Magic: The Gathering's newest set Aetherdrift is shooting for pole position when it comes to introducing new and unique legendary creatures. Fledgling drivers and grizzled veterans alike should be able to find a new pilot for their Commander decks, a great Limited bomb or an awesome payoff for their Standard deck. I've selected 5 legendary creatures that I think any player would be happy to build around. Drivers, start your engines!

Starting us off at D Tier, we'll take a look at the Mono-Black crocodile Kalakscion, Hunger Tyrant. Kalackscion is a vanilla 7/2 reminiscent of Yargle, Glutton of Urborg. Yargle saw a lot of play as a voltron style commander and Kalackscion is leaner and meaner. Regardless of format, a 7 power creature puts your opponent on a 3 turn clock by itself and getting to resolve it on turn three gives you a huge head start. This saltwater monstrosity is also begging to be equipped with a Whispersilk Cloak to make short work of the table or to be sacrificed to a Disciple of Bolas to gain 7 life and draw 7 cards.

Pulling up in C Tier is Kolodin, Triumph Caster. A simple yet elegant build around to take advantage of vehicles and mounts. At 2 power there are very few vehicles that Kolodin can't crew on his own and the larger crew costs can be ignored by his static ability the first time around. It's very reasonable to believe that Kolodin will see play across multiple formats but he has the capacity to shine brightest in Commander. By giving our mounts and vehicles haste, we'll get immediate value from attack triggers. Playing a turn two Kolodin and a turn three Smuggler's Copter lets us sculpt our hand in the early game. Resolving and attacking with a Parhelion II in the same turn puts 13 power on the board immediately, and will continue to pressure the table until the battle cruiser gets removed.

In B Tier, we have the newest iteration of a character from Amonkhet, Samut, the Driving Force. Samut inherits one of the newest mechanics to Magic: The Gathering, Start your engines! When a creature with start your engines! enters the battlefield we get 1 speed. As we meet the requirements of our opponents losing at least one life during each of our turns we'll continue to gain speed until we max out at 4. The speed mechanic is similar to The City's Blessing, as once you've gained speed, there is currently no way to get rid of it. Samut's static abilities buff our creatures and make our noncreature spells cost less equal to how much speed we have. Samut screams to be the key in a go wide strategy. By generating a large amount of small creatures we can almost guarantee that we'll swarm the board and any of our payoff spells like Overrun or Beastmaster Ascension will have a decreased mana cost so we can layer additional damage on top.

Next on the track at A Tier is Zahur, Glory's Past. Zahur should peak the interest of any Aristocrats players. Aristocrats is a fan favorite deck archetype that causes incremental life loss to your opponents by sacrificing and recurring creatures. Like Samut, Zahur has start your engines!, but this time we gain the Max Speed ability as well. When we've reached our max speed we get to create a tapped 2/2 zombie every time a nontoken creature goes into our graveyard. Not that this could get any better, but Zahur also has a sacrifice ability! Once per turn we can sacrifice a creature to surveil 1. Zahur gives us a sac outlet in the command zone, a way to generate tokens for more incremental damage and a way to look deeper into our deck.

Besides all of the other Aristocrats' pieces, Zahur's best friend is probably Gravecrawler. Since Zahur is a zombie, it will let us continually recast Gravecrawler from our graveyard for one Black Mana. This paired with a card like Phyrexian Altar will let us generate an arbitrarily large number of 2/2 zombie tokens. Throw in a card like Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat and we'll have the table drained in no time.

Coming in first at S Tier is Loot, the Pathfinder. Loot is a remarkable build around. He has some decent abilities, a great color combination and you're not going to be able to dodge this little guy at Commander tables. Loot is also the inheritor of a new mechanic called Exhaust. Abilities with Exhaust can only be used once per game, per instance of the card. So if Loot is recast or blinked we'll get to use all of his abilities again. Loot's first ability is a mana filter. One Green Mana, tap and Exhaust and we'll get to generate three mana of any color. The next ability is one Red Mana for a Lightning Bolt, again nothing too incredible. The ability everyone is after is the Ancestral Recall. One Blue Mana, tap and Exhaust and draw three cards.

Now, you're thinking, "How do I draw 3 cards every turn?" We'll bundle Loot with cards like Thassa, Deep-Dwelling and Conjurer's Closet to reset our card draw every turn. We could even use cards like Concordant Crossroads to give Loot haste so he can be used on our opponents turn. Just reset him with cards like Blur or Essence Flux for max value. Loot is going to dig us deeper and deeper into our decks to find our win conditions and crazy combos!

These 5 creatures are just a few of the cool legendaries we'll get to play with once Aetherdrift releases in a few weeks. With all the potential this set has, we'll see cards played in Limited all the way to Commander. What do you plan on brewing?