At MagicCon: Las Vegas over the weekend, we got our first glimpse at the interstellar wonders that await in Edge of Eternities. As the first full-on sci-fi set in Magic: The Gathering, it’s pushing boundaries even before any cards are revealed. Based on early spoilers, it looks like it’ll do so in the mechanical sense, too. Edge of Eternities is adding Spacecraft as a new MTG card type, and Station as a corresponding mechanic. Together, they let players reach for the stars in a wonderfully literal sense.
Fun and flavorful as it looks, early player reaction to the Spacecraft/Station duo has been fairly negative. Many see it as another needlessly siloed Magic mechanic, unlikely to be reused in the future. Amid these rising concerns, MTG Head Designer Mark Rosewater has taken to Blogatog to confirm that the two mechanics are not intrinsically linked. We may not get more Spacecraft any time soon, but Station is very much on the table.
MaRo Speaks On The New MTG Station Mechanic
- Mana Value: 1WW
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Artifact – Spacecraft
- Stats: 5/5
- Card Text: When The Seriema enters, search your library for a legendary creature card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle.
Station (Tap another creature you control: Put charge counters equal to its power on this Spacecraft. Station only as a sorcery. It’s an artifact creature at 7+.)- STATION 7+
Flying.
Other tapped legendary creatures you control have Indestructible.
This revelation came via a Blogatog post on Saturday. Responding to a player’s concerns about the difficulty of reusing Station, Mark Rosewater set the community’s mind at ease.
“retchgorger: Hi Mark! Is the station ability tied to the spacecraft type? Seems impossible to reuse in sets that don’t have a space theme.
Mark Rosewater: Station is not inherently tied to Spacecraft ruleswise.”
Via Blogatog
While it seems like a minor thing, this is actually fantastic news. Time and time again, we’ve seen Wizards create interesting mechanics that never see the light of day again because they’re ‘flavor-locked’ to specific planes. The likes of Start Your Engines, Collect Evidence, and The Ring Tempts You come to mind as examples.
Looking at Spacecraft/Station, it’s easy to assume it’s just another mechanic in this line. Space travel is way outside the norm for Magic: The Gathering, after all, so we’re unlikely to ever see Spacecraft regularly. If Station were tied to it, then by extension, we’d rarely see that, either. By separating the two, Wizards has opened up a lot of potential design space.
Station very much feels like the next iteration of Crew. We’ve already seen Saddle as an initial spin on it back in Thunder Junction, and Station is the next step. In a way, it’s actually a total inversion of these two mechanics. Rather than asking you to tap your creatures each turn to temporarily create a creature, Station asks you to tap creatures over time for a permanent change.
There’s a lot of room for interesting decision-making with a mechanic like this. Do you invest your creatures into a Station ability with no immediate payoff, or keep them up to block? The sorcery speed limit here, while certainly a huge drawback, makes gameplay much richer. Since it isn’t exclusive to Spacecraft, we could well enjoy this dynamic in a range of sets down the line, as we do now with Crew.
Sighs Of Relief
For a lot of MTG players, the fact that the Station mechanic isn’t Spacecraft-exclusive will be cause for celebration. Much of the early discussion around Spacecraft/Station has been critical, as players assume that we won’t see them reused much due to their specificity.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love them mechanically, the idea of incrementally crewing a vehicle that stays crewed and could have multiple levels is sick, but I wish they were also vehicles just for vehicle synergy.”
fanservice5800, via r/magicTCG
Rosewater’s comment doesn’t fully address these issues. The fact that Spacecraft aren’t also Vehicles creates a bit of an awkward synergy gap, where some interesting interactions could’ve existed. Whether Spacecraft become a regular part of the game or not, letting them play with Vehicle support cards would’ve given them much more scope for success.
On the other hand, the fact that Station isn’t Spacecraft-exclusive means the other new ideas here are less likely to fall by the wayside. A lot of the criticism leveled at the new mechanics so far was based on Wizards’ track record with mechanics like this.
“They do this all the time and it drives me insane. They know it’s a problem too, the fact that a lot of the mechanics in the original Kamigawa were overly unique and didn’t play with other sets was one of the main problems with the set according to Rosewater.”
rdhight, via Blogatog
Based on the information we have so far, there’s no guarantee that this still won’t be the case. Just because Station can come back on non-Spacecraft cards doesn’t mean that it will. The fact that Rosewater mentioned this specifically is a good indicator, mind you. With his advance knowledge of upcoming sets, there’s a good chance this means there are some interesting non-Spacecraft Station designs in the pipeline already.
Endless Frontiers
“You could station at a Port or Flotilla on the Water. You could station a Defensive Tower on land. You could Station a Cloud Castle with dragons and griffins.”
Mcfernis, via Blogatog
Now that we know the Station mechanic will likely see use beyond Spacecraft, MTG players are starting to brainstorm ideas on how it could be implemented. The word ‘Station,’ as Mcfernis notes above, is fairly generic. This means there’s a wide range of possible applications, across all sorts of card types.
The most obvious use case for Station is as an alternative to Crew on Vehicles. For bigger Vehicles with more powerful effects, locking that power behind a bigger upfront cost is a nice valve for Wizards to be able to turn. Maybe some Vehicles could even have both Crew and Station, giving you some nice extra options.
“I feel like the Station aspect of them could be reused on things other than spacecraft. They could do enchantments or lands that are headquarters, lairs, fortresses, etc. that have the Station mechanic.”
CassandraVonGonWrong, via r/magicTCG
Looking a bit more outside the box, we could also see Station on other permanents. A land that becomes a creature after you invest some resources into it is nothing new for Magic: The Gathering. We just saw Soulstone Sanctuary in Foundations, to give a recent example. A new activation method for manlands would be a great use case for this new mechanic. The same is true for generic artifacts, too.
Perhaps even more interestingly, we could see Station as a new way of ‘leveling up’ permanents you control. As waterloograd suggested on Reddit, multiple tiers of Station on a card could represent gradual upgrades over time. We may even see this in Edge of Eternities itself; we’ve only seen one Station card so far, after all.
However Wizards handles it, the fact that Station will likely be getting more time in the sun is great news for the mechanical health of the game.
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