With the tabletop prerelease already underway and the digital set coming to MTG Arena on February 11, it's time for our usual guide to Aetherdrift's limited archetypes! I've already written a couple of articles on Aetherdrift about the introduction of the 10 racing teams and the limited mechanics, which can be considered as a supplement to this, and I'll leave them here in case you want to delve deeper.  

Aetherdrift has finally been fully spoiled, and with the upcoming prerelease starting February 7th, let's take a look at what's up in the new set! As usual, I will show you each of its color pairs for Limited, but not in this article, because here I will focus on the mechanics and keywords you will encounter. Aetherdrift is a racing competition between 10 teams and takes place across three planes. This is beautifully reflected not only in the design of the cards but also in their abilities and keywords, which we can divide into three groups, perfectly in line with the key elements of the set:

While we're not done with Goblins in Explorer just yet, let's take a look at their current state in Standard, where they have seen some major upgrades in recent months with the release of Foundations! Aetherdrift is coming soon, and it's good to check how playable Goblins are in the format, also for an easier evaluation of the new ones that are about to come out, increasing the card pool (for those who aren't following the spoilers, in Aetherdrift there will be an entire racing team made up of Goblins, which will cover the Gruul colors). At the moment I think there are two main ways to build our favorite tribal in Standard:

We're one month away from Aetherdrift, the first Standard-legal set of 2025, which will be released everywhere starting February 14. Even though the spoiler season hasn’t started yet (we only know four cards at the moment), we can already take a first look at what awaits us: where the set is located, what the plot is, who the characters are, and what the ten color pairs are based on. So, let's dive right in! Aetherdrift Storyline

These days we're enjoying the latest newcomer, Pioneer Masters, which added nearly 400 cards to MTG Arena and finally brought competitive Explorer to the same level as Pioneer. As we dig deeper into the set, however, we are increasingly noticing cards that were missing and that we expected to be there. It’s true; fortunately, they are no longer key pieces for the best decks that we can now safely netdeck, but often they are still iconic cards that have seen play in the past and that many would like to see on the platform. From the perhaps hundreds of missing cards, I have selected some of the most requested and those I believe are the most important in order to improve variance and give birth to or strengthen new archetypes.

Anticipated since the beginning of the year, Pioneer Masters has finally landed on MTG Arena, and it's now possible to overlap the Explorer and Pioneer formats from a highly competitive perspective. Yes, because this set did not bring all the missing cards, which would have been too many, but a good part of them, prioritizing all those present in the most competitive lists, so as to make the transition from paper to digital possible without having to give up anything. From this point of view, Explorer has therefore reached the Pioneer, also filling the last holes of the missing cards, but above all by unlocking the decklists that until yesterday were not buildable on MTG Arena due to the lack of one or more key pieces for the archetype.

With Pioneer Masters and new Goblins on the way, there's a lot of hype for Explorer Goblins, which will finally see the addition of the last missing pieces. However, we don't have to sit around doing nothing, because Foundations has already brought a lot of material, and I have a new brew for you that doesn't strictly require the new incoming creatures. In the last episode we saw Raise the Past in action, which, yes, involved new Goblins like Searslicer Goblin, but it neglected one, perhaps the most anticipated of all, and who will be the protagonist today: Krenko, Mob Boss!

Naya Convoke was definitely one of the most dominant decks in Alchemy Best-of-One last season, which ended not too many months ago with the arrival of Bloomburrow! This date, in fact, marked the rotation of the format the beginning of a new metagame, where Convoke could no longer be present, having lost too many important cards to remain competitive. Aside from some potentially replaceable 1-drops, the biggest losses were definitely Resolute Reinforcements and Knight-Errant of Eos, along with most of the untapped lands: BRO's painlands and ONE's fastlands, which made the mana base solid and aggressive, despite the Naya tricolor.