Max Speed received a lot of flack from the community for… frankly, being an incredibly weak mechanic. While many may think that the idea of Max Speed should be something that favors an aggressive archetype, the reality is that Max Speed is rather slow. The quickest that you can achieve Max Speed is over a three-turn interval, and you need to be dealing damage to an opponent on every turn. At least, that’s what people thought.
Thanks to MTG YouTuber This is A Commander Channel, players now have a strategy that can achieve Max Speed in just two turns. While the strategy has too many moving parts for competitive formats, it could help players trying to build Max Speed decks in Commander.
Copy the Trigger!
The biggest hurdle when utilizing Max Speed is the ‘once per turn’ clause. It would obviously be easy to accelerate to Max Speed if you could gain more than one Speed per turn. It would also be a lot easier in games of Commander to accelerate to Max Speed if you could gain Speed on opponent’s turns. Sadly, neither of these things are true.
Because of this, players are forced to gain one Speed per turn, and only on their turns. You can technically gain a Speed on the turn that you Start Your Engines, which means that three turns is the fastest that you can accelerate to Max Speed without some very specific tech.
That tech, as discussed in This is A Commander Channel’s video, involves copying the Max Speed trigger. This is one of the few if only, ways to accelerate to Max Speed faster than three turns. While you may only be able to trigger Max Speed once per turn, there’s no rule against copying your triggered ability.
So, how do we do this? Strionic Resonator and Lithoform Engine are offered as colorless examples that can copy Max Speed triggers. This can allow you to hit 3 Speed on the same turn you Start Your Engines. Technically, with two copy effects on the board, you can hit Max Speed in the same turn you Start Your Engines.
Turn 2 Max Speed in Standard?
It is possible to reach Max Speed in two turns in Standard, but it requires a very specific sequence with a bunch of questionably useable cards. First, you need to open the game with a land that Starts Your Engines. Muraganda Raceway is probably your best option since, should you pull this off, you’ll be able to tap the land for two mana as early as turn 3.
Next, you need a creature with Haste. In Standard, that’s Gingerbrute. Connect with your opponent and get to Speed 2. On your second turn, if Gingerbrute can connect again, you can copy the Speed trigger with Vantress Visions to hit Max Speed on turn two.
Unfortunately, Gingerbrute and Vantress Visions are hardly the most competitive Standard options, making them difficult to use outside of this context. There are artifact decks in the format that abuse Zoetic Glyph, so that may be a direction to take this if you want to try this for yourself. Alternatively, Mendicant Core, Guidelight with an Affinity shell might make the most sense.
New Tech
Unfortunately, cards like Strionic Resonator won’t pass for grass in two-player formats. Every card generally needs to pull its weight, and cards that need others to generate value can be difficult to pull off. That said, this does create new tech for Max Speed Commanders like Samut, The Driving Force. At the time of writing, trigger-doubling effects for Max Speed aren’t even suggested as support cards for Samut on sites like EDHREC. This is A Commander Channel’s video is likely to change that.
This could, in turn, cause a slight price spike for cards that can copy triggered abilities. Max Speed doesn’t exactly have a lot of Commander support, so it’s unlikely that many players will be trying to build this. That said, those that are, will likely all want copies of cards like Lithoform Engine and Strionic Resonator.
This is likely the most efficient way to get to Max Speed that Commander players have. Unless you can reliably Start Your Engines on turn one and somehow deal damage each turn, chances are that copying your Speed triggers will be a faster way to get to where you need to go.
While this does add a lot of flavor to the Start Your Engines mechanic, it still sucks. The fact that you have to go through this many hoops to speed up a mechanic all about speed is an absolute miss for me. This does, however, give Commander players a more promising direction to use the race-themed mechanic.
