Budget Orzhov Aristocrats (Modern)

Are you a modern player on a budget who loves Orzhov? Do you enjoy violently squeezing every last drop of value out of even the smallest creatures? Maybe you just like the imagery of a vampire eating a ghost to get stronger. In any of these cases, an aristocrats deck might be for you!

Based on the archetype popularized in Gatecrash Standard, Modern Aristocrats focuses on making lots of recurring creatures to gum up the board, then sacrificing them for value while protecting your more important pieces. The deck sits comfortably somewhere between aggro and midrange, using small evasive creatures to chip away at your opponent's life total while gaining more value from dying creatures as the game goes on. To better understand our deck, let's look at each of its individual cards, divided by their job in the deck.

THE NOBILITY:
The basis of any Aristocrats style deck is sacrificing your own creatures, and this deck is no exception. Sacrifices that can happen at instant speed and for no additional cost are strongly prefered, as you can use them in response without leaving mana open, and can often be used to close out the game.

Viscera Seer: The cheapest of our sacrifice outlets, this creature remains valuable throughout the entire game. Scrying is one of the better ways to spend your creatures if you're stuck at a stalemate, or when you need a specific card to answer an opposing threat. You can also always sacrifice this creature to himself if something else would kill him, so you're guaranteed to get at least some value. The only real down side is that having multiple copies of him in play doesn't give much benefit besides another 1/1 body, so we only run 2 copies.

Cartel Aristocrat: One of the namesake cards of an Aristocrats deck, this creature does a ton of work. Give protection from your opponent's creature colors during your turn to make her unblockable. Give protection during their turn to prevent combat damage, making her good for fending off first strike or trample creatures. Give her protection in response to any removal spell to fizzle it. So long as you have meat to throw in the grinder, this creature is all but impossible to get rid of or block.

Bloodthrone Vampire: A more aggressive option for when our opponent doesn't have much in the way of blockers or removal, or if our opponent is playing creatures only slightly too big to kill with our Cartel Aristocrat. This creature is a must block when you swing with it, since you can always sacrifice other creatures at instant speed to buff it for the turn. However, this card fares poorly against go-wide strategies due to a lack of evasion, and has no way of dodging creature removal, so we'll stick with just 2 copies instead of a playset.

THE FODDER:
With all of these cards that are fueled by sacrifice, it only makes we provide them with some more efficient and less valuable resources to chew through. All of these cards provide not only multiple sacrifices off of a single card, but most also assist our more aggressive tendencies on their own as well.

Doomed Traveler: A 1/1 for a white mana that can die twice may not seem like much in most decks, but with the Aristocrats this card is awesome, and probably our best turn 1 drop. In the early game, no one wants to trade with or remove this creature because of lost value, and later on you can use it to chump block multiple times, or to fuel one of your sacrifice creatures and get a free flying token out of the deal. It's also a great card to have sitting in your graveyard in the end game, but we'll get to that later...

Reassembling Skeleton: Paying more mana for another 1/1 that you have to pay to get back seems like a strict downgrade from our Doomed Traveler, but this creature has it's own uses. The fact that this card is returned to play as an ability means it can be done at any time (ideally your opponent's turn), and can be done repeatedly in one turn if you have enough mana. This can be played out of your graveyard if it gets discarded or milled, and effectively gives you the option to pay 1 and a black mana instead of actually sacrificing a creature for your sac outlets. Multiples are a little redundant, but they still make good chump blockers every turn if you have the spare mana lying around, so we play 3.

Lingering Souls: I cannot say enough good things about this card. 2 tokens with flying on turn 3 is nice for any aggro strategy. Another 2 tokens later for only 2 more mana is even better. Helps against discard and mill, and puts a ton of evasive power on the board all at once in the late game, as well as giving you plenty of fodder for your sac outlets. The only way this could get better is if you could re-cast it more than once.

BECAUSE DEATH MATTERS:
Not content with just sacrificing a creature for a single benefit, are we? Not to worry, Aristocrats has you covered. One of the decks biggest strengths is getting extra benefit from our dying comrades, helping us drain our opponent and take care of their biggest threats.

Tragic Slip: For when you just can't let that one creature stay in play, accept no substitutes. This card can kill anything with 1 toughness normally, but if any creature has already died this turn (yours or your opponents) it gets turned up to 13. Works on indestructables and regenerators, and thanks to all your sacrifice outlets you will almost always be able to cast this with Morbid if you need it.

Blood Artist: For a card with 0 power, this creature sure does a lot of work towards being our biggest damage dealer. You get to drain your opponent whenever any creature dies, including theirs. This turns even neutral combat interactions strongly in your favor, and we will often try to win the game by sacrificing all of our creatures after combat to drain our opponent past 0. The life gain also helps cushion us against burn or other aggro strategies.

Zulaport Cutthroat: Why have 4 copies of Blood Artist when you can have 8? This creature has the downside of not draining from when your opponent loses creatures, but having the ability to attack can sneak us in damage in the early game or let us trade more favorably. (Side note, if you are ever playing this deck in multiplayer, this card also drains each opponent, not just a target one, so fewer triggers, but the triggers hit more people).

MISCELLANEOUS SHENANIGANS:
While this deck definitely relies heavily on it's three main categories and their synergy to win the game, we also have a few aces up our sleeve, plus a card or two that fit into more than one category.

Hidden Stockpile: Want some more benefit from killing your cards? This makes a token... once per turn, and only on your turn. Need more fodder? Same story, and you have to have at least a little fodder to get it started, and these tokens don't fly. Need a sacrifice outlet? Use this to scry... if you also pay the activation mana. This card can fill any role in our deck, but it does them all poorly compared to the other options. We'll mostly use the scry to look for better cards of whatever category we're lacking in, but this card also never stops being useful thanks to its repeated token generation. As fun as it is to get multiple copies into play to get multiple tokens off of a single sacrifice, we still only play 2 since it doesn't work alone.

Zealous Persecution: This isn't exactly how we want to win games, but it certainly works. Giving all of our creatures +1/+1 at instant speed is nice with all of our flying tokens, and the -1/-1 our opponents get can make for some very favorable surprise trades, as well as outright killing all of our opponent's 1/1's, for which your friendly local Blood Artist thanks you. This is a nice surprise to keep up our sleeve and having multiples is useful, but it's limited by the board state, so we run 3.

Rally the Ancestors: Now this is more like it. With every single creature in our deck costing 2 or less, this card is effectively a 4 drop to bring back all of our creatures until the end of the turn. Sure, they can't attack that turn, but that isn't the plan anyways. With at least one free sacrifice outlet and one drainer either in play or in the graveyard, you can pay 4 to bring it all back, then sacrifice it all away for a ton of damage. This can also be used in a pinch to make more chump blockers for you, just be absolutely certain you can sacrifice all the ones that survive, or else they'll get exiled instead, meaning you won't be able to do it again.Having these in your opening hand isn't very useful, and we usually don't need multiples to close out a game, so we only run 2, but this is definitely a top pick when digging through your deck with scry in the later game.

THE MANA BASE:
You can't play magic without mana, it simply isn't done amongst polite company. As such, here are the lands to facilitate our play.

Swamp: They make black mana, they come into play untapped, and they are effectively immune to a lot of land hate. Oh, and they're dirt cheap, so that helps. We have more black than white in our total mana costs for the deck, plus we need it for any ability cost that cares about color, so we run more of these than any other land, but not by too wide a margin.

Plains: While we have fewer white mana symbols in our costs and effects than we do black mana, it is still the color we need for our favorite turn 1 play, and many of our cards are multi-color, AND we need 2 of them to play our favorite finisher, the only double cost card in the entire deck. As such, we keep more of these around than most decks of a similar ratio would.

Caves of Koilos: Let's be blunt, if your deck is multi-colored, you want some multi-colored lands to help things run smoother. And if you don't want to spend more on a set of dual-colored lands than you've spent on the rest of the deck put together, you get this card. If you have some other Orzhov lands lying around, they're probably a better choice than this one, as long as they come into play untapped. After all, we do have some aggro tendencies, and slow mana slows us down. Plus, while paying life for color every single time you need it isn't fun, we have enough lifegain to equal it out most of the times it will matter.

SIDEBOARD:
As wonderful as our deck is, sometimes it will have to be adjusted to deal with specific threats. While these cards may be less synergistic than the main deck, they all have very distinct purposes.

Tormod's Crypt: This is your dirt-cheap graveyard hate. It costs 0 mana to cast, 0 mana to activate, and only hates on your opponent's graveyard, not your own, so it doesn't mess with your Lingering Souls, Reassembling Skeleton, or Rally the Ancestors. It has one job, and it does it relatively well without interrupting your normal gameplan.

Bone Splinters: It's very uncommon, but there are a few cases where you may need more creature removal. While this can't kill indestructables, and sacking as a cost is usually worse than the Morbid mechanic, this card can also be better than Tragic Slip if your opponent has ungodly huge creatures or if you can't find your sacrifice engines.

Duress: Get a look at your opponent's hand and see what's going on! Good at removing planeswalkers, enchantments, or artifacts before they become a problem, as well as slowing down combo decks.

Suture Priest: This creature is a fun addition against the two types of aggro decks we struggle with the most - go wide, and burn. The extra life you gain from all of your tokens helps to prevent burn from closing out the game too fast, or the creature at least eats a burn spell that was otherwise aimed at your face. Meanwhile, it kills tokens almost on its own, totally shutting down options that go wider than your own.

Banishing Light: This is our choice card for non-creature permanent hate. While some people may choose a card like Disenchant for this slot instead due to lower mana cost and instant speed, this option allows for more flexibility in our targets, and is a better tool for dealing with Chalice of the Void, since most of our cards have CMC of 2.

Lost Legacy: A surprisingly inexpensive card that is back-breaking against combo-based decks. If they have one or two cards that they need to go off without any alternatives, this is a game ender. Becomes more useful the longer you dragged out your last game, since it gives you a better idea what has to be pulled out. It's a proactive Surgical Extraction and a Nevermore that can't be removed. A shame it can't hit artifacts or lands, but most combos don't use those two card types exclusively, so just aim for the other pieces.

And that's the deck! As with all of my decks, this will forever be a work in progress, and any feedback is welcome! Any taken suggestions will be credited at the end of the description in all future updates, and rules for card consideration are as follows:

-This is supposed to be a budget deck. No cards over $3, please.
-When suggesting a card, also include what you would remove to put it in, and why.
-While I am aware that many decks in this style add a third color, please keep it to just Orzhov colors. Three+ color mana bases simply don't work well on a budget.
-Please be aware that not all suggestions will be added in. If enough people suggest something, I'll likely trust your collective judgement over my own, but a single comment will not get me to add a card I think makes the deck weaker.

In any case, I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions, and if you like the deck, be sure to give it an upvote to help more people see it! And finally, this same deck is also posted over on Tappedout.net at http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/orzhov-budget-aristocrats/ so feel free to swing over there if you want to see all the conversation and suggestions that are occuring!