THE AUTHORS WHO CHASED THE CARD BOOM

Mag Force 7 was born in the moment when everyone thought cards were the future.

In 1993, `Magic: The Gathering` changed the tabletop business. It did not merely introduce a successful game. It introduced a new retail machine: randomized packs, repeat buying, rarity, collectibility, deck-building, tournament culture, and the intoxicating belief that a game company could print demand by printing cards.

For a few years, the hobby industry bent toward that idea.

Role-playing publishers, board game companies, comic-adjacent firms, and new studios all rushed toward collectible card games. Some had strong mechanics. Some had famous licenses. Some had beautiful art. Some had almost nothing except the hope that retailers would buy one more display box before the window closed.

Mag Force 7 entered that world with more credibility than most.

The company was run by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin. That pairing mattered. Weis was already one of the defining fantasy authors of the tabletop generation. Her work on `Dragonlance` with Tracy Hickman had helped prove that a game world could become a mass-market fiction phenomenon. She understood characters, settings, reader loyalty, and the power of attaching a game product to a larger story.

Perrin brought a different kind of strength. He had military and technical training, a background in mathematics and physics, and a designer's interest in tactical structure. Where Weis could give a product world and audience, Perrin could help give it formation, movement, and procedure.

Together, they built Mag Force 7 in the Lake Geneva orbit, the same old tabletop ecosystem that had already produced TSR, the TSR diaspora, and a dense web of writers, editors, artists, designers, and retailers. The company's geography is sometimes listed as Lake Geneva and sometimes Williams Bay. In practical hobby-history terms, both descriptions point to the same small Wisconsin creative cluster around Geneva Lake.

Mag Force 7 was also a name with two lives.

It was a company.

It was also a fiction brand.

Weis and Perrin wrote a science-fiction novel series called `Mag Force 7`, beginning with `The Knights of the Black Earth`, followed by `Robot Blues` and `Hung Out`. Those books focused on Xris and a team of specialized mercenaries operating in the broader `Star of the Guardians` universe. That dual use of the name reveals the company's instinct: fiction and games were not separate lanes. They were mutually reinforcing ways to build an audience.

The company's first major game followed that logic directly.

`Star of the Guardians Collectible Trading Card Game` adapted Weis's own space-opera universe. The novels already had factions, royal legitimacy, warlords, starships, loyalty, betrayal, and the kind of military melodrama that could be translated into cards. Instead of chasing generic fantasy, Mag Force 7 began with a setting it controlled and understood.

That choice had advantages. It reduced licensing risk. It gave the game a built-in reader base. It let the company define its own tone. But it also meant the game had to sell outside the core readership of the books. In a CCG market filling with louder brands, a novel-based science-fiction game had to work mechanically, not merely exist as merchandise.

Mag Force 7's answer was the Lane-to-Lane combat system.

This was the company's signature design idea. Instead of placing cards into a loose abstract combat zone, Lane-to-Lane made position matter. Players arranged ships, fighters, and other forces in physical lanes, creating a visible tactical structure between opponents. Combat felt closer to naval or aerospace engagement than creature trading. Where many early CCGs were races of resources and attacks, Mag Force 7 tried to make the table itself feel like a battlefield.

That was the company's identity in miniature.

It wanted collectible card games with tactical bones.

`Star of the Guardians` also tried to be fairer to players than many CCGs. Starter decks included needed system/resource cards, while boosters emphasized the rarer and more variable cards. That mattered in a market where some games forced players to chase basic playability through randomized packs. Mag Force 7 understood that a player should be able to buy in and actually play.

But a collectible card game is never judged only by rules.

It is judged by the hand, the pack, the art, the first spread of cards on the table. And here `Star of the Guardians` struggled. The art direction was widely considered uneven and often weak. That hurt badly. CCGs live on visual desire as much as mechanical interest. A game can be clever and still lose the room if the cards do not feel worth collecting.

Mag Force 7 learned that lesson quickly.

The next move was to seek a bigger outside property.

The company secured the license for `Wing Commander`, the enormously popular PC space-combat franchise from Origin Systems. That was a smarter mass-market hook than a prose-only setting. `Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger` had brought cinematic full-motion video, Mark Hamill, and a major entertainment aura to computer gaming. If Mag Force 7 could turn that audience toward a tabletop card game, the company could break beyond the small world of readers and CCG completists.

The timing looked good.

The license looked good.

The mechanics had a tested foundation.

But the market was already changing under them.

The CCG gold rush had created too many games, too fast, for too many shelves. By the time Mag Force 7 was building its second wave, the opportunity and the danger were becoming the same thing. Every publisher wanted in because the market looked rich. The market became dangerous because every publisher wanted in.

Mag Force 7 had arrived with real talent, real systems, and real brands.

Now it had to survive the crowd.

LANES, STARFIGHTERS, AND STAR TREK

The height of Mag Force 7 was not long, but it was crowded.

In less than two years, the company moved through three major card-game efforts: `Star of the Guardians`, `Wing Commander`, and the design of Fleer/Skybox's `Star Trek: The Card Game`. That pace tells you almost everything about the mid-1990s CCG business. There was no time to build slowly. A company had to get visible, get product into distribution, and get another project moving before attention shifted.

`Wing Commander Collectible Trading Card Game` was Mag Force 7's strongest licensed swing.

The video game franchise was exactly the kind of property CCG publishers wanted: visual, factional, combat-focused, and loved by an audience already comfortable with rules, ships, pilots, and campaign identity. Mag Force 7 did not have to explain why space fighters were exciting. `Wing Commander` players already knew.

The game placed the Terran Confederation against the Kilrathi Empire. It turned the video game's dogfighting logic into cards by having players build flights from fighters, pilots, weapons, and support cards, then move those forces through contested nav points toward an enemy carrier. That was a good adaptation choice. It did not simply paste screenshots onto a generic combat engine. It tried to make the table behave like a mission map.

The company's Lane-to-Lane thinking was still visible, but reshaped for the license. Position, timing, and formation mattered. The game rewarded planning more than blind attack. The flavor also dug into the source material: pilots, ships, captured personnel, intelligence, and the tension of pushing forces away from safety toward a carrier strike.

For a company like Mag Force 7, this was the ideal middle ground: licensed enough to attract fans, tactical enough to express the studio's design identity.

The third project was stranger and more historically confusing.

Mag Force 7 is often mentioned in Star Trek card-game history, but that sentence needs immediate clarification. The company did not publish Decipher's `Star Trek Customizable Card Game`. That was a different product, focused first on `The Next Generation`, and it became one of the great licensed CCG successes of the decade.

Mag Force 7's Star Trek work was for Fleer/Skybox.

Fleer/Skybox held rights connected to the Original Series trading-card space and wanted a card game of its own based on Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the 1960s show. The result was `Star Trek: The Card Game`, released in 1996. Mag Force 7 designed the base set, with Jeff Grubb, Don Perrin, Margaret Weis, and the studio name attached to the project.

That role matters.

Mag Force 7 was the design studio, not the owning publisher.

The game itself was incompatible with Decipher's system. It had to be. It came from different rights, a different publisher, and a different design brief. Instead of competing by copying Decipher's engine, it tried to make play feel like assembling and resolving a television episode. Players used iconic crew members to meet challenges in a structure that was lighter and more casual than the tournament-heavy CCGs dominating hobby shops.

Reviewers generally treated it as playable and thematic, though not as deep as the strongest competitive games. That is a fair description. `Star Trek: The Card Game` was not built to become the next Magic. It was built to give Original Series fans a functional card-game experience with familiar characters and retro flavor.

For Mag Force 7, the project had a very different business meaning than `Star of the Guardians` or `Wing Commander`.

The first two games carried the risk of publishing. Mag Force 7 had to make the product, sell the product, support the product, and live with the inventory. Star Trek was a design contract tied to a larger publisher's machinery. That could be safer in one sense: the studio was not carrying every warehouse and printing risk itself. But it also meant Mag Force 7 did not control the future of the line.

That future depended on Fleer/Skybox and its corporate parentage.

For a brief moment, the Star Trek project looked like a strong third credit. It gave Mag Force 7 another famous property and another proof that Weis, Perrin, Grubb, and their circle could build card-game engines for serious licenses. The Original Series game received one expansion, `Starfleet Maneuvers`, in early 1997, though that expansion was not a Mag Force 7 design in the same foundational sense as the base set.

Then the larger structure cracked.

The peak of Mag Force 7 was really the peak of the CCG bubble in miniature. The company had a proprietary science-fiction game. It had a major PC-game license. It had a Star Trek design credit. It had Margaret Weis's literary name, Don Perrin's systems background, and Jeff Grubb's veteran design credibility. It had real products, not vapor.

But the shelf did not care about deserving.

By 1995 and 1996, retailers were drowning in CCGs. Every new game asked a player for money, attention, binders, trades, rules learning, and opponents. Every new product asked a retailer for display space and confidence. Distributors had to decide which games were alive and which were already dead before boxes even moved.

This was brutal for second-tier games.

The market did not only kill bad CCGs. It killed decent ones, clever ones, licensed ones, and games that might have found audiences in a slower era. Once players retreated to the few supported giants, smaller card games could become functionally dead even with playable rules.

Mag Force 7 had one more problem.

The company was strongest at design and fiction, but collectible card games are manufacturing beasts. They need constant art, collation, printing, packaging, promotion, organized play, expansion schedules, and retailer reassurance. A role-playing book can remain useful for years. A CCG without continuing support starts to look abandoned almost immediately.

That created a trap.

To support a CCG, a publisher had to keep spending.

To justify the spending, the game had to keep growing.

By the time Mag Force 7 had its third card-game credit, the growth path was closing. The Star Trek project, according to the founder-side version of the story, did not need to be treated as a disaster. It broke even. It did the job well enough. The problem was that the CCG market around it collapsed, and the publisher structure behind the line was unstable.

That distinction changes the lesson.

Mag Force 7 did not fail because Weis and Perrin could not make a game. It did not fail because every product was unwanted. It failed as a CCG company because the business model it had entered was burning through oxygen faster than small and mid-sized publishers could replace it.

The cards had lanes.

The market did not.

WHEN THE CCG MARKET CLOSED

The end of Mag Force 7 as a card-game company should not be told as a simple flop.

That would miss the point.

The company had shipped real games. `Star of the Guardians` had introduced its Lane-to-Lane combat idea. `Wing Commander` had translated a major computer-game property into tabletop form. `Star Trek: The Card Game` had given Mag Force 7 a design credit on one of the most recognizable entertainment franchises in the world.

The problem was the market.

By late 1996, the CCG boom was becoming a CCG crash. Retailers had been trained to chase the next `Magic`, then punished for believing too many publishers at once. Shelves and back rooms filled with unsold boxes. Players consolidated around the strongest games. Distributors became wary. A new CCG was no longer automatically exciting. It was a risk.

Mag Force 7's third major card-game effort landed in that closing window.

The founder-side version is important here: after the third card game broke even, the CCG market collapsed. That is not the same as saying the game destroyed the company. It says the opportunity ended. A break-even project can be survivable in a healthy market. In a collapsing market, it becomes a warning. If a Star Trek-linked design cannot produce a clear path forward, what will?

Fleer/Skybox's side of the story made the danger worse.

The Original Series `Star Trek: The Card Game` was tied to a publisher and corporate structure outside Mag Force 7's control. Fleer and Skybox were part of a larger entertainment-card world, and Marvel Entertainment's financial trouble in the mid-1990s damaged that whole ecosystem. The Star Trek game received one expansion, but the longer line did not become the stable continuing platform a CCG needed.

For Mag Force 7, that meant there was no reason to keep throwing capital into the card-game furnace.

This is one of the smarter decisions in the company's history.

Many CCG-era publishers kept chasing the bubble after the air was already gone. They printed too much, promised too much support, or tried to rescue one dead game with another. Mag Force 7 did not become a long, public collapse. Weis and Perrin had other strengths: fiction, worldbuilding, role-playing design, licenses, and relationships. They could leave the card market and still have a future.

So the company changed direction.

The Mag Force 7 novels continued, with `Hung Out` arriving in 1998, but the company no longer looked like a rising CCG publisher. The creative path moved toward what would become Sovereign Press. That next chapter brought Margaret Weis and Don Perrin back toward role-playing games and fantasy publishing, using the lessons, contacts, and business experience gathered during the Mag Force 7 years.

Sovereign Press would publish the `Sovereign Stone` role-playing game, with Don Perrin and Lester Smith central to the rules work. The company later became important to `Dragonlance` again, licensing the setting for d20-era products after Wizards of the Coast took over TSR. That arc gave Weis a remarkable return to one of the worlds that had made her famous.

Later, after Margaret Weis and Don Perrin divorced, that Sovereign Press chapter changed and eventually gave way to Margaret Weis Productions. That later company would become known for licensed role-playing games such as `Serenity`, `Battlestar Galactica`, and `Marvel Heroic Roleplaying`, built around the Cortex family of systems.

But that is the next story.

Mag Force 7's own legacy is narrower and cleaner.

First, it is part of the first great CCG gold rush.

The company shows how quickly respected creators moved toward cards after `Magic`. Weis and Perrin were not fringe operators. They were serious professionals with literary reputation, design capability, and real access to licenses. Their entry into the CCG field shows how persuasive the boom looked from inside the industry.

Second, it shows the limits of IP.

`Star of the Guardians` had an author-owned universe. `Wing Commander` had video-game heat. `Star Trek` had one of the strongest media brands in pop culture. None of those facts guaranteed a sustainable card-game line once the market became saturated. A famous name can get a game noticed. It cannot force players to maintain another collectible ecosystem.

Third, Mag Force 7 deserves credit for tactical experimentation.

The Lane-to-Lane system was an attempt to make card position matter in a more concrete way. It was not just another Magic imitation with renamed resources. It came from designers thinking about ships, squadrons, carriers, nav points, and military pressure. Even when the individual games fell out of print, that design instinct belongs in the record.

Fourth, the Star Trek confusion deserves permanent correction.

Mag Force 7 did not publish Decipher's `Star Trek Customizable Card Game`. It designed Fleer/Skybox's Original Series `Star Trek: The Card Game`. That distinction matters because Decipher's game had a much longer competitive life and a different mechanical identity. Mag Force 7's role was real, but specific.

Finally, Mag Force 7 is a rare CCG-bust story with an afterlife instead of only wreckage.

The company did not become the final form of Weis and Perrin's publishing work. It became the bridge. The CCG experiments, the licenses, the design partnerships, the Lake Geneva network, and the retail lessons all fed into the Sovereign Press era. The founders stepped away from a collapsing market and moved toward a form of publishing they understood more deeply.

That is the useful ending.

Mag Force 7 did not conquer the CCG world.

Almost no one did.

It tested the lanes, flew the fighters, borrowed the Enterprise for one mission, and then got out before the crash defined everything that came next.