Sneaky Standard Synergies to Accelerate Aetherdrift’s Vehicles

There are very few people in the world more revved up than I am at the thought of vehicle-themed Aetherdrift decks. I just love how vehicles create natural counterplay to sweepers and other sorcery-speed interaction, or give decks on the defensive insurance against their blockers being removed before combat. So I’m not looking to just play an odd vehicle or two for incidental value – if at all possible, I want them to be the focus of my deck!

Normally, I would advise deckbuilders against going all-in on set-specific mechanical themes like this. It’s tough to be competitive building mainly from that one set that cares about vehicles, while every generalist deck can pick from all the best cards of the last 3 years.

But thanks to the unique ways they work, vehicle decks don’t necessarily struggle in this area. So long as you’re prepared to explore all possible uses of their mechanics, you’ll find that there’s already a bunch of cool support cards for these decks in current Standard – you just have to know the right things to look for. 

WRECKING CREW

One of the most interesting avenues to leverage with vehicles is the “tap an untapped creature” cost of crewing them. Wizards has been making a concerted effort to print mechanics like mounts, survival, enlist and convoke which give deckbuilders more incentive to explore this theme.

The survival cards from Duskmourn: House of Horror are going to be our first priority. The other mechanics don’t actually interact directly with vehicles, they just happen to benefit from the same payoffs that benefit from crewing. But survival creatures (and mechanically similar triggers like on Annie Flash or Wylie Duke) ARE the payoffs.

Those two Thunder Junction legends stand out thanks to their power level and clear thematic association with mounts & vehicles. But there are at least a few such creatures in nearly every current Standard set. Unctus, Grand Metatect looks like a potential standout if blue gets enough vehicle cards to form an aggressive archetype, providing a stat boost to vehicles as well as steady card selection whenever you crew with blue things.

Split Up is a very interesting option to consider. It does get significantly weaker if the opponent has even one Vehicle available, but when YOU cast it you can use crew to help set up a perfect one-sided boardwipe. 

On a similar note, Lost in the Maze and The Wandering Rescuer give us the power to dodge all future targeted removal by crewing vehicles with the targeted creature in response! This gets even better when you remember that already-crewed vehicles can still tap to crew themselves, and I’m sure that if vehicle decks do post results then one or both of these cards will be involved somehow.

Team-wide untap effects like Dazzling Theater//Prop Room negate the defensive disadvantage of tapping to crew on our turn. The vehicles we attack with get untapped as well, so it’s basically vigilance for vehicle decks. Anzrag, the Quake-Mole does one better, untapping our stuff and also providing additional combat steps. 

This templating can be explosive for vehicle decks, as you can have all your vehicles “chain-crew” one another before the first combat, then have Anzrag untap ALL of them for a huge second swing. The Mole God also contributes a whopping 8 power to crewing the turn he comes down, making it a little less sad in situations where we can’t give him haste.

Unfortunately, Anzrag’s design does give opponents a choice to negate our untap & extra combat by sacrificing 8 life to leave him unblocked. That’s why my top synergy card in this category is actually Great Train Heist! 

It offers the same big play potential of a second combat where both our crew and vehicles get to swing, but can also show up on defense (untapping our team for a surprise block) or provide other utility. The treasure generation is the most situational of its three “modes”, but it does have some great upside in conjunction with our next type of synergy – artifacts-matter effects!

TWISTED (TO OUR ADVANTAGE) METAL

This category is nice and straightforward; vehicles are artifact creatures, and with a little deckbuilding effort we can make most of our crew artifacts as well. Normally I would be excited about finding cards that buff artifacts in aggressive ways, but value engines can also be useful if they don’t hurt our curve too much – and Standard currently has some interesting cards along those lines.

Fabrication Foundry’s combination of efficient ramp plus secondary utility is not something you see very often. Its true worth will depend on how many four-drop artifact haymakers and activated costs you can pay for with it, but it seems more likely to work than to whiff. 

Meria, Scholar of Antiquity is another great support piece, giving you the choice to turn dormant vehicles and other artifacts into either cards or mana as needed. The fact she’s a solid 3/3 for three mana is a huge boon since we can at least rely on her to crew in aggressive situations where we want those artifacts tapping to attack instead. 

Fomori Vault isn’t very flashy for a mythic rare, but it’s an extremely handy effect for an aggro deck to have in your back pocket (or on an untapped land, which is basically the same thing). 

Many other cards from The Big Score bonus sheet also have great artifact synergy, so it’s worth browsing through that small-but-mighty set to see what’s available in your colors (or revisit my article about brewing with Big Score from back when those cards were released). There’s too many to go through in detail here, but Simulacrum Synthesizer gets a special shout-out for creating powerful “Karnstruct” tokens.

I should take a moment to point out that some artifact support cards do NOT play well with vehicles. For instance, effects which clone or create token copies of artifacts lose value when targeting vehicles since most of the time your available crewing power bottlenecks how many vehicles can be used.

Effects that care about artifacts entering and dying are also not at their best in these decks. Their payoffs have to be balanced around how cheaply players might create and sacrifice Treasure tokens or Candy Trail, so they end up not giving us much return on the larger investments we put into vehicles.

But there is also a specific kind of artifact support which is super-effective for vehicle decks: those which animate non-creature artifacts! Cards like Case of the Filched Falcon, Unctus’s Retrofitter, Tawnos’s Tinkering and Zoetic Glyph can turn vehicles into creatures permanently, sparing us the need to crew them every turn. 

We may end up slightly downgrading the vehicle’s stats (the base power and toughness set by the animating effect takes precedence, even if you then crew the creature-vehicle afterwards), but rare vehicles with additional keywords and abilities retain all those characteristics, meaning this is often a good deal. 

Cards like Behind the Mask and Tough Cookie which animate vehicles only for one turn are less impactful, but can be a good “combo” with certain vehicles balanced around very high crew costs.

FLEX YOUR MUSCLE-CARS

The other main synergy I’d look to build into vehicle decks is effects which scale with the size of your creatures. Generally speaking, vehicles can have much higher power and toughness than “normal” creatures of the same mana cost, since you have to jump through the additional hoop of crewing to use them.

This means we can get an early head-start on things like discounting Ghalta, Primal Hunger and Molten Monstrosity, generating big tokens with Tumbleweed Rising and The Skullspore Nexus, blasting boards with Lukka, Bound to Ruin and Waltz of Rage, or drawing cards with Dragonhawk and Season of Gathering!

You can effortlessly solve Case of the Trampled Garden, or counter any spell for just UG with Repulsive Mutation. Your vehicles probably also benefit from the defensive power of Smuggler’s Surprise and the haste triggers of Surrak, the Hunt Caller and Cactusfolk Sureshot. 

Tyvar the Pummeler can convert one big vehicle into a huge team-wide pump, while also serving as a secondary enabler for our survival cards. But probably the best way to leverage the size advantage of our vehicles – at least for true aggro decks – is to Fling them at people! 

Vehicles are hard to block or remove favorably in the early game, so many opponents will drop below 10 life while they focus on stabilizing or killing your crew. Then you follow up that last huge motorized swing with Voldaren Thrillseeker or the adventure side of Callous Sell-Sword to finish things off in a glorious action movie explosion!

Obviously these sorts of effects are much less exciting when they can’t target opponents directly, but some are worth a look for efficiency or synergy reasons – Dire Flail and Hunter’s Talent come to mind. But I think we’ve shown there’s enough great support cards for vehicles that you shouldn’t need to dip too far into the mediocre.

BUCKLE UP, BUTTERCUP

I won’t be so bold as to 100% guarantee that there will be viable vehicle-based aggro decks winning majors in Aetherdrift Standard. However, we did see that such archetypes can be successful during the only comparable window of emphasis on this card type: back when they were first printed in Kaladesh. 

Their inherent mechanics are already well suited to our present Constructed metagame, so the only way I can really see vehicles failing is if they can’t find enough efficient ways to crew – the Toolcraft Exemplar or Peacewalker Colossus type cards. 

But with vehicles so integral to the theme of this set, I can’t imagine a world where Wizards forgets to include these crucial enablers. That’s why I wanted to share this quick guide to vehicle deckbuilding – so when Aetherdrift actually becomes Standard legal, you can really put your pedal to the metal!