Magic's death race set Aetherdrift gives us the goblins we deserve: ones who look like a psychobilly album cover

A goblin in goggles rides a rocket craft as it explodes.

(Image credit: April Prime/Wizards of the Coast)

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.

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Afterburner Expert — (Image credit: April Prime/Wizards of the Coast)

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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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.