Wizards of the Coast said the Omenpaths plot point would give us the chance to visit lots of Magic: The Gathering worlds in future sets, and so far Aetherdrift is sticking true to that promise. Not only does the race itself take place on two planes that haven’t been revisited for years and one that’s never been fully featured, but the ten teams that make up the Grand Prix all come from different worlds, including some that have never been mentioned in Magic before.
Most of these new MTG planes have actually remained unnamed. For instance, one team, The Guidelight Voyagers, consists of automatons all sharing one machine intelligence, which fell through an Omenpath and wants to get back to its own, undescribed world. This group seems very hard sci-fi, so perhaps there’s a connection to Edge of Eternities, the MTG set coming in August next year.
Then there are three teams from unknown planes. The Speedbrood are a group of insect people who become living vehicles through metamorphosis. The Keelhaulers are shark people who also arrived on Avishkar through an Omenpath. And the Goblin Rocketeers are batlike goblins who come from a world where they worship speed in the form of the BOOSTGOD, and fear the dreaded ‘deadstop deity’.
Since Wizards hasn’t bothered to come up with names for the planes these racers hail from, a visit to any of them any time soon seems unlikely. The Speedbrood, especially, apparently comes from a plane “with an untranslatable name” which might be hard to make marketable.
But there are a couple of new named planes, as well, which by way of being specified, seem far more likely to show up again. The Quickbeasts come from a never seen prior plane called Alacria, where huge, intelligent animals, themselves called Quickbeasts, are an important part of society.
It’s not clear exactly how, but the recent ‘Planeswalkers guide’ article states that “they are regarded as the souls of the city districts across Alacria, whose honor and legend they inherit from the Quickbeasts that sired them”. So perhaps this world is a bit like Ikoria, but with a stronger focus on monster taming?
Then we have Gastal, my favorite of the new planes, even though it’s essentially just Mad Max land. Gastal is a dying world with few creature comforts, but plenty of gasoline. Gastal’s inhabitants took every opportunity offered by the opening of the Omenpaths to leave their world (Innistradians should take a leaf out of their book) but soon found out that ‘gas’ didn’t exist on most Magic: The Gathering planes, and were forced to take up mercenary work to find ways to stay fuelled up.
I’m a little bit sad now that Gastal is not the main focus of Aetherdrift, but hopefully in inventing these new planes, Wizards has set the stage to have other cards that refer to them later down the line. Or perhaps we’ll never hear from them again, who can say?
The set will also provide a chance to see how Amonkhet and Kaladesh (now Avishkar) have changed in the wake of the Phyrexians’ invasion. Amonkhet seems to be looking very pretty for a world that was just hit by two world-ending catastrophes. Its inhabitants don’t seem to know how to build anything that isn’t shaped like a lotus flower, however, which seems like a very time consuming way to do architecture.
We’ll also get more than a glance at the prehistoric plane of Muraganda, which seems full of luscious landscapes, and also enormous bones.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, we recommend our guides to the MTG release schedule, to see all the new sets coming out next year. You can also peruse our guide to the best MTG Arena decks, if you’re sick of getting wrecked in Standard Ranked.
Source: Wargamer
