Start your engines! The first tentpole release for Magic: The Gathering in 2025 is here with Aetherdrift, and we're racing to take a look at one of the preconstructed decks. This Living Energy review will examine it and answer what is it, is it worth buying, and if you do buy itm what are some cards you can look to add to it.
Living Energy Review
Living Energy is the third energy deck set to be released in less than a year, but it is the first of those in Temur (green/blue/red) colors. The deck is also meant to capture some of the mechanical identity of Avishkar (the plane formerly known as Kaladesh) that the main set wasn't able to due to its focus on the race across three planes.
Living Energy showcases well known characters of Avishkar like Saheeli, and Pia Nalaar. While there is a primary focus on energy in Living Energy as the name implies there are also subthemes in the deck of artifacts, and thopters that fit that Avishkar mechanical identity role, while synergizing well with the rest of the deck.
As far as play goes, Living Energy plays very ramp heavy. With 15 different pieces of ramp or mana fetch, along with 38 lands and a few ways to cheat out spells, it’s built to ramp to high mana values and take over the game with big spells. It shows in the deck’s aspirational mana curve, and average mana value of 3.64. which is higher than you typically want to see.
Valuewise, there are some notable cards included in Living Energy. Academy Ruins runs for $15-$20 and is the most expensive card in the deck. After that you have Elder Gargaroth which is also over $10, while there’s a set of highly playable cards in the $5-$9 range including Retrofitter Foundry, Lightning Greaves, Panharmonicon, and Triplicate Titan. From a Living Energy review perspective, this is good, but not phenomenal value.
Living Energy Commanders Review
Living Energy comes with two commander options, both of which are among the new cards for the deck. Saheeli, Radiant Creator is the face commander, and is a 4 mana 4/4 with a pair of important abilities. Her first ability is that she gives energy whenever you play an artifict or artificer, similar to Dr. Madison Li from the Fallout Science! deck. Setting her apart though is her second ability, where you spend three energy to make a 5/5 token copy of any permanent you control until end of turn.
The alternate commander is Pia Nalaar, Chief Mechanic. A 3 mana 2/4, she gets down early, and generates 2 energy whenever artifact creatures deal combat damage to a player, encouraging an artifact creature heavy deck that is more aggressive. Like Saheeli she has a second ability, where at the end of turn you can spend any amount of energy, to make a vehicle token with power and toughness equal to the energy spent, and crew 2
While Pia Nalaar has potential in more aggressive decks, she’s much narrower that Saheeli, and Living Energy is built to work with Saheeli in charge. Pia Nalaar still works as an energy creator and sink in a Saheeli deck, so unlike some commander decks, the two options work together here.
Cards To Upgrade Your MTG Living Energy Commander Deck
If you purchase Living Energy it should be playable at casual tables, but there’s definite room for upgrades. Taming the deck’s manacurve, and focusing on making the most out of Saheeli are our major focuses here..
From the Science! commander deck, The Motherlode is an energy generator, solid sized creature, and has the ability to take care of disruptive non-basic lands. When it does that, it also removes makes that players non-flyers unable to block until end of turn, opening up that opponent for an alpha strike.
Providing some redundancy for our commander, Displacer Kitten takes advantage of all the enters the battlefield effects in the dec by blinking them in and out of existance. The Displacer Kitten can blink any non-land permanent you control, so there’s lot of flexibility in it’s use.
An odd omission from the deck, Roil Cartographer is from Modern Horizons 3 and will join with Nissa, Worldsoul Speaker to provide energy on each land drop. The cartographer can drop on turn 2, and later on it can trade in energy for cards.
Another area the deck is a bit light in is card advantage, so Unstable Amulet provides an early drop that can create some energy, do occasional chip damage, and essentially draw a card for two energy.
Another two-drop option, Izzet Generatorium creates an additional energy anytime you make one, and lets you draw a card on any turn you’ve used at least 4 energy.
Also from the Fallout Science! deck, Robobrain War Mind generates you a bunch of energy, draws cards on attack, and gets bigger as you have more cards in hand.
Instead of some of the pricer options in the deck, I would purpose Wurmcoil Engine is a very good option with being a 6/6 for 6 with useful abilities, who creates tokens when it dies. It’s a perfect target to copy with Saheeli, swinging for 6, gaining 6 life, and leaving you two 3/3s behind.
Scrap Trawler leans into the artifact and sacrifice side of the deck, by turning all your deck artifacts into resurrection spells. Since Saheeli’s ability makes copies, those copies also have the originals mana value, meaning you can grab pricey artifacts from the graveyard, along with cheap ones.
Let’s keep drawing on that Fallout precon, this time with the best energy counterspell. While 3 mana is more than ideally you spent on a counter, the ability to get a bunch of energy from it makes it worthwhile in Electrosiphon’s case.
You can put Doubling Season in this spot too, but Aether Refinery is a lot cheaper moneywise, and does what you’re wanting, while providing an energy outlet for big tokens. Given the deck's energy hunger, adding some explosive energy generation seems useful.
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If you want to see what the deck might look like with those 10 cards added, I’ve put it up on Archidekt, with 10 potential cuts that you can see here.
Overall, our Living Energy review finds it is a slow, rampy deck with a lot of synergy and a number of different ways you can customize it. With Modern Horizons 3 energy theme, two other commander decks in slightly different colors that use energy in the past year, the cards for this archtype are as cheaply available as they’ll be right now.
A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don
