Welcome back to Aether Revolt Prerelease Week! Today we’re going over Vehicles, a returning card type and mechanic from Kaladesh. Vehicles have a unique card frame, including a Power and Toughness box on the bottom right, even though they aren’t creatures… normally. All Vehicles have an ability called “Crew”, which is always followed by a number. “Crew N” is an activated ability that lets you tap any number of creatures you control, so long as their total power is at least N, to ‘crew’ the vehicle. For example, Crew 3 would require a total of 3 power (whether that’s just tapping a 3/3, or a trio of Servos, or even a 5/5 if that’s all you have!). Once a vehicle is ‘crewed’, it becomes a creature until end of turn, with the Power and Toughness that’s printed on the card. This doesn’t count as the creature ‘entering the battlefield’- it was already there, it just looks different now!

Now, onto a few of the finer points of Vehicles. First, just like with Improvise, you can use “summoning sick” creatures to Crew a vehicle, because the Tap symbol isn’t involved. You could play a creature and immediately use it to crew the Vehicle you played last turn, no sweat (but once the Vehicle is a creature, summoning sickness rules apply; if you crew a Vehicle the turn you play it, it won’t be able to attack unless it has haste!). Also like Improvise, the tapping of your creatures is a cost, paid all at once; your opponent can’t respond to it until the ability is on the stack (at which point destroying the creatures wouldn’t stop it). You can even crew a Vehicle with another Vehicle if you need to, and you’re free to Crew your vehicle even if it’s already crewed, on the chance you happen upon a reason to want to. Once the Vehicle is Crewed, there’s not really a link between it and the creatures that you used; most notably, destroying a crewed Vehicle won’t mess with the crew (Those Kaladeshi inventors make one heck of an airbag). Finally, the printed P/T on the card CAN be overwritten; for example, if you played Tezzeret’s Touch on an already-crewed Vehicle, it would overwrite the printed P/T with “5/5”, because that’s what the spell says. Crewing it again wouldn’t change that; it’d still be a 5/5.

That covers today’s refresher on Vehicles! We’ll see you tomorrow, when we go over Energy.

Today’s Driver’s Ed Course was written by Trevor Nunez