You Get the Aetherdrift, Part 2

Welcome to the second week of Aetherdrift. This week, I will introduce Aetherdrift's Set Design team, continue the story of how it came to be, and walk you through the ten Draft archetypes.

Before I continue the design story from last week, I want to introduce the Set Design team. As always, the team lead will introduce their team members. For Aetherdrift, that was Yoni Skolnik, whose bio I wrote.

Finding the Energy

When we left last week, I said there were three pillars that Vision Design was looking at using to represent racing, each meant to support a different aspect of competition:

• Vehicles – The racers and their rides
• Start your engines! – The race itself
• Energy counters – Fuel and technology

That last one was important to us. A big part of racing is how racers tune their vehicles using the latest technology. Since we were going back to Avishkar, energy seemed to capture that essence well from a mechanical standpoint.

While we chose to focus more on racing as a theme than the mechanical identities of the planes we were visiting, energy struck a balance between those two that was most appealing to the Vision Design team. Players had been asking for a return to Avishkar, and a big part of that included energy. Energy has proven to be a popular mechanic, and players have been asking for us to make more for years. It's a very parasitic mechanic, so it benefits from new cards more so than most mechanics. We knew that Modern Horizons 3 was also planning to use energy and thought having two sets with energy would be synergistic.

Energy was first created while we were working on Mirrodin. Inspired by the card Serrated Arrows from Homelands, I liked the idea of artifacts that had a limited number of uses that were also interchangeable. Initially, we had you remove charge counters from permanents, except you could use charge counters from any of your permanents to activate an ability. We quickly realized that using counters that you, the player, had did a better job of capturing the feel we wanted. Plus, since players spent time figuring out which artifact you should remove the charge counters from, it helped reduce complexity. 

When the Design team turned in Mirrodin, then head designer Bill Rose said he felt the set was too complicated, so I removed energy. Over the years, I tried putting energy into different sets but always wound up removing it. Thirteen years later, when making Kaladesh, I realized we'd finally found the perfect spot for it. The mechanic was well received but proved to be overpowered. Numerous energy cards had to be banned. New resource systems are tricky to balance, and we'd gotten a bit too aggressive.

With this in mind, we knew adding energy to the set came with a lot of baggage. During vision design, we decided we'd try a few things:

1. We were stingier with sources of energy but creative with energy outputs. That would tamp down the power level of energy in Standard while offering a lot of fun new toys for energy decks in larger formats.
2. During Kaladesh and Aether Revolt, we avoided letting you interact with your opponent's energy counters. This time, we decided we'd let people have more interaction.
3. Energy had been a separate resource system in its first outing. We were interested in energy helping you discount mana more than avoid mana all together.

The third point led to our biggest design innovation: hybrid energy costs. For example, a cost of {2/e} could be paid either with two generic mana or one energy. We put this on mana costs, ability costs, and kicker costs. The one place we used energy without a mana-based alternative was as an alternative to crewing Vehicles.

So, why isn't energy in Aetherdrift? At the vision design summit (the final major playtest of vision design), the loudest feedback we got was that players liked the mechanics individually but not as a whole. We try hard not to have too many tricky mechanics in the same set, and the combination of Vehicles, start your engines!, and energy overwhelmed players.

Yoni asked if he could have a couple months to try and simplify energy's role in the set. Initially, they tried having energy in just one archetype When that didn't work, they tried an alternative mechanic that focused more on larger, less-common effects over smaller payments.

Yoni and the design team liked this new mechanic but soon realized that it didn't need energy. Once-per-game activations were cool and evoked the feeling of flipping a one-time nitro switch. They ended up calling the mechanic "turbo." However, it would later become exhaust when we realized we'd want to use it in future, racing-unrelated sets.

Motor Cycling

The fourth and final main mechanic in the set, along with start your engines!, saddle, and exhaust, was cycling. It was originally included as a callback to Amonkhet and Ikoria, as Ikoria was being considered as the third plane of the race. Cycling, which is deciduous, is always generally useful but had two additional advantages in this set.

First, while cycling's flavor has always been a bit generic, this was a set where the name matched the theme. During exploratory design, we leaned into this, testing out variants with fun names like bicycling and motorcycling. Words have power, and cycling's name finally gets a chance to shine.

Second, making Vehicles more common in the set had all sorts of problems, one of the biggest being that it created what we call "mix issues." Vehicles require creatures. If you draw too many Vehicles and not enough creatures, your Vehicles can become dead cards. (We also solved this problem through secondary uses as I talked about last week.) Cycling is nice because you can add it to cards that would otherwise be dead (in this case Vehicles), letting you cash them out for other cards.

The set has a lot of cards with cycling that fall into two major categories. The first are generic cyclers, letting you discard a card for another one. The second are cards that trigger an effect when you cycle them, so they play a bit more like modal cards, as you get a choice between two effects.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

While Aetherdrift focuses on racing, the identities of its host planes are still an important aspect of the set. Avishkar and Amonkhet are associated with Vehicles and cycling respectively, so we brought those into the set. We also included some cameo mechanics and one-off designs that reference iconic aspects on these planes. For Muraganda, we included a handful of cards that care about vanilla creatures and a cycle of vanilla legendary creatures to play into the plane's identity.

Just My Archetype

Recently, we've been exploring giving each two-color pair an in-universe representative. This gives our settings more identity and can help guide drafters. In Aetherdrift, each two-color pair is related to one of the ten teams competing in the main race. I should note this is not the same as faction sets, seen on Ravnica or Tarkir. Those are where we build the design around the identity of five or so factions. Each faction has a clear-cut mechanical identity, often with its own mechanic. That said, this new approach to flavoring archetypes does have a similar feel in the resulting product, so I understand why Aetherdrift resembles a faction set.

I'll walk you through each of the archetypes, their associated team, and their mechanical identity. A lot of the flavor descriptions of these draw from Miguel Lopez's work on the Planeswalker's Guide to Aetherdrift (Part 1 and Part 2), which you can read here.

White-Blue: The Guidelight Voyagers

Flavor
The Guidelight Voyagers, an uncanny collection of automatons, are a bit of an accidental team turned competent competitors; they stumbled into the first edition of the Ghirapur Grand Prix and did well enough that the organizers—bemused and curious—extended them an invite to the second. To the surprise of everyone, they accepted! What the Voyagers don't tell folks is that they're competing in the race not necessarily to win but to progress through stable Omenpaths at a high enough rate that they might trigger an anomaly similar to the one that initially tore them from their homeland and dumped them on Avishkar. If they're first through an Omenpath, that only increases their odds of being unlucky again.

Mechanics
White-blue is a slow, controlling archetype that builds up a board of artifact creatures to eventually overwhelm your opponent. It has artifact synergies that play well with Vehicles.

Blue-Black: The Speed Demons

Flavor
This crew is on a field trip, more or less. The Speed Demon itself is a lesser creature of Valgavoth's domain, embodying death and speed. He's been released by Valgavoth to chaperone Winter, who has been promised a chance at freedom if he successfully secures the Aetherspark. Alongside Winter and the Speed Demon are a whole host of possessed survivors, glitch ghosts, razorkin, and other creatures of Duskmourn. They're working at advancing Valgavoth's assimilation process across the Multiverse.

Mechanics
Blue-black is a slow and steady bleeder deck where you gum up the board and use a variety of cards to slowly plink away at your opponent's life total.

Black-Red: The Endriders

Flavor
The Endriders are a crew of survivors from Gastal, an apocalyptic plane of gas, draconic warlords, road warriors, and colossal dry lightning storms. They followed their leader, Far Fortune, through a momentary Omenpath to Avishkar, where they found little gas but plenty of fresh, clean water. Gastal is gripped by water wars due to its scarcity; if Far Fortune were to win the Grand Prix and take the Aetherspark, maybe she could open the floodgates and save her homeworld.

Mechanics
Black-red is an aggressive beatdown deck that takes advantage of start your engines! and max speed to upgrade your attackers.

Red-Green: The Goblin Rocketeers

Flavor
By goblin standards, these guys are the best of the best. By everyone else's reckoning, they tend to overcook things and are a bit chaotic. But, on their homeworld, the Rocketeers are the equivalent of test pilots and astronauts, literal rocket scientists who applied their love of speed and daring to excited chemical ends. They worship a deity called the BOOSTGOD, a heroic god who promises escape from a barrier around the goblin plane, called the velocity limit. This brave crew of goblins broke through that limit and found themselves on Avishkar. Now, they want to race and find their way back home to prove to their people that their mission was a success.

Mechanics
The red-green deck is a midrange deck that uses the exhaust mechanic to upgrade its creatures to impressive size.

Green-White: The Alacrian Quickbeasts

Flavor
The Quickbeasts are from a plane linked to Avishkar through a stable Omenpath. Alacria is a vast city on the plane, which is composed of more than a dozen unique districts. Each district has a mascot: a "soul" that's embodied in a great beast unique to the plane. Each beast has a human counterpart, usually soul-linked, but in rare cases these bonds can be forged. Alacria has a strong tournament and sporting tradition, so they sent representatives to compete in the GGP as a diplomatic overture to Avishkar: Caradora, a young but talented rider, and Lagorin, the mighty soul chosen to represent Alacria's united districts.

Mechanics
Green-white is another midrange deck that encourages you to play a lot of Vehicles and saddle with effects that will help boost them on their path to victory.

White-Black: The Champions of Amonkhet

Flavor
Amonkhet's racing team is led by two co-captains, Basri Ket and Champion Zahur. Basri is a well-known figure, the people's champion and consummate sand-mage warrior of Amonkhet. Zahur is a mummy and ancient charioteer hero who will gladly take a crack at another race. Together, they represent the hopes and dreams of Amonkhet's living and undead.

Mechanics
White-black is an aggressive attrition deck, using start your engines! and max speed, which keeps up an endless army of attacking Zombies while whittling away your opponent's resources.

Blue-Red: The Keelhaulers

Flavor
The Keelhaulers are a rough-and-tumble crew of interplanar shark-person pirates and their hangers-on, fish folk and other benthic baddies that they've recruited in their voyages across the Omenpaths. Far from home but eager to plunder, eat, and breathe aether, the Keelhaulers are a new team to the race. They're supported by Kari Zev, a pirate herself who was willing to sponsor their entry for reasons only known to her and Ragavan.

Mechanics
Blue-red is an aggressive deck that makes use of discard, mostly through cycling, to keep its card flow of attackers coming.

Black-Green: The Speedbrood

Flavor
The Speedbrood are a unique clutch of humanoid insects who seek to become speed itself. They grow from small grubs to become "radians," leaders who are on the ballistic path toward becoming a living heart of a Speedbrood vehicle, a living, aether-fueled machine metamorphosed from the radian who donated their body and life to grow it, becoming a vehicle for speed itself.

Mechanics
Black-green is a recursion-centric deck that focuses on filling up its graveyard and returning large threats to the battlefield.

Red-White: Cloudspire Racing Team

Flavor
The Cloudspire Racing Team is a high-speed, low-drag team of racing professionals. Hailing from Kylem, a plane where triumph can be channeled as magic, the Cloudspire Racing Team won last year's Ghirapur Grand Prix and earned themselves an automatic entry into this year's edition. With that pedigree, they bring the promise of another win, so Chandra, on the hunt to re-spark her girlfriend Nissa, accepted an offer from Cloudspire to join their team as an honorary co-captain, sharing duties with Cloudspire's chief pilot: the triumph-mage Kolodin.

Mechanics
Red-white is an aggro deck that has extra synergy with Vehicles.

Green-Blue: The Aether Rangers

Flavor
The Aether Rangers are Avishkar's flagship team. Their vehicles are quick, handle well, fueled by aether, and hover just above the ground, making them good for any terrain they might encounter during the race. Their chief engineer and public representative is Pia Nalaar (Chandra's mother), and the masked racer Spitfire is their lead pilot.

Mechanics
Green-blue is a ramp deck that builds up its mana to play large creatures and Vehicles. It also uses that mana on exhaust costs to overwhelm the opponent

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The Finish Line

We've come to the end of today's column. I hope you enjoyed hearing about how we designed Aetherdrift. As always, I'm eager to hear your feedback on today's column or any of the elements of Aetherdrift I talked about. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and maybe TikTok).

Join me next week for Aetherdrift's vision design handoff document.

Until then, may your pedal always be to the metal.