When I was a child there was nothing I loved more than waking up on a Saturday morning to watch cartoons. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Power Rangers and TMNT were just the tip of the iceberg of what I consumed on a weekend morning. My favorite, the one I loved above all, was Speed Racer. Speed Racer, or Mach GoGoGo, aired from 1967-1968 in both Japan and the USA and was quickly syndicated. It starred the titular Speed Racer, a teen racing sensation behind the wheel of the powerful Mach 5! Speed would go on adventures that had him driving the Mach 5 through deserts, cities, mountain passes and even underwater.

When I play Magic: The Gathering I get to live in a fantasy world. There are spells to sling, monsters to summon and foes to defeat. I can saunter through the city of guilds or get lost in a haunted house. There really is something for everyone. If you can imagine it, it will likely happen and for me my childhood dream of being behind the steering wheel of the Mach 5 has come true.

Aetherdrift is a set themed around the Girapur Grand Prix, a race that has drawn in people from dozens of planes to try to win the Aetherspark. The set is filled with numerous vehicles and mounts that players can ride to victory! Besides those vehicles and mounts, Aetherdrift brings us a new mechanic that will help us get that Speed Racer-like experience, Start Your Engines!

Start Your Engines! is a mechanic exclusive to the permanents in Aetherdrift. It's seen in all colors and even colorless artifacts, with its highest concentration in Red. When a permanent with Start Your Engines! enters the battlefield you earn the second part of the mechanic Speed. Just like a vehicle, we accelerate our speed until we hit 4 and that gives us Max Speed. The easiest way to analyze the speed mechanic is to look at the reminder text directly.

"Whenever an opponent loses life during your turn, if your speed is 1 or greater, increase your speed by 1. Max speed is 4. This ability triggers only once each turn."

We can infer a few different things from this rules text:

1. We can only increase our speed once per turn
2. We can only increase our speed on our turn
3. We need to have at least one speed in order to accelerate
4. We are capped at 4 speed
5. This ability will only trigger once per turn.

Something important to understand is that gaining our first speed through Start Your Engines! does not limit us to gaining one more speed that turn. So if we play our Gastal Thrillseeker, Start Your Engines! will put us up to one speed and the enter the battlefield trigger will cause our opponent to lose one life gaining us a second speed. This interaction will work with combat damage on the same turn or even our opponent cracking a fetch land on our end step.

Moving forward we'll only be able to gain one speed per turn, but we're given a great pay off with Max Speed abilities. Vnwxt, Verbose Host is a great example of a creature with a beneficial Max Speed ability. Once we've hit 4 speed Vnwxt says if we draw a card, draw two cards instead. This incremental increase in value will pull us back to parody if we're behind or put us so far ahead no one would dream of catching up. Max Speed has been tuned reasonably well and there are abilities that should shine in a handful of formats.

Now, I am not a multi-format brewmaster, but I've created a standard deck that should do a good job of starting our engines and getting us to max speed!

Start Your Engines! | DFT Standard | Mike Cummings

• Creatures (33)
• 2 Krenko, Mob Boss
• 3 Hazoret, Godseeker
• 4 Burnout Bashtronaut
• 4 Dropkick Bomber
• 4 Fanatical Firebrand
• 4 Greasewrench Goblin
• 4 Howlsquad Heavy
• 4 Rundvelt Hordemaster
• 4 Searslicer Goblin

• Instants (7)
• 3 Abrade
• 4 Burst Lightning

• Lands (20)
• 16 Mountain
• 4 Amonkhet Raceway

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I love kindred decks, their synergies make them easy to build around and typically as creatures compound you generate more and more value. This deck will use the goblin archetype and their abundance of lords, or creatures that buff creatures of the same type, in the standard format. Our MVP here is Burnout Bashtronaut, this little guy will start our engines on turn one, and increase our speed with his powerful evasions ability, menace. Once we've gotten max speed the Bashtronaut will have double strike, and pair that with a few lords and life totals will start dropping quickly!

Overall, a quarter of our deck is designed to start our engines and the goblin synergy will get us to max speed in no time. With Krenko, Mob Boss at our top end we can go wide and run over our opponent or we can use Hazoret, Goodseeker to smash with a big indestructible god. This brew may not take you to the Pro Tour but it should be something fun to play at the kitchen table or your local Friday Night Magic.

Hopefully this breakdown of Start Your Engines! and the provided deck list will give you a solid starting point when you try to incorporate this new mechanic into your own decks. While I don't predict it having a huge impact on formats like Vintage or Legacy but, it should be a Limited and Standard darling. New sets will always bring new mechanics or new ways we can think about our favorite game, so pull up to the starting line and START YOUR ENGINES!