STLV ‘26: Wizards of the Coast confirms more LOWER DECKS cards in MAGIC: THE GATHERING | STAR TREK decks

Wizards of the Coast has unveiled the five Welcome Decks accompanying Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek, and buried in the reference-card fine print is proof that the crossover isn’t just playing the greatest hits of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation — it’s giving Star Trek: Lower Decks its due, too.

Announced August 5, 2026, the five monocolor, 40-card Welcome Decks (White, Blue, Black, Red, Green) are built to teach new players Magic‘s fundamentals through Star Trek‘s cast, with each color mapped to a faction’s philosophy: Jean-Luc Picard anchoring White’s cooperative ethos, Klingons fueling Red’s aggression, and so on. They pull cards from both the mainline Star Trek set and its Commander companion, and they’ll roll out at Wizards Play Network stores and Star Trek conventions like Star Trek: Las Vegas, ahead of the set’s November 13 release.

Lower Decks! Lower Decks!

The clearest Lower Decks pulls surface in the Black and Green decks:

• Badgey, Malicious Glitch (Black) — the unhinged holographic combadge from “Terminal Provocations” gets his own card, villain arc and all, dropped in among Borg and Klingon threats.

• Moopsy (Green) — the bone-drinking menagerie escapee from “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee” shows up as a green creature, presumably as harmless-looking and lethal on the battlefield as it was in Narj’s cage.

• Gumato (Green) — a sapient species whose most notable appearances are in both TOS and LD.

• Exocomp (Blue) — a creature that can replicate new circuits as they learn inadvertently bootstrapped exocomps into sentience in the 2360s.

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It’s a small footprint compared to the TOS/TNG heavy-hitters (Kirk, Picard, Spock, the Borg Queen, V’Ger) filling out the rest of the lists, but it’s exactly the kind of deep-cut inclusion that signals the Wizards creators did its homework across the franchise rather than just skimming the movies.

The needle-drop moment didn’t go unnoticed, including by Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan himself. He reacted on his Bluesky account with, “WAIT MOOPSY TOO??,” seemingly caught off guard that Wizards had gone deep enough into his show’s creature catalog to pull The Menagerie escapee specifically. 

Comics creator and Lower Decks super fan, Zoe Tunnell (@zoewithasword.bsky.social), also echoed the sentiment with a blunter three-phrase verdict: “LOWER DECKS LOWER DECKS LOWER DECKS.” 

Between the creator’s surprise and the fandom’s excitement, it’s clear this wasn’t the reaction of an audience expecting the show to get more attention in the Magic decks than was announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2026.

Back on July 14, Wizards’ initial first look for the mainline Star Trek set spoiled Brad Boimler, “Eager Ensign,” and Beckett Mariner, “Impetuous Ensign,” the show’s two lead characters, reportedly designed to synergize with each other in Limited play. The reveal was still circulating in fandom spaces over a week later, when I posted my own gleeful “LOWER DECKS! LOWER DECKS!” on July 23, 2026, when the cards were discussed in-depth at this year’s SDCC on Star Trek collectibles, underscoring that excitement over the show’s presence in the set had been building well before the Welcome Deck reveal put Badgey and Moopsy in front of fans.

Welcome Decks are Magic‘s on-ramp product, a.k.a. the thing a store owner hands a Star Trek fan with zero Magic experience. Slipping Lower Decks references into that on-ramp is a signal about who Wizards thinks the audience is: not just legacy fans who grew up on TOS  and TOS reruns, but the newer, more online, comedy-forward fandom that Lower Decks built. Pairing Badgey and Moopsy with card templating clearly built to teach removal and combat tricks also means these aren’t just cameo flavor text, they’re functional cards new players will actually cast.

May you RIP, Lower Decks

The crossover also lands with a little extra weight given the show’s fate. Paramount ended Lower Decks after its fifth season, with the cancellation announced in April 2024 alongside a renewal for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a decision McMahan and executive producer Alex Kurtzman framed at the time as bittersweet, thanking fans while noting they remained hopeful the Cerritos crew would “live on with new adventures” in some form. 

The show wrapped its run in late 2024, part of a broader trim of Paramount+’s animated Star Trek slate that also claimed my favorite new Trek series, Star Trek: Prodigy. Seeing Badgey and Moopsy immortalized in a physical, retail product over a year after the show ended reads, for a lot of fans (and evidently for McMahan himself), like exactly that kind of afterlife.

Full decklists and the Star Trek Card Image Gallery are live now on Wizards’ site. Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek releases November 13, 2026.