Despite Magic: The Gathering's creator, Wizards of the Coast, insistingthat Universes Beyond is largely a well-supported and popular part of the game, it's getting hard to ignore the persistent negative narrative around these sets when prerelease comes around.

Star Trek officially hit prerelease last Friday, and while I enjoyed my own experience at my LGS, it's impossible to ignore the waves of disparaging comments online, whether it be about attendance, playability, or the fact that stores are reportedly being forced to buy Universes Beyond stock under threat of having in-universe stock limited if they don't.

Early online responses to the set and prerelease are bleak, and when you combine that with complaints from players who were willing to buy and invest in the set but couldn't get stock in some cases, it paints a picture of a poor end to 2026. The key, however, is that the negative voices are vocal online players and represent a minority of the game's audience, and this is becoming a consistent trend after the release of Universes Beyond sets that don't fit the typical Venn diagram of Magic players' presumed interests, because the silence after the release of The Hobbit was deafening.

The post that prompted my deeper look at how the Star Trek prerelease was performing overall came from Robert Taylor, in response to a call from Saffron Olive asking how the events were shaping up. The post, which is still live on Twitter / X, has Robert sharing attendance numbers for all of this year's pre-release events at their local store, Mayhem Comics in Iowa.

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