header image courtesy of The Command Zone

The Command Zone team had never attempted anything of this scale before.

It was a daunting task. A cast and crew numbering upward of 40 people. A script months in the making but tinkered and retooled up to the day of shooting. Fully built sets on a soundstage, costumes, professional equipment, and weeks of post-production. All for the best 15 minutes of Magic: The Gathering parody the team could create.

But as grandiose as the vision might have been, and as complicated and meticulous the execution had to be, what's seen on screen isn't a corporate mandate, or the checked boxes of a marketing plan. It's passion for Magic, and its community of players worldwide, that served as the motivation for the Command Zone team.

"I feel like people miss the fact that the Command Zone is just 20-ish nerds in a building who are all constantly excited to talk about Magic and make stuff about Magic and do stuff about Commander," said Jordan Pridgen, who served as one of the writers for the project. "That's the core of our experience."

Just like how Magic sets are framed and designed well in advance of their eventual release, so too was the Command Zone's parody video of Edge of Eternities.

While filming took place in late June, Command Zone CEO Josh Lee Kwai (JLK) said initial discussions and writing began in early February, nearly six months before the video's debut.

And that was the easy part. "The amount of moving pieces there are that you have to plan for," he said.

"We're a few bones short of a skeleton crew, Sami, but we've got plenty of spine."

The final product seen on YouTube wasn't the first idea, as is often the case. JLK said that "for a long time," he and the team were looking to frame the video as a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof, and that the script's writers Jordan Pridgen and Jamie Block were toying with several different concept paths at one point or another.

At various stages, the "Away Team" featured a Fremen from Dune and a retro American astronaut, complete with massive bubble helmet.

The one constant was sci-fi; it was known that the video's release would coincide with Edge of Eternities, so no matter what, the cast would find themselves among the stars. "We just weren't sure which concept we were going to go with. And I think what was it probably like mid-April or late April when we finally locked in," said JLK. "We still iterated a ton from that point, but we were like, 'okay, we're committing to this.'"

The concept art for characters and costumes was all done by Art Director Beky Bell.

Pridgen said the script was always being worked on and improved, sometimes right before a scene was shot. "We were still changing it and working on stuff, because we just kept wanting to make it better," he said. And that's not unique to this production.

With much of the cast and crew experienced in filmmaking, collaboration and iteration is just part of the process. "So you just leave yourself open to any good joke that could come at any point, even on the day that you're shooting," said JLK. "If somebody comes up with a good idea, you want to be able to incorporate it, because we always say that jokes are worth their weight in gold. Like, you'll go out of your way for a funny joke."

And there were plenty of people on-hand during production capable of pitching jokes and ideas to incorporate on the fly. According to writer Jamie Block, who also portrayed the body of the Away Team's solemn robot (with the character's voice attributed to Jacob Bertrand), it took around 40 professionals to create the video.

Compared to the typical Command Zone video project, that's roughly five times as many people involved. "Just sort of internally, between people we contracted or who are Command Zone, there were a ton of creative people behind the scenes, set construction, set dressing, camera, lighting, grip," he said. "It was a full scope production, for sure."

The team created concept animations to block out movement for each scene.

Every so often, the Edge reminds you that there's always more to discover.

As much as the "payoff" of a project like this was simply to put into action and onto film the team's passion for Magic, there was the added benefit of providing paying jobs for a few dozen people. "Nobody was working on it as a, like, sweetheart, 'come on and just do it' sort of thing," said JLK. "We hired a Director of Photography, gaffer, and production assistants."

He said the set construction was a big component of the project, and hired professionals worked on construction for over a month on a soundstage, with the set build and 3D models of the spaceship interior handled by the team's Production Designer, Nathalie Neurath.

While this project was the team's most comprehensive in terms of scope, it's not Command Zone's first attempt at a scripted love letter to Magic. And along the way, they're able to slowly build a network of industry pros.

"We're lucky enough that we've done a good number of productions now, and in each of them, we've found people who are good at various things," said Pridgen. "So it was a nice excuse to take all these people that we'd worked with elsewhere, professionals who had done things right, and be like, 'let's make something bigger and cooler.'"

The soundstage on which the set was constructed and filming took place wasn't any soundstage. Last year, the Command Zone moved their headquarters from a house to an actual studio. "And we really hadn't done a production that required the new space. We got a bunch of office space, and we have more parking than we used to, and the bathrooms are a better situation; there's a bunch of reasons we like to be over here," said JLK.

But alongside the day-to-day improvements, there's also a soundstage. "We hadn't really shot anything that we couldn't have shot in our old office, so I've been really thinking for the last year, one of my goals was that we need to do something that justifies that we're here, something that is big enough that it requires the space," JLK said.

The environment informs the project, and JLK said it took awhile to shake the thought that the scale of projects needed to be tempered. "I think also we were kind of constrained in our ideas from our old thinking and like the scope of what we used to do, and we needed something that kind of breaks the barrier and says 'no, no, this is the new bar by which we have to judge what we're doing, so that every future idea will have to be compared to this,'" he said. "That means we sort of can break out the sandbox in our mind."

That's not to say the team's former constraints didn't require creative solutions that arguably improved the final product.

According to Block, when filming their video released alongside Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, they came up with the strategy to hide some of the seams by "making it look like a cheesy VHS" video. "We're not going to be able to make a hyper-realistic gate of a medieval village, so how can we make something that has a cohesive style?" he said. "We would come up with a solve."

But in the new studio, it became evident that the old way of thinking was no longer necessary. "Here in this space, we started to talk like that and say, 'oh, what if we made it kind of retro sci-fi? And frankly, the more I've watched the cut, you can see that that influence is there," said Block. "But it's really freeing to be in a space where we can just come up with an idea and we don't then have to say, 'how do we make it doable?' We can just do it. We have the means, we have the people, we have the space."

"Brightstar-1 to FlightComm: Scopes are clear. The stars are yours."

It became public knowledge in August of 2023 that Magic would be heading to space with Edge of Eternities, almost exactly two years prior to its release.

Then, it was referred to as "Volleyball" and little else was known about it other than its descriptor as a "space opera set" as per Mark Rosewater's 30th Anniversary Panel presentation at Gen Con.

And largely, that was what the Command Zone knew, too. The Edge of Eternities video project isn't associated with or produced by Wizards of the Coast but is rather wholly developed by the Command Zone team themselves.

The Command Zone team did have "broad, general knowledge" of Edge of Eternities earlier than the public through their Game Knights partnership with Wizards, "but we didn't work with them at all in this video," said JLK. "We just made this on our own."

That independence created opportunity, JLK said. "One of the things that we found throughout the course of the writing, later in the process, was we started trending towards referencing and poking gentle fun at Universes Beyond that wasn't necessarily in the original script," he said. "That was one of the things that, if you're officially sponsored by and working with Wizards of the Coast, it's harder to have Thor or a Nav'i from Avatar show up on screen." This video, JLK said, was "one where we were just like, 'nope, we're just going to do this on our own.'"

While Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast isn't a partner, that doesn't mean the Command Zone team had to go it alone. EDHREC is a major supporter and sponsor of the project, just another team-up in what has been a relationship between the two entities going back nearly a decade.

JLK said he and Don Miner, founder of EDHREC and CEO of Space Cow Media, have been friends for "a long, long time" and joining forces again was like second nature. "We both started around the same time; I think he was on, like, our tenth-ever episode of Command Zone, when EDHREC had just started as a bot on Reddit, before the website even began," he said. "It's great to have EDHREC and Don as people in the community who get what we're doing and want to support it. I think EDHREC has been a really positive force in the community in general. They support a lot of different creators and a lot of different initiatives."

JLK said it was an "easy call to make" to ask Miner if he'd like to be involved. "And you know, he was like, 'yeah, we're in.' And without that, we probably can't even do stuff like this video, which is not even that related to anything that EDHREC is doing. But just a thing where Don's like, 'yeah, that's cool. And I'm a Magic player, and we're in this community, and we want that to exist as well.'"

"You would hope," said JLK, "and you would wish that every community would have entities like that."

"Come! Join me in the sun!"

At its core, the project is the exemplification of the Command Zone's philosophy; sharing what's great about Magic always beats out negativity. "It's always been our goal to show our love of the game and to introduce it to people," said JLK. "It's like a thing we love, that we think other people would love, and if we can bring that joy to other people, that's a pretty good mission to have."

Everything the Command Zone does is couched in the philosophy of striving to be a "love letter" to Commander. "I think we're generally on that side of the fence," he said. "Not that we love everything, and that we don't express our opinions, but we just generally are more inclined towards playing up the things we love rather than complaining a lot about the negatives."

What tens of thousands of Magic fans are watching today is a culmination of six months of planning and hard work, of dozens of people coming together for a common cause, of community partnerships; all around the connective tissue of a 31-year-old card game.

And at the end of the day, said JLK, "it was a swing for the fences. And even if we miss, it's worth it just for the joy of trying something big."