Aristocrats in Cube | Archetype Breakdown | #101

So, James, let's talk about... aristocrats um kind of give me an overview of what an aristocrat's deck is trying to do yeah

so aristocrats is an archetype named after i believe the original was falcon rath aristocrat maybe i don't know um but aristocrats is an archetype based around sacrificing creatures for some sort of advantage um So this can be just sacrificing to get a good sacrifice trigger, or sacrificing to trigger some of your other effects.

But that might be drawing cards, that might be dealing damage with something like a Blood Artist.

But that's how we're trying to get ahead in this deck, is by sacrificing our creatures.

And it can have quite a few different sort of overall game plans.

You can have very aggressive versions with sort of one-mana creatures that are recursive and looking to get in damage early and then drain them out.

Or you can have more grindy versions looking to sort of accrue card advantage with your sacrifice triggers.

And there's even some combo stuff you can do as well.

Think the Gravecrawler combos, for example, go really well in the Aristocrat stack.

Yeah, there's definitely some nice overlap because a lot of creature-based combos revolve around the free sacrifice outlets, which you get inherently and you need in an aristocrat deck.

So that's all really nice.

In terms of cubes, James, what type of cubes do you think an aristocrat deck can show up in?

So I say generally sort of mid to low power level.

While it can be a really strong strategy, the sort of full-on Aristocrats deck tends to not quite get them the highest power level cubes just because it's a little bit vulnerable to disruption.

and you're playing a few too many slightly weak cards in order to enable your synergies.

That being said, in high-power cubes, you do see there are little pockets of sacrifice synergy.

Even some of the most powerful cards in those cubes, things like Guts, Broadside Bombardiers, do involve sacrificing cards, and you can build around those a little bit, but you certainly don't have anything that you would call an aristocrat's deck.

But it is very common in sort of mid-power level cubes.

I think Rakdos Aristocrats has to be one of the most commonly listed archetypes when you look at those cubes.

Yeah, it's kind of like Azorius Flyers.