Magic the Gathering is actually probably one of my foundational fantasy inspirations. I started playing when I was 8, roughly a year after the game first came out in the early 90s, and I encountered Ironwood Treefolk long before I read about Treebeard and the Ents' march on Isengard.
Magic always had little elements of sci-fi in it: Antiquities, the second expansion set after Arabian Nights, really launched the Magic story, telling the story of the Brother's War, though in an interesting way: the cards were antiquities - ancient relics of a bygone era. It wouldn't be until the recent Brother's War set that we got a look at that conflict presented with a contemporary perspective (one justified - I'd argue unnecessarily - by time travel and visions of the past). The point is, the Artificers of early Magic already infused the game's aesthetic with a quasi-sci-fi vibe, perhaps a "magepunk" or "dungeonpunk" aesthetic.
I'm always impressed by Magic's creative team and their ability to weave new worlds that are built around the game's central 5-color motif that nevertheless feel distinct from one another. If there's one disappointment to all of this, it's that the game and its flavor are somewhat divorced from one another (though the championship finale for Eldritch Moon, which saw the winner's Liliana and Zombies deck beat their opponent's Emrakul deck, was a surprisingly canonical expression of the events of that set's story).
In recent years, Magic has really started to push outside of the standard fantasy genres. While Kaladesh (the plane now renamed to Avishkar to better reflect a more likely "fantasy India" world) brought in significant technological elements, the technology was all based in more fantastical resources, like Aether.
I'd say where things really started to turn (and this includes the revisit to Avishkar in Aetherdrift) was the transformation of Kamigawa in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Kamigawa was introduced in 2004 as a Japanese-themed setting that focused on Legendary cards as its biggest theme. However, the block (back when Magic had year-long three-set blocks) was also set in that plane's distant past - the central hero, Toshiro Umezawa, was an ancestor to one of the original legendary creatures from Legends, itself I believe depicting an era prior to the Brothers' War.
Coming back to Kamigawa thousands of years later, Neon Dynasty imagined the plane had progressed in its technology, appearing not as a feudal land of clashing kami and mortals, but fully a cyberpunk future of cybernetic implants, towering skyscrapers, and, as the name implies, a night lit by colorful neon.
Not much later, we were given Duskmourn (honestly one of my favorite recent sets,) a plane that is just one big haunted house, inspired by horror movies of the 1980s, with 80's technology like camcorders and televisions (a setting whose flavor was, admittedly, sometimes a little confused, as Spice8Rack pointed out).
It's thus, perhaps, not that surprising that we're getting a fully science-fantasy setting with Edge of Eternities. What is surprising (perhaps) is that the setting expands out the lore of the Magic multiverse in rather shocking ways.
I just read through the Planeswalker's Guide to Edge of Eternities, which takes the form of a kind of intelligence report delivered to Tezzeret. Tezzeret, one of Magic's enduring recurring villains, has strategically played the role of second fiddle to other big-bads like Nicol Bolas and later the Phyrexians, but his role in the March of the Machine and the Phyrexians' simultaneous invasion of nearly all the planes of the multiverse via the Omenpaths saw him sent somewhere beyond.
And we're now learning what that "beyond" is.
The Magic multiverse contains the various planes all sitting within an area called the Blind Eternities. But what I've read in the latest Planeswalker's Guide suggests that there's something beyond - and it's more or less a change in genre.
As Tezzeret writes in his notes, the universe he's found himself in is profoundly advanced in technology, but utterly primitive in the use of magic. The people of the Annular Space use things like Aether and Mana, but these materials are treated more as power sources for technology. What is annular space? Well, an annulet is a ring, and describes something like a toroid. There's this idea of a "donut-shaped" universe, where if you travel far enough in any direction, you'll come back around to the same point. It's a little different than a sphere, because if you travel "north" on a toroid, you'll still come back to the same point, but without also crossing the other side of the ring. Notably, the world maps in a lot of video games, like much of the Final Fantasy series, actually work like Toroids. A Toroid has a big advantage in making maps because you can flatten it out into a rectangle, unlike that of a sphere (you've probably seen how the Mercator projection of the world map makes places like Greenland and Antarctica look enormous while shrinking places closer to the equator, because those northern and southern reaches need to be stretched out to unroll the single points of the north and south poles into an equator-long line).
While a toroid-shaped space (obviously, this is an abstraction, flattening three dimensions into two to then imagine the shape in three dimensions, when we're probably talking about something that's more like four or more dimensions) doesn't have any edges, per se, there is something described in the Planeswalker's Guide where there are two edges - one inner, which is blue-shifted, hot, and destructive. It seems very much like the firewall just above the event horizon of a black hole. Essentially, because of the intense gravity at the surface of a black hole, only the very most energetic stuff has the momentum to avoid getting sucked in, and so there's this high-energy wall that will obliterate anything that tries to pass through it. Edge of Eternities also has a "Quiet Barrier" where things are red-shifted and fade away, which is actually also a phenomenon in our universe - the universe is continuing to expand, and the farther something is from us, the more space there is to continue expanding between us, creating what is effectively faster-than-light departure from us (which cheats the universal speed limit because it's not stuff that is moving faster than light, but just the space between us getting larger). Past a certain radius, the speed at which things are getting farther from us means we cannot (at least without figuring out FTL travel or observation, which current physics considers impossible) actually see anything beyond this barrier, thus creating a certain sphere around Earth that is the "Observable Universe".
Here's the really interesting thing, though: The blue-shifted, "Chaos Wall," is, I believe, implied to be the thing that separates Space from the Magic multiverse - in other words, we're beyond the planes, beyond "Dominia." This set takes place in a realm beyond. And, again, it's a realm that trades fantasy for science fiction.
Some other fun elements:
One of the central conflicts is between the Summists and the Monoists. I don't think either are implied to be "good guys," but they have vastly different philosophies. The Monoists see holiness in black holes, or supervoids (I'm not sure if supervoid is the in-universe term for black holes, or if it's an actual physics term describing them, or I'm actually mistaking it for something else,) and turn stars into them with their technology.
The messianic savior of the Monoists is the Immortal Faller, who they can see in not just one, but all supervoids.
This is actually a really cool reference to a real astrophysics idea: that if you observed someone (or an object) going into a Black Hole, time would warp in such a way that they would seem to be falling into it forever. (What's even more bizarre is that from the perspective of someone falling into a black hole, if they survived the fire wall, their experience would not match the observations of outsiders, and would maybe not even notice as they passed the event horizon - the fact that they can never return to compare notes allows for this seeming split in the reality of what actually happened to them - quantum physics is weird.)
Another big note: there is ample reference to an ancient conflict called the Fomori-Eldrazi War.
As far as I can tell, this conflict is like a "millions of years in the past, before any of the current vaguely-humanoid spacefaring species were around" thing. But it's one of the few places where familiar proper-nouns are introduced. The Eldrazi, of course, have been a big part of Magic's lore since their introduction in the first Zendikar block, posing a comparable threat to the Phyrexians and villains like Nicol Bolas. The Eldrazi are right out of HP Lovecraft - bizarre and utterly alien monsters whose hidden existence allowed the mortal races to misinterpret them (I love the way that the merfolk of Zendikar imagined them as humanoid deities, their shapes vaguely reminiscent of their true forms).
I've often argued that what makes cosmic-horror monsters so fun is that they're an invasion into whatever genre they're in from another genre. In more rational, sci-fi stories, they are like demons and monsters from the fantasy genre, but in fantasy, this is kind of flipped, with them emerging as something more alien and defying the mythological hierarchies of gods, demons, and such. They live in that uncanny area between the rational and the mythical.
And holy crap, if the Eldrazi are originally from this "outer" space beyond the primary Magic multiverse, doesn't that just retroactively make them that much more cosmic in nature?
Also, the Fomori are a name we've heard before: Thunder Junction, the Wild West-themed plane (another step outside of the typical fantasy genre) was home to a vast Fomori Vault. Are we now discovering that that vault might have served a purpose in that grand war? Did the Fomori send the vault through the Chaos Wall to preserve some part of their culture or world as the Eldrazi came to wipe them out? What else comes from the Fomori? (The Izolith on Ikoria feels like a prime candidate).
One last note: Edge of Eternity has a planet of sapient Kavu. Previously seen only as non-sapient beasts on Dominaria, there's apparently a whole planet (that's in the process of falling apart, prompting a global evacuation) of technologically-advanced, intelligent Kavu. Notably, this isn't like the typical "we use this creature type for the humanoid version of this creature" like Aven are for birds or Rhox are for rhinos, but instead, it seems like the Kavu of Dominaria might just not be living up to their potential. Did they emerge from a Fomori Vault on Dominaria?
Pure speculation here, but I've been playing with the idea of making the Golgothian Sylex come from outside of the Magic multiverse in my Ravnica D&D campaign - it was already a mysterious ancient artifact when Urza used it to end the Brothers' War. My plan for my players is that when they hit level 20, they'll go to the D&D multiverse and we're essentially going to have a Planescape campaign as the final chapter, with the Sylex created by two of my original deities as part of their path to apotheosis.
But canonically, could the Sylex actually be a technological weapon built out here?
Anyway, I'm really, really excited to get my hands on this set - obviously, the mechanics of Magic do all encourage you to ignore lore and just build whatever archetype does well (I'll be so sad if Red Deck Wins keeps dominating. I'm so sick of red aggro decks) but I think it's such a cool aesthetic and story move to go into the realm of science fantasy.
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