You Get the Aetherdrift, Part 1

Welcome to the first week of Aetherdrift previews. Today, I will introduce you to the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams, tell you the origins of Aetherdrift's design, and show off a cool preview card.

As a quick aside: Last month, we published an article (which you can read here) about our decision to change the name of the plane of Kaladesh to Avishkar. For this article, whenever I reference the plane itself, I am going to call it Avishkar. When referring to the set that used the plane's old name, I'll call it Kaladesh.

Aether/Or

Before we can get to the design story, I want to introduce the people that did the early design work on the set. As is customary, I will have the vision design lead introduce everyone. For Aetherdrift, that was me.

Aether Way

Aetherdrift is what I like to call a "chocolate and peanut butter" creation. For all my readers not from the United States, the mixing of chocolate and peanut butter is very popular here. We'd tossed around the two component pieces—a death race set and a travelogue set—but it wasn't until we thought of bringing them together that the set was finally greenlit.

The idea of a death race set came first. Vehicles premiered in Kaladesh, and racing as a theme gave us plenty of real-world and pop culture inspirations. The death race vibe came from Magic needing a combative element, and the trope of racers sabotaging one another filled that need nicely. It gave the event higher stakes and helped justify a lot of cards a Magic set needs to have. We knew it would have cool visuals, and the tie to Vehicles gave it a mechanical center, but it sat on a long list of potential sets for many years.

Then came March of the Machine and the introduction of the Omenpaths. Now, non-Planeswalkers easily travel the planes. While this has had a lot of story ramifications, I was curious about what the mechanical ramifications might be. Were there sets that we could now make that we couldn't make before? I created a list of different types of sets we could now make because of Omenpaths. One of those was something I called a travelogue set. Normally, a Magic set takes place on a single plane. But what if we made one that moved between planes?

The travelogue idea also solved a different problem. We like about half of our Magic Multiverse sets to be new planes and half of them to be revisits. This, however, leads to a problem. Every two years, we get to revisit three old planes, but we also add three new planes to our roster. Our number of revisit slots stays the same, but our pool of potential places to revist goes up. This means some planes get left on the backburner. A travelogue allows us to revisit more planes in the same amount of time.

Going to multiple planes sounds cool, but we had to answer the question of why we were visiting multiple planes. As with any theme, we didn't want to do something just to do it. It had to make sense for the set. So, we asked ourselves if there were any sets we had considered in the past that would be better spread across multiple planes. It turns out we did: the death race set. We could do a race across a single plane, but wouldn't it be cooler to race across multiple planes? The travelogue concept gave the death race idea the twist it wanted. The death race idea gave the travelogue concept the justification it needed. Once we combined the peanut butter with the chocolate, the set was added to the calendar.

But how many planes should we revisit? Our initial thought was four, but as we started breaking down what that meant for the set, we realized three made more sense. Three planes gave us enough scale for the race to feel multiversal but also ensured that each plane got some space to breathe in the set.

Next, it came time to pick which planes we wanted to revisit. Our initial thought was to pick three planes that had been the setting for a previous set. Two of them would be planes we've revisited, and one would be plane we hadn't revisited as a main setting. By revisiting planes that we'd been to in the past, we wouldn't have to do a style guide for three planes. After much deliberation, here's the list we came up with for possible revisits:

• Alara 
• Amonkhet 
• Arcavios 
• Avishkar 
• Eldraine 
• Fiora 
• Ikoria 
• Ixalan 
• Kaldheim 
• Kylem 
• Lorwyn-Shadowmoor 
• Mercadia 
• New Capenna 
• Rabiah 
• Tarkir 
• Ulgrotha

We planned to revisit some of these in other sets that were already being mapped out, so we didn't want to double up on those. So, we cut Arcavios, Eldraine, Ixalan, Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, and Tarkir from the list.

• Alara
• Amonkhet
• Avishkar
• Fiora
• Ikoria
• Kaldheim
• Kylem
• Mercadia
• New Capenna
• Rabiah
• Ulgrotha

After running this list by the Creative team, they flagged that some of these planes would need an extensive amount of work to adapt to our modern worldbuilding standards. These planes had been developed a long time ago or for a supplemental set, which meant they didn't get the same level of worldbuilding we'd need for a premier set. If we were going to do three planes, we didn't have the resources for those. That cut Fiora, Kylem, Mercadia, Rabiah, and Ulgrotha.

• Alara
• Amonkhet
• Avishkar
• Ikoria
• Kaldheim
• New Capenna

The first plane we chose was the one that had inspired our previous death race pitch: Avishkar. Kaladesh introduced Vehicles, plus the technology level of the plane and the flavor of invention was a great fit for a racing set. We realized that Avishkar should not only be one of the three planes, but it should be the home of the race.

We then asked ourselves which planes would be cool settings for a race. Two planes stood out from the rest: Amonkhet and Ikoria. Racing through the desert or avoiding monsters as you drive both felt pretty cool, so we chose Amonkhet and Ikoria to be our second and third planes. Moving into exploratory design, we started with Avishkar, Amonkhet, and Ikoria as the locations for the death race.

Our first instinct was to take one mechanic from each plane. It was a death race set, so we wanted to bring back a mechanic that felt like it made sense in a set focused on a race. Avishkar had Vehicles, but as they had become deciduous, we wanted something specific to Avishkar. We chose energy. Fuel is a key component of racing, and we felt like energy could do a good job filling this flavor role. The idea of Vehicles you could crew with energy was an area we wanted to explore.

Amonkhet and Ikoria weren't quite as easy as Avishkar. Yes, both had cycling, and those jokes write themselves in a racing set. But because both sets had it and weren't flavorfully tied to either plane, it didn't feel like a hallmark of either plane. We did end up including cycling in the set, and we even played around with variants like "bicycling."

For Amonkhet, we explored bringing back exert, especially on Vehicles. The flavor of having technology that let you temporarily boost your Vehicle felt super on brand for racing. For Ikoria, there wasn't a great choice. We ended up choosing keyword counters to represent Vehicle customization.

But then, we had a little shake-up. Our Arc Planning team was looking at sets even further in the future and had a cool idea for what we could do with Ikoria. To keep our possibilities for the future open, we were asked if we could swap out Ikoria for another plane. So, we had to go back to our list.

• Alara
• Kaldheim
• New Capenna

None of these were a great fit for what we needed. Both Alara and Kaldheim already had multiple settings in a single plane (the shards of Alara and the realms of Kaldheim), so it didn't seem like a great fit for a travelogue set. Alara also was closely associated with three-color, which didn't have a place in Aetherdrift. New Capenna was a city, which we already had with Avishkar. Doing a death race on New Capenna wouldn't add anything new. We had run out of options.

Then, we considered pulling back on our restrictions. What if the third plane was a known plane, but not one we'd built a style guide for? We talked with the Worldbuilding team about our problem, and they agreed to let us explore the idea. We limited ourselves to planes that got a battle card in March of the Machine. Here are the ones that didn't have a full, modern style guide:

• Azgol
• Belenon
• Ergamon
• Fiora
• Gobakhan
• Karsus
• Kylem
• Mercadia
• Moag
• Muraganda
• Pyrulea
• Regatha
• Segovia
• Shandalar
• Tolvada
• Ulgrotha
• Vryn
• Xerex

Again, we asked ourselves what plane would be cool to be the setting of a racing set. We wanted something with a different aesthetic than Avishkar or Amonkhet. The clear winner was Muraganda. It was our prehistoric world. We'd showcased the plane on a handful of cards, but all we really knew was that it had dinosaurs, oozes, and lots of large flora. The Worldbuilding team felt they could work with it and signed off on it.

Muraganda did have two issues. One, there was one mechanical identity attached to it: vanilla creatures matter, meaning that cards like Muraganda Petroglyphs cared about cards with no abilities. While we could make a few cards for the theme, it's not something we could do a lot within Limited, and just didn't have the depth that other mechanical themes had. Two, other than a handful of disparate cards, there wasn't much of a mechanical identity outside of vanilla creatures matter.

This led us to rethink how we wanted to structure the larger set. We decided to focus on hitting the racing theme and less on trying to bring a mechanical identity of each plane to the forefront. The set still had energy from Avishkar and cycling from Amonkhet, but the focus would be on making the best racing set that we could.

On Your Mark

The first thing that a racing set would need was a mechanical focus on Vehicles. The way I thought of it was that there was a spectrum between how many Vehicles a set could have. The low end of that spectrum was zero Vehicles. I didn't know what the high end of that spectrum was, but I knew Aetherdrift should be at it. Our racing set should be the set with the most Vehicles in it.

So, Exploratory Design and Vision Design spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to make a lot of Vehicles. We examined our existing Vehicle designs to see what had worked best and spent time talking to other parts of R&D to get their feedback. We came to three main conclusions: 

1. A deck built around Vehicles was tough to do, as Vehicles require creatures to crew them. Rather than trying to make Vehicles a singular mechanical theme, we liked the idea of making a wide variety of Vehicles so that many different types of decks could make use of them. 
2. The best Vehicles had a secondary purpose. Maybe they had an enters effect that let them function like a spell or another use that was functional in the early game, something like tapping for mana, becoming a Vehicle in the middle to late game. 
3. Another important way to make Vehicles more relevant was to finding alternative means of turning them into creatures. Yes, most Vehicles wanted crew, but having other options allowed us to focus on their individual designs.

With those three goals in mind, the team spent a lot of time exploring how to optimize our designs. We explored what Vehicles could do to help different archetypes and encourage their widespread usage. We experimented with additional secondary purposes for those Vehicles. We tested different ways of turning Vehicles into creatures. We ended up with a lot of cool designs, many of which we put into the file. It was clear that we were a little over where Set Design and Play Design would want the Vehicle as-fan, but we wanted to give them a lot of options.

This also led us down the path of exploring creatures riding other creatures. One of the tropes from pop culture racing is that sometimes racers ride creatures rather than drive vehicles. Was there a way for us to represent that? Interestingly, Outlaws of Thunder Junction was exploring the same space, and I had led the vision design of that set as well. I was curious to see how each set solved the problem.

Because Aetherdrift was a racing set with a lot of Vehicles, our solution was to treat riding a creature like a variant of driving a Vehicle. In fact, our pitch was to make a new variant of crew, one that basically worked the same, except it applied to creatures. We called it "crew steed." Yeah, we knew it wasn't the best name. The idea was that by using a variant of the crew ability, we could make cards that refer to crewing that would affect both normal crew and this new mechanic.

Because a creature couldn't turn into a creature as it already was one, we focused on adding attack triggers for the turn. Set Design would later turn it into its own keyword and just have cards in the set reference crew and the new keyword.

Once the mechanic had settled into a good place, we went to Dave Humpherys, the set design lead for Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and suggested that we consolidate the two mechanics. As Aetherdrift had the simpler version, we suggested that Outlaws of Thunder Junction change from their version of creature riding to ours. They did keep the name saddle, however.

Hitting the Gas

The next thing we wanted to make Aetherdrift feel like a racing set was a racing-themed mechanic. 

Here's what we initially wanted:

• A competition with other players – A key part to a race is that you're racing against someone else. 
• A task to complete quickly – The idea of trying to do something as fast as you can felt core to a race. 
• A reward for winning – A key trope to racing stories is that there's something important on the line.

We explored a bunch of different ideas, but the idea we liked most was a subgame that happened while you were playing. We didn't want it to distract you, that is, we didn't want to lengthen the game because you're trying to do something other than win, so we tied the win condition to attacking. During vision design, we called it "enter the race." Start your engines! went on to become the final name.

The earliest design had a little card that represented the three legs of the race, one for each plane. To finish that leg, you had to deal damage (or more) equal to the number of that leg. For instance, dealing 1 damage advanced you from leg 1 to leg 2. Each leg got harder as the number got higher. Then, when you finished the race, you got a Treasure token and an additional Treasure token for every other player that hadn't finished the race yet.

The earliest version had everyone join the race whenever anyone played an enter the race card, but giving a player resources when they didn't spend any resources of their own made the mechanic hard to balance. Why should I spend mana to do something that helps my opponent? We had a similar problem with Attractions in early Unfinity design. In the end, we ended up having each player join the race by playing their own enter the race card.

The Treasure you got for winning was meant to be more flavorful than anything else, so we knew we needed some other type of reward. The solution to that was to have the cards with enter the race get better once you finished the race, which we did with an ability word we called victory lap (max speed in Aetherdrift). During vision design, we made permanents that were upgraded and spells that gained flashback when you finished the race. To simplify things, Set Design only put start your engines! on permanents.

Start your engines! was simplified a bit during set design. Instead of increasing the damage requirement each leg, you now only need to do 1 damage to advance your speed. There also was no Treasure for finishing the race. The max speed upgrades proved to be enough of a reward. Finally, the templating moved away from referencing legs of a race in favor of referencing speed as a number. This change was partly to simplify the template but also to address that you weren't necessarily racing against another player.

The next thing we tackled was the flavor of fuel, making use of energy. I'll get to that story next week.

Before I wrap up for today, there's one last thing I need to do. I have a preview card to show you all.

When we chose to return to Amonkhet, we wanted to show off some new gods, as most of the existing ones met an untimely end during Hour of Devastation. My preview today is a new God card.

And We're Off

That's all the time I have for today. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article or any part of Aetherdrift that I talked about. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok).

Join me next week for part two of Aetherdrift's design story.

Until then, may your opponents be at your back.