Shell regex globbing without matching files

I frequently make use of shell file name globbing to do things like operate on all of /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc by doing /dev/sd[a-f], however, this relies on there being files on disk that match that pattern. Today I wanted to run gitk on each of master@{1}, master@{2}, etc, but gitk master@{[1-5]} does not work since there are no file names matching that pattern on disk.

How can you get the shell to perform regular expression expansion without regard to actual disk files?