Magic: The Gathering Fizzles in Space with the New Edge of Eternities Set

By Cameron Kunzelman | July 31, 2025 | 2:00pm

Tabletop Features Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering Fizzles in Space with the New Edge of Eternities Set

Magic: The Gathering originally came out in 1993, and it has done a lot of weird things in that time. The game has taken players on travels through the planes. We’ve worn cowboy hats, and we’ve learned about a city-world of guilds. We’ve seen a place made almost entirely of metal, and we’ve also gone to multiple places that were just very cold. Magic is a land of multitudes. And now we’re in space.

Or something like it. Edge of Eternities is a new Magic set that takes the game into the novel realm of space-fantasy, a genre where magic and interstellar travel sit together with relative ease. I admit, as a long-time Magic player, that I balk a little bit when confronted with this. Magical technological ships that take us from magical plane to magical plane are totally fine in my mind, but I draw the line at space. Or I guess I want to, in my hypocrisy, even though Wizards of the Coast fully broke this barrier a few years ago with the cyberpunk-inflected Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.

I say this about my general feelings because I want to be honest about them before sharing my belief that I don’t find Edge of Eternities to be a very good Magic: The Gathering set. I’ve played a lot of it, probably more in the first week than any other set I’ve played in the past couple years, because I was struggling to figure it out. What cards are good? How do you play a limited format well? What are the card interactions that aren’t necessarily immediately clear but which are really fun to exercise and figure out on your own?

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What I’ve mostly learned is that Edge of Eternities feels like a bit of a mess. The strengths are very strong. I was hesitant about the space theme and how it would work, but they sunk the shot. There are great big scary space ships and there are small, brave humans and there are weird space creatures that have to be dealt with. It is a set that plays a lot in a very specific pulp genre tone, and they got it right—it feels like you have plopped down into an adventure serial where sword-wielding knights might defeat stellar worms. That stuff is great.

The mess comes in when I’m actually engaging with the set mechanics, which dominate the play patterns of Edge of Eternities. The big space vehicles, which you power up by Stationing, are only viable if you are willing to play defensively and sit back. Warp, a mechanic that allows you to play a creature card for a single term to get an effect, interacts with Station by giving you creatures that you’re not scared to tap since you’re going to lose them anyway. This is notionally great, and the Warp cards mostly have very beneficial effects that you’re happy to get for free. The problem comes in when you have to do all of these things in sequence, which mostly asks you to sit back, power up a big board state, and generally play an undynamic game.

I fondly remember Rise of the Eldrazi “battleship Magic” from 2010, which was about doing this exact thing. The issue is that those play patterns are from 15 years ago, and it’s not the kind of Magic that I find particularly exciting at this point. Nearly all of the mechanics in the set are “on board,” meaning that they are static effects that are open information and based on what cards already exist in play. On one hand, that’s really great because it gives you the opportunity to really analyze everything and make the best possible decisions. On the other hand, it makes play extremely slow, and it focuses the game around building that really big board to maximize your array of options. Playing counterspells, combat tricks, and some of the splashier non-permanent spells all work just fine, but if you build a deck around those things you will find yourself behind very quickly. It’s just not the vibe that I like, although I might be in the very small minority on this one.

It’s undeniable that when you get all the cards you’re looking for, the limited play for the set is awesome. I drafted a red-blue deck that was all artifact cards plus Mm’menon, Uthros Exile and Pinnacle Emissary. I had a really fun time, and the things I did felt unfair because everything was pinging off everything else, creating lots of niche combos and edge cases that really enlivened the cards. The other 30 games or so I played in the preview and through this week have not felt that way at all.

Edge of Eternities’s effects on constructed Magic are still a little vague. The price lists, which show some general demand shifts, seem to suggest that people are interested in the multiplayer-centered cards for Commander more than they are any particular beaters for Standard or Modern, although trying to split this up is difficult. Icetill Explorer, which is a card that embraces some classic design and mechanics, seems to be a fun early standout. Hard to say.

I think that the best part of Edge of Eternities has nothing to do with opening packs or playing with cards. Noted science fiction and fantasy author (and Destiny loreslinger) Seth Dickinson wrote the story for the set, and it is some of the wildest stuff that Magic has ever put out in any format. It’s in 11 parts, has text and audio versions, and really plays into both how weird Magic is and how much the game could be leaning into what it does best: taking the fantastical and the new and weaving them through the 30+ year old ideas that Magic has been working with this whole time. It’s very special, and even if you don’t care about Magic as a game, I think you’d get something out of it.

Overall, Edge of Eternities is a rough place to be. There’s not much interest there for me, and it is breaking out of Magic’s comfort zone in a lot of ways. Mark Rosewater has written about the development of the set, which (from the outside) reads as more troubled than the average one. And, of course, it is sandwiched in between Final Fantasy (the most profitable Magic set of all time) and the upcoming Spider-Man set, which I imagine will also be a very lucrative opportunity for WOTC that will also drive a lot of interested people to the game. Maybe this is the best time for a set that’s a little weird—new people in the game might be more accepting of it given that they are open to all the novelty you can give them. But I think that Edge of Eternities will go down as one of the lesser sets in terms of gameplay while simultaneously being recognized as a triumph in visual and narrative design. Hopefully that means they can return to the edge in the future.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.