One of the best ways to know what bulk rares are targeting in each set is to watch how popular on they are on Deckbox. When you see a card like Peacewalker Colossus, which seems like it should be at the heart of a highly-competitive Vehicles deck, you wonder why it’s so cheap. Well, people indeed were brewing with the 3-mana Vehicle on Deckbox in a variety of Standard deck builds. Why hasn’t it seen more Standard play with amazing vehicles like Heart of Kiran, Skysovereign, Consul’s Flagship and the 1 mana 7/11 Consulate Dreadnought so good with the Peacewalker’s ability?
Saffron Olive actually did try a Vehicle-themed deck called “Self-Driving Cars” in his hugely popular Against the Odds video series. The deck went 3-3 in matches on Magic Online and had a 50 percent win percentage in games, as well. These aren’t fantastic results, and were Smuggler’s Copter still legal in Standard, the deck would probably be a great rival to the very good Mardu Vehicles decks.
Even then, why doesn’t a 3-mana 6/6 with such a powerful two-mana ability not see any play? 1W is very cheap to instantly turn a Vehicle into a creature without having to Crew it. Perhaps the fact that it can’t target itself and has a Crew cost of 4 total power is part of the reason why. But, there is no reason that Peacewalker Colossus can’t target another copy of himself. The reason this Colossus has seen so little top play is that you really have to go all in with Vehicles for this card to be most effective. In the current meta, the successful Vehicles decks play a lot of the support creatures, not really leaving room for this guy.
This doesn’t mean that he’s bad in any sense. Perhaps a deck down the road will strike a nice balance between the “Self-Driving Cars” deck and the widely successful Mardu Vehicles decks that utilizes the Peacewalker Colossus to some degree. There are plenty of players out there that want this to be good. Down the road, if you stashed a few of these away, you may be happy that you did.
