Race to the Finish
Welcome to Aetherdrift Set Reviews! I'm Michael Celani, and I'm using this opportunity to trade my checkered past for a checkered flag. When it comes to this set's reception, some people would say that having a death race in Magic: The Gathering is a jarring tone shift that's hard to take seriously.
Anyway, we've got a lot of cards to cover, and I'm looking to set a record for speed in a place other than the bedroom, so let's get to the review!
Mythics
Salvation Engine reminds me of myself: an ungraceful lunk who inherited clashing traits from their parents that really have no business being together on the same body.
If you're looking for the substantial boon to artifact creatures, I struggle to see why you'd run Salvation Engine over Illustrious Wanderglyph, who provides the same anthem at the same price with the added benefit of barfing out four free 3/3s a turn cycle.
On the other side of the coin, if you're looking to bring artifacts back from the scrap heap, then Salvation Engine offers little over Ironsoul Enforcer, who has a more flexible reanimation trigger and doesn't require you to have six power of creatures on the board before it can do anything at all.
Theoretically, the ideal home for Salvation Engine is some deck that would want both Ironsoul Enforcer and Illustrious Wanderglyph, but that's a surprisingly hard target to hit. The best answer I could come up with is some flavor of token-based Shorikai, Genesis Engine list that primarily discards and reanimates creatures along the lines of Myr Battlesphere, Threefold Thunderhulk, and Triplicate Titan.
My runner-up was Jan Jansen, Chaos Crafter, who can use Salvation Engine as a way to recur their noncreature artifact sacrifice fodder while buffing the tokens. Unfortunately, I would assume you're much better off pitching small things to him that would be more easily brought back (if you're not already just sacrificing his Treasure). Don't worry, I'm not a completely joyless monster: I admit it would be fun to scrap Portal to Phyrexia only to rebuild it every turn. Well, fun for me, at least.
I suppose the one thing going for Salvation Engine that its two parents never had was a giant, beefy body. 6/10 is a lot, though it suffers from a noticeable lack of evasion. If you can give your Vehicles flying or trample, then Salvation Engine might be a good enough beater on the back of its stats alone to make up for its lack of grace.
And ultimately, "a lack of grace" is my take on this card: it's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it's just awkward and clumsy. There's a good chance some part of this card will end up neglected in any deck thinking of including it, and we here at Commander's Herald encourage you to use the whole buffalo.
Valor's Flagship is the behemoth of a machine that you'd see at your local truck dealership, and like a truck dealership, you shouldn't be happy paying sticker price to drive it off the lot.
This thing is just begging to be reanimated. It even cycles itself away! The ideal play pattern here would be a turn three cycle followed by either a Refurbish or the sudden realization that Greasefang, Okiba Boss is your commander. The second most ideal play pattern would be sinking infinite mana into it so that you can introduce your Witty Roastmaster to his biggest audience yet. If you're doing neither and are just looking for a huge lifelinking flyer, why bother with the crew cost?
And that got me thinking about Vehicles in Commander, by which I mean there aren't any. Seriously: raise your hand if you've ever seen a Vehicle in a Commander deck that was not specifically themed around the type. Vehicles don't exist; normal Commander decks don't play them.
According to EDHREC, the most popular Vehicle in Commander is Smuggler's Copter. It's included in around 47,000 decks, making it the 1776th most popular card in the format. That seems both impressive and American, but don't lie: you've never seen a Smuggler's Copter outside a dedicated Vehicle list. The same goes for the four next most popular Vehicle cards (with the exception of maybe Shorikai, Genesis Engine), and that's because the stats are skewed: they're only so represented to begin with because they were all reprinted in the Buckle Up precon list, which was sold during the wildly popular Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty expansion.
The first Vehicle card on the rankings not printed in that precon was The Indomitable, which is included in decks because it's another Coastal Piracy, and compared to other Coastal Piracies (Coastals Piracy?), its numbers are not flattering. In fact, it's the bottom of the barrel, only beating out Deepfathom Skulker. Why is that?
There are only two conclusions I can come to: that The Indomitable is unknown because it was only printed in a single Commander precon, or that players just do not value its inherent crew ability. Given that some cards in precons become wildly popular despite limited printings (e.g., Trouble in Pairs), I think it's much more likely that the answer is the latter.
And that gets to the crux of the issue. There is no Vehicle worth actually crewing in Commander. The inherent tradeoff -- that you have to tap your smaller creatures to temporarily enable a bigger one -- doesn't add up in a multiplayer format where you have to weather significantly more game actions before you can replenish your resources. If you crew in Commander, your creatures are tapped for four times as long, but playing Commander doesn't magically make your Vehicles four times as big.
And without that balance change, most Vehicles look pretty demure compared to the entirety of Magic's card pool. If you want a big beater for combat, like Valor's Flagship, you're often better off just playing a non-Vehicle one, like Angel of Indemnity, since it can start putting in work from an empty board. Having a hand full of Vehicles sucks when all you want is a blocker.
But maybe you don't care about combat; you have a fancy Ghostly Prison and you only kill your opponents by infinite-mana Banefires. If all you want is a value piece, and it happens to be on a Vehicle, then you'll never want to crew it and risk losing it to creature removal or combat shenanigans. Nobody is going to swing with Hedge Shredder for the 5/5 doink and a measly mill two.
So if the cost to crew is so high, and the only real benefit of the mechanic is that you don't have to interact with it for some of your permanents to keep working, then why would you deign to acknowledge its existence? The Indomitable might as well have the exact text of Coastal Piracy.
Wizards, you gotta print a Vehicle card that makes sense to include in the average Commander deck and which is worth crewing throughout the game, and ideally, you do this without an immense amount of power creep. This problem isn't intractable, but it is hard to solve, and I don't think you've hit the mark just yet. You're on the right path, though; I think saddle is an interesting exploratory step, and I'm excited to see what you come up with going forward.
Rares
I'll admit that Basri might really be tomorrow's champion, because today he kinda blows.
He's obviously not making a splash in the command zone. Paying and exerting to create a 1/1 Cat with lifelink is abysmal. To even come close to making him playable, you'd need to sidestep that exert cost by untapping him manually, and without blue, that's just not consistent. Seriously, Rhys does everything Basri does, but better and with access to an additional color.
Even outside the command zone I don't even know if I'd ever cast him if I drew him. I really don't see what a single Cat every other turn cycle gets you, even in the best of circumstances. I guess enough untaps would leave you with an army, but there's just so many better options you could be playing with if you're abusing that mechanic.
That just leaves this card's alternate mode, which is a Heroic Intervention for Cats that happens to cycle itself. To be honest, I'm not sure that I'd be willing pay for an actual Heroic Intervention that cycles itself, let alone one that only works on Cats. This is the most disappointing feline-related piece of media I've seen since 2019.
Unlike a carton of eggs these days, Bulwark Ox's ability to put a +1/+1 counter on a creature during combat is a dime-a-dozen, and when you consider that this 2/2 has to attack while saddled to get a single counter, you can see why I'm thinking the milk ain't worth the squeeze.
Instead, consider the far more interesting line of text here: that powercrept Selfless Spirit ability. If you're in a deck that wants to put some form of counter on all its creatures, upgrading from mere indestructible to both indestructible and hexproof is a worthwhile shift.
If you're on the fence about Guardian Sunmare, consider that his floor is "Zur the Enchanter with ward ." Hell, I'd rate tutor a three-cost nonland onto the battlefield as a playable sorcery at four mana, and Guardian Sunmare can do it again and again without getting knackered. All you need is a sufficiently beefy rider, and Boxer here will work hard for you.
Now, I don't think Guardian Sunmare is making it into the more linear combo decks (which appreciate cheaper, actual tutors instead of reusable ones), but toolbox decks will love it, be they creature-based, Aura-based, or even artifact-based. Let's just look at some of the things you can get.
- Tocasia's Welcome, Enduring Innocence, and friends to make your tutored creatures draw cards;
- Clones, like Glasspool Mimic, to make more Sunmares;
- Anti-interaction, like Grand Abolisher or Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar;
- Sac outlets, like Ashnod's Altar;
- Recursion, like Eternal Witness;
- Removal, like Loran of the Third Path or Fiend Hunter; and
- Bullshit, like Necropotence, Rhystic Study, or Grim Monolith.
For my money, I think your first priority should be fetching something that shields Guardian Sunmare from being beaten into a dead horse. He does have to attack, after all, which means blockers can be a problem. Shielded by Faith makes a lot of sense here, since it not only protects Guardian Sunmare in its initial combat, but it also can be moved around to higher value creatures when they enter.
This is a fantastic card, and the only sad, depressing, miserable missed opportunity I can think of is that this doesn't cost and also trigger when it enters. I want my Horse Titan, dammit!
Great card name. "On Wings of Gold" is the title of my new 80s hair metal album where I wear tight jeans, smoke drugs in my parents' basement, and express chauvinistic views about women to electric guitar.
If you're playing Zombies, it's obviously good: it gives your whole field a reasonable buff and flying. If you're constantly recurring stuff from your graveyard to your hand, it's obviously good; it pumps out flying 2/2s for free.
The only controversial thing here is its applicability to your average token deck. Is switching vigilance for flying worth the premium over Intangible Virtue? Probably not; if you're going sufficiently wide, then your opponent shouldn't be able to realistically block a vast portion of your army anyway. If they can, we already have Moonshaker Cavalry, so skip it unless you're either undead or just diecurious.
Perilous Snare is an artifact Banishing Light, but an artifact Banishing Light is still a Banishing Light. It's sorcery speed, it's vulnerable to removal (even more so than usual, given that red can touch it), and it's costlier than most staple alternatives.
You can read the entire spiel I wrote about this type of removal when I reviewed Sheltered by Ghosts, but the gist is that you need some sort of advantage over regular removal to consider playing Perilous Snare. Can it cross the finish line?
Well, for some decks, the artifact type alone might be enough. White works really well with historic permanents, and Perilous Snare is the first unconditional artifact-typed Oblivion Ring we've ever gotten in the color. Triggering Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle off your removal, or putting another nasty in the box thanks to Gandalf the White would probably feel pretty good.
For other decks, I can't ignore the annoying ugly gremlin in the cage: starting your engines. When something tells you to start your engines!, you get one speed, and that increases once on each of your turns where an opponent loses life, up to a maximum of four. I assume Wizards chose four because that's the amount of engines in a car or something; I dunno, I'm not a mechanic.
Start your engines! has several massive flaws that will undoubtedly cause it to burn out in Commander. First, it's a parasitic mechanic: only Aetherdrift cards and the one throwback Modern Horizons IV card will instruct you to do it, meaning you better be deep into the set's card pool if you want to build around it.
Second and most critically, it's glacially slow. Just take Perilous Snare as an example. Assuming you cast it on turn three, and without shenanigans, you would need to wait until turn five to start putting counters on stuff, and that's if you're able to damage your opponents every round including the round you play it, which is not necessarily a given.
Then, unlike heating up the car in your driveway in winter, starting your engines earlier doesn't help all that much, either. You're not guaranteed to draw a playable ignition card early in the game, and even you manage to slam something with the mechanic on turn one or two, I find it unlikely or at the very least inconsistent that you'll be able to follow that up with a flawless set of pings to an opponent on each subsequent turn.
And should you manage to jump through the ridiculous set of hoops that would make Siegfried and Roy's tigers blush, the rewards don't match the payoff. Most cards with the mechanic are middling at best, and obviously designed for the formats where you can include them in multiples. Your reward here for playing subpar removal is a Luminarch Aspirant on turn five. Don't bother capturing Loot; just punt the little runt and move on.
This is a misprint. Priest of the Crossing was obviously supposed to be a legendary Selesnya creature named Asmira, Justice Upheld. The damn thing doesn't even have the manners to be an uncommon so I could defect to PDH for that sweet, sweet forbidden fruit!
Oh, right, the review. The next in Wizards' series of for the love of god, aristocrats decks, do something other than drain your opponents out with your tokens, Priest of the Crossing buffs up your whole army by enhancing them with the bones of their fallen comrades. The wider you go, the better, on both fronts; you'll have more stuff to beef up, and more stuff to treadmill into the never ending maw that is Ashnod's Altar.
A proper use of Priest of the Crossing will transform you into a table-wide problem real quick. Make sure to wait until your antecedent's end step before sacrificing your board so that you can surprise all your enemies with five counters or so on all your dorks.
Renewed Solidarity takes the proven winner that was Ocelot Pride and puts a new twist on it by adding severe nerfs. Instead of doubling literally every token that entered for , like our feline friend did, we're now limited to creature tokens of a specific type for a much more reasonable . Don't get me wrong, that's still an incredible card, and it was my opinion that Ocelot Pride was best at copying creature tokens anyway, but those downsides are gonna block it from the fifty-dollar zone.
To be fair, Renewed Solidarity does some work to justify its higher mana cost. It's an enchantment instead of a creature, which makes substantially more resilient. It also strengthens whatever creature type you chose with a +1/+0 buff, which is surprisingly relevant in a lot of board states; just look at anyone playing with Heraldic Banner. Finally, you don't need to gain life and the city's blessing to trigger its effect... but to be frank, neither of those were particularly challenging criteria to meet in the first place.
There's two main deck types that Renewed Solidarity fits into. The obvious one is the go-wide tokens deck that makes a lot of a single type of token, especially if your commander is the one generating that army. Thalisse, Reverent Medium is the big winner here: you can name Spirit, have Thalisse trigger first, and then have Renewed Solidarity double those tokens.
The second strategy is the type-changing token copy deck. You know the ones, where you create a token that's a copy of whatever, except it's a Zombie or a Nightmare or a Brushwagg. Suddenly, its inclusion in a precon alongside Hashaton, Scarab's Fist makes tons of sense to me, but I'm personally most excited to see it in The Jolly Balloon Man, if only for the novelty of naming Balloon as a creature type.
It's great, put it in your token decks, and move on. Now, for my traditional set review rant about token doublers. These tyrants at Wizards--
Nobody plays these sorts of cards in Commander, and somehow I doubt stapling a 3/3 Vehicle flyer onto one is going to usher in the great stax Renaissance.
The only two things worth pointing out about Skyseer's Chariot are that it a) doesn't carve out an exception for mana abilities, so you can go ahead and make that Ashnod's Altar useless, and b) it can name Skyseer's Chariot, which hilariously taxes its own crew ability.
Spectacular Pileup is just neo-Wrath of God with cycling bolted on to it to justify its higher price tag. Let me explain.
People dunk on the last phrase of Wrath all the time: "those creatures can't be regenerated." How quaint! Nothing regenerates anymore, Grandpa, and the war ended thirty years ago. We laugh and laugh, needling the poor little sorcery for its outdated verbiage, until one day you're fighting a Skittles and suddenly Grandpa looks like a thirty-year-old playboy billionaire with a Ferrari and seven girlfriends.
Spectacular Pileup stymies the forgiveness of the damned the same way that Wrath of God did in its heyday: it's neo-Wrath. If your opponents want to react to your impending Friday at 4 PM on the Dan Ryan with a Heroic Intervention, then they're out of luck.
It's a more modern and applicable take on a classic, but I can't help but smile at the irony that Spectacular Pileup can't stop regeneration, the original method of protecting your creatures at instant speed.
They did it! They fixed Warden of the Inner Sky! I was so upset that you couldn't activate that ability at instant speed. All it took was making Voyager Glidecar a Vehicle, and suddenly I've stopped caring. Weird how that works.
Woof, Harsh Mentor isn't looking all that hot in his twilight years.
In addition to his hair, Wizened Mentor also lost the power to trigger more than once a turn, and that really limits the card's stop-your-opponents-from-doing-whatever-they-wantitude.
Harsh Mentor shuts down a lot of infinite mana combos that Wizened Mentor can only get a single 1/1 out of. In fact, Wizened Mentor's best showing is four 1/1 Zombies each turn cycle, comparable to a Tendershoot Dryad, but he has no built-in buff for Zombies and can't guarantee the token every turn. Wizened Mentor is ultimately more annoying than useful, so unless you've buffed your Zombie tokens up to Sliver levels of busted, might I recommend Charismatic Conqueror instead?
Uncommons & Commons
Alacrian Armory bulks your Vehicles and Mounts up with both vigilance and a toughness boost, but the most interesting part of the card is that free crew or saddle on your combat. Jury's out on whether or not that's worth four mana, but the longer the game goes, the more value you get out of it.
For what it's worth, there's a stronger case for it in the Vehicle deck than the Mount deck. Vehicles have a much more interesting relationship with board wipes, since, like a Cybertruck in a crash, they tend to survive catastrophes unscathed while their drivers get absolutely mangled. Alacrian Armory lets you crew at least one Vehicle while you wait for more courageous pilots to sign up for the death race.
Mounts don't have the luxury of dodging board wipes, and in most Mount-based decks I've looked at, it mostly looks like Mounts are mounting other Mounts, a sentence that I am unwilling to rephrase. Bottom line, you're either saddling Mounts or you have no creatures; there's no real in-between, like the Vehicle deck has.
For Vehicle decks, I'd rather run Tempered Steel and a wider range of artifact creatures, because giving your Foundry Inspector or whatever +2/+2 is tantamount to running a Pilot that can crew a Vehicle as if it had more power.
Mount decks don't quite have the same range of buffs, though something tells me I'd still run a real anthem that hits everything instead. I guess I just don't put a lot of stock in crewing things for cheaper.
In what world is the Pilot token worth sacrificing a whole land? If you could activate Country Roads at instant speed in desperation when you need a chump blocker, then sure, I'd get it, but I can only take this one home at sorcery speed. Aetherdrift: the set that'll give you slow-motion sickness!
If you're worried about drawing a land late in the game and would rather have it turn into value, I see no reason to waste your land drop for a three-mana vanilla creature instead of simply playing a Cycling land, and if you actually wanna crew Vehicles, just play Mech Hangar.
Detention Chariot is a cavalcade of all the ways white can be inefficient being inefficient at once.
The most interesting thing about this Magic equivalent of a police car might be that it's got a 1-cost cycle. Sometimes you just want cheap cycling, and if you're already running stuff like Brilliant Restoration, getting this as gravy would be fine. Still not worth the slot, in my opinion, but the floor is pretty high here.
Well, cycling is a start, but these conditional removal spells like Gallant Strike really need to outright cantrip before they can even begin to challenge the ubiquity of Swords.
White can search your library for lands of any type, so long as its a basic Plains, and while Gloryheath Lynx can repeatedly seek them out, it remains outclassed by the variants of this card that can actually put that card onto the battlefield. Anyone telling you to run this over, say, Weathered Wayfarer is reaching.
Just play Duelist's Heritage. The fact that every start your engines card has a comparable, easier-to-set-up version is doing the mechanic absolutely no favors.
Isamaru, Hound of Konda for people who hate dogs, one-drops, or both.
Another Refurbish is always welcome for the decks that want to reanimate artifacts. Its crewification is permanent, too, so it's best spent on Vehicles with prohibitively expensive (or missing) crew costs. Still, don't be afraid to include this in artifact decks that don't particularly care about Vehicles: you'd be surprised how backbreaking bringing back even a Myr Battlesphere can be.
Wow, a Mount that actually negates the downside of saddling it.
A saddled Unswerving Sloth isn't going to die in combat, and it untaps your whole board, which is especially good if you've got tons of mana dorks, untappers or, uh -- (think of a third thing, think of a third thing) -- Inspired creatures.
Yes, it doesn't just twiddle the creatures that saddled it: it hits everything on your field. There's a disgusting combo out there with Aggravated Assault, I'm sure of it, and if you have tons of activated abilities, then this is just another way to reuse all of them. The only downsides are that it's expensive on both the mana and crew costs, but an indestructible 5/5 hitting every turn seems worth it to me.
Go-wide decks may be tempted, but they're forgetting that Bovine Intervention exists.
Okay, there's no world where Interface Ace is most interesting at the reins of a boat or the wheel of a horse. This thing untaps itself when it becomes tapped for any reason, including combat and whatever other activated abilities you graft onto it.
It takes mana generating Auras like Leyline Immersion or Bigger on the Inside particularly well, alongside anything that draws cards, such as Quicksilver Dagger and Oracle's Insight. I'm just sad that all the super fun stuff, like Burning Anger and Elemental Mastery, care about the given creature's power, which is a fat goose egg here.
This is Sram bait if I've ever seen it. In that deck, all you have to do is find a way to sacrifice it over and over again and you're drawing cards for just a pop. Unfortunately, you have to get up to max speed first, so I don't see it displacing Conviction any time soon.
Like Foundry Inspector? Here's another one.
This is a heavily Vehicle- and Mount-focused set, and if that's not your cup of bolts, then I'd say skip this one. Renewed Solidarity and Guardian Sunmare aside, white doesn't really get anything that's applicable to broader Commander gameplay here; there's no great applicable removal this time around, nor interesting commander, nor strong and reasonably priced value engine. But maybe I've got it wrong; let me know what you're excited for below, and remember to check out the other set reviews!
