Hey everyone! I guess it wasn’t just Jace messing with reality that dragged me back into writing these reviews, because here I am again, jamming a ridiculous pile of words onto the internet.
This time, we’re boldly going where no Limited review has gone before. Or, you know, where plenty of them have gone before, but with more Star Trek references, bad puns, and questionable jokes.
I’ll be reviewing every card in Star Trek from a Draft perspective, breaking down what’s worth picking, what’s worth avoiding, and what’s probably going to make you regret your life choices somewhere around turn six.
5.0: Disgustingly powerful and basically unbeatable. Either answer it the turn it comes down or start packing up your cards.
4.5: An incredible bomb that can completely take over a game, but still gives your opponent a slim chance to fight back.
4.0: Great rares, the absolute best uncommons, or extremely premium removal. Cards I’m very happy to first pick.
3.5: Excellent role-players or removal spells that basically never get cut.
3.0: Good playables that I’m almost never cutting from my deck.
2.5: Solid playables and roughly the bar I hope nearly every card in my deck can reach.
2.0: Mediocre filler. These are normally fighting for those last few spots in the 20th-23rd card range.
1.5: Replaceable and generally below-average filler. This can also include decent sideboard cards or cards that need a very specific deck.
1.0: Bad filler that gets cut most of the time. There may be a deck that wants it, but I’m not happy when mine does.
0.5: I’m very unhappy to main deck this, but there might be some fringe sideboard application. These are cards that could be useful in the perfect situation but are bad almost everywhere else.
0.0: Completely unplayable in basically every possible situation. Thankfully, they rarely print cards this bad anymore.
A Note on Ratings
These grades aren’t meant to exist in a vacuum. Limited cards can move considerably depending on the deck around them. A 2.0 role-player might become a 3.0 in the archetype that actually wants it, while a supposedly powerful card can drop quickly if your deck can’t support it.
I’ll try to grade cards based on their average performance while pointing out the ones that have especially high or low ceilings depending on synergy.
Now this is the kind of instruction the spells deck needs. Every noncreature spell leaves behind a 1/1, letting you build an army or chump block while you get up to your usual shenanigans.
Better yet, you’re getting rewarded for casting cards the deck already wants: removal, card draw, and tricks. No need to jam questionable spells into your pile just to keep the Instructor employed.
You still need a steady stream of spells before the lesson plan comes together, so I’m not calling this premium. In Izzet, though, I’m happy to have it teaching the class.
This is basically a two-mana 2/1 first striker wearing a paragraph of extra rules text. Reading all those words doesn’t magically improve the card.
What do you get for managing to attack with Mariner three times? A whopping two extra damage to your opponent’s face.
Apparently, Starfleet handles promotions the same way school administrators reward their teachers. You put in all that extra work, exceed expectations, and instead of getting a bonus, they throw you a pizza party.
Boarding Action seems to have two competing ideas about what your deck is supposed to do.
The name screams aggression: turn creatures sideways and keep the pressure on. Beam Me Up, meanwhile, asks you to give up tempo by picking up a creature you’ve already committed to the battlefield.
There are certainly times when reusing an enters-the-battlefield ability makes that worthwhile. But spending mana to replay your own threat isn’t exactly how most aggressive decks want to spend their turn.
That’s not a deal breaker, just a tension worth keeping in mind when you decide whether the card belongs in your deck.
I just find it amusing that a card called Boarding Action is encouraging you to send your own crew back to the transporter room.
Every once in a while, a card comes along that has absolutely no business being in your Limited deck. Brazen Bluff isn’t merely situational; it needs a spectacular collection of circumstances to accomplish something mediocre.
Your opponent must cast a noncreature spell while you’ve got this in hand and two red mana open. They can simply accept the counter, in which case you’ve spent a card and two mana stopping a spell they didn’t mind losing.
And that’s probably your best-case scenario.
More often, they’ll let you cast a noncreature spell from your hand instead. Great, provided you happened to draw an expensive spell worth going down a card to cast, kept this in hand, and left up the mana at exactly the right time.
Seriously, just don’t. The only person getting bluffed here is you if you convince yourself this belongs in your final 40.
I’ll somehow manage to restrain myself from making the approximately 47 jokes about how “cantankerous” is just a fancy way of saying several other four-letter words. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks yourselves.
As for the card, it’s a useful role-player in an aggressive deck. Pushing through extra damage matters when the board clogs up and your opponent thinks they’ve finally stabilized.
Nobody’s mistaking this for a bomb, but it doesn’t need to be one. Sometimes the last few points of damage are the entire job description.
Giving Kirk a 4.0 feels right, even if the games won’t all play out like one of his legendary victories.
At his floor, you’re getting a 2/2 and a 1/1 for three mana. Fine, if a little underwhelming for a man whose job description apparently includes saving the galaxy every other Tuesday.
Start triggering all his abilities, though, and that modest opening turns into an impressive amount of value. Most importantly, you can do it more than once.
Repeated triggers are what push Kirk into bomb territory. Your opponent has a very good reason to kill him before he gets comfortable in the captain’s chair.
Unless you can put multiple lands onto the battlefield in a turn, Burnham is a serviceable Limited creature without much to distinguish her from the crowd.
Trigger her repeatedly and the math changes; now she’s a payoff rather than just another body on the curve. That can be done with plenty of spells at instant speed that put a land into play such as Genesis Effect.
That’s a real upside, but I’m grading the average game. I’d like a little more from my captain before going higher.
This feels like one of those combat tricks that I never actually put in my deck, but somehow end up getting absolutely wrecked by later in the format because I’ve stopped bothering to play around it.
I was ready to call this a straight-up bomb until I noticed you have to sacrifice the token at the end of every turn. That’s a pretty important distinction between building an army and renting one.
I could even see choosing not to finish stationing this. While it’s generating value without becoming a creature, conventional removal has a harder time touching it. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do with your giant warship is leave it in spacedock.
You’re obviously going to want some expendable sacrifice fodder to get the most out of this.
The body is slightly below curve, but turning a disposable creature, treasure, or food into a Shock on the way in makes up for it. Picking off a two-toughness threat while developing your own board is a trade I’m happy to make.
And really, what’s more Klingon than sacrificing one of your own guys just to make sure somebody else dies?
That’s a lot of mana and an even larger wall of text for a card that accomplishes less than you’d think.
You can only copy your opponent’s creatures, and each one can be chosen just once. If they’re not going wide, you might have only one or two worthwhile targets.
And those copies disappear at the end of the turn.
Sure, you’ll occasionally copy an enormous board, swing for lethal, and post the screenshot. That one game will convince somebody this is the sleeper bomb of the set.
The screenshot won’t show all the other games where Dominion Infiltration rotted in their hand waiting for that exact board state.
I expect it to steal the occasional game and waste considerably more early draft picks for the unsuspecting drafter.
A slightly more expensive Pyroclasm or a Divination? Now that’s the kind of choice I can get behind.
Neither effect is particularly groundbreaking on its own, but they solve two very different problems, and having both available on the same card is a pretty fantastic deal.
There are a few rare lands running around that have some nice interactions with this such as the cycle including Federation Outpost. Realistically, most of the time you’re going to be picking up a land just to replay it and maybe gain a whopping one life.
The land doesn’t enter tapped, at least, so replaying it can provide some temporary ramp if you’ve got a use for the mana.
To make Ortegas genuinely exciting, though, you need a rare land worth reusing, a Spacecraft that benefits from the extra station potential, or some similarly specific payoff.
That’s a lot of moving parts for a four-drop. In most decks I’d prefer a pilot who doesn’t need the entire bridge crew to help her take off.
Four mana for an enchantment that doesn’t affect the battlefield is a painful investment in Limited. It had better pay you back quickly.
Even getting started is awkward: cast this, play a land, and somehow have mana left to cast what you hit. That’s not likely to happen the turn you play this.
In a slow control matchup, that repeatable source of cards could bury an opponent. I can absolutely imagine this being miserable to play against when both decks are trading resources and nobody’s attacking.
Against aggro, good luck explaining that your enchantment will be fantastic later while your opponent is busy beating your face in.
Paying five mana to fix your colors feels backwards. By that point, you’ve probably figured out how to cast most of your deck, though I suppose it could find the last color for one of your wildly irresponsible splashes. In reality the best part about that is being able to get another landfall trigger at instant speed.
That makes this primarily a removal spell, and six damage takes down an awful lot of Limited creatures.
The catch is spending your entire fifth turn answering something your opponent may have cast two turns earlier.
Short version: Six damage is a lot. So is five mana.
Reaching nine mana is hard enough. Getting a worthwhile payoff afterward is a completely different problem.
You need a game-changing instant or sorcery in your graveyard and enough differently typed non-Borg creatures to justify the whole production. That’s a remarkably long checklist before you even get to enjoy your nine-mana spell.
Someone will assemble the perfect deck, cast it, and post an absurd screenshot. I hope they have a wonderful time.
Yes, I already made the reference. At this point, screaming Khan’s name is practically a set mechanic.
At least the removal is good. Two damage for two mana, four for three, or six for four gives you a clean answer at several points on the curve without asking you to commit more mana than necessary.
Khan looks like a superstar against a battlefield full of one-toughness creatures. Against opponents with larger bodies, that first impression gets a lot less exciting.
While this is clearly designed to fit into the Boros deck, I think it has a little more flexibility than that. Realistically, any red deck planning to put a bunch of creatures onto the battlefield could find a use for La’An.
On her own, though, La’An doesn’t accomplish enough. You need creatures already on the battlefield for her to really contribute, and that makes her a poor draw when you’re behind.
She’s not locked to Boros, which saves her from a lower grade. Any red deck going wide can use her; just don’t ask her to carry the entire team by herself.
On her own, Lwaxana is basically a Grizzly Bears that requires an extra click to untap on Arena. Apparently, we’ve reached the point where even our mediocre two-drops come with additional administrative work.
There’s upside if you’ve drafted a few triggered abilities worth reusing. Then she has something to do beyond being an unnecessarily complicated bear.
If you’ve somehow managed to draft a deck without any meaningful triggered abilities, feel free to knock her down to the dreaded 1.5. I’m not interested in doing extra paperwork just to play Grizzly Bears.
This person clearly looks like a perfectly sane and well-adjusted individual. I’m sure giving them access to explosives is a fantastic idea.
The card itself holds up better than its owner’s judgment. Decent stats, trample, and a ping when it dies add up to a creature that keeps contributing even after your opponent deals with it.
This is exactly the kind of card that almost always makes your Limited deck but never gets mentioned when you’re talking about your draft with your teammates.
I’m going to show some remarkable restraint and avoid commenting on how unserious this card is or the obnoxious jokes its name is inevitably going to generate.
The card is bad enough that, with any luck, we’ll hardly have to hear the jokes.
The land enters tapped, so you can’t use it immediately, and it disappears on the third step of the saga. That’s a temporary ritual, not lasting ramp, and it costs a card to get there.
The counters and haste are nice, but you’d need to cast multiple creatures during that brief window to get a worthwhile return. That’s an awful lot of scheduling for a card I’m not eager to play.
Good luck blocking this thing. It’s typically going to be attacking as at least a six-power first striker, which is already an absolute nightmare to deal with in combat.
Pah-Wraith also pumps the rest of your attacking team, turning a board of ordinary creatures into a very real threat. Assemble enough differently named lands and the bonus gets downright silly.
The awkward part is that a go-wide attacking bonus belongs in an aggressive deck, while a seven-mana card with Strange New Worlds requirements asks you to play a longer game.
Both halves are powerful. They just don’t naturally belong in the same strategy, which is enough to hold this at a 4.0.
This 2.0 is for the first copy. A second copy starts drifting toward the 1.5 bin where mediocre combat tricks go to collect dust.
Between the Borg and Spacecraft, there should be plenty of excellent artifacts to blow up. Two mana at instant speed is an efficient answer to some genuinely scary cards.
If your opponent doesn’t have a good artifact target, +3/+2 is at least a usable fallback. I’m not drafting a pump spell for that rate, but it’s better than staring at a dead card.
Having two modes means you face a dilemma, giving you a little extra payoff in decks built around the mechanic.
One mana to kill a small creature is already solid. After combat, when you can deal four damage instead, this starts answering threats that usually require a much more expensive removal spell. Timing matters, but the upside is enormous for a single red mana.
I’d love this at two mana, but being able to hit any target makes the higher price easier to accept.
And here’s your friendly reminder to check your opponent’s life total before automatically pointing this at some random creature. There’s nothing quite like realizing three turns later that you could have just killed your opponent instead of their mediocre three-drop.
Rummaging away a dead card or an unnecessary land helps too. You’re paying more than you’d like for the burn, but at least you’re improving your next draw.
Flexible removal that can finish off your opponent and clean up your hand? That’s an easy card to play, even if it won’t win any efficiency awards.
Stacking the deck? I believe there are a few professional Magic players who could teach Q a thing or two about that particular strategy…
Q could be an unbeatable bomb that makes your opponent wonder why they bothered showing up. He could also be a 4/4 that immediately dies to Planetary Bombardment. That’s quite a range for a mythic.
In Constructed, you can design your deck to make the payoff more predictable. In Limited, you can’t just jam 39 lands and one absurd card into a pile and call it a strategy.
I’m giving Q credit for the enormous ceiling, not pretending every casting comes with a magical Christmasland guarantee.
I’m sure there’s some absolutely ridiculous nonsense you can pull off with this card in Constructed, especially in Commander, where people have apparently decided that Magic is more fun when everyone has a 45-minute turn.
One-on-one Limited is less hospitable to that nonsense.
You’re making two Treasures per turn cycle, but you can’t spend them while Quark is alive. That’s a fairly important catch for a card whose entire job is to make money.
There is some tension: your opponent might avoid attacking into him because killing Quark hands you a pile of mana. It’s an amusing trick, but I wouldn’t build my deck around a Ferengi who won’t let me spend my own Treasures.
Reckless Impulse sounds like a pretty accurate description of how I ended up writing all these articles again. Either that, or I desperately need to fund my wife’s Disney habit.
We’ve seen the card enough times to know the deal: two mana for access to two more cards. It’s a welcome reload in aggressive red decks once you’ve dumped your hand onto the battlefield.
Station ten looks absurd until you remember that this boosts all your creatures’ power. That makes getting the ship online easier than the number suggests.
The team-wide boost also helps push damage through right away, and eventually you get a sizable threat of your own. That’s a good deal if your deck can make use of both halves.
I’m tempted to bump this to a 3.0, but that depends on how fast the format ends up being.
A two-mana ramp creature that can also attack for two is a promising start.
Treasure tokens do more than fix your mana here. Cards like Automated Warfare System can sacrifice spare artifacts for profit, letting the Profiteer feed both your expensive spells and your artifact payoffs.
If games go long enough to cash in those extra resources, this might be one of red’s better commons. If everyone is smashing faces by turn four, building a savings account gets a lot less appealing.
For now, 2.5 feels right, with room to move up once we get some games in.
You only get so many expensive slots in a Limited deck, and the basic landcyclers already have their eyes on them.
Silicate Surveyor at least replaces itself, which makes the investment easier to justify. It’s not spectacular, but I won’t complain about getting a card back with my creature.
I’d like this a lot more if the death trigger worked on your opponent’s turn. Requiring it to die on yours is an awkward restriction for something that’s supposed to generate value.
Attack for one and your opponent can just take it. They’re not obligated to block and hand you a trigger.
A sacrifice outlet fixes that problem, so there’s a home for it in decks that can kill their own creatures on demand. Without one, you’re left hoping your opponent decides to be helpful.
This is an interesting option for Izzet spells: a more expensive Thermo-Alchemist, but with a body that can actually attack.
When the way is clear, get in for three and then untap it with noncreature spells to keep pinging away. That’s a lot of potential damage from one card.
If attacking isn’t safe, it can stay home and chip away instead. That flexibility matters more than it might look like on the surface.
The extra mana over Thermo-Alchemist is real, so I’d stick to decks with a healthy spell count. Give it enough fuel and it will do its job.
In an average Limited deck, Targ Wrangler isn’t doing much to earn a slot.
Put it in a hyper-aggressive deck with a steady supply of 1/1 tokens to throw around, though, and it can become a genuine threat. This is one of those cards where the surrounding thirty nine matter more than the card itself.
This has two obvious homes: aggressive Klingons and Izzet spells.
Klingons want another way to push damage; Izzet wants a noncreature spell that contributes to its various payoffs. Same card, different job descriptions.
It’s still playable elsewhere, just less efficient without those synergies.
That poor redshirt has seen better days. Although, considering what Janeway did to Tuvix, I’m starting to think Starfleet should stop letting people near transporters.
Lightning Strike has always been excellent in Limited. Sorcery speed hurts, but three damage for two mana still handles plenty of early threats.
The variation on flashback is what makes this absurd. Kill something early, then get another shot later without spending another card. Even six damage to your opponent’s face is a very real way to close a game.
The timing restriction keeps it just shy of a 4.0, but I’ll be thrilled to draft plenty of these.
Riker offers temporary ramp that can also trigger landfall multiple times. In a deck with the right payoffs, that’s a useful combination.
Pulling lands out of your deck slightly improves your future draws too, though the effect is much smaller than people tend to think.
The body is the letdown. If you’re not taking advantage of those extra land triggers or mana, you’re paying too much for what he’s bringing to the battlefield.
Worf can turn a good attacking position into an absolute nightmare for your opponent. That’s exactly the kind of pressure a creature-heavy red deck wants.
Sacrifice synergies make the exchange even nastier, letting you squeeze value out of creatures that were already helping you press the advantage. He’s at his best when you’re the one setting the terms of combat.
I’d happily play The Wrath of Khan for its first ability alone. Everything after that is just gravy on a card that’s already doing its job.
Rummaging away a card while making your opponent sacrifice a nontoken permanent is particularly nasty in a format filled with Officer tokens. They can’t toss some random 1/1 into the dumpster and call it a day.
And the entire package costs three freaking mana. That’s the sort of wrath I’m happy to unleash.
Red looks like a color that’s going to reward you for knowing exactly how you plan to win. It has some terrific removal, a few genuinely disgusting bombs, and plenty of cards that are much less impressive when you toss them into a random pile and hope for the best.
The removal is where I’m most excited. Transporter Malfunction, Encounter the Unknown, Plasma Cascade, and The Wrath of Khan all give you real ways to interact without feeling like you’ve thrown away a turn. Planetary Bombardment can be a bargain too, provided you’re paying attention to when you cast it. If I start a draft with one of those, I’m feeling pretty good about my life choices.
Then there are the flashy cards. Captain Kirk, the D-7 Battle Cruiser, Pah-Wraith, and Q can all do some incredibly stupid things. Of course, Q can also leave you staring at an ordinary 4/4 and questioning the series of decisions that brought you here. That’s Limited for you.
The archetypes matter. Izzet spells gets some real incentives in Academy Instructor and Tal Shiar Analyst, while aggressive Klingon and go-wide decks want to keep the pressure on and make use of spare bodies. Savvy Profiteer and the artifact-sacrifice cards offer a different kind of value, but I wouldn’t get so distracted counting Treasures that I forget to attack. And don’t assume Beam Me Up belongs in an aggressive deck just because it’s printed on a red card.
My biggest takeaway is that red has good reasons to draft it, but not a license to play every card with a red mana symbol. Some of the filler is genuinely rough, and Brazen Bluff deserves to stay as far away from your final 40 as possible. There are plenty of ways to do something powerful in this color without trying to win a game through interpretive dance and eleven impossible conditions.
That’s it for red! Next up is green, where I fully expect to draft creatures large enough to solve problems with their fists and mana bases irresponsible enough to create entirely new ones.
Until then, stay classy people.
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
Josh is a member of the elite limited team The Draft Lab as well as the host of The Draft Lab Podcast. He was qualifying for Pro Tours, Nationals, and Worlds literally before some of you were born. After a Magic hiatus to play poker and go to medical school, he has been dominating Arena with over an 80% win percentage in Bo3 as well as making #1 rank in Mythic.
