Standard: 5 Decks with Aetherdrift to try out!

Aetherdrift is already knocking on our door. The new Magic: The Gathering expansion returns to themes around artifacts, vehicles and also brought some cards that care about discard effects and even the number of exiled cards in the game.

With so many different mechanics, it's natural that the new set will become a deckbuilding paradise as we approach its official release, with a dozen new strategies emerging in competitive formats.

In this article, we present five decklists with Aetherdrift cards and mechanics for the Standard format!

Dimir Bounce

Current Dimir Bounce lists mix cards like Stormchaser’s Talent and This Town Ain’t Big Enough with the already solid Dimir Midrange core of Enduring Curiosity and cheap creatures, but we can bet on a more all-in version of Bounce with new Aetherdrift cards.

The most obvious inclusion that should be perpetuated in different variants of this strategy is Momentum Breaker, which will replace Tithing Blade and, perhaps, will gain even more space due to the interactions it has with the discard subtheme proposed by Hopeless Nightmare

But here we want to focus on Oildeep Gearhulk: a creature with a relevant ETB, a decent body (despite dying to Sheoldred on combat), with Lifelink and built-in protection, not to mention that it bypasses both Go for the Throat, Nowhere to Run and Anoint with Affliction, making it a robust win condition with good interactions with This Town Ain’t Big Enough since we can, for example, bounce it and a troublesome permanent on the opponent’s board to play it again and force the other player to discard the card.

Selesnya Gearhulk

Brightglass Gearhulk is probably the strongest card in the new Aetherdrift cycle due to its versatility in searching for any creature, artifact, or enchantment with a mana value of one or less, allowing an efficient toolbox with several one-cost cards for different situations.

In this version, we have Basilisk Collar for life gain and attrition, Skrelv, Defector Mite to get past blockers, Dusk Rose Reliquary as removal, Shardmage’s Rescue for protection, plus Lavaspur Boots to give immediate impact to any creature, including an Overlord of the Hauntwoods, plus Nurturing Pixie that lets you bounce Gearhulk and play it again to get two more cards, and Marketback Walker as a late-game target that punishes your opponent’s removals.

Added to the already solid base of Selesnya Cage, Brightglass Gearhulk allows for several lines in the colors and enables Collector’s Cage for Overlord of the Hauntwoods on its own, while its 4/4 body with Trample and First Strike and equipped with an ETB that punishes players for bouncing it, make it a potential staple of what is currently one of the most efficient decks in Standard.

Golgari Vehicles

Webstrike Elite and Thunderous Velocipede have motivated aggressive green lists trying to bring the classic “Stompy” back to Standard, most of the time with a splash for Mosswood Dreadknight and cheap interaction.

Here, we also take advantage of the new Siege Renault, or Debris Beetle, a card that turns any creature into a threat on its own, has a decent body, evasion and has a low cost and an ETB that severely punishes Bounce players for returning it to its owner's hand, in addition to having a low crew cost that almost all creatures on the list can afford.

Added to Thunderous Velocipede, another low-cost, evasive and high-power vehicle whose passive ability increases the power of any creature you play, it is possible that we will see the return of an aggressive vehicle-oriented deck in Standard, similar to the old Mardu Vehicles from the Kaladesh season.

Esper Repurposing Bay

Repurposing Bay is one of the most interesting cards from Aetherdrift for Standard. An artifact Birthing Pod creates a range of possibilities that the format doesn't usually have, with the possibility of a "toolbox" where we don't use more than two copies of cards that aren't essential to the list.

Fabrication Foundry, for example, is an excellent card to play alongside Repurposing Bay because we can use it to return the artifacts we sacrificed, and we take advantage of the fact that 100% of the non-land cards are artifacts to explore the Affinity mechanic again with Demonic Junker, a card that is a targeted removal and can be sacrificed right away to get Cityscape Leveler, capable of winning games on its own.

It's possible to go even further and include cards like Portal to Phyrexia, or increase the amount of Cityscape Leveler since our main strategy involves cheating the mana value of Demonic Junker to put it into play early, but with Fabrication Foundry to resort to Leveler whenever necessary, we don't want to clog our mana curve with too many high-cost cards.

Jund Dredgeless Dredge

Dredge is a mechanic born in 2005 with the release of the first expansion of the original Ravnica block, and it will probably never return to Standard because it is a counterintuitive ability to what Magic proposes as a game, but the reprint of Bloodghast and the arrival of Afterburner Expert give us the tools to try to replicate the mechanic.

The idea of ​​the list is to use mill cards to put several copies of creatures that return to the battlefield in some way from the graveyard: Bloodghast when lands enter, Afterburner Expert when an Exhaust ability is activated, and Flamewake Phoenix when we control a creature with power four or greater - these two are our Narcomoeba and Prized Amalgam.

To make the deck more synergistic, we use Insidious Roots as our Bridge from Below: whenever a creature leaves the graveyard, we will put a token into play and increase the power of each token we create. It is worth mentioning that, although Insidious Roots says “one or more cards in the graveyard”, the triggers for Bloodghast and the other creatures are separate and, therefore, trigger the enchantment for each of them that leaves the graveyard.

Draconautics Engineer is our primary means of enabling Afterburner Expert (although they do enable each other). In an ideal turn, we want to play a land and return as many Bloodghast as we have, Use Engineer's Exhaust for , return multiple copies of Afterburner Expert, and then pay to return each of the Flamewake Phoenix from the graveyard, totaling an absurd amount of damage against the opponent.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!