What Is Aetherdrift

Magic sets come out so fast these days that keeping track of them is hard. Speaking of tracks, the most recent set, Aetherdrift, puts us in the newly-renamed plane of Avishkar, as avid Formula 1 fans watching a cross-plane race with a planeswalker's spark up for grabs as the top prize. But what really is Aetherdrift, and what are the most essential elements of this new set?

The Mechanics of Aetherdrift

As with all new sets, we're going to see a few old mechanics and a few new ones. Among the returning mechanics are:

Cycling

And activated ability on a card that allows you to discard the card and draw one for a cost. There are 28 cards with cycling spanning every color and a few payoffs for discarding cards, too.

Energy

Energy is another resource generated by cards that add it to an "energy pool." Typically, you can spend this energy to perform actions granted by certain cards. Energy isn't included in the set itself, but appears in the commander precon deck that comes with the set.

Vehicles

It'd be a pretty boring race if you didn't have vehicles in it and this returning artifact type gets some new flavor in the set.

Mounts and Saddle

If you can ride it, you can race it. This is another returning creature type which we first saw in Outlaws of Thunder Junction and while it's similar to vehicles, it's its own thing.

Aside from these returning mechanics, we have a few new ones to play with. Since the set is based on the theme of racing, we have quite a handful of race-themed mechanics are play.

Start Your Engines! And Speed

The Start your Engines! mechanic reminds me a bit of The City's Blessing from Rivals of Ixalan in the sense that you can't lose it once you have it. Unlike The City's Blessing, you don't need the creature to stick around to get it.

Once you play a creature with "Start your Engines!" it will generate speed immediately. Your speed shifts from one to four, with certain cards allowing bonus effects with each level of speed or when you hit max speed (which is 4).

Players will gain speed once per turn, as long as they have their engines started and deal damage to an enemy. The creature that started the speed mechanic doesn't need to hang around once they started the engines, which is a step up from the City's Blessing.

I'm pretty excited to see how this plays out. From the few games I've seen in preview play, it has the potential to get out of hand really quickly. It's too early to tell whether speed will play a huge part in Standard play as yet, but it looks like a really fun mechanic.

Exhaust

Exhaust as a mechanic refers to using the ability once per turn and is a nice throwback to the Exert mechanic from Amonkhet. This seems like a balanced mechanic until you realize that if you can blink the creature, you get multiple bites of the apple.

Moreover, there's also a creature that allows you to copy exhaust abilities, making them happen more than once a turn. As fun as this mechanic sounds, I can see multiple ways it can be abused, making me think Loot, the Pathfinder, will be a menace in Limited matchups. Not to mention the potential for abuse in Standard.

Legendary Creatures and Planeswalkers

As Magic seems to be moving away from flooding sets with Planeswalkers, we only get two of them in the set.

Chandra's passive ability works well with her 0-cost loyalty ability, allowing you to make a 3/2 vehicle and turn it on during combat on your turn. She's not a great Planeswalker, though, as she doesn't have any defensive abilities.

The second planeswalker in the set is also a bit underwhelming. The prize of the whole competition, the Aetherspark, is only really useful if you have a creature to attach it to. Sure, it had other abilities it can use when not attached, but it's not really that good when it's not pretending to be an equipment.

There are 29 legendary creatures in Aetherdrift but there are some notable build-around commanders, such as:

Loot

Loot, the Pathfinder is one of the more exciting characters, and since it has haste, once you can blink it, you can almost guarantee yourself an Ancestral Recall each turn!

Mendicant Core

Mendicant Core, Guidelight is one of the more powerful commanders coming out of this set, and building him shouldn't be too much of a challenge, with the right cards and mindset.

Kolodin

Kolodin, Triumph Caster is my personal favorite legendary creature in this set, but I'm definitely biased because I really want to make Vehicles a commander menace.

Samut

Samut, the Driving Force gets props for being both a great pun, and a Naya commander that breaks the shard's identity somewhat, leaning into non-creature spells as well as offering creatures some extra power.

Unremarkable Mentions

There's also a cycle of vanilla Legendary creatures that make for an interesting way to add flavor to the world. There's one in each color, but it's unlikely we'll see them helming any Commander decks any time soon.

It's clear that there's a lot to explore in this set, and all these cards entering Standard will lead to some really interesting (and janky) builds for the next few weeks.

Pedal To The Metal!

I'll be honest, when I first heard about Aetherdrift, I wasn't really sold on the idea. However, as the cards got spoiled and I started realizing the sheer power in the set, I can't wait to get my hands on it. Now all we need is a Universes Beyond set with Speed Racer alts for Aetherdrift and I'll be all set!