Against the Odds: Just How Good Is The Aetherspark, Actually?
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! The Aetherspark is easily one of the most unique and hyped cards from Aetherdrift, although so far, it has seemed almost impossible to play in Standard. There's simply too much removal and bounce realistically to play the equipment planeswalker and stick it on a creature for a few turns to get value from it. But what if we didn't have to play The Aetherspark in Standard? That's what we're going to figure out today as we head to Brawl, where we can play The Aetherspark as our Commander, which means we'll not only have access to it every game whenever we need it but also can go all-in on building around it! Of course, this comes with a big challenge: since The Aetherspark is colorless and Brawl uses color identity just like Commander, we'll only be able to play colorless cards in our deck, which seems tricky. While colorless cards are really good at some things (like ramping), they are also really bad at others (like removal and sweepers), especially with the Magic Arena card pool. What are the odds of winning with The Aetherspark in Brawl? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: The Aetherspark
Wrap-Up
As far as the deck itself, we can't really go card by card—doing this for 100 singleton cards is simply too much for an article. But here's the deck's main plan. First and foremost, it's all about maximizing the power of The Aetherspark within the confines of being a colorless deck, which is by far the biggest challenge of the deck. So, how do you build around The Aetherspark? Well, first, we want as many powerful (and ideally evasive) two- and three-drops as possible so that, when we play The Aetherspark on Turn 4, we'll have something good to equip it onto to start generating loyalty. Second, the strongest mode on The Aetherspark is making 10 mana, so we want to make sure we have massive bombs that we can drop into play early thanks to this extra mana.
In our perfect world, we would play something like Crystalline Giant or [[Liberator, Urza's Battlethopter] on Turn 3, play The Aetherspark on Turn 4, equip it, and attack to get some loyalty. Then, we can attack again on Turn 5, which should give us enough loyalty to make 10 mana and drop something like Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger or Portal to Phyrexia into play on Turn 5!
If we don't have a way to take advantage of The Aethersparks mana, then we can use its –5 mode as a backup The One Ring, drawing us a couple of extra cards each turn, which should slowly pull us ahead of our opponent in resources, little by little, turn by turn.
While the deck generally functions well, it has a major weakness: the lack of cheap removal and sweepers. As a result, aggro is our hardest matchup since we can get run over before we get a chance to get The Aetherspark going. While we do get some removal in the deck, it's mostly expensive and clunky, like The Mightstone and Weakstone or Invasion of Ravnica. The only real sweeper in our deck is Perilous Vault, which is fine, although having a few more cards that can reset the board would be nice. Really, though, this is just the cost of playing a colorless deck in Brawl, and it's certainly not a deal-breaker.
Record-wise, we finished 8-5 with the deck, although Brawl records should be taken with a little grain of salt since some people scoop early if they don't like the matchup. (I think we had one or two free wins with the deck because of this, although we still had a positive record, even discounting these wins.) As for The Aetherspark itself, it actually felt great in Brawl. Yeah, once in a while, you run into a deck with a ton of removal, and it's hard to get it going. But we also had a bunch of games where The Aetherspark more or less won all by itself thanks to the huge burst of mana and cards it can make once it gets online.
All in all, I came away from this deck feeling like The Aetherspark is actually a good card, perhaps even a great card. It's just not really designed to work in most 60-card formats, where there's just too much interaction to make it happen. On the other hand, The Aetherspark might be a legit staple in Brawl and Commander, where it's more likely to stick around. If you've been wanting to try The Aetherspark but keep getting wrecked in Standard, keep Brawl in mind because the equipment planeswalker is super fun and also quite powerful when it's your commander!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
