Limited Weekend Update – Star Trek Mechanics and saying Goodbye to Reality Fracture

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another Limited Weekend Update, where I continue to inexplicably get the opportunity to ramble about whatever is going on in Limited on MTG Arena this week.

This week, we’ll be saying a brief goodbye to Reality Fracture before turning most of our attention to the mechanics of the upcoming Star Trek set. We’ll be looking at how these mechanics might play out in Limited, so we’ll be ignoring the Commander-only abilities. Sorry, Commander players. You’ve already got enough people writing about your format.

I know some people have requested that I cover Cube. The problem is that the current iteration hasn’t changed enough from the previous one to justify writing an entire article about it. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is that you should probably be taking lands higher than you currently are. Yes, I realize taking a land instead of that shiny spell isn’t particularly exciting. Neither is losing because your deck can’t cast anything.

Even that advice has been beaten to death by approximately everyone on the internet with a functioning keyboard, so I’m not going to waste your time pretending I’ve stumbled upon some revolutionary drafting strategy.

If there’s ever a significant shift in Powered Cube from one iteration to the next, I’ll happily write about it. Until then, I don’t see much point in recycling the same advice just to fill an article. I’ve got plenty of questionable opinions about new cards to share instead.

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Goodbye, Reality Fracture

Reality Fracture has been one of the best draft sets we’ve had in a long time. Unfortunately, Reality Fracture walked into the bar, announced, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time,” and apparently meant it.

I’ll always wonder how the format would have held up if it had stuck around longer. Would we have eventually ended up with a homogenized format where everyone was fighting over the same few decks, or would it have remained as wide open as it was? It raises an interesting question about whether this was the perfect lifespan for a modern draft set or whether Reality Fracture was just that damn good.

I was pretty close to spot-on with my evaluations during preview season, with a few notable exceptions that I covered in a previous episode available here. The biggest thing I missed was just how terrible aggressive decks were going to be. Apparently, attacking your opponent with creatures is a questionable strategy when they’re busy doing things that actually matter.

One of the few complaints I heard about the format was that it was a bit of a prince format, with some legitimately ridiculous bombs running around. Much like Crimson Vow, I actually considered that a feature rather than a detriment.

There was so much card selection available that you could build your game plan around finding your own bombs while also preparing for whatever nonsense your opponent was planning to throw at you. It also rewarded players for understanding that just because you have a removal spell in your hand doesn’t mean you need to fire it at the first creature that has the audacity to enter the battlefield.

I’m sure this was a difficult adjustment for some people.

Removal became a resource you needed to manage carefully rather than something you simply used to maintain tempo. I appreciated the change of pace, especially in a world where so many modern Limited formats revolve around curving out and trying to kill your opponent before they get to do anything interesting.

That brings me to probably the biggest takeaway from Reality Fracture: generating value mattered.

Simply putting creatures on the battlefield and attacking wasn’t always going to get the job done. You needed to have an actual plan for what happened when the game went long. Having a reasonable curve was nice, but it wasn’t going to do much good when your opponent was drawing half their deck and throwing bombs around like they were commons.

Then there were the five-color soup decks.

I spent a good portion of our previous update discussing how to draft these, so I’m not going to rehash the entire thing here. The important takeaway is that Reality Fracture actually gave us the tools to make these ridiculous piles work.

Between the dual lands, landcyclers, and generally slower pace of the format, splashing powerful cards was not only possible but frequently encouraged.

And there’s something inherently satisfying about watching your opponent play a perfectly reasonable game of Magic while you’re casting your third off-color bomb.

Of course, you still needed to be able to cast your spells. Apparently, that particular detail escaped some people who interpreted “five-color soup” as permission to throw every rare they opened into a deck and hope for the best.

The final thing I’ll say about Reality Fracture is that it rewarded flexibility. You could certainly draft a traditional two-color deck and do perfectly well, but there were plenty of opportunities to branch out when the right cards came along. Understanding when to stay the course and when to get greedy was one of the things that made the format so enjoyable.

I’m going to miss that.

At least until Wizards gives us another format where I can play entirely too many colors and pretend it’s good deck building.

Boldly Going Into Star Trek

Enough about the past. It’s time to boldly go into the future. Because it’s Star Trek. Get it? Oh man, I really hope these jokes get better as we go. Somehow, somebody keeps letting me publish this stuff.

Star Trek arrives on Arena on November 10, giving us a little time to look through the mechanics before we start making terrible drafting decisions. Only a portion of the set has been spoiled as I’m writing this, so we’re going to have to work with the information currently available. I’ll leave declaring the format solved based on twelve preview cards to the people on Reddit.

One of the things that immediately caught my attention is how many of these mechanics appear to reward planning ahead rather than simply playing your cards on curve and turning them sideways. That’s generally something I appreciate in Limited, since I occasionally enjoy having to think about what I’m doing.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting another slow format. I’ve been playing Limited for entirely too many years to know better than to start predicting format speed before we’ve actually seen the cards. Nothing makes you look quite as stupid as declaring that a format is all about generating value before somebody beats you to death with a bunch of two-drops.

Still, there’s some interesting stuff here, and several of these mechanics have the potential to create some pretty complicated board states. Whether that’s actually a good thing or just another opportunity for people to misplay spectacularly remains to be seen.

Let’s take a look.

Beam Me Up

Of all the new mechanics, this is probably the one I’m most interested in exploring.

Beam Me Up gives certain instants and sorceries an alternative way to be cast from the graveyard. You pay the listed cost and return a creature you control to your hand. Afterward, the spell gets exiled.

The obvious comparison is to Flashback, although the requirement to return a creature makes this considerably more interesting.

Anyone who’s played Limited for more than five minutes should immediately recognize some obvious potential here.

Creatures with enters abilities are already good. Getting to reuse those abilities while also casting another spell out of your graveyard sounds like an excellent way to generate value.

Let’s say you’ve got a creature that draws a card when it enters the battlefield. You’ve already gotten your card, and now you get to return that creature to your hand to cast another spell. Assuming you’ve got enough mana, you can replay the creature and draw another card.

That’s a pretty sick sequence, especially when you’re getting an actual spell out of the deal instead of just bouncing your own creature.

There’s also the potential to use Beam Me Up at instant speed to save a creature from removal. Since returning the creature is part of the cost, your opponent doesn’t get an opportunity to respond before it’s safely back in your hand.

We haven’t actually seen any instant-speed Beam Me Up cards spoiled yet, but WotC specifically mentioned instants and sorceries when introducing the mechanic. I’m going to assume they weren’t just throwing the word “instant” in there to mess with us.

If we do get some, keep that interaction in mind. Turning your opponent’s removal spell into a wasted card while getting another use out of one of your own spells is a pretty substantial swing in card advantage.

Of course, there’s one rather important downside to all of this.

You actually have to return a creature.

It’s easy to get excited about all the ridiculous things you can do with enters abilities, but returning a creature to your hand isn’t always going to be a positive. When you’re behind on the battlefield, taking away one of your blockers and potentially spending another turn replaying it can be a pretty substantial cost.

I suspect the quality of the creatures available is going to be a major factor in how good Beam Me Up ends up being. The speed of the format will also matter quite a bit, along with what kind of early speed bumps we have available to help us survive long enough for all this value to start adding up.

If we’re getting reasonable bodies with useful enters abilities, this mechanic could be fantastic. I’m particularly interested in seeing whether there are any cheap creatures that can repeatedly generate value without costing us an entire turn to replay them.

On the other hand, if you’re returning a mediocre creature to cast a mediocre spell, you’re probably doing a whole lot of work to accomplish very little.

Just because you can generate value doesn’t mean the value you’re generating is actually worth it. It’s like spending your entire life getting rich only to die before you have a chance to enjoy it.

Face a Dilemma

Face a Dilemma is a pretty straightforward mechanic that rewards you for choosing modes on spells or abilities. Fortunately, this set looks like it’s going to give us plenty of opportunities to make those decisions, and we all know how much I enjoy games of Magic where the choices actually matter.

If you’ve played Magic for any amount of time, you’ve seen plenty of modal cards. They’re the ones that give you multiple options and allow you to choose whichever effect best fits the situation.

Whenever you choose one or more modes, you’ve faced a dilemma. You then get whatever bonus is attached to your Face a Dilemma card, such as Seven of Nine letting you grip an extra card. Seems like a pretty good deal.

For clarity, even if you choose multiple modes on the same spell or ability, it still only counts as facing one dilemma. Sorry to anyone who was already planning on abusing that interaction.

Now, I generally like modal spells in Limited.

Flexibility is valuable, especially when you’re trying to avoid drawing cards that don’t accomplish anything in a particular matchup. A spell that can serve as removal in one situation and provide additional value in another is usually going to get my attention.

Being able to trigger other cards by casting those spells makes them even more appealing.

Dimir is the primary dilemma archetype, which makes perfect sense for a color combination that generally wants to play a longer, more controlling game. Drawing cards, making decisions, and slowly burying your opponent in value? Sounds like my kind of Magic.

The big question is going to be how much we’re paying for all that flexibility.

There’s a pretty significant difference between playing a good modal spell that happens to trigger your other cards and putting a bunch of mediocre cards in your deck because they have the right words printed on them.

We’ve seen plenty of Limited archetypes fall into that second category, and most of them end up being excellent ways to make your opponents feel better about their decks.

I want my synergy cards to actually accomplish something when I draw them without their payoffs. If my entire deck requires three different pieces to make a bad card slightly less embarrassing, I’d probably be better off just playing good cards in the first place.

Unfortunately, the non-rare Face a Dilemma cards we’ve seen spoiled so far haven’t exactly impressed me. On their own, they look pretty underwhelming, which has me concerned about the archetype’s overall viability.

Unless we see some significantly better payoffs at common and uncommon, or there’s a critical mass of modal spells that we’d happily play without any Face a Dilemma synergies, this archetype could be dead on arrival.

There’s still plenty of the set left to spoil, so I’m not writing it off completely.

But if your deck needs to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make mediocre cards playable, perhaps the real dilemma is why you drafted those cards in the first place.

Federation

Federation rewards you for controlling a variety of creature types among your non-Borg creatures.

Each different creature type counts toward your total, so a creature with multiple types can contribute more than one. For example, a Human Scientist and a Human Officer would give you three different creature types.

There’s also an interesting interaction with changelings worth mentioning. We don’t know whether the set will actually have any, but this could certainly come up in Cube or other formats, so I might as well explain it.

Since Federation specifically counts creature types among your non-Borg creatures, changelings actually contribute absolutely nothing. They have every creature type, which unfortunately includes Borg. Congratulations, your creature has several hundred creature types and somehow manages to contribute zero of them.

There’s also some negative synergy with Assimilate, since assimilated creatures become Borg and lose their other creature types. That means they contribute absolutely nothing toward your Federation count.

Anyway, Federation is an interesting departure from the tribal mechanics we’re accustomed to seeing.

Normally, when a set cares about creature types, you’re encouraged to play as many creatures of the same type as possible.

Federation wants you to do the opposite.

Instead of loading up on Humans or Scientists, you’re encouraged to spread things out and get as many different creature types onto the battlefield as possible.

That should make creatures with multiple types particularly appealing, especially when they contribute something your other creatures don’t already have.

It could also create some interesting decisions during the draft.

Imagine you’ve got two creatures that are roughly comparable in terms of stats and abilities. One of them happens to introduce another creature type into your deck. If you’ve got enough Federation payoffs, that could easily be the deciding factor.

The important thing is not to get too carried away with this.

Playing a bad creature because it happens to have a creature type you don’t already control probably isn’t going to win you many games. I realize we’re all excited about making the numbers on our cards bigger, but that doesn’t mean we should throw basic card evaluation out the window.

The payoff still needs to justify what you’re giving up.

There’s also some tension between Federation and the Borg cards, since your Borg creatures won’t contribute anything toward the Federation count. I appreciate the flavor here, although I’m considerably more interested in whether any of these cards are actually worth putting in my deck.

I suspect it’ll be something that provides incidental value in creature-heavy decks. If you’re already playing good creatures with a variety of types, getting some additional benefits from them sounds great.

If you’re filling your deck with garbage just to get another creature type on the battlefield, you might want to reconsider your life choices.

Not every mechanic needs to be the centerpiece of your deck.

Strange New Worlds

Wizards has apparently decided that what Magic players really need is another excuse to build questionable mana bases. Before I get fifteen different versions of the same question, no, you should not be playing off-color basic lands just to power this mechanic up. There, we’ve gotten that out of the way. I’m sure that will stop approximately nobody from asking.

Strange New Worlds rewards you for controlling lands with different names.

That’s it.

If you have three Forests and an Island, you’ve got two different land names. Add a differently named dual land, and now you’ve got three.

The mechanic doesn’t actually care how many colors you’re playing. It cares about the names of your lands.

That’s a pretty important distinction.

From a Limited perspective, this means that dual lands and utility lands could potentially become more valuable than they would be in a normal format. A land that provides the same colors as another land might still be worth including simply because it has a different name.

That’s where things start getting interesting.

We already know that Simic is the primary Strange New Worlds archetype, so I’m expecting there to be some reasonable support for the strategy. The question is how much we’re going to have to compromise our mana bases to make it work.

After spending the last few weeks talking about five-color soup decks, I feel like I should probably clarify something.

Being able to cast your spells is still important.

I realize this is a controversial position among people who enjoy drafting every rare they open, but I’m going to stand by it.

And yes, I already mentioned this, but I know how much people love to argue about this sort of thing. Playing an off-color basic land might improve your Strange New Worlds count, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.

There’s a pretty significant difference between playing a dual land that helps you cast your spells while also increasing your Strange New Worlds count and putting a random Mountain in your Simic deck because you really want to make a number bigger.

One of those is good deck building. The other is a great way to lose a game while convincing yourself that you were just unlucky.

I’m all for getting greedy when the payoff justifies it. I’ve built more than my fair share of questionable mana bases over the years. But there’s a difference between stretching your mana to play a powerful card and actively making your deck worse to squeeze a little more value out of a mechanic.

I suspect the best versions of this strategy will be the ones that can increase their land diversity without sacrificing too much consistency. If the fixing is good enough, this could end up being one of my favorite mechanics in the set.

If not, we’re going to see some truly awful mana bases.

Considering the average Magic player’s willingness to ruin a perfectly functional deck in pursuit of a little extra value, the most likely outcome is probably both.

Spacecraft and Station

I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to predict that we were going to get Spacecraft and Station in the Star Trek set. I suspect we’ll get the same thing in the inevitable Star Wars set. Don’t judge me. You know it’s going to happen, and you’ll be equipping lightsabers right alongside me.

Spacecraft are artifacts that gain additional abilities as they accumulate charge counters. Many of them eventually become creatures once you’ve added enough counters.

Station allows you to tap another untapped creature you control to add charge counters equal to that creature’s power.

You can only activate Station as a sorcery, so you’re not going to be pulling off any surprise combat tricks with it. However, you can still use creatures with summoning sickness, which makes that essentially free value as long as you weren’t planning on using them to block.

Unlike Vehicles, where you’re generally getting a temporary creature, Spacecraft reward you for investing resources into building something that becomes more powerful over time.

That creates some interesting decisions.

Do you tap your creature to add counters, or do you attack with it? Can you afford to leave yourself open on defense just to get your Spacecraft online a turn earlier? And perhaps most importantly, how many turns are you willing to spend building something before it needs to start actually accomplishing something?

I’m particularly interested in how creature power affects the mechanic.

A bigger creature can add more charge counters at once, potentially getting your Spacecraft operational much faster. That could make some creatures considerably more appealing than their normal Limited evaluations would suggest.

It also means that combat tricks or other ways to temporarily increase a creature’s power could potentially have some additional utility especially when combined with Vigilance. Whether that’s actually worth doing will depend on the cards, but it’s certainly an interaction worth keeping in mind.

We’ve also got Azorius as the primary Spacecraft archetype, with Artificers providing additional support.

My biggest concern is that this looks like the sort of strategy that can be absolutely incredible when you’re ahead and completely miserable when you’re behind.

Spending multiple turns assembling an enormous Spacecraft sounds great until your opponent kills you while you’re working on it. I’m sure we’ve all had enough experience losing games with cards that were supposed to be amazing next turn.

There’s also the question of how much you’re actually getting for your investment. Tapping a creature that wasn’t going to do anything anyway is a pretty reasonable cost. Tapping something that could have attacked or blocked effectively is an entirely different story.

Just because you’re putting charge counters on something doesn’t mean you’re actually advancing your position in the game.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of spending several turns working toward some impressive payoff while completely ignoring what your opponent is doing. Then you finally get your massive spaceship operational just in time to lose the game to a single removal spell.

Congratulations on your engineering achievement. I’m sure the consolation prize is lovely.

Still, the mechanic has plenty of potential, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of enablers and payoffs are available at common and uncommon. If we have enough ways to build up our Spacecraft without sacrificing too much tempo, this could end up being a pretty powerful strategy.

If not, we’re going to have a whole bunch of people spending their games building expensive artifacts while their opponents are busy smashing face.

Assimilate

Naturally, we can’t have a Star Trek set without the Borg.

Assimilate allows you to bring opposing creatures under your control, turning them into Borg artifact creatures with a +1/+1 counter.

Depending on the effect, you might be stealing something directly from the battlefield or bringing a creature onto the battlefield from another zone.

Stealing your opponent’s creatures has historically been a pretty good thing to do in Limited, dating all the way back to the days of Control Magic. I’m not exactly breaking new ground with that observation. Taking your opponent’s best creature while simultaneously adding it to your own board has been an excellent way to ruin somebody’s day for over thirty years.

The real question is how easily we’re going to be able to accomplish it.

So far, we’ve only seen two cards spoiled with Assimilate, and they’re both mythics. Frankly, that’s probably for the best. This feels like the sort of mechanic that could absolutely ruin a Limited format if it were too prevalent.

There’s only so much fun to be had when your opponent keeps stealing your best creatures, and I’m fairly certain most of that fun is being had by the person doing the stealing.

Orzhov is the Borg artifact creature archetype, which makes me particularly interested in how many artifact synergies we’re going to have available.

Even without stealing opposing creatures, a deck that consistently generates artifact creatures could have some pretty powerful interactions. The fact that Assimilate also adds a +1/+1 counter gives us another potential avenue for synergy.

For now, I think Assimilate is one of those mechanics where we really need to see the individual cards before making any serious judgments. I’m hoping it remains relatively rare, because there’s a pretty significant difference between having a couple of absurd mythics running around and having an entire format revolve around stealing your opponent’s creatures.

I enjoy powerful Limited formats as much as anyone, but I’d prefer to actually get to play with the cards I drafted.

One nice thing about this preview season is that Wizards has already given us the intended themes for all ten two-color combinations.

Of course, just because Wizards tells us what an archetype is supposed to do doesn’t mean that’s what we’ll actually end up drafting. There’s every possibility that we’ll discover another five-color soup deck running around or that three-color decks are actually where we want to be.

I’m going to keep this relatively brief because, with the number of cards spoiled so far, anything beyond the basic themes would be almost entirely speculation. I’ve certainly got no shortage of opinions, but I’d prefer to have some actual cards to base them on.

I’ll also be doing my usual breakdown of the archetypes, complete with deck skeletons, before the set launches. We can save the more detailed analysis and questionable predictions for that article.

For now, here’s what Wizards has planned for us:

• Azorius (WU): Spacecraft and Artificers
• Dimir (UB): Dilemma Control
• Rakdos (BR): Klingons and creature deaths
• Gruul (RG): Away Team Landfall
• Selesnya (GW): Doctors and +1/+1 counters
• Orzhov (WB): Borg artifact creatures
• Izzet (UR): Scientists and noncreature spells
• Golgari (BG): Archaeology and graveyard synergies
• Boros (RW): Command, rewarding eight or more total power
• Simic (GU): Strange New Worlds

There’s a pretty interesting mix of traditional Limited strategies and some of the newer mechanics here. I’m particularly interested in seeing how much overlap exists between the archetypes, since that can make a huge difference in how flexible we’re able to remain during a draft.

For now, I’ll reserve judgment until we’ve seen the rest of the cards. There’s not much point in declaring a color combination the best deck in the format before we even know what half the commons do.

I’ll leave that to the people who somehow manage to solve every Limited format before the prerelease. It’s pretty impressive how they manage to solve every format before playing a single game and still end up being wrong about almost everything. You’d think that kind of consistency would be difficult to achieve.

You used to talk about food on the podcast, and I’ve seen you mention some place called Sizzler in Twitch chat. Would you say that’s your favorite restaurant? – Randy R.

First off, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Randy R. (presumably short for Randerson) isn’t your real name. I also have a pretty good suspicion about who you actually are, but I might as well finally address this inside joke so you’ll stop sending me variations of the same question from different accounts.

For those who aren’t familiar with the legendary establishment known as Sizzler, it’s pretty much bottom-tier food. Somehow, it manages to limbo under the already impressively low bar Golden Corral has established for restaurant quality. I’m not entirely sure how that’s possible, but I suppose we should appreciate excellence in any field, even when that field is being terrible.

The whole Sizzler thing is just a running joke that started forever ago and has somehow refused to die.

I’ve never been particularly shy about living in Orlando. I mean, you’ve got to be close to Disney and Universal. One of the nice things about the area is that we have pretty much every restaurant imaginable, so naturally, whenever we’re making dinner plans, the joke is that we’re going to Sizzler.

The best part is that there hasn’t even been one open around here since before COVID. Apparently, the joke has managed to outlive the actual restaurant.

As for my actual favorite restaurant, I’d probably go with Victoria & Albert’s at Disney’s Grand Floridian, specifically in the Queen Victoria Room.

There are only four tables in the room, and you get a ten-course meal. It’s a pretty incredible experience.

I know there are plenty of people who love complaining about fancy restaurants serving tiny portions and charging outrageous amounts of money for them. I’m a big dude, and I’ve done more than my fair share of eating challenges over the years. Seriously, my lore goes a lot deeper than most of you realize. I’ve never once left Victoria & Albert’s hungry.

It turns out that eating ten courses adds up, even when each individual plate isn’t large enough to feed a family of four.

I’d highly recommend it if you’re ever visiting Disney and want to splurge on a special dinner. The food and service are fantastic, and the entire experience is something you don’t get at most restaurants.

There’s also the added benefit of not having little kids running around. Guests have to be at least ten years old, and with only four tables, it’s an incredibly quiet and relaxing experience.

As much as I love Disney, sometimes it’s nice to spend a few hours somewhere that doesn’t involve screaming children, massive crowds, or somebody trying to run over your ankles with a stroller.

And somehow, I suspect “Randy” is still going to ask me about Sizzler next week.

That’s going to do it for this week’s Limited Weekend Update!

Reality Fracture turned out to be one of the best Limited formats we’ve had in quite some time. Between the ridiculous bombs, interesting gameplay decisions, and opportunities to build mana bases that would make a responsible Magic player physically ill, there was a lot to love about this set.

I’m genuinely going to miss it. I would have loved to see how the format continued to evolve, but apparently having nice things for an extended period is too much to ask.

Fortunately, Star Trek is right around the corner, and we’ve got plenty to look forward to. I’ll be doing my usual Star Trek set reviews, where I’ll go through every card and give you my initial thoughts on how they’ll perform in Limited. I’ll also have my breakdown of the draft archetypes, complete with deck skeletons, before the set launches.

Of course, I’ll still be covering Midweek Magic every week, with event guides, decklists, and whatever nonsense Wizards has decided we’re playing this time around.

Between the set reviews, draft guides, Midweek Magic, and these updates, I’ll have plenty to keep me busy. I’m starting to think my actual hobby is writing about Magic rather than playing it.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next weekend for another Limited Weekend Update!

Until then, stay classy, people.