A lot of MTG players are not a fan of the Start Your Engines! mechanic. Not only does the mechanic seriously create flavor fails when printed on regal characters like Hazoret, but, despite its name, Start Your Engines! is absurdly slow.
For the most part, you need to get to Max Speed for the mechanic to pay off, and it takes three turns, at the fastest, to do that. Not only do you need to Start Your Engines to begin the process, but you need to deal damage to your opponent during your turns to even tick up the Speed. This is a very tall order if you plan on using the mechanic aggressively.
All of these blatant problems have MTG players disappointed and confused. Wouldn’t there have been a better name for Start Your Engines! that described the flavor of the mechanic, while not clashing with the seriousness of Magic’s characters?
Renaming Start Your Engines
Start Your Engines! is such a bizarre name for a mechanic as slow as this one. Sure, it appears in a racing set, but anything that had to do with motion would still get the message across, perhaps in a classier way. In alignment with this idea, many MTG players have suggested replacing Start Your Engines! with Momentum. Considering how the mechanic works, Momentum is a fantastic name for it. Your Momentum starts at 1, and as you increase your Momentum, you can unlock powerful abilities. This is supported further by Aetherdrift cards like Samut, the Driving Force that gets continuously stronger as you gain Speed, or Momentum.
Momentum would have worked much better flavorfully for a character like Hazoret, as well. The card art even looks like the god is trying to pick up momentum to throw a javelin.
Naming this mechanic Start Your Engines! presents another problem: it is going to be very difficult to bring this mechanic back in a flavor sense. While bringing back something named Momentum would be pretty easy, Start Your Engines! doesn’t really make sense outside of a racing or Masters set. Ironically, Magic Design has made this mistake before.
Ninjutsu suffers the same problem. Because the mechanic was so heavily tailored to Kamigawa’s worldbuilding, it’s difficult to use it in other settings. A different name, like Assassination, could have allowed the mechanic to more easily return in different planes.
While Ninjutsu was a mistake, Start Your Engines! was a bit more intentional than players may have expected.
Flavor Fails With a Purpose
While Start Your Engines! may not coexist well with serious characters like Hazoret, it is undeniably very flavorful in a Hot Wheels-esque MTG racing set. That said, it doesn’t fit with anything else. According to MTG designers, this was actually done on purpose.
After Start Your Engines was revealed to the world, MTG players reached out to MTG designer Mark Rosewater to ask if any alternatives were considered for Start Your Engines. Spiritkhan specifically wanted to know if names that would have allowed the mechanic to be more reusable were considered.
Mark Rosewater’s response revealed a lot about the on-the-nose naming choice of Start Your Engines. The MTG Design team doesn’t really plan on reusing Start Your Engines very much:
“This isn’t a mechanic we expect to use a whole bunch, so we didn’t feel it needed a more neutral name.”
Mark Rosewater
He also revealed that Aetherdrift’s other new mechanic, Exhaust, had its name changed for exactly this reason. The mechanic was originally named Turbo, referencing a one-shot speed boost commonly seen in racing movies. While it provides a powerful boost, you can only use it once, otherwise, your vehicle’s system won’t be able to handle it. Exhaust suggests a similar idea, but the mechanic can be brought back a lot easier in planes that aren’t about racing cars across planes.
Being Careful With Player Mechanics
Putting Start Your Engines!’s name aside, this mechanic also appears to be poor for gameplay. The irony of a speed-based mechanic being unbearably slow was not lost on the MTG player base, and there are some major concerns about the mechanic’s playability outside of Draft. Of course, players have not had a chance to test the mechanic for themselves, so it’s difficult to know for sure, but in theory, Start Your Engines! seems poor.
There may be a bigger reason for this than some players realize. Since this is Magic’s first real return to Avishkar, previously known as Kaladesh, there are a lot of callbacks to the original block. Start Your Engines! happens to be very similar to a mechanic from Kaladesh, but that mechanic was incredibly problematic.
Start Your Engines! is a player-based mechanic, just like Energy. As most MTG players should know, Energy has been repetitively problematic power-level-wise throughout MTG’s history. Its recent stranglehold over the Modern format was a very good representation of what player-based counter mechanics are capable of, but Energy’s transgressions only start there.
Back when the mechanic was Standard legal, it completely took over the format. Multiple cards had to be banned as a result of its providence, including Aetherflux Reservoir. This problematic history may have caused MTG design to be very careful with their take on a player-based counter mechanic this time around.
While Start Your Engines!’s flavor is certainly questionable, a lot of the design decisions around the mechanic were expectedly purposeful. It will be interesting to see how this mechanic plays when Aetherdrift releases.
