Spoiler Highlight: The Last Ride on Standard & Pioneer

If you follow my articles, you've probably seen me mention more than once my desire for a reprint of Death's Shadow in Standard so it can enter Pioneer. It's the card that tops my desire for reprints for the format, and the main reason is that Grixis Shadow and its various variants in Modern were the best deck I've ever played.

Wizards had an excellent opportunity to reprint this creature in Duskmourn. They didn't do it, not even as a Special Guest, so my hopes were dashed only for the company to release, in the following expansion, a Shadow with Wheels - The Last Ride.

Same cost, same ability, same body, with the need for another body to crew it. It's close enough to generate hype among Death's Shadow fans, and as one of them, I've spent the last few days analyzing and testing how comparable The Last Ride is to the card it was born from.

The answer is not much, and the problem isn't that the new card is a vehicle and needs a suitable pilot, but that it's Legendary. By limiting the number of The Last Ride we can have to one, the design team takes away one of the greatest potentials that Shadow allowed and, consequently, makes the necessary concessions to play the card worse. Why would I increase the number of Shock Lands and life loss effects in my list if I can't get the most out of my payoff?

And even with this drawback, The Last Ride's second ability is strong because it feeds into the card's theme itself, preventing people from wasting too many slots trying to make it work, but strong enough to make it deserve a spot in Standard and Pioneer.

The first thing we need to do when looking at The Last Ride is to stop comparing it to Death’s Shadow, at least in essence. Both cards play too differently to be comparable because, as explained above, The Last Ride being legendary makes a huge difference.

One of the biggest advantages of Shadow decks was using Shock Lands and Thoughtseize to disrupt the opponent’s plans in the first few turns and then deploying two 4/4 Death’s Shadow that will be 7/7 or higher the next turn and closing the game in two combats, and the vehicle doesn’t allow that opening.

The best way to look at the new card is as a mix of source of card advantage and alternative win condition. The Last Ride is, besides a wannabe Shadow, a glorified Greed, which wouldn't be enough to make it deserve space in decks if it weren't for also being a threat that punishes the opponent for pressuring you - it adds this pseudo-inevitability that, at some point, your opponent will need to deal with a creature up to 12/12 on the board.

This side can be partly compared to Reckoner Bankbuster, except that the Neon Dynasty artifact does not have a color restriction, but rather an activation restriction, and it generated many benefits by activating multiple times instead of losing life - not to mention that is a much lower value than - but the logic of both is the same: a source of card advantage that we can activate at any time as a complementary threat or, in the case of The Last Ride, a win condition at the board.

The Last Ride has two fundamental problems in Standard. First, it is terrible against Bounce, which are the best decks in the format today. Second, Red-Based Aggro is another of the main competitors in the Metagame and the archetypes that could use it lose a lot by not using ways to hold the damage through life gain.

There are a few lines we can think of for the artifact. Black Midranges can take advantage of The Last Ride to have a very efficient clock that can win games “for free”. If a Rakdos Aggro appears, it could use it as a mana sink for longer games and, when it has low enough life, use something like Callous Sell-Sword to sacrifice it and win the game.

In fact, there is another combo we can execute with it involving Voldaren Thrillseeker and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron to give the card the ability to sacrifice by putting a +1/+1 counter on it and then sacrificing it for up to 12 damage to the opponent. Unfortunately, it's more situational than Tree of Perdition, but this line exists and should be considered.

Things get much more interesting in Pioneer for The Last Ride, mainly because we have access to Thoughtseize and Shock Lands in this format - good cards that we can use to voluntarily lose life.

All the possibilities mentioned for the vehicle in Standard apply here, but with some bonuses: Midranges like Rakdos, which already run Reckoner Bankbuster, can find another win line with The Last Ride and have the ability to crew it at any time with Mutavault, and if the life loss isn't beneficial, the combination of Unholy Annex with the land ensures that the damage is compensated.

And you don't even need to be in Rakdos colors to take advantage of this interaction. Any list with can try to include Mutavault to interact with Unholy Annex and, consequently, The Last Ride in the process. The list below, for example, is an attempt to replicate as much as possible of the old Grixis Shadow lists from Modern, with Abhorrent Oculus being the improved Gurmag Angler.

In fact, even at Sorcery speed, Quag Feast is a card that players should consider if they want to play Oculus in lists with post-Aetherdrift.

Another option for The Last Ride is, obviously, alongside Greasefang, Okiba Boss.

Here, we can even threaten more combo-kills with Greasefang, Okiba Boss and the vehicle if we have low health, either with the opponent's board empty, or with Temur Battle Rage for the famous combo that Death's Shadow had in Modern, and we can't neglect the potential that the extra combat of Fear of Missing Out offers with a 7/7 or higher creature on the board.

And of course, we can complement Scourge of the Skyclaves in Rakdos Aggro with The Last Ride and still have a powerful attrition tool for longer games, but this version is inferior to the current Rakdos Prowess because the interaction between Manifold Mouse with Emberheart Challenger or Heartfire Hero is too big to ignore.

It is also possible to play it in Rakdos Tree lists, but I don’t know if the deck really needs this type of card currently, or if there is even room for it.

The Last Ride is not Death’s Shadow and cannot be treated as such. It's more self-contained than the Worldwake creature and has other uses beyond being a big body, but its legendary status limits much of its potential to establish a Shadow deck, placing it in a support position for archetypes that might find it a source of card advantage coupled with a powerful win condition against careless opponents.

Thanks for reading!