It takes a certain energy to fully appreciate a good five-color manabase.
Once upon a time, this little card was legal:
Tendo Ice Bridge is like a much better Crumbling Vestige, since you can use the charge counter to give you one mana of any color the turn you play the land or save it for a future turn.
Nevertheless, Crumbling Vestige showed up here and there, primarily as a source of colorless mana for casting Matter Reshaper, Thought-Knot Seer, and Reality Smasher. Of course, with painlands like Yavimaya Coast and Caves of Koilos rotating out, there is potentially even more need for colorless lands that can also fix your mana.
Tendo Ice Bridge, on the other hand, has seen quite a bit of play in a variety of formats. It was used as a five-color enabler in Kamigawa block, helping make splashes possible while ensuring that you always had a source of green early to cast your other fixers.
It was also used as a fixer for two-color aggro decks, like R/W Aggro, that just wanted more ways to fix their mana without having tapped lands. They did get a little extra utility out of the ability to bounce it with Boros Garrison, but at that point, your mana was usually all set anyway.
Tendo Ice Bridge has been used in a variety of combo decks that have two or three primary colors but want to be able to splash a fourth. It works particularly well with decks that have extra ability to fix their mana on turn 3 or 4. When your deck contains cards like Explosive Vegetation or Coalition Relic, Tendo Ice Bridge works great. It gives you untapped, pain-free fixing of every color. If you only need a specific color from it early and can then count on having perfect mana later from an expensive fixer, it’s the perfect card for the job.
If today’s preview card were merely a Tendo Ice Bridge reprint, that would already be a meaningful card. Today’s preview is actually strictly better, but that’s just scratching the surface. Today’s preview card is Aether Hub, which is everything Tendo Ice Bridge was and much more.
If you don’t interact with Energy at all, Aether Hub is already functionally better than a Tendo Ice Bridge. You can use the Energy just like using the counter that was on Tendo Ice Bridge; however, you can also use the Energy of any other Aether Hub. For instance, if you sacrifice Tendo Ice Bridge, the counter is gone, whereas if you sacrifice Aether Hub without using its Energy, the next Aether Hub you play functionally has two charges. While bouncing a Tendo Ice Bridge with some sort of a bounceland would reset the counter, bouncing an Aether Hub would actually store up an extra Energy.
While we’ve only seen a small fraction of the Kaladesh spoiler so far, we already have a number of cards that give us extra options for how to put the Energy produced by Aether Hub to good use. For instance:
Voltaic Brawler is priced to move! This two-color beatdown machine really appreciates extra fixing that enters the battlefield untapped. Aether Hub makes it easier to cast Voltaic Brawler on turn 2 reliably. Then the Energy produced by Voltaic Brawler can help ensure we cast our spells early if we are counting on the Aether Hub for one of our colors.
Of course, it also goes the other way. If we draw an Aether Hub later in the game, we can actually use its Energy to pump the Voltaic Brawler. An extra +1/+1 and trample until end of turn is great upside from our land that is very unlike what Tendo Ice Bridge would have given us.
At its base, Harnessed Lightning is a two-mana instant that deals three damage to a creature. However, an Aether Hub can let you deal four damage instead. Being able to customize the damage on a card like this is a big deal. Likewise, you can kill a two-toughness creature with Harnessed Lightning and use the leftover Energy as an extra source of fixing with your Aether Hub.
Some creatures give you a bunch of Energy when they enter the battlefield. This can lead to Aether Hub producing colored mana every turn, turn after turn. Additionally, every Aether Hub is halfway to an extra attack from Lathnu Hellion, if you are so inclined. It’s a third of the way towards an extra Bristling Hydra pump. All this Energy adds up.
Heck, if you want, you can use something like Architect of the Untamed to give you extra Energy every turn. The more ways you have to produce Energy, the more valuable cards that use Energy efficiently are. The more ways you have to use Energy efficiently, the more valuable ways to produce it are.
While some cards will be more about the Energy they produce, and other cards more about their ability to efficiently spend Energy, some will help smooth out both sides. Aether Hub is one such card. It’s so good at producing Energy, we might see Mono-Red decks use it. It’s so reliable without other Energy synergies, we might see decks with zero other Energy cards use it.
In addition to enabling Energy synergies, by serving as an untapped multicolor land for aggressive decks and helping splash colors in strange decks with expensive fixing, Aether Hub is also an important new tool for Eldrazi Aggro decks. With Yavimaya Coast, Caves of Koilos, and the like rotating out, Aether Hub provides some much-needed colorless mana for Thought-Knot Seer or Reality Smasher that can also help ensure we can cast our Eldrazi Displacer on time, or our Drowner of Hope, or whatever.
In addition to many color Eldrazi decks, this could also take the form of a two-color deck that splashes off-color Eldrazi with Corrupted Crossroads, Aether Hub, and maybe one basic to find with an Evolving Wilds. It could also take the form of a two-color deck that just uses Aether Hub as a colorless source that can help ensure we hit our colors early.
However it ends up best being used, Aether Hub is a strong enough card that it will certainly find some homes, regardless of synergies. That said, I’ve got a feeling at least one of those homes will be a dedicated Energy deck (and probably three).