Aether Revolt (AER): Set Guide & Card Overview

The revolution is here. Aether Revolt is the set where the oppressed Consulate workers and renegades of Kaladesh finally pushed back - and the cards tell that story in every mechanic and keyword on the sheet.

What is Aether Revolt?

Aether Revolt (AER) is Magic's 73rd expansion and the second set in the Kaladesh block. It released on January 20, 2017, as a small expansion of 197 cards, following the full-sized Kaladesh (KLD) from September 2016.

As a small second set in a two-set block, Aether Revolt was designed to deepen the mechanical themes established in Kaladesh while advancing the story toward its conclusion. If Kaladesh was the spark of rebellion, Aether Revolt is the fire that followed.

Themes and mechanics

Kaladesh as a plane runs on aether - a magical energy source that powers the inventions, vehicles, and artifice that define the world. Aether Revolt keeps that artifact-heavy identity front and centre, while shifting the tone from wonder to conflict.

The set builds on Kaladesh's core mechanics - energy counters, vehicles, and fabricate - while introducing new tools suited to a world at war.

Improvise is Aether Revolt's signature new keyword. It lets you tap artifacts to help pay for spells, essentially treating your battlefield of trinkets and constructs as a second mana source. In a set defined by artifact synergies, improvise rewards you for going wide with your contraptions before you go tall with your spells.

Revolt is the set's other new mechanic, and it's thematically perfect. A card with revolt gets a bonus if a permanent you controlled left the battlefield this turn - from a creature dying, a fetch land cracking, or even a sacrifice effect. It rewards aggression and attrition in equal measure, and gives sacrifice and flicker strategies a meaningful payoff.

Planeswalker cards also became permanent types in this set - a rules change that affected the entire game, not just AER. Before this change, planeswalkers were a card type but not a permanent type in the rules sense. This was tidied up during the Kaladesh block, and Aether Revolt is part of that transition.

Limited and Draft

Drafting Aether Revolt means drafting it alongside Kaladesh - a KKA format (two packs of Kaladesh, one of Aether Revolt), which keeps the energy and vehicle strategies from the flagship set relevant throughout.

The artifact synergies that power improvise mean that going wide with small creatures and tokens remains a strong axis. Revolt rewards decks that are willing to trade resources and attack into opposing boards, so aggro and midrange strategies both have access to meaningful payoffs.

The format speed, as with Kaladesh Draft, tends toward the midrange - not blindingly fast, but punishing to decks that stumble on their synergy pieces.

Notable cards and format impact

Aether Revolt landed in Standard during one of the most dramatic periods in recent memory - and the set was at the centre of all of it.

The January 2017 bans

A few weeks before Aether Revolt's release, Wizards banned three cards from Standard: Emrakul, the Promised End, Smuggler's Copter, and Reflector Mage. This was the first time cards had been banned from Standard since 2011 - a genuinely historic moment. All three were defining pillars of the format at the time, and their removal shook up the entire Standard landscape just as a new set was arriving.

The Saheeli combo

Aether Revolt introduced Felidar Guardian, and players immediately noticed that it formed an infinite loop with Saheeli Rai from Kaladesh. The interaction is elegant in a terrifying way: Saheeli's {-2} ability creates a copy of Felidar Guardian, the copy's ETB (enters-the-battlefield) trigger blinks Saheeli, and the newly untapped Saheeli can do it again - indefinitely, creating infinite hasty copies of whatever you like.

The combo drew enormous attention heading into Pro Tour Aether Revolt. At the first Star City Games Open featuring the new set, three of the top eight decks ran the combo, and 25 of the top 64 included it. That's a significant footprint for a mechanic that requires just two specific cards.

Rules note: The combo requires Saheeli Rai to have her loyalty intact (at least 3) so her {-2} ability is available. In practice, the combo is set up with both pieces in play simultaneously, then initiated on your turn.

The combo's long-term viability in Standard would become a major conversation - though Felidar Guardian's fate in the format was eventually resolved by Wizards in the weeks following the Pro Tour.

The Black-Green midrange decks

For all the noise around the Saheeli combo, the top three slots at that first Star City Games Open went to Black-Green midrange decks - none of them playing the two-card combo. Those decks were built around Walking Ballista, Winding Constrictor, and Rishkar, Peema Renegade, a trio that formed an incredibly coherent +1/+1 counter engine. Winding Constrictor doubled up counters, Rishkar turned those counters into mana, and Walking Ballista served as both a flexible removal spell and a late-game mana sink.

This was arguably the defining deck of the Aether Revolt Standard era - efficient, resilient, and deeply synergistic without relying on a two-card infinite.

Lore and setting

Aether Revolt takes place on Kaladesh, a plane of bright invention and oppressive order that had been slowly building toward conflict since the flagship set. Kaladesh as a world is governed by the Consulate, a bureaucratic authority that controls the flow of aether and, by extension, the plane's entire economy of invention.

The first set showed us the wonders: the Inventor's Fair, the gleaming skyships, the aether refineries. Aether Revolt shows us the cost. The renegades - led by figures including Pia Nalaar, Chandra's mother - have had enough of Consulate overreach, and the story follows their uprising against an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The Gatewatch (Magic's team of allied planeswalkers at the time) are drawn into the conflict, and the set's climax resolves the fate of Kaladesh as a plane. It's one of the more grounded, human-scale stories Magic had told in years - no Eldrazi, no world-ending threats, just people fighting for their freedom on a steampunk world that runs on magic gas.

Set legacy

Aether Revolt is remembered as one of the more turbulent releases in recent Standard history - for reasons that weren't entirely the set's fault.

The triple banning that preceded it was unprecedented in the modern era. The Saheeli combo dominated conversation before, during, and after the Pro Tour. And yet, underneath all of that noise, the set delivered genuinely interesting Magic: the Black-Green counter engine was a beautifully constructed midrange shell, improvise opened up interesting deckbuilding space in older formats, and revolt rewarded thoughtful play in a way that doesn't always show up in small sets.

In Commander and casual formats, the set's artifact synergies - already strong in Kaladesh - found a permanent home. Improvise spells and revolt payoffs have aged reasonably well as role-players in artifact-themed decks.

Honestly, I think Aether Revolt deserves to be remembered as more than just "the Saheeli set." It's a small set that punched above its weight in terms of both story and gameplay, even if it got a little overshadowed by the chaos around it. ✨