Star Trek Prerelease in Des Moines & Ankeny: Set Guide and Where to Play (Nov 6–8)

If you play Magic anywhere in the Des Moines metro, or you've ever wanted a reason to start, the weekend of November 6 is the one to circle. Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek releases everywhere on Friday, November 13, but prerelease weekend puts the set in your hands a full week early, and Jay's is running three sessions across two stores: Southside on Friday night and Saturday at noon, Ankeny on Sunday at noon. This is the set guide, the schedule, and everything a first-timer needs to know. When you're ready, reserve a seat here.

What Magic's Star Trek set is

Wizards' line for it is the one you already know: Your continuing mission? To boldly go where no one has gone before. This is a Universes Beyond set that pulls from all sixty years of the franchise at once. Kirk, Spock and the original Enterprise. Picard, Data and the Enterprise-D. Sisko on Deep Space Nine, Janeway lost in the Delta Quadrant, Burnham on Discovery, the Kelvin-timeline crew, even the animated shows. The Borg and the Klingons are the heavies. Every era gets cards, and most of them get a captain.

It matters for the game, too: Star Trek is a Standard-legal set, so the cards you open at prerelease are playable at Friday Night Magic for years, not just in Commander. Set code TRK. The main set is 296 cards (81 commons, 110 uncommons, 80 rares, 25 mythic rares) plus ten common dual lands. Card previews are underway now, the set hits MTG Arena and Magic Online on November 10, and paper release is November 13.

Mechanics you'll see in Sealed

• Assimilate is the Borg's mechanic and the one everybody will talk about. You take a creature (an opponent's, or one from a graveyard, depending on the card), put a +1/+1 counter on it, and it becomes a Borg artifact creature that fights for you. Resistance is, in fact, futile.
• Federation rewards the opposite plan: it counts how many different creature types you have among your non-Borg creatures, and a Starfleet crew of Humans, Vulcans, Klingons and Androids racks that up fast. Hoshi Sato, Exolinguist digs deeper the more types you have.
• Spacecraft are back from Edge of Eternities, with Station. A ship enters as a plain artifact; tap your creatures to station it with charge counters, and once it has enough it becomes an artifact creature with the full set of abilities. The Enterprise-D is one.
• Beam me up lets you cast certain instants and sorceries from your graveyard by returning a creature you control to your hand as part of the cost. The spell is exiled afterward, so it's one extra use, not infinite.
• Strange new worlds counts the differently named lands you control, a simple way to reward a deck that plays a few different land types.
• Face a dilemma is the wording for choosing a mode on a modal spell. Cards like Seven of Nine pay you (a card, usually) every time you do it, so the set's "choose one" spells matter more than they look.

Sealed advice that holds for every set: find your two deepest colors, count your removal, keep the curve honest, and don't splash a third color for one bomb unless the fixing is there. Our staff will help you sort a pool if it's your first time.

The chase

The collector side of this set is the biggest story Magic has told in a long while. For the first time ever, there are signed cards: seven Headliner cards, each a textless version of a card in the set, hand-signed in the text box by the actor who played the character. Kirk by William Shatner, Picard by Patrick Stewart, Janeway by Kate Mulgrew, Data by Brent Spiner, Geordi by LeVar Burton, Seven of Nine by Jeri Ryan and Spock by Ethan Peck. Wizards says fewer than 250 copies of each exist, they're English-only, and they can only turn up in Collector Boosters. If one gets pulled in Iowa, we want to hear about it.

Below that there's a lot to open. LCARS frame cards (39 of them, including a cycle of ten shock lands) styled after the Enterprise-D's computer panels. Classic Enterprise cards, 24 of them, painted like 1960s Star Trek posters. Four borderless Scene panoramas that fit together card by card: Showdown at Sector 001, Mirror Mirror, Unimatrix Zero and Deep Space Find. Klingon frame cards, with Klingon-language versions in foil Collector Boosters only. And 30 Stardates cards: borderless reprints of Magic classics recast in the Trek universe, like Kenrith as General Picard, Earth Warlord and Sheoldred as Khan, Engineered Evil. The Beam Me Up Bundle adds two of eight ship-schematic promos, and there are full-art Holodeck and Away Team basic lands in the mix.

None of the Collector-only treatments are in the prerelease kit, but the Play Boosters you open at prerelease are the same Play Boosters that go on sale November 13, LCARS cards, Scene cards, Classic Enterprise and all.

How a prerelease works, and why it's the best first event

Every seat gets a Star Trek Prerelease Pack: six Play Boosters, one traditional foil rare or mythic rare, a deck box and a spindown die. You open everything, build a 40-card deck from what you opened plus basic lands from the counter, and play a few short rounds against the rest of the room. Everything you open goes home with you, win or lose, and there's prize product for the players who win.

Wizards lists prerelease at the casual rules-enforcement level, and that's exactly how ours run. Nobody has a deck built in advance, nobody has seen the cards, and half the room is figuring out what Assimilate does at the same time you are. If you've only played at a kitchen table, or you're a Trek fan who has never played Magic at all, this is the easiest possible step into a store event. Tell us it's your first one at check-in and a staff member will sit with you and build the deck before round one.

Two practical things. First, install the free Magic: The Gathering Companion app and create a Wizards account before you arrive; pairings run through it, and if you add the account name when you reserve we'll have you seated in seconds. Second, arrive 15 minutes before your session for check-in and your kit.

Play it first in Des Moines and Ankeny

• Friday, November 6 at 6:30 PM at Jay's Southside, 3315 SE 14th St, Des Moines
• Saturday, November 7 at 12:00 PM at Jay's Southside, 3315 SE 14th St, Des Moines
• Sunday, November 8 at 12:00 PM at Jay's Ankeny, 613 S Ankeny Blvd, Ankeny

Entry is $30 when you reserve online and $35 at the door. Reserving holds your seat; seats are capped at every session and walk-ups get in only while there's room. If your plans change, call the store before your session and we'll move you to any open slot. Seats aren't refundable, because the kits are allocated to us in advance.

Reserve your Star Trek prerelease seat →

Can't make a session? Preorder the set

Play Booster boxes, Collector Boosters, the Bundle and Beam Me Up Bundle, the two Scene Boxes and the four Commander decks (Federation Fleet, Landing Party, Klingon Fury and We Are the Borg) are all in our Star Trek collection, factory sealed from our distributor. Pre-orders are charged when they ship, and in-stock orders leave our warehouse within a business day. Or come play first, then buy the box you already know you want.

Set facts from Wizards of the Coast's "Collecting Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek" and "Star Trek Mechanics" articles (October 20, 2026), the official product page and the WPN dates-and-details post, with TCGplayer's "Everything We Know About Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek" (August 25, 2026) and TrekCore's coverage of the October 20 reveal stream for the signed-card actor list, as of October 22, 2026. Session times and pricing are Jay's own.