Federation Fleet Precon: Decklist, Value, and Verdict

Jean-Luc Picard, Luminary

Whenever another historic permanent you control with mana value 3 or greater enters, draw a card. (Artifacts, legendaries, and Sagas are historic.) Seek out — Whenever you draw your second card each turn, put a +1/+1 counter on up to one other target creature and two charge counters on up to one target Spacecraft.

Singles value

$119.38

TCGplayer market, 79 cards, basic lands counted at $0; 26 pre-sale cards at 50%; 8 not priced yet

Sealed price

$62.10

TCGplayer price for the box (Amazon $64.00) · singles are 1.9× that · MSRP $75.00

New cards

33 / 100

First printings in this deck

Bracket

Core, out of the box

Is Federation Fleet worth buying?

from MTG Star Trek Commander Decks: Are They Worth It? by Timothy Zaccagnino

Federation Fleet’s a hard sell for me. The art direction is off-putting, the “draw cards” theme isn’t very compelling, the payoffs for engaging with said theme are all over the place, and the reprint value is low compared to the other precons in this cycle.

The only way I’m recommending this deck to you is if you’re here primarily for the Star Trek flavor and Federation Fleet covers your favorite era of the ‘90s shows. As an outsider looking in, it’s just a bunch of people standing around pointing at stuff, like Doctor Who or Fallout without the quirkiness of those two IPs. This one’s double thumbs down for me.

How Federation Fleet plays

Federation Fleet is a Jeskai precon with various themes like spacecraft and card draw, with a light touch of group hug. You’ve got Jean-Luc Picard, Luminary and Captain Janeway, Endgame as interchangable commanders to lead the fleet. It’s a huge turn-off artistically, since half the deck is people standing around posing for YouTube thumbnails. And I dunno, all the spacecraft just look very samey as someone who’s not already invested in the source material.

It also just seems very unfocused. There’s blink cards, charge counter manipulation for spacecraft, card draw payoffs, +1/+1 counter incentives, group hug elements, and just a mess of random effects that happen as you draw cards. Don’t get me wrong, drawing cards is inherently powerful, but that’s gotta serve an ultimate goal, and I don’t know if stationing up spacecraft is really the endgame I’m looking for in a card draw deck. Seems very finicky out of the box, where you’ll probably be doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t necessarily amount to a full strategy.