Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1357: Aether Revolt

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

This episode is another in my series to talk about every Magic expansion. Here, I talk about Aether Revolt, the second set in the Kaladesh block.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for a drive to work. Okay, one of my ongoing quests of this podcast is to record a podcast about every expansion of magic. And there's a lot of them. And I made a good headway. I think today I'm up to Aether Revolt.

So Kaladash was the large set in this block. It's a block, one large set, one small set. I have talked about Kaladish a couple times. I have not talked about Aether Revolt. So I'm going to set the scene a little bit. I got to talk about Kaladesh a little bit. Kaladash, the plane now known as Avishkar. But let's talk a little bit about the making of the original set,

and then we'll get into Aether Revolt. So the idea, the original, I think the jumping off point for this block was the idea of us doing a steampunk set. We talked for a while that we wanted to do something, And then we wanted to do kind of our stamp on it. I think Jeremy Jarvis, who was the art director of a time, liked to call it Etherpunk. And the idea was our take on it was to try to go a little bit more optimistic than often.

Often steampunk can be a little less optimistic. And we like the idea of something very bright and shiny. We had done some darker worlds and we're like, okay, how was something bright and shiny about creativity and invention? And we were really into this idea of something that really was, you know, a little bit about the excitement of invention, the excitement of artifacts. So what had happened was we had figured out that we wanted to do this world,

and we actually teased it in, what was it called? It was called Magic Origins, which was, it was a corset, but it was a corset that had its story to it. And the story was we introduced each of five Plainswalkers, Gideon for White, Jace for Blue, Lillian for Black, Chandra for Red, and Nissa for Green. What happened to be the first five members of the Gatewatch, by the way. And we showed each of them in their original home plane, and they saw. sparked and we showed them in the first plane post-spark. Now, some of them had come from places that people knew. You know, Liliana was from Dominaura. We'd been Dominaura a lot. Nissa was from Zendikar.

We've been Zendikar's. But Shandra's home world, we decided that we wanted it to be this steampunk world that we've been talking about. And so we actually did a little bit of work during Magic Origins to start doing a little bit of how they look and feel. And so we did that, and we did what we call a throw forward, which is, here's something we're going to do and then we're going to revisit, you know, relatively quickly. I believe it came out,

Magic Origins was before Oath of the Gatewatch. So it's just a few years before, or a couple years, before Caledish came out. So anyway, because Kaladish was this idea of invention, I had made a mechanic called Energy for original Mirrodin. The idea being I was trying to find a way inspired by artifacts that had a limited time usage. I was really interested in the idea of what if we made artifacts that had so many uses, but you could share the usage between them.

Originally, I did that with like charge counters, meaning an artifact would come with so many charge counters, and then to use the ability, you had to remove a charge counter from any artifact you control. It was originally how it worked. But then I realized that that was kind of fiddly, that you had to kind of balance. Like, you wanted to use your stuff such that no matter what got destroyed,

you didn't lose too much. And there was a lot of energy, I guess, spent on trying to maximize what was going on. And we realized that wasn't really the fun part of it. And so he said, well, what if instead of all these counters living on all your artifacts, we just give a player counter? And that's how we came up with energy. So the idea is some cards give you energy. And obviously, an original Meriden, which is very artifact focused, it was only on artifacts.

But when we brought it back, we used it all over the place. And I had tried to get energy in a whole bunch of different sets. The gap between Mirrodin and Kaladesh, I believe, was like 10 to 13 years. It was a lot. And I tried to fight other places for it, but when we got to Kaladesh, it was so obviously the right thing. And I was so excited by it that the creative team actually wove it into the world. That the world had this aether that was, like there's this natural source of energy that was plentiful in the world. And the reason that the world was all about invention was because of this access to this energy.

And that was a big part of sort of what defined the world. We would do some other stuff. We also ended up introducing vehicles in Kaladesh. We had talked about doing vehicles for a long time. It was one of those flavorful things. And the real question was how to capture them. What do we do that really gets a sense of what they are? And in the end, the solution we came up with in,

I forget whether it was exploratory or vision, probably exploratory, for Kaladesh was what if they were artifacts that turned into creatures when you when they got crude meaning when other when essentially I have an object you know my object is nothing until somebody some person comes and cruised it meaning they get in to drive it and then it becomes a creature only in the sense of the game sense of now I can attack and block with it and that was kind of our thing is they are not sort of creatures until somebody cruise them and essentially You know, a car is just a car until driver gets in it with sort of the flavor.

And that worked pretty well. We were pretty happy with that. And then, yeah, the mostly, so one of the things about blocks in general is when you make a block, you want to have some inherent conflict for a world, and then you want to have some evolution of story, right? What happens? So we wanted to start with this really exciting, you know, creative energy, you know, this inventor's world is what we wanted. With an underlining sort of, I mean, we call it Atherpunk now, but a steampunk, atherpunk vibe of we wanted this, you know, it's a world.

And the other thing we decided really early on was that while there was magic in this world that most of the, most of what the cards were, represented was not magic but technology. And so if you look at a lot of the spells, that a lot of what you're seeing is people using objects to be able to do things. And so anyway, one of the things that we got on pretty early on was that we created a government for this place. It was a little controlling. And we liked the idea that what? What if you came to this world and everything seemed so wonderful, but you realize that under

the surface things aren't quite what they seem. Now originally, so we knew Chandra was going to be here. It was Chandra's home. We had, the idea was we knew that Shandra, Chandra thought her parents were dead. We decided that one of her parents was dead, her dad had died, but not her mom. And so we knew we'd get to reunite with her mom. And the other thing was, this was so Otho the Gatewatch gets created.

So there was Battle for Zemakar, Oth of the Gatewatch gets created. Then we go to Shadowmore for Shadows over, we go to Inestrade for Shadows over Inestrade and Eldridge Moon. And okay, we pick up Lillian into the Gatewatch. And we sort of told that story, which was kind of an Aldrazi story because Emmer Cool gets pulled over to So the first kind of story, it's kind of this year-long story where they're dealing with the Aldrazi. They don't quite know the Aldrazi is what's going on in the second part of the story, but we learn it is. And then we decided that we, this is kind of our first big arcs in a while. Obviously, the Weatherlight saga was a big art, but we wanted to do an arc and what we ended up

calling the bolus arc. And the idea of the bolus arc was, it was going to be three acts. So the idea was act one, we learn of the threat, the threat is bolus. Act two, our heroes get sort of thrown about and try to figure out what's going on. And then act three leads up to a giant battle. And the idea, and this was Doug Byers sort of brainchild, the idea of what if it culminates in a war on Ravnika, a plainswalker war, where almost every plainswalker we know is fighting Bullis and his eternal army of zombies. So we really wanted to set things up. Interestingly, the very first set was supposed to be not Kaladesh, but Aminket. Originally, it was going to go

Amin Kat was going to be the first set of the year, first block of the year, then Cala just the second block. Then we're going to go to Ixelon, then to Dominaria, and then finally to Rafnika for the the whole final year. That was the plan. We were actually in a vision, early vision, or maybe we were exploratory design for Aminket. I think we were an exploratory design for Aminket when we decided to swap Kaladash and Amin Kat.

That the idea was we wanted Kaladish to come first. Part of the story, I mean, I can tell you now because was Bollus, so the master plan was Bullets needed somebody So somebody had to fight the Plainswalkers

and so we loved this idea that he had this army of zombies and the story we came up with was that he had built them in Aminket that he had sort of taken over the city and sort of co-opted the way the city function

as a way to build his zombie army but we needed a way to get a zombie army to Rabnika because we really wanted the final the final battle would be in Radnika. We wanted a place that was really meant something. There was a lot of a lot at stake,

right? And so we needed a way to get the zombies there. So that is where the planar bridge comes into play. So the planar bridge ends up being this invention invented on Kaladesh. And we get to see that in Kaladesh.

The set. And so the idea was this was going to introduce that item. And I think we just, I'm trying to remember why we rearranged it. Oh, I know why it was.

Is we wanted the end of Act 1 to be the Gatewatch being defeated at the hands of Bullis. So for those that know three-act structure, what's normally common is you introduce your villain in Act 1 and then normally your villain

defeats your heroes. And often that's the end of Act 1, that your heroes have a great defeat at the hands of the villain, and now you're getting into Act 2 to figure out how do they come back for this? And we really liked that idea. So we thought if we put Kaladesh first, we can introduce the Planner Bridge in a subtle way. Tezaret is there.

You don't know that Tessar specifically is working for Bolas yet, but Tessarid steals the Planner Bridge. You can, the Vorthosis could start piecing things out. Tessorat did have a history of working with Boles. I mean, you could figure that out. And so we decided to swap them so that we could have Amin Ket be second. And basically our heroes who have a victory. So the Gatewatch gets together.

They basically defeat the Eldrazi. And they're feeling really good. And so when they discover a new problem, they're like, okay, let's get the band together. We're going to go solve this problem. And they go to Aminket thinking, okay, we know what we're doing. And it's their first really big defeat. And so that was part of the region of the switch. Anyway, back to...

Okay, so we design Kaladash. There are other things that go into it. There's other mechanics like fabricate stuff. But the main two things that are in the set, which is what we care over to Aide their Revolt, is energy and vehicles. Oh, and the other thing is, so we set up in the very first set. So originally we were going to have...

Shaanra be the face of the first set. But as we worked out the story, what we realized was that we actually wanted there to be a revolt, that things weren't as good as they seemed, and that it turned out the government was really up to no good. And so, you know, Dovan Bond worked for the government. And so we needed to create this environment where the first story seems like everything's great, but the second story things break into open revolts. We also knew, like I said, that we wanted to introduce Chandra's mother.

She was getting reunited. Like, Shandra needed to come home. This is the first time she had returned to her home plane since she had sparked. And the idea that her mother, who she thought was dead was not dead, was a fun turning point. And then when we decided that we wanted it to be a revolt, we're like, oh, well, what if her mother was leading the revolt? So anyway, it all sort of came together. The other interesting thing was originally Shandra was going to be the face for Kowadesh. We realized that we were going to do sort of the invention set and then do the revolt set.

I'm like, well, if Shand was the face of anything, it's revolt. She definitely is someone who like will not stand for injustice and we'll do what needs to get done. So she made more sense for Aida Revolt. We ended up making the character Sahili because Sehili was an inventor. So we created Sahili specifically to be the face of Kowadash. to fill that role. Anyway, that brings us to A. The Revolt, aka Stock.

So the sets that year, when we named them before they went to two and two, we named them locked stock and barrel. And then when we changed it over, so what happened was we had blood, sweat, and tears, and locked stock and barrel. And then, because those, the nicknames were public, we had to be careful about

giving away that we had that we had changed over from three set blocks to two set blocks. So it became, let's see, it was blood and sweat, then became tears and fears, and lock and stock, and became barrels and monkeys, is the thing. So, anyway, so this set, A The Revolt was led, it was a small set, led by Mark Gottlieb. The design team was me, Gottlieb, me, Ken Nagel, Gavin Verhe, Adam Prozac, I believe, and Ari Levich was the creative lead. And then development was led by Penn Hayes, and then Sam Stoddard, Ethan Fleischer, Anna Prozac, Yanni Skolnik, and Tim Aden. So I think Adam was the overlap between the two.

Okay, so we knew basically that this was an extension of Kauadesh. But the story had an upbeat, which is all about revolt, that the people are revolting against the government, who's not so nice. So what we cited was we wanted to kill. have some carryover, it's still a block. But also, we were more over the years, in early magic, the way blocks worked is the large set would introduce a mechanic,

or two mechanics, usually. And then the small sets would just evolve those mechanics. Eventually, we started introducing new mechanics later on the block. And by the time we got here, the idea was, we'd introduce things in the large set.

Some of those mechanics, the major ones, would carry over. But we would then invent new mechanics. So we carried over energy, we carried over crew, in vehicles, and then we decided to come up with two new mechanics. So first, improvise. So one of the things we wanted to play into is that the people revolting were inventors, right? One of the things about this world is, this is a world of creativity. And so obviously, if you are inventors and your revolting, and you're revolting, you would use your inventions to do so. And so that was something that we thought was, it was important, even though there was a theme

of revolution, we definitely wanted to keep the idea of, like revolution is here, but there's still some invention. Invention is still important. And so improvise basically was a tweak on Convoke. So Convoke was a mechanic created by Richard Garfield. field, an original Ravnikah. Interestingly, he originally suggested it for Boros

to represent sort of the army working together, and I moved it to Selesnia to capture the the Selesnia sense of we're stronger by our numbers. And it just worked a little bit better in there. So we really liked Convoke. Convoke was a lot of fun.

We brought it back in a main set. We brought it back actually the guild mechanic at one point. Or that might be the future from here. But we thought it was a fun mechanic. And so the idea was improvise was essentially Convoke, but

instead of tapping creatures, you tapped artifacts. And the idea was, I think the only thing that's different from Convoke is Convoke if you tapped a coward creature, you could replicate coward mana. And I think improvised mostly went on artifacts that were generic.

So we're still at a time, just real quickly. When we made Kaladesh Block, we were still in the day where mostly artifacts for generic, colorless things. We had a few colored artifacts, the Gear Hulk's were colored. So it wasn't that we never did color artifacts. Esper had happened before this time. So colored artifacts were a tool in our tool bucket, but it was something we still did lightly. Kaladish Block would go awry and cause us some play balance issues and made us realize we needed to use colored artifacts more. So it's after Kaladesh that we start being a lot more aggressive about using colored cost in artifacts.

And so because the problem really is when you make artifacts that are too good and they're colorless, they're generic mana, any deck can play them. It causes a lot of problems. And so, but anyways, improvised is still in a time period where most of our artifacts, artifact colorless. And so it doesn't have the writer that convoked it that you can have for colored mana, mostly because most of the artifacts, in fact, maybe all the artifacts that had improvised at the time were callous. Do you try to remember where they were on spells or not? Not 100% sure. But anyway, so improvised was us doing another sort of staying with the invention, but playing the idea of the utility of invention.

The idea, the thing we like to improvise is like, well, things aren't as they normally are. Things are going awry. And so you now have to use your inventor skills to sort of create things that you might not normally have needed. And the idea is, in the time of revolt, I have to take my inventions and repurpose them for revolt, is the idea. Speaking of revolt, we did, in fact, have a mechanic called revolt. So this is an ability word.

It says if a permanent left the battlefield this turn, or sorry, if a permanent under your control, or the permit left the battlefield under your control of this turn, I think it's how it says. It's an ability word meaning it's it has a little italic text in front of it. The idea of revolt was we really wanted to lean into

the idea that things are going to get destroyed and sacrificed. I think this was worded, so it did trigger if it left the battlefield anyway. If you bounced it, it did also work. But the idea essentially is this is sort of a tweak on morbid. Morbid showed up in a

original anastrade. So morbid was a mechanic that said, if something died this turn, there is a bonus to the card. And so this works in the same way. It's just looking for a permanent to leave plate. So it's a little, it's a little wider than morbid. Morbid was only creatures and only if they went specifically to the graveyard where this had a little wider. We had actually played around, I forget what we called it. I think we had a mechanic called Dedinate. for a while in where the idea is they came with counters and then you did things remove the counters and they blew up and did damage in that. I think what was decided was while we liked the theme of revolts, we wanted to stay a little bit away from like bombs blowing up and stuff so detonate ended up not staying. It was actually a fun mechanic but it was a little we had to be careful. There's a lot

imagery here where you know we want to sort of portray sort of fictional revolts, but more of fantasy revolt and not get too realistic. I think the set also had a theme, a little X theme that ran through it. Like one of the things, obviously, that when you mix a small set with a big set, the big set has a lot of influence for limited especially. Like I said, there's a continuation of energy and vehicles.

So the interesting thing is, I think that we had done something a little bit different than we normally do which was normally the conflict is right out of the gate that normally when we do a set the conflict of the world

is very loud at the beginning oh well these people are fighting those people or whatever this time we did something a little bit different where the idea is we start with what seems like a happy world and you kind of get a block where there is no conflict.

Now, we hint at it. If you read the story, there's clearly things in the story that are going on. You know, and mostly what's... So, the idea here is there is two different sort of story. There's the story of what's going on

on the plane of, at the time, Kaladashkar, where there was open revolt happening. And we liked the idea, we like the idea of sort of fun that we present you a world, but then the conflict sort of comes out of that and that we could see the conflict

in the first set, but it's really the second set that the, like the conflict, the volume of the conflict goes way up in the second set. And we hadn't done that before. So I really liked the idea of sort of getting to show you a happy world before we throw the conflict in.

And so that was, it was something a little bit different than we had done before. I also thought that I liked I really enjoyed one of the things that was fun

about designing this block was the theme of invention allowed us it had an artifact basically it was an artifact block and we got to experiment

a lot with doing really fun weird quirky artifacts like Panharmonicon was one of the ones I made for original Kaladesh

and that was sort of fun it was fun I like sets lean in different directions and this block leaned

little more in Johnny and Jenny, that we got to do a little bit more, here's weird, quirky things. What are you going to do with these weird and quirky things? And I like the idea that improvised was there to sort of help you. And Revolt was sort of fun and then it added this little extra, like, even though it was used to represent the conflict, Revolt actually had a lot of Johnny and Jenny fun elements to it, which is, I need to get my things, I need to leave the battlefield. there's a bunch of ways I can leave the battlefield. And so you had a lot of different ways to explore that. Now, there also, I mean, there's plenty for Timmy and Tammy and for Spike.

I mean, all of our sets are designed for all the, the, uh, psych graphics. I'm trying to think any other fun things to talk about this block. I don't know. It's funny. I really, when you ask me my favorite blocks, I have a fondness for Innestrade and for original Rabnika, and Zendikar. But I really, Caledish is definitely up there for me of one of the blocks where I really like the world. I think it is something that is, like one of the things that is one of the challenges of what we do is,

there's a multiverse. We're constantly visiting different worlds. And like, you need worlds to stand apart from each other and have a certain energy to them. And that you need them to sort of have a different feel. And I really enjoyed the idea of having a world that was a little more up. beat, there's a little more about, the fact about creativity and invention, that there's a world where that played a major role, I thought it was really cool. And even when we get to the revolt part of the set, even when we get to the second set, there still was this through line that these are creative people using creativity to solve their problems. That's why I like to improvise a lot. It's like, okay, maybe we didn't make these artifacts specifically do these things, but we could adapt and use them. And I thought that was pretty fun. And P.

who is who is Chandra's mom I thought was a really really fun character and the idea that there's something really fun about you see Chandra

and then you meet her mom and you're like I kind of get where I kind of you better understand Chandra having met her mom and that is something that I was super fun we sadly for some reason

do not get to meet a lot of parents of planeswalkers a lot of our planeswalkers have sad stories and do not have living parents. And so they had the opportunity to really have an interaction

between a Plainswalker and a parent was great. And cathartic reunion is... So that's the one we show it's Chandra and her mom seeing each other for the first time. In fact, in mood swings, on the card love, it's that picture of Chandra and her mom

from the cathartic reunion. I like that picture so much. We used it for love. And it's interesting that one of the things about magic is, because we're a game of conflict, it's a lot easier on cars to show like anger and such. It's a little harder to show love. And so I, cathartic reunion has kind of been this weird stake in the ground

of carving on a little space for red where we get to show a little love from time to time. And I love that every time we use cathartic reunion, we just show different people coming back together. And that started here. I thought that was pretty cool. But anyway, the set, the block in general got decently received. I think the small sets never got received as well as the large sets. And obviously, Caledish got...

So one of the issues of Caledish real quick, we put a little history behind the scenes, is we tried some big swings. We did energy, we did vehicles, both of which were things we had not done before that were very complex systems. Energy requires the whole economy, vehicles. It's just using a cost we'd never used before.

And we missed on both, meaning we made both energy and vehicles that were just stronger than ideally they should be because when you do things early on, you don't always, like, it takes a little time to sort of understand things. And so, Caledash, as a constructed environment, had a lot of issues because there were some, I will call it broken cards, some really overpowered

cards. And that had an impact on A the Revolta because by the time we were making A The Revolt, we understood some of the things that went wrong. And so I think Aid the Revolts suffered a little bit more from Cowardish kind of breaking. And like I said, Cowardish did a lot to have his revamp how we did artifacts. That whole block really was a big, eye-opened, of... It was what got us to the move to colored artifacts and really got us to sort of rethink how we were doing

artifacts sets and blocks and such. But anyway, guys, that is the story of Aida Revolt. The rebels do win, by the way, for those that want to know how the story turns out. Well, they kind of win. But anyway, that my friends... I'm now at work.

That, my friends, is the story of the making of... of Aether Revolt. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast, but as I'm at work, we all know what that means, means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see y'all next time. Bye-bye.