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Magic: the Gathering Aetherdrift Expansion Review
Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast
Loading...After a strong restart late last year with the Magic the Gathering Foundations set, Aetherdrift is the first expansion to come to the card game in 2025.
Aetherdrift may also be one of the expansions I’ve liked most for the card game. Not because of the mechanics added (which I’ll get to shortly) but just because of the backstory and art.
The latest set pays homage to battle racers such as Mad Max, Wacky Races and more. Ten teams are competing on races across different planets to try and win the Aetherspark, an artifact containing a Planeswalker spark. The teams range from the Mad Max-esque Endriders, the aquatic pirates called the Keelhaulers and more.
These teams become much of the focus of the cards in this set, featuring their riders, vehicles, abilities and more unique to each team. Also a focus in the set are the lands based around the race locations: Avishkar, Amonkhet and Muraganda. The lands are sometimes shown in a first person view of the racers; at other times, you can get a beautiful wide view of these raceways.
As far as new mechanics go, there’s only two to talk about here. The first, naturally, is Start your engines! Once you play a card with this effect listed, you gain a speed counter of 1. The counter doesn’t go away or lower, but the first time you deal damage to an opponent on your turn, it will go up by one. Once you hit speed 4, the max speed, additional abilities become usable on these cards. While it takes a few turns to build up early on, once you hit max speed any time a card comes in with that ability you can start off with the extra ability ready.
The other mechanic is Exhaust, which are one time use effects. Once you’ve used them, they’re locked out, only usable again if a card leaves the battle and returns later on. Personally, I liked the Exhaust effect of Loot, the Pathfinder, which gives you three different ones you can use: either adding 3 mana of any color, drawing 3 cards or dealing 3 damage to a target.
As for the Planeswalker cards go, we have Chandra, Spark Hunter entering the field to claim the Aetherspark. Additionally, because the Aetherspark has a Planswalker spark, this artifact also features the same style of abilities and usage as normal Planswalker cards.
Overall, the set features 291 cards to bolster your decks with. There are also two new Commander decks to give you a jumpstart with a 100-card deck and some boosters to open. While it’s not as great of a starting point as Foundations was for new players, it is definitely a great first expansion to check out if your entry point was Foundations.
Now, I want to mention the highlight of the set to me, the artwork. Of course, the big one shown off early was the First-Place variants, which are gold border style cards. I like the thoughts behind them, but they weren’t my favorite style in the set.
That honor goes toward the Rude Rider art styles, which is a callback to the rat rod-style vehicles and designs from years back. There are 14 cards in the set that get this cartoony treatment (I ended up pulling three of them to see). I actually loved the style and hope to pick more up over time.
The set also features a Graffiti style that is used for the Gearhulk creatures, as well as the Amonkhet gods. I actually ended up getting Ketramose, the New Dawn in this style, which looked nice compared to the original card.
Finally, there is a numbered variant of The Aetherspark. The set contains 500 of the cards with a unique art style as well to grab. There are also the art series cards to collect in the set as well, which I actually enjoyed getting this time around just to see the full artwork without any text on them.
