Poor Balance Undermines Magic's New Aether Revolt Set
If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering, you know to be afraid of artifacts. Whether you slung some powerful free spells back in the 1990s or lived through the multiple “combo winters” of the turn of the millennium, you probably know that artifacts are often a place where the design of Magic goes awry. Even if you’ve only played a couple games, you’ve probably seen them: They’re grey in color, fit into any deck, and in the fiction of the game they are powerful machines that give access to abilities and effects that cannot be bounded by the different colors of mana that infuse the game world with magical energy.
Kaladesh, the most recent card set (called a “block”) of Magic, is what’s known as an “artifact block.” As creative team member Kimberly Kreines explained to me last year, the world of Kaladesh is one of constant development and invention. It is a place where people are putting all of their energy into creating devices that they think will make the world better in some way (at least theoretically). That means that there are lots of artifact cards, cards that care about artifacts, and generally just interesting ways of thinking about machinery and what machines can do within the wide world of Magic.
When the world of Kaladesh was opened up to players last fall, big events happened. Deck builders flocked to artifact cards like Aetherflux Reservoir, Smuggler’s Copter, Dynavolt Tower and the (extremely powerful) Aetherworks Marvel in order to generate very fast, very efficient and very splashy win conditions for their decks. Some were more silly and fun than others, but each of these strategies had the same basic structure: Get your artifact on the battlefield and execute your plan quickly. These strategies were dominant in casual and competitive play, and many of them won so quickly that a slight misplay on the part of an opponent would mean that they had no chance of recovering. It was not, as they say, “fun.”
Aether Revolt, the newly-released second half of the Kaladesh block, is an answer to Kaladesh in many ways. Where the first part of the block was invention and discovery, the second half is breaking things and revolutionizing the way power is held on that world. From a mechanical standpoint, some of those mechanics are very clear in cards like Fatal Push or Rishkar, Peema Renegade. The “Revolt” mechanic, new to this set, is focused on cards leaving the battlefield either in tactical retreat or through violent destruction. From top to bottom, Aether Revolt wants to (pardon this pun) revolutionize the way that Magic works right now.
