Generating creature tokens is a common way to make the most out of your resources in a game of Magic: The Gathering. They can be sacrificed for powerful effects, used to chump block, or amassed to overwhelm your opponent. Cards typically generate tokens of the same color, like white Warriors for Secure the Wastes, green Squirrels for Deranged Hermit, and black Zombies for Ghoulish Procession. Yet numerous cards in Magic: The Gathering Star Trek generate 1/1 red Officer tokens regardless of the base color, from the white Captain Benjamin Sisko to the green MACO Strike Team. The discrepancy is a nod to the sci-fi franchise’s darkest running joke.
Star Trek: The Original Series established that Starfleet officers wear brightly colored uniforms based on their job. Captain James T. Kirk sports gold to indicate he’s in command. Spock and Dr. Leonard McCoy wear blue, the color of Starfleet’s medical and science divisions. Red is the color of security and operations, worn by chief engineer Montgomery Scott and communications officer Nyota Uhura.
The series follows the U.S.S. Enterprise on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. When the ship finds a planet to investigate, they typically send down a few members of the senior staff along with some extra security and operations personnel for support. The show’s writers tended to kill off these nameless red-clad officers to show the situation was serious without hurting one of the show’s main characters. These disposable background characters came to be referred to as redshirts. You can see one such moment in the art for the removal spell He’s Dead, Jim, which shows McCoy bending over a redshirt who died on an alien planet, delivering the bad news to Captain Kirk.
Redshirts have a lasting pop culture legacy
Star Trek: The Next Generation actually changed the color of uniforms so that red was worn by the ship’s top officers, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Commander William T. Riker. The show also found a new way of proving the situation was serious: beating up Chief Security Officer Worf. But the name for the trope was already so well established that it stuck.
John Scalzi wrote a Hugo Award-winning novel called Redshirts that follows an ensign on a starship where the crew is terrified of going on away missions or even being around the ship’s senior officers because of their disturbingly high casualty rate. In the Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest, Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell) played a nameless character in a single episode of the show who was quickly killed off. When alien fans of the series abduct the show’s cast, Guy is convinced that he’s going to experience the same fate as his character. But he survives the adventure and winds up getting elevated to Security Chief for the show’s reboot.
The red Officer tokens generated by Magic Star Trek cards perfectly represent the redshirt trope. They are disposable creatures you can use to block or sacrifice to cards like General Chang, Cold Warrior while protecting your more important cards. They’re especially likely to die to the Borg, who generate their own 1/1 creature tokens. But the Officers can also be used to Station Spacecraft and even allow a player to search their deck for a Spacecraft to put onto the battlefield with the help of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Magic’s Universes Beyond sets can have a hard time sorting existing characters and ideas into the mechanics of Magic’s five colors. Magic Star Trek divides characters based on their personalities rather than uniform color, though there are some times that they align like Will Riker, First in the Field and Mr. Spock, Science Officer. Creating 1/1 Officer tokens would most commonly be a white effect, like generating 1/1 white Soldiers with Resolute Reinforcements or 1/1 white Monks with Monastery Mentor. But the set’s designers clearly made the disposable Starfleet members red as a nod to the show’s most enduring dark trope.
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