MTG Arena Zone Premium
Join our Premium community, remove all advertisements, get access to exclusive content!
MTG Arena Zone Premium
Join our Premium community, remove all advertisements, get access to exclusive content!
Era of Innovation Art by Jason Rainville

Kaladesh Remastered Draft: Best Cards and Synergies

What cards and synergies should I draft in Kaladesh Remastered? Make the most of out of your free entry while the draft is around for the next five days! Here is our primer to the format, a curated amalgamation of both Kaladesh and Aether Revolt.

What cards and synergies should I draft in Kaladesh Remastered? Make the most of out of your free entry while the draft is around for the next five days! Here is our primer to the format, a curated amalgamation of both Kaladesh and Aether Revolt.

Hey everyone! Kaladesh Remastered is coming back to Arena on August 15th and I definitely recommend checking it out as everybody gets one free entry. I played Kaladesh and Aether Revolt Draft nonstop when I was away at college and both formats were unique, difficult to master, and overall enjoyable. Kaladesh Remastered is even better since the set designers made the incredibly wise decision to omit Renegade Freighter from it.

This set compacts all of Kaladesh block together and let’s you experience the best the format had to offer in one single draft! Playing a large swath of Limited formats is also one of the best ways to improve your combat, card evaluation, and mulliganing abilities, so people should be drafting more if they’re serious about improving!

Today I want to break down some of the basics of the format in order to give you the foundation needed to help you win some drafts. A lot of that will come in the form of tips and tricks about the specific synergies of the format. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty gritty of Kaladesh Remastered.

Broken Uncommons

First and foremost, let’s address the elephant in the room about the format; there’s a lot of disgustingly powerful uncommons. There’s literally a Verdurous Gearhulk uncommon in the form of Ridgescale Tusker for crying out loud! Those uncommons should be the guiding light that pushes you into a specific archetype since their power far eclipses the supporting commons that are around them.

Here are my favorite in no particular order:

I also didn’t bother trying to include all the fantastic removal in the format like Fatal Push and Welding Sparks since there’s just so much of it. Don’t pass these overpowered uncommons if you can help it.

What you Should be Doing in Each Color

Green

As the list above might be indicative of, my favorite color in the format is green because of how high quality the creatures are. Green also has solid ramp in the form of Servant of the Conduit, Wild Wanderer, and most importantly, Attune with Aether. Attune with Aether might look unassuming at first glance, but it offers fixing with some serious value attached to it. It allows green decks to be able to stretch into three or four colors with ease while also building up incidental Energy for the good common Energy creatures like Thriving Rhino and Riparian Tiger.

Prophetic Prism is another key way to successfully splash cards at an incredibly low opportunity cost. So if you’re base green after pack one and open a powerful multicolored spell like Cloudblazer, don’t be afraid to take it and splash it. While four to five color green decks are great in this format, I still love the green beatdown strategies. Great creatures across the curve really allow green to be the most flexible and powerful color in my eyes.

Black

My second favorite color because despite black’s reputation of being the great removal, bad creature color identity, in Kaladesh Remastered both the black removal and creatures are pretty great. Aether Poisoner, Maulfist Squad, and Night Market Lookout all play very well into the go-wide artifact based aggression game plan that black is often trying to enact.

For example, Underhanded Designs perfectly encapsulates what the color is trying to accomplish. Rakdos artifact aggro, Golgari counters, and Orzhov go-wide have all been fantastic for me and show just how well black pairs with every color. You can only go so wrong in limited when you back up a nice curve of solid creatures with some great removal.

White

White has multiple cards that make Servos, which more or less defines what the color is trying to accomplish. Glint-Sleeve Artisan, Propellor Pioneer, Visionary Augmentor, Servo Exhibition, and Countless Gears Renegade are all roleplayers that in conjunction with Inspired Charge and Dawnfeather Eagle make it easy to overrun the opponent.

Aviary Mechanic is also great in the archetype because of how well it synergizes with the Fabricate cards while also embarrassing opposing Revoke Privileges and Malfunction effects. Also I know white goes wide, but please don’t play Engineered Might with these cards. It’s just too weak of an effect and not being an instant like Inspired Charge really makes it easy to play around. 

Red

Red is kind of like black, but with slightly worse creatures and no ways to gain life. Like white, red is also very linear and is almost exclusively looking to beat down. Aether Chaser is a key common here, as it’s a great attacker and the Servos it creates help fuel Enraged Giant, Salivating Gremlins, Sweatworks Brawler, and Welding Sparks.

I’m also a pretty big fan of Spireside Infiltrator because, like Night Market Lookout, it beats down early on but is also easy to trigger later in the game with Vehicles when the board gets gummed up. Like Kaladesh, in Kaladesh Remastered you usually want to be beating down, and red is pretty fantastic at that. I really enjoy in this set how even though some colors are better than others, every color is viable and has a powerful game plan that it can reliably assemble.

Blue

Unlike most sets, Blue isn’t a particularly controlling color in Kaladesh Remastered. The threats of the format are just too powerful and cheap for you to be wasting time holding up counterspells or spending your entire turn drawing a few cards. Also as a side note, please don’t play Revolutionary Rebuff in the artifact based set because it’s as awful as you’d think.

Where Blue really shines is as a support color because of how powerful all the blue multicolor cards are. In particular, Izzet Improvise is my favorite blue color combination because both Aether Chaser and Aether Swooper are top notch two drops that help power out the strong improvise threats. That, and Izzet has Maverick Thopterist and Whirler Virtuoso, which are both pretty busted and probably make Izzet the best color pair in the entire set.

Lastly, don’t sleep on Minister of Inquiries. Hedron Crab effects are always the least fun cards in their respective format because of how quickly they mill the opponent out and Minister is no exception to the rule. 

Kaladesh Remastered features the four following mechanics: Revolt, Fabricate, Energy, and Improvise. There are loose archetypes in the set like Golgari Counters and Simic Energy, but for the most part you’re looking for the powerful individual card synergies to dominate the game. Here are the ones that have been impressive in my experiences and that can be used for some easy wins. Just keep in mind that because this is a bigger set, sometimes the necessary synergy pieces won’t be opened, but that’s okay. Just pay close attention to what’s opened and what’s wheeling, and it’s also nice that most of these powerful synergies utilize less desired playables.

Powerful Interactions Amongst the Commons and Uncommons

Night Market Lookout and any Vehicle (in particular Sky Skiff) is one of my highest win rate game plans in the format. It’s kind of unbelievable how powerful such an anemic looking card can be when the right format conditions are met. During my last go around of the format Night Market Lookout was going unbelievably late because people made the assumption that a slightly better Pulse Tracker was still a bad card.

However, context is everything and in a set full of vehicles Night Market Lookout will often peck in early for two to four damage and then sit around in the late game and drain the opponent to death. Early plays that are also good in the late game are almost always overperformers in limited, and Night Market Lookout is no exception. So let your opponent groan in frustration as you curve Night Market Lookout into Sky Skiff and absolutely run them over.

Cogworker’s Puzzleknot and Salivating Gremlins. I love when two weak cards combine to put the hurt on the opponent. Gremlins into Puzzleknot leads to an 8/3 trample swinging in on turn four, which is exactly what the Boros aggro deck of the format is looking to do.

Live Fast and Die Young obviously work together quite nicely, but I try to just stick with Die Young since the format is often too fast to be spending your third turn drawing cards and losing life with Live Fast instead of committing a creature to the board.

Era of Innovation and Whirler Virtuoso are absolutely nuts together. It more or less lets you pay a colorless and one energy to make a 1/1 Thopter, which is surprisingly easy to do. Whirler Virtuoso is so good that it should never be going past pick two in my opinion, which will make it hard to assemble this combo, but it’s still good to keep an eye out for. Whirler is fantastic on its own because of how well it synergizes with every Energy producer and any card that wants an artifact to enter the battlefield.

Decoction Module and Fabrication Module let you go off and easily dominate the board once you start making a few Servos. I’ve lost many games to this brutal combo, so don’t undervalue them just because they don’t look amazing on their own. Plus if you ever get the holy trinity and get Animation Module into the mix you basically get to go infinite!

Shrewd Negotiation is a really swingy card because it has such a high ceiling, but also such a low floor. However there are lots of great combos with this card that basically turn it into a Control Magic, which has historically been one of the strongest limited cards of all time. Trading a Servo for their best creature is pretty good, but you can do one better by trading a Prophetic Prism or Renegade Map instead. You can also use Aether Tradewinds to get the artifact you gave away back into your hand! 

My goodness, I feel like there’s still so much more that I could say about Kaladesh Remastered! However, I think that taking these format basics and jumping into the draft queue will be enough to further solidify your knowledge of the format and bolster your wildcards collection. You can also check out the perspectives of our other limited experts here for further reading.

Enjoy drafting and thanks again for reading!

Premium >

Enjoy our content? Wish to support our work? Join our Premium community, get access to exclusive content, remove all advertisements, and more!

  • No ads: Browse the entire website ad-free, both display and video.
  • Exclusive Content: Instant access to all exclusive articles only for Premium members, at your fingertips.
  • Support: All your contributions get directly reinvested into the website to increase your viewing experience!
  • Discord: Join our Discord server, claim your Premium role and gain access to exclusive channels where you can learn in real time!
  • Special offerFor a limited time, use coupon code L95WR9JOWV to get 50% off the Annual plan!
MTG Arena Zone Premium
Chris Kvartek
Chris Kvartek

While Chris Kvartek technically kicked off his career in 2012, he burst onto the scene in 2019 like few before him. With an early season Top Finish at Mythic Championship II and narrow miss for his second at Mythic Championship IV, Kvartek earned invitations to two more Mythic Championships through online qualifiers. He secured his second Top Finish of the season at Mythic Championship VII, and now this rising star must prove he can stay among the elite of professional Magic.

Articles: 41