'Teg' Chadha wrote on the company's Discord in a message that is no longer public. "We hid these in the site like we've done in past for rumors to bribe Google to like our website. No one found the Nicktoons MTG set, though!"
Saga Concepts didn't just create one listing for an imaginary MTG x Star Trek card set, it created multiple ones that have since been deleted. Following in the format that Wizards of the Coast has done with other crossover sets, such as with Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings, Saga Concepts listed four Commander Deck products, a Play Boosters product, a Collector Boosters product, and various Bundles. It even went to the point of creating what it now says is a fictional release date, that of September 30, 2026.
Will a Magic: The Gathering x Star Trek deck ever happen?
Will a MTG x Star Trek ever happen? Speaking as a 20+ year pop culture journalist and someone who plays MTG with friends weekly (sometimes more), I would say its likely. Not through any insider information, but by these three simple facts:
- These crossover decks are Wizards of the Coast's best-selling decks in well... ever.
- Wizards of the Coast has a stronger relationship with the owners of the Star Trek franchise - Paramount Global - and has already announced crossover decks for other franchises it owns such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and SpongeBob SquarePants.
- People like money.
- MTG fans love Star Trek
As I await the eventual, probable announcement of an MTG x Star Trek deck sometime in my lifetime, let's not get ahead of ourselves and remember rule #7 of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: "Keep your ears open."
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