“You will overvalue Vehicles.
As Sam Stoddard pointed out in his weekly design article, the closest analogue to Vehicles in current Magic is Equipment. The only difference is Vehicles are designed to not have the “annoying issue” with Equipment where they turn all of your creatures into threats.
Turns out basically every Equipment printed that was Constructed-playable operated on the principle of making all your random bodies into threats, especially your 1/1 creatures. Letting their Murder also just kill the thing boosting your creature basically negates all the upside of the effect.
Beyond the Vehicles that have an immediate impact when they aren’t Crewed and are spells with an upside, I am skeptical many of them will see Constructed play. Even if they do, they will be in very limited quantities as multiples are quite bad. One Birds of Paradise can carry two Sword of Fire and Ice, but one Lambholt Pacifist can’t drive two cars.
That would just be silly.
This doesn’t mean I won’t test with the pushed Vehicles, but I’m not going to go too far out of my way to make them good if they underperform.”
Since then, we have had some actual tested reviews come on the new set. How did the Vehicles stack up?
“Smuggler’s Copter is nuts.”
– Gerry Thompson last Friday
“While Smuggler’s Copter will almost undoubtedly be the best vehicle from Kaladesh, I don’t think people really grasp just how good it is.”
– Todd Anderson last Thursday
Even beyond that single card, I was wrong. Very wrong. The Vehicle card type is significantly different from my initial expectations in a good way, and the individual cards are designed to make you want to play with them.
Vehicles are Drawback Creatures, Not Equipment
While Vehicles are immediately compared to Equipment as creature-dependent artifacts, their functionality is far from it. A lot of the things that we have learned about Equipment in the decade since Mirrodin are oddly inverted with Vehicles.
While both Equipment and Vehicles require creatures, they tie to them in different ways. The immediate distinction everyone draws is that Equipment provides increased card quality in the face of removal, while Vehicles simply trade like a creature. This was hint one that Vehicles are closer to creatures than artifacts, but I missed it as a downside.
What I missed was that they had a mirrored upside: “haste.” When you Equip a fresh creature, you are locked into the same “pass the turn, then attack” cycle for use of your upgraded creature. There is no similar drawback for Vehicles. Once they are on the battlefield, your fresh creatures can Crew them for an immediate attack.
Hidden in the archives of old Magic sets, we actually did have an odd comparison for this style of play:
The closest comparison to Vehicles is actually Halcyon Glaze, an oddball enchantment from original Ravnica. While it never quite crossed the barrier into Standard, it certainly had an impact in Limited, where it was a quick finisher. The Vehicles in Kaladesh hit on the Limited front but have also been pushed into the Constructed realm.
Vehicles follow a similar style of play: cast a creature, tap it to crew, attack with your undercosted threat. The “Equipment mode” where you tap a creature already on the battlefield to make a bigger threat is still there for the turns you aren’t casting something else as a fail-safe or something else you can maximize.
Note the quick finisher part of Halcyon Glaze also applies. It isn’t like Vehicles are random bodies; they are all real threats that close quickly. You don’t have to repeat this play pattern many times for the game to just be over, and if you miss a turn and have to tap a potential attacker, you are still clocking your opponent very well.
Aside: This is also why Kaladesh Limited has absurdly huge common creatures. You can’t print smaller Vehicles, as those would suck, and you can’t print big Vehicles and small creatures without making the format completely Vehicle-centric. Bulking up the other threats is the only way to make a format where both avenues of attack are balanced. This is also solving the Battle for Zendikar issue where green basically wasn’t a color, as the biggest creatures were colorless.
Tapping the smallest possible thing isn’t the only way to get value out of a Vehicle. Crewing a Vehicle using something you couldn’t or wouldn’t be using anyway is just as good, if not better.
There are still some parallels to Equipment in the higher crew cost Vehicles. Getting to four or five power on a single creature is difficult, and it’s even more difficult to churn out multiple times to keep Crewing your Vehicle. But by tapping your summoning-sick creature, that high Crew cost that everyone assumed was equivalent to multiple creatures being tapped is much closer to you tapping one attacker to make a massive creature. This means that, at some point on the Crew cost curve, there is a split where the lower half of the Vehicles work one way and the upper half work another. This also means that this new ability has a lot more hidden complexity than initially expected, as evidenced by basically everything else I’ve said today.
Haste on a Vehicle also creates a weird scenario where the card pushes you towards getting value in both ways: having a small creature when you cast it and following up with more. Alternatively, you can set up a Talara’s Battalion scenario where you cast both your haste Vehicle and another creature on the same turn. This is currently limited to Ovalchase Dragster, as Fleetwheel Cruiser takes the whole initial activation out of the picture, but is worth considering, as the numbers on Ovalchase Dragster are certainly good enough. At the least, Aether Revolt may bring more of this combination and it is worth thinking about how to approach it in deckbuilding.
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Many Vehicles Make Themselves Work in Multiples
Aside from reading like “bad Equipment,” the big issue everyone saw with Vehicles was that they got very bad in multiple copies. The difference in functionality between expectations and reality doesn’t stop this. If anything, it makes it worse. While being able to produce a creature a turn might be relatively easy, producing multiple bodies a turn is not easy or sustainable. If the second Vehicle is much worse than the first, the third is basically impossible to utilize. It’s hard to really consider Vehicles as creatures as a result and the mechanic has anti-synergy with itself. You can’t use your new car to drive your old one, as that would be very dumb.
Fortunately, Wizards of the Coast was one step ahead of us here on the Development side. The higher-rarity Vehicles are all equipped with extra features to make extra copies still worth something.
Smuggler’s Copter probably has the most obvious answer to drawing too many Vehicles. If you draw more Smuggler’s Copters than you can Crew, you can loot them away into real cards. The looting ability also raises floor on multiple Smuggler’s Copters, as it is much easier to hit a creature or two a turn when you are seeing so many cards.
Worth noting: Smuggler’s Copter also makes the prospect of tapping a creature that could attack to Crew it fairly attractive as well. It isn’t just bigger; it adds important effects. Not only do you get the loot, but the flying plays a big role as well. Often you will have something on the battlefield that doesn’t have a profitable attack on the ground, but in the air the 3/3 can get through.
Cultivator’s Caravan is technically a Vehicle, but it’s a weird one. It dodges the issue of multiples being dead by being a fully functional artifact, which honestly might be the card’s primary mode. While a Manalith isn’t the most exciting card ever, Manalith with an upside is definitely interesting.
Fleetwheel Cruiser’s enters-the-battlefield trigger answers the whole multiples issue pretty well. The next Fleetwheel Cruiser is still a Ball Lightning effect. In theory you could have issues activating both of your first two Fleetwheel Cruisers if you play a third, but how many times can they actually take a hit for five trample damage that you really need to make this play?
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship probably has the worst solution for multiple copies of any of the rare or mythic Vehicles. A five-mana three damage spell is not really a card you want to cast. Fortunately, Skysovereign offers some indirect ways to mitigate multiples.
The first is simply adding another drawback: Skysovereign, Consul Flagship is a legendary permanent. Your other Vehicles might make the multiple-Vehicle issue come up, but there’s no way you have to crew multiple Flagships at once.
The second is similar to the Fleetwheel Cruiser answer: Skysovereign should just kill them before the second copy comes up. Making a pseudo-Inferno Titan is a real reason to tap an existing creature and should be something that takes over a game.
This puts Skysovereign in a weird deckbuilding spot. Half of it wants to be a one- or two-of, but it might just be so game-ending that you want to push up to three or four copies. Of course this is just a question of “is the card merely good or actually really good,” so once you are thinking about it, you are well past the initial hurdle of the card being playable.
Standard Has Options to Keep Crewing Vehicles
So you draw two Vehicles. For some reason you are stuck with them. You can’t trade them in combat, but you need to keep them active. Maybe you are blocking fliers with your Smuggler’s Copters? I don’t know. Still, you need to find a Crew for them.
You have options.
There are a number of creatures in Standard that produce multiple bodies for one card, allowing you to Crew multiple Vehicles. The only problem is they are all small and can’t Crew the larger Vehicles like Skysovereign, Consulate Flagship in this way, but presumably you can add another token to the larger body and add up to the right numbers across the board.
You can also play something that gives you an extra creature a turn to Crew with. The easiest way to do that is with planeswalkers. To some extent that also feels like a win-more, especially with Gideon, Ally of Zendikar: “Oh, I’ve resolved a planeswalker and plan on activating it multiple times, which means I’m ahead or stable and about to pull ahead. Let’s add another card and make things even better!” Still, this closes the window you need your planeswalker active for, which is fine.
Finally, a lot of my discussion has been predicated on the creatures you cast wanting to attack. What if you have a creature that can brawl but sometimes doesn’t want to attack because trading it off isn’t the best thing it can do? Your Eldrazi Displacer could be a Trained Armodon, or it could Crew something and still be around later to activate.
To temper all this discussion, Vehicles aren’t the end-all, universal answer to the format. They still require creatures, excluding them from a whole category of decks. The drawback of multiples being bad still exists to an extent, and losing all your creatures and being stuck with dead enhancements is not out of the question.
But there is payoff. Shows me right for doubting the R&D process. They are doing a good job of making their new mechanics work, especially if they look really cool on the surface.