Pattern Recognition #433 - Speed is Life

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

27 August 2026

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

So last week, I talked about acceleration in the form of summarizing how each color does it, but there was another form of moving fast that I thought about while typing, and you know what? I decided that I should talk about a more recent set and a mechanic in it and what do you mean it was a year and a half ago?!?!

So yeah, as of the time of this writing, Aetherdrift was released 18 months ago, and oh god, really? How time flies when you're not having fun. Anyway, in that set we were introduced to the core mechanic - Speed. This isn't actually a direct mechanic, but rather it is a trait, much like like having the City's Blessing from Ixalan through the Ascend mechanic. This trait is granted to you when you resolve a spell with the keyword of Start your Engines. This doesn't use the stack, and cannot be responded to; so you cannot Stifle the Engine starting. Once this is in play, the player's Speed starts at . From there, whenever an oppoenent loses life during your turn, increase your speed by 1. This may only trigger once per turn. Once you have reached a Speed of , you have achieved Max Speed, and your speed cannot increase past this point.

This design went through several iterations during development, from 'entering the race' and 'completing laps' to earn Treasures or by having your speed only iterate when you Started your engines with more Speed manipulation mechanics including setting ones speed or reducing that of your opponents. Almost all of these ideas were removed in development as being too complicated to work with, especially in a limited environment. Spikeshell Harrier is the only remaining part of these aborted developments.

Speed was met with mixed reviews from the player base. With only four cards that scaled based on the actual value of your current speed out of about 40 in total. Which meant that players had to start their Speed on a turn, and take a minimum of three turns to enable Max Speed for that player. As you can gain Speed the same turn you Start your Engines.

In fact, back in Standard, one of the ways to do this was to Start and then play one of the Outlaw Junction deserts that pinged the opponent when they entered, giving you a free, unanswerable point on the Speed scale. In this, and have an advantage given that they can cause damage/lifeloss straight to a player without needing to attack them.

But before I go further in how to utilize this, let's look at the colours. Surpising no one, , the color of speed has the most mono-colored cards that care about this mechanic, topping out at Hazoret, Godseeker. In addition, most of the multi-coloured cards have , with five of the 8 being paired up with . Which is the next most common colour in general, followed by and (which are tied), and lastly, two symol:G creatures round it out.

This actually makes a lot of sense, save for . I've already covered why gets the lead for being go-fast, and is ok for being artifact-centric, which a lot of Vehicles are. also makes sense because why would they bother? But it's the presence of is what confuses me, and I can't really figure out why - or find anyone saying why - it's so prevalent. Anyone got ideas in the comments?

Of course, this all culminated Mystery Booster 3, where Tsagan, Raider Warlord got moved from an Arena-digital card to an actual physical printing! WOOO!!

Prolly never going to see one in person, but you never know.

But back to practicalities.

The biggest problem with Speed is that it takes so long to get rolling, which is kinda the opposite of how it should be, you know? I pointed out earlier that it takes three turns at best to reach the state in which most of the cards would actually be able to work. And three turns is a long time in a lot of formats, so there wasn't any guarantee that this would work out at all. Which was annoying playing a deck that tried to invoke Max Speed and yet the game was over because I had won before I reached that point. Which is where my poor Godseeker decks flailed.

Curiously, this makes Speed more of a tempo mechanic than an aggro mechanic. Playing it, it's not about slamming home the win right away, but building momentum and getting to the point where you mechanic comes fully online so then you can move on the win. Which is annoying.

I suppose this disconnect is part of the reason why the mechanic really had no plans to come back. MaRo calls it a on his personal Storm Scale, and it seems like from what I can see, Wizards didn't have high hopes for it in the first place. It was there, it had a theme, and they did the at least make it a major part of the set, but there was no heart behind it?

Like, I think back on the set, and I don't think anyone cared?

There is room for improvement, obviously. Lots, I think. For starters, had it been the focus of one of the Commander decks instead of Energy (WHICH WASN'T EVEN IN THE SET) and Undead recursion with Eternalize (NOT IN THE URZA-DAMNED SET), it may have been given more options to work with, like cards that can turn on or off depending on ones Speed, trigger only when you reach a certain speed or leave it. Like say a card that only has an effect at Speed 2 or at Speed 3 for example.

But this line of thought leads to the same degree of complexity that Wizards was trying to avoid when they said they had to reduce complexity. but that was a statement meant for Limited, not for a Commander precon where difficulty and complexity cna be increased. They included for crying out loud! In a set with no support for it!

Moving on!

I agree that this mechanic is highly unlikely to return as while Speed is a neutral word (which means it isn't tied to a given Plane or event), it does imply motion and that it is part and parcel of the setting. Speed is Life is one of the watchwords of one of my other games, Star Fleet Battles, and that sort of association is baked into the word itself. Speed means things.

It was an experiment, and it didn't really work. Not everything has to win, and this was not one of them. Such is life.

Sorry for the short article this week, but writing this one reminded me of something that I need to look into. I may have it ready for you next week, I may not. We'll see!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!