Magic Cancelled Its Cheap Star Trek Starter Box — the $55 Resin Dice Are Still Coming
If you were hoping to get into Magic: The Gathering’s upcoming Star Trek crossover on the cheap, Wizards of the Coast has some bad news for you. If you were instead hoping to drop $55 on a single die with a tiny painted starship suspended in resin, good news: that part of the crossover is sailing ahead exactly as planned.
On September 21st, Wizards quietly killed the Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek Beginner Box, the entry-level, learn-to-play product that was supposed to be the easiest and cheapest way into the set. The official statement was short and vague in the way these things usually are: “Due to delays in production, logistics, and shipping, we will no longer be producing” the box, in any region, full stop. Preorder customers were pointed toward their local game store or retailer to sort out refunds — which is standard practice, but never a fun email to receive two months before a set you already paid for was supposed to show up.
Here’s the part that makes this more than just another cancelled SKU: two days later, dice maker Sirius Dice announced a full line of Star Trek-branded Magic accessories, and none of it got caught in whatever “production, logistics, and shipping” problem sank the Beginner Box. There are $7.99 blind-packed Treasure Packs with spindown life counters sorted into common, rare, and legendary rarities. There are $19.99 miniature dice cups themed around Starfleet, the Klingon Empire, the Borg Collective, the Ferengi, and — as the chase variant — Q. And then there’s the flex piece: a $54.99, 55mm oversized spindown D20 with a painted miniature of either the U.S.S. Enterprise or a Klingon Bird-of-Prey suspended inside clear resin. All of it is timed to land in November, alongside the actual card set, to coincide with Star Trek’s 60th anniversary. Wizards was explicit on this point too — “no other Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek products are affected” by the Beginner Box cancellation.
We’re not going to pretend we know exactly what broke in Wizards’ supply chain, and it’s entirely possible the Beginner Box’s cancellation really is the boring logistics story it’s being sold as — a licensed dice line from a third-party manufacturer like Sirius Dice is a very different manufacturing and shipping problem than a boxed, Wizards-produced starter product with its own components and printing schedule. But the optics are hard to ignore regardless of intent: the product built to be the affordable, casual-friendly on-ramp for new players is dead, while the product built for collectors willing to pay premium prices for a themed accessory is arriving on schedule, in time for an anniversary marketing push.
That’s really the story of Universes Beyond crossovers at this point. Magic’s licensed sets increasingly live or die on how well they convert existing fandoms — Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Marvel — into people willing to spend well past the cost of a normal booster pack, and the accessory ecosystem around them (dice, playmats, deck boxes) is where a lot of that spend actually happens. A cancelled beginner box is a bummer for anyone who wanted a cheap entry point. A $55 resin starship die selling out is a pretty good sign Wizards doesn’t need one.
If you’d rather get your Star Trek Magic fix without waiting on a blind box of dice, the actual November card set already has preorders live, including a Commander deck built around the Borg that feels like the more reliable way to actually play with this crossover. We’ll be keeping an eye on whether the rest of the November launch goes out the door any smoother than the box that didn’t make it.
Featured image: “Star Trek – Enterprise D Saucer Section” by tkksummers, licensed BY-SA (via Openverse). Source.
