Magic: The Gathering's Aetherdrift Set Is A Mess, & That's Okay
The first new Magic: The Gathering set for 2025, Aetherdrift, releases on February 14th, and the cards that have been revealed for the set paint an interesting overall picture. The new set takes place on three of Magic's Planes, with new and old characters racing against each other to win a powerful, life-changing artifact.
As a result of Aetherdrift's Wacky Races story across multiple planes, the set feels like a thematic mess — mixing up planes with their distinct themes and notable characters and shoving them onto cars, motorbikes, and ships. Unlike previous Magic sets that have focused too heavily on themes and not enough on characters and settings, Aetherdrift makes sense thanks to its high-stakes prize and the development of the inter-planar travel system in the Magic multiverse.
MTG's Aetherdrift Set Is All Over The Place
Traveling Between Planes Is No Longer A Big Deal
The Phyrexian invasion across the multiverse that took place during the Phyrexia: All Will Be One and March Of The Machine sets changed interplanar travel in the Magic universe forever. Originally unique to Kaldheim's World Tree, Omenpaths let anyone travel from one plane to the next, but the Phyrexian Invasion Tree created them across the Multiverse. These new Omenpaths were a key part of Kellan's adventures between Wilds of Eldraine and Outlaws of Thunder Junction.
The Phyrexian Invasion also caused The Desparkening, where many of the multiverse's Planeswalkers like Nissa Revane and Vraska lost their sparks. These desparked Planeswalkers now rely on the Omenpaths to travel to different planes. It was only a matter of time until these Omenpaths were used by powerful figures for their benefit. Niv-Mizzet and Ral Zarek from Ravnica were quick to use them for interplanar communication, and now the Avishkari have standardized the Omenpath system.
Loot, the Fomori child rescued by Jace and Vraska in OTJ, can see the endpoint of every Omenpath and new planes coming to life in real-time, which is why he appears in so much of Aetherdrift's flavor-text.
Now the Avishkar Assembly is using its knowledge of where the stable Omenpaths reside to hold the second inaugural Ghirapur Grand Prix across multiple planes. These planes are the focus of the Aetherdrift set, which features characters from the newly-named Avishkar, the lesser-explored Muraganda, and the ancient-Egypt-inspired plane of Amonkhet. Magic: The Gathering has focused on a different plane for each set for the last two years, and now with the Omenpaths, it looks like more sets will continue to expand across the Multiverse.
Aetherdrift Isn't The First Messy MTG Set
2024 Had Some Even Sillier Settings And Themes
Aetherdrift's wild mixing of planes, characters, themes, and references shouldn't come as a shock to Magic players who have followed the game's story for the last year or two. Some of 2024's expansion sets were just as messy as Aetherdrift's and made less sense. Magic in 2024 started with Murders At Karlov Manor, which was a murder-mystery-inspired expansion set on the fan-favorite plane of Ravnica. It quickly became one of Magic's least popular sets, as it wasn't a proper Ravnica-focused expansion.
MKM was a mashup of Ravnican characters who were suddenly Detectives, to the point that it felt like the expansion could have taken place on a completely different plane. That feeling was even stronger in the following set, Outlaws of Thunder Junction. This time, characters from across the Multiverse were now on the new plane of Thunder Junction, for one reason or another, and they were all wearing Cowboy Hats and Boots. These two sets focused too much on the specific theme, and with the setting and characters not having enough focus, they felt like a joke.
Magic: The Gathering Justifies Aetherdrift's Silliness
The Ghirapur Grand Prix Prize Mixes Everything Up
Magic: The Gathering's leap into 2025 is similar to its 2024 start, with a heavily themed expansion set featuring a wide variety of popular characters. However, this is a theme where having a mix of characters makes sense. An inter-planar race should have competitors and background characters from the three planes the race happens on, and the prize for the Ghirapur Grand Prix also justifies the crossovers seen in Aetherdrift.
The winning team gets their hands on The Aetherspark, an artifact containing an artificial Planeswalker's spark that can grant anyone Planeswalking abilities. The prize should attract powerful or power-hungry beings from across the Magic Multiverse, especially some of the desparked Planeswalkers who miss their powers or surviving Planeswalkers who dislike the Omenpaths. The Aetherspark card itself is a mix of card types — it's the game's first Artifact Planeswalker Equipment, meaning it is an Artifact that comes in with Loyalty Counters that can be used for its three abilities, and it can also be equipped to a creature.
Now that Universes Beyond sets are taking up one of the four expansion slots in a year, the first being Marvel's Spider-Man at the end of 2025, Magic: The Gathering's in-universe sets are becoming less plane-specific. Whether that's good or bad is down to each player's preference, but Aetherdrift is doing it in a way that makes more sense than previous sets.
