Magic: The Gathering's science-fantasy set adds spacecraft, and a rules change for the Commander format

The Seriema, a spacecraft appearing in Edge of Eternities — (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

While Final Fantasy may be the current hotness, MagicCon: Las Vegas dedicated most of its preview panel to an expansion that's coming later in the year. Edge of Eternities is a set that takes Magic to the limit of its multiverse as well as its genre, with a science-fantasy setting that has room for jellyfish aliens, religious wars in space, and a whole species who can travel at faster-than-light speeds by "weftwalking".

Also, it's got spaceships.

Instead of using the existing rules for vehicle cards, as the Doctor Who set did, Edge of Eternities will differentiate spacecraft by making them a separate card type with a slightly different rule. While they still have to be crewed before they can be used, the crew don't have to be tapped every turn. The new rule is called stationing, and it means you tap creatures to add charge counters equal to their power to a ship. Once you've got enough charge counters, your spacecraft becomes an artifact creature able to function independently of whoever's stationing it.

Edge of Eternities is also bringing back five of the shocklands, which will please the players who never shut up about them, when it releases on August 1. The preview panel followed Edge of Eternities with a glimpse at a couple of cards from the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender set, and revealed two sets due next year. Both of them are returns to popular planes, with Lorwyn Eclipsed returning to the home of the elves on January 23, and Secrets of Strixhaven heading back to the Magic's magical university at some point later in 2026.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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