I feel the need—the need for speed.
Aetherdrift is a Magic: The Gathering expansion whose designers looked at Mad Max and Death Race 2000 and said, yeah, we can put some of that in our wizard game. Sure, we absolutely can take this idea of motorsport as a violent gladiatorial contest, and theme a set of cards for our dorkus malorkus card game around it. No worries.
The concept has it that there’s a race taking teams across three different planes of reality at top speed, and those teams include magical beastriders and undead charioteers. It’s tough to pick a favorite out of all the teams when the options include pirate sharks and spiders piloting the bodies of a previous generation of spider-drivers, but I’m immediately partial to the Goblin Rocketeers.
Imagine the kind of Rat Fink artwork you might see on a greaser’s tattoo, poking out from under their rockabilly shirt with flames on it. A character with bloodshot eyes and a tongue like a dog leaning out the window as they hoon down the highway in a vehicle with pipes blasting fire and smoke. That image is the Goblin Rocketeers’ whole deal. Their backstory is that they’re trying to break a fundamental speed limit of physics as a way of letting their deity, the BOOSTGOD, into the multiverse. “No brakes” is their religion, and I suspect they’d consider Cannonball Run a holy text.
Aetherdrift includes a couple of mechanics to facilitate the idea of speed. Some cards let you Start Your Engines, which gives you a speed of 1 and lets you increase it by one point a turn if you damage your opponent. Once you hit 4 that’s Max Speed, which unlocks bonuses that differ based on the cards you’ve played, but might let you draw two cards in any situation where you’d ordinarily draw one, or otherwise increase the tempo of play.
The other new mechanic is Exhaust. Like the scene in any Fast and the Furious movie where someone hits the nitrous, Exhaust abilities are one-time boosts that let you kick things up a notch. Our preview card, Afterburner Expert (with art by April Prime), is an example of that. For a cost of two and two green, you get to put two +1/+1 counters on the card, which represents a goblin driver called Speedbump thumbing the switch on a rocket designed for velocity rather than stability. Afterburner Expert can also come back from being swatted down by a Shivan Dragon or whatever, because if you use the Exhaust ability of another card they return from your discard pile, ready to hit the nitro and wipe out on a corner again. Which is how it should be.
Aetherdrift will be racing into release on February 14. There will be a pre-release event on February 7 at your local WPN store.
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