Start Your Engines
Sorcery
Vehicles you control become artifact creatures until end of turn. Creatures you control get +2/+0 until end of turn.
- CMC
- 4
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- R
- Rarity
- uncommon
- Set
- Kaladesh
- Price
- $0.29
- EDHREC rank
- #11769
Start Your Engines gives every creature you control a Vehicle's best perk — becoming a threat with power equal to its toughness — for three mana at instant speed, turning a board of small bodies into a lethal alpha strike out of nowhere. Balthier and Fran decks run it as a core finisher, not a fringe include, and the inclusion rate backs that up.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
Balthier and Fran
Balthier and Fran's gameplan is assembling a fleet of Vehicles and the crew to swing with them, and Start Your Engines doubles as a combat trick and a kill condition — crewing everything and pumping each pilot simultaneously means even modest boards hit for lethal.
Kolodin, Triumph Caster
Kolodin, Triumph Caster cares about Vehicles and the creatures that interact with them, and Start Your Engines converts an otherwise defensive board into an offensive one at instant speed, which pairs cleanly with Kolodin's reward structure for crewing and attacking.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | legal |
| pioneer | legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Start Your Engines is a Commander card through and through — the payoff scales with board width, and multiplayer games generate exactly the kind of wide boards where flipping power and toughness across six creatures ends the table. In competitive 1v1 formats like Modern and Legacy, three mana for an effect that requires a populated board is too slow and too conditional against interactive decks that will have already disrupted your setup. Pioneer is similarly unkind, where the card sits as a narrow combat trick without a dedicated Vehicle shell to support it. In Commander, it slots into any Vehicle or go-wide aggressive deck as a serious finisher, not just a role-player.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$0.29 bulk tier
At $0.29, Start Your Engines is firmly bulk — easy to pick up as a four-of or to slot into any Vehicle build without thinking twice about cost. Bulk rares at this price point rarely climb unless a dedicated format combo emerges around them, so treat it as a cheap pickup for the decks that want it rather than a spec.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
- Balthier and Fran
- Kolodin, Triumph Caster
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.