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Aristocrats in EDH
CleanBelwas:
Aristocrats is my absolute favourite way to play Magic. Here is everything I remembered to write down about it. Maybe it will help you.
What is Aristocrats?
Aristocrats is an archetype of MTG that looks to sacrifice its own creatures for value. The name comes from a deck that was popular back in Innistrad Standard that made use of Falkenrath Aristocrat and Cartel Aristocrat, as well as some chaff to sacrifice, to smash your opponents face. It was generally quite an aggressive deck with a little midrange support, but the same strategy can be adapted to be more viable in EDH.
It's worth noting that the definition of Aristocrats can be a little ambiguous depending on who you ask. Because of the cards that popularised it, many people consider Aristocrats strategies to be specifically focused around creatures sacrificing creatures for benefit, either to pump themselves, gain protection etc. This definition has broadened somewhat and it is generally acceptable to refer to any deck that sacrifices creatures for value as an Aristocrats deck regardless of the source of the sacrifice.
The Fundamentals
A good Aristocrats deck contains the three basic building blocks of the Aristocrats strategy.
1. Creatures to sacrifice
2. Ways to sacrifice them
3. Payoffs
What these are, how they should function and how many of each you should include will all be covered later on, but these three things are the core of the strategy.
Why Aristocrats?
There are a lot of upsides to playing Aristocrats:
- You’re in control. Everything you need to win the game exists within your deck. What your opponents are doing makes little to no difference.
- The deck is resilient. We’ve already covered the three building blocks of an Aristocrats deck, but there are a lot of cards that can fulfil the role of each block, and they pretty much all work interchangeably. Taking down one part of the engine will only slow it down until it can be replaced. Stopping the engine entirely is very difficult. In EDH, this is particularly advantageous for us. Without a sideboard, most ways of shutting us down entirely are narrow and therefore don’t see much play. Even graveyard hate won’t ruin us. It’ll hurt, sure, but it’s not enough to stop us entirely.
- The Payoffs are resilient. Most of the game ending payoffs come from cards like Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat. The big benefit of these cards are that they attack life totals directly. An army of tokens can’t stop a Blood Artist trigger. Additionally, the incremental nature of these effects make them difficult to stop. Stifling one Gray Merchant of Asphodel trigger is a lot easier than stifling ten Blood Artist triggers.
- The deck is reactive. When the engine is set up correctly, it can all be operated at instant speed. This allows you to bide your time and choose your moment. It also does a wonderful job of deterring your opponents from coming at you, lest you activate in response and take them out.
Why Not Aristocrats?
As with all decks, there are downsides too. The major downsides to Aristocrats are:
- It can be slow. We are looking to amass an amount of creatures to sacrifice, then sacrifice these and incrementally drain our opponents. This can be slow. Glacially slow.
- We are hurt massively when we miss one of our key pieces. For Aristocrats to function properly, we need all three of our building blocks. If we miss one, our deck will be durdling and doing a whole load of nothing.
- We need control support. Because of the nature of how Aristocrats looks to win in EDH, it needs to see itself in to the long game. As such, we tend to try and control the board so we can make it long enough to assemble our combos. If control isn’t your style, Aristocrats probably isn’t for you.
OK, we’ve covered the basics of what Aristocrats is. If you like the sound of what you’ve read so far, it’s time to start thinking about putting a deck together.
The Building Blocks
As we’ve established, our deck wants to comprise of three key components - Sacrifice Fodder, Sacrifice Outlets and Payoffs. There are lots of options for each and every one of these categories, but not all cards were created equal.
Sacrifice Fodder
Your sacrifice fodder will consist of two main components - Tokens and Recursion.
With tokens, we care about numbers. We want as many creatures as we can to keep the wheels turning. Some examples of good token generators include:
- Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
- Pawn of Ulamog
- Sifter of Skulls
- Xathrid Necromancer
- Requiem Angel
All of these cards create tokens based on what you want to be doing anyway. You’ll be casting creatures to sacrifice, and Endrek means you get more creatures. The others all make tokens when you kill your own stuff, which you’ll be doing a lot. I particularly like Pawn of Ulamog and Sifter of Skulls because the tokens they make will ramp you, but can also sacrifice themselves, which will synergise well with a lot of your payoff cards.
Cards that can naturally recur are an absolute mainstay for Aristocrat strategies too. Most of the best payoff cards won’t care about a creature being a token, but some do (especially those that will draw you cards). As such, having actual creatures that can come back over and over again will ensure you are getting maximum value from your sacrifices. Some good examples include:
- Reassembling Skeleton
- Endless Cockroaches
- Gravecrawler
- Nether Traitor
- Squee, the Immortal
Sometimes it is also worth running a subset of utility creatures that have a worthwhile trigger when they enter the battlefield and die. Things like Solemn Simulacrum, Filigree Familiar or Bitterheart Witch can all be fine options, especially on a budget, when you are in control over when they die.
Sacrifice Outlets
Oh boy. I finally have an outlet to talk about how much I love a good sacrifice outlet. But before I get into the details of why they are so good and why they arguably have a place in any deck, not just Aristocrats, let me lay down the most important foundation.
The best sacrifice outlets can sacrifice for free and at instant speed.
This truth is absolute. It is not to say that some sacrifice outlets that require an additional cost aren’t good cards in their own rights, but for free and at instant speed is always best. Always. Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and Priest of Forgotten Gods are both excellent cards, but they are not excellent sacrifice outlets.
There is a joke that says that a card that read “Sacrifice a creature: Sacrifice a creature” would see play. I mean, it’s not really a joke to be honest. I would play that card a LOT.
It comes back to being able to play reactively. You want to be able to do your thing at the opportune moment. Any time you have to pay an additional cost (be it mana, life, tapping a creature) you are limiting the amount of times you can perform that action in a turn. This limit is something you want to avoid as much as possible. Let’s say someone has just cast Path to Exile, targeting your Blood Artist. You want to be able to respond and sacrifice your Blood Artist. A Blood Artist in the graveyard is better than one in exile. Even better, let’s say someone overloads a Winds of Abandon. Now you need to sacrifice your whole board to stop it getting exiled. If you have to pay a cost to do this, you’re limiting your ability to do so. This is true for all decks and archetypes, but is especially relevant for Aristocrats. Our decks by their very nature are looking to sacrifice creatures and recur them, so putting things into the graveyard is not something we should be worried about, and a free, instant speed sac outlet is the best way to do this.
Now, we’ve established what makes a good sacrifice outlet, let’s look at some examples of the best ones. No prizes for guessing my first choice.
- Ashnod’s Altar. Hand’s down the best sacrifice outlet of all time.
- Phyrexian Altar. This is close second, but 2 colourless is more useful more of the time than one of any colour.
- Spawning Pit. An underrated gem. Sacs for free at instant speed, and makes more things for you to sac.
- Viscera Seer. All the stuff a sac outlet needs, plus card advantage.
- Altar of Dementia. A little win con all of its own in the right place.
- Fallen Angel. A threat that has to be dealt with, lest it kill you.
- Goblin Bombardment. Combo piece extraordinaire.
- Greater Good. Who doesn’t like cards?
- Falkenrath Aristocrat and Cartel Aristocrat
- Phyrexian Plaguelord. Sac outlet that doubles as removal that can even get around indestructible.
- Butcher of the Horde. Big lad, doesn’t mess about.
- Yahenni, Undying Partisan <3
There are many, many others, but the key is that they all operate for free and at instant speed.
Payoffs
Once we have our fodder and we have a way of sacrificing it, we want to to be able gain all the benefits we can from this. Payoffs come in many shapes and sizes and offer all kinds of upsides from cards, mana, drain and gain, removal and more. The important part is to pay attention to what causes it to trigger.
Some cards care about who owns the card. Some cards care about whether or not the creature is a token. Some cards don’t care about anything, only that a creature has died.
These should all be considered when determining what you want to be sacrificing. If your payoffs tend to care about the creature not being a token, focus on using recurring creatures as fodder.
Common Payoff cards for Aristocrats include:
- Blood Artist
- Zulaport Cutthroat
- Falkenrath Noble
- Cruel Celebrant
- Syr Konrad, the Grim
- Vindictive Vampire
- Midnight Reaper
- Grim Haruspex
- Moldervine Reclamation
- Harvester of Souls
- Smothering Abomination
- Pitiless Plunderer
- Pawn of Ulamog
- Sifter of Skulls
Synergies
There are a number of cards that synergise with your strategies, but might not necessarily be considered payoffs (either because they don’t get you closer to winning or their effects are situational / dependant). They are still worth considering and running because their benefits are huge.
In general, a synergistic card would be considered one that triggers when a creature dies. This covers quite a broad spectrum of cards, so I'll highlight a few examples below.
Grave pact effects (Grave Pact, Dictate of Erebos, Butcher of Malakir). These are excellent in Aristocrat decks because they contribute towards the control elements touched upon earlier. You are going to be sacrificing your own creatures anyway, and these cards mean that doing this makes it incredibly difficult for your opponents to maintain a board presence and only increases your chances of staying alive into the late game, where your deck will shine. Additionally, a lot of cards in your deck will likely benefit from your opponents creatures dying too. Blood Artist, Falkenrath Noble, Yahenni etc. will all love 4 triggers from each sacrifice.
I would also put cards like Skullclamp here. An incredibly potent draw engine, especially if your fodder is made up of little tokens, but there is a cost associated with the equipping so I would consider it more of a synergy than a pay off.
My final example for synergies would be cards like Athreos, God of Passage. An undoubtedly strong card for these strategies, but the decision being left to your opponent means you might not always get the result you want. Draining for three or a creature back to hand is never bad, but it might be you wanted the creature and they paid the life.
Picking a Commander
There are many facets to deciding who to run as your Commander for an Aristocrats deck. I am a huge advocate for playing the cards you want to play so I’m not going to say “these Commanders are good and these are not”, but I will offer advice on some considerations that are worth making.
Colours
There are a decent amount of colour combinations that can make a viable Aristocrats deck, and they all contain Black. Black is by far and away the best colour for these decks. All the best payoff cards are in black. All the best recursion is in Black. All the best tutors are in Black. You’re welcome to try and build a deck without it, but all the best ones will be focused on Black.
Mono Black
Black is where all the best Aristocrat cards are. Mono black is great because it lets you play all of these cards while also giving you the benefit of making effective use of other Mono Black pay off cards like Cabal Coffers and Gray Merchant of Asphodel. As with all mono coloured decks, it will have its shortcomings but makes for a much easier, cheaper and more consistent mana base.
Orzhov (Black/White)
Adding white gives us access to a host of strong Aristocrat cards (Teysa Karlov, Cruel Celebrant, Cartel Aristocrat), while also giving us access to some powerful token generators (good for sacrificing) and some more utility removal, especially for artifacts and enchantments. As with any EDH deck, additional colours means your mana base is going to run slower or cost more, which is worth keeping in mind.
Rakdos (Black/Red)
Adding red gives us access to a host of creatures with built in recursion. From Phoenixes to Squee, there is a decent package of recurring creatures available in red. This can be a huge upside as some (though not all) payoff cards are especially effective when it’s a non-token creature that dies. There is also a strong package of sacrifice outlets available with the inclusion of red such as Falkenrath Aristocrat, Goblin Bombardment and Thermopod.
Mardu (Black/White/Red)
Mardu is where it all began. It is a tried and tested colour combination that looks to get the best of all worlds. It has all the upside of the previous colour combinations mentioned, and all the downside that comes from a three colour mana base in EDH. If Mardu is where you want to be, expect your lands to be slow or expensive. An excellent choice, but not where I’d recommend if you’re building on a budget.
Additionally, there still isn’t an excellent Mardu Commander for Aristocrats. More on why this is and what makes a good Commander coming up.
Dimir (Black/Blue)
A road less travelled, but Dimir can definitely provide the shell of a solid Aristocrats deck. The addition of blue gives you access to all the control pieces blue likes as well as some tribal synergies with serious potential. Dimir is famously the colour combination most associated with Zombies and there are is a vast selection of cards that offer payoffs specific for Zombies such as Plague Belcher, Diregraf Captain and Vengeful Dead. Dimir also has a decent selection of viable Commanders that offer sacrifice outlets or recursion to help get your engine going, not to mention the inherent recursion Zombies tend to have.
While I haven’t covered every colour combination here, that does not mean that these are the only ones that are viable. Sultai (Black/Green/Blue) and Jund (Black/Green/Red) in particular can also offer viable shells for Aristocrats. Sultai is a combination synonymous with graveyards and recursion, and Jund can do wonderful things with tokens and sacrifice.
The Commander
When it comes to deciding who should be at the helm of your deck, my advice would be to follow one simple mantra - Your Aristocrats Commander should operate as one of your key building blocks.
Your Commander should ideally either be a good sac outlet, be able to create fodder to sacrifice, or provide significant pay off for your sacrifices.
Some good examples for each option include:
Sacrifice Outlets
- Yahenni, Undying Partisan <3
- Yawgmoth, Thran Physician
- Prossh, Skyraider of Kher
- Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
Fodder
- Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
- Sek’Kuar, Deathkeeper
- Edgar Markov
- Meren of Clan Nel Toth
- Teysa, Orzhov Scion
- Gisa and Geralf
Payoffs
- Teysa Karlov
- Judith, the Scourge Diva
- Korvold, Fae-Cursed King
Ultimately, your commander filling in one of the gaps is the most important thing. As I stated in the downsides of Aristocrats, it requires several key pieces to function, so having constant access to one of these pieces is incredibly valuable.
Unfortunately, despite being generally one of the best colour combinations for Aristocrats, Mardu doesn’t have a stand out Commander that excels for this strategy. Edgar Markov’s token generation is good, but that deck can win just through all out aggression anyway. Queen Marchesa offers a solid Mardu commander that has token generation or card draw, but Mardu still falls short of a truly excellent Aristocrats commander.
-- UPDATE --
With the release of C20, we have seen the partner pairing of Trynn, Champion of Freedom and Silvar, Devourer of the Free. These are very good Aristocrats for EDH in Mardu colours. Having two of your three building blocks in the Command Zone is huge. For my own personal preference, the casting cost is a little too high and the restrictions are a little too narrow to make them exceptional, but they are certainly very good and very viable. I especially like them for someone new to Aristocrats. The consistency they offer is very nice.
----
Deckbuilding and Ratios
Aristocrats as a strategy is one that is well suited to the 8x8 theory of deck building. You pick out 8 key categories, choose 8 cards that fill those categories, add in 36 lands and you have a deck. The reason this is a solid starting point for Aristocrats is because the decks engine has several pieces that all need to be in place at once to function properly. You want to make sure you are including many options for each of your building blocks so that you hit them consistently and have the aforementioned redundancies in case one or more the pieces are dealt with.
Your first draft of a deck might look like this:
8 x Sacrifice Outlets
8 x Token Generators
8 x Pay off Cards
8 x Ramp
8 x Card Draw
8 x Removal
8 x Synergies
8 x Utility / Meta calls / Additional support
Note that your commander is included in these cards.
The next thing to do would be to determine which role your Commander is fulfilling in your deck. Having constant access to your Commander means you need to concern yourself less with hitting that component out of you 99. This means you can reliably remove 2 or 3 cards out of that category and devote a few more slots to something else.
For example, I have a mono black Aristocrats deck with Yahenni, Undying Partisan as the Commander. Yahenni is an excellent sacrifice outlet that is also able to protect itself and has a cmc of only 3. As such, I can get Yahenni out early, it will likely stay out for a decent stretch of the game and if I do need to recast it, it’s CMC is low enough that the tax is rarely an issue. All of this means that I don’t need to run as many sac outlets in my deck and have more room for other things.
In terms of what those other things should be, the two best replacements to fill these slots are card draw and sacrifice fodder. Magic, especially EDH, remains quite a creature centric game for the most part. Even decks that are looking to combo win will still use creatures to draw cards, destroy permanents and bring back things from the graveyard. Every Commander is a creature. By dedicating extra slots to fodder, you provide yourself with blockers to help see you into the late game and assemble your engine. Even if you don’t have it set up yet, you need to stay alive long enough to get there and negating damage and not making yourself an easy target is an effective way of doing this. A board of blockers and no sac outlet is much better than a board of sac outlets and no creatures.
Also, the more cards you draw, the more likely you are to find your missing pieces. If you ever have a slot or two to fill for any deck, a couple of extra card draw spells are never going to be bad.
Now your deck starts to look more like this:
4 x Sacrifice Outlets
10 x Token Generators
8 x Pay off Cards
8 x Ramp
10 x Card Draw
8 x Removal
8 x Synergies
8 x Utility / Meta calls / Additional support
You can likely tweak this further still. As I’ve mentioned, your engine might require a bit of time to get set up and you need to keep yourself alive long enough to make it happen. It is then a good idea to drop a few cards from the Synergies and Utility section in favour of more removal / control elements. Cheap removal spells picking off key targets or letting your opponents commit to the board then wiping it are effective ways of buying yourself the time you need, which leads me nicely onto…
Strategies and Playstyles
It’s a Keeper
Knowing what we do about our strategies, our ideal starting hand would include a repeatable source of card advantage. Something like Phyrexian Arena or Greed would be a good start. It’s worth mulliganing quite aggressively for this. We have a lot of components to hit and the best way to do this quickly is to draw lots of cards. Opening hands with Tutors are also worth keeping, assuming casting them isn’t too far off.
Buying Time
As we’ve established, one of the biggest hurdles Aristocrats has to overcome is making it to the point in the game where the engine can be assembled. The main ways we do this are packing removal or flooding the board with blockers. Being in Black and having access to the best removal and some quite formidable token generators mean this isn’t usually too much of a challenge.
While the getting is good
Aristocats is generally dependant on small, incremental advantage. Killing three opponents with a Blood Artist is going to take a while. With that in mind, it is usually worth getting in for early damage when possible. Generally speaking, Aristocrats decks run fairly low to the ground and can often deploy a reasonable force of creatures in the early turns of the game. It’s worth making an aggressive start if you can. You’ll generally be able to stabilise and absorb any crack back with your removal and chump blockers. All damage you can get in in the early game is less you have to do in the late game. Additionally, a lot of payoff comes in the form of drain and gain so you can often reliably take a few hits knowing you’ll be able to recoup the life again later.
When to deploy
While Aristocrats can be played incredibly responsively, it’s key pieces are telegraphed from a mile away. We are usually fine to deploy our tokens or our recurring creatures, but it’s usually worth waiting on a payoff until we have all of the other pieces. A Blood Artist will not stick around so waiting to drop it until the turn you can use it effectively is always the best option.
Threat Assessment
As with all decks, good and accurate threat assessment is important. While we may find ourselves running an above average amount of removal, that doesn’t mean we should be firing it off unnecessarily. This is equally true when it comes to determining who to attack in your early aggression. Focus on the opponent most likely to put a spanner in your works.
When to Sacrifice
One of the most important decisions to make when piloting an Aristocrats deck is deciding when to sacrifice a creature and when to leave it. Luckily, we’ve chosen our sacrifice outlets well so we have the most options available to us. Generally speaking, the correct answer is to wait until the last possible moment. It can be very tempting to start sacrificing creatures as a turn cycle ends and you are about to move into your turn again, but this will often result in less value from that creature than you could otherwise get. For example, one of the most common tricks in the mid-game an Aristocrats deck will use is to declare a creature as a blocker, then sacrifice it before combat damage. Sacrificing a creature before your turn starts to draw an extra card is tempting, but the creature has then died without getting the most out of it. Given that our sacrifice outlets can operate for free and at instant speed, there is usually no downside to waiting and drawing for turn. You don’t lose anything. You can still sacrifice your creature for the same benefit, but now you’ve seen an extra card and have the most information available to you possible. As much as we want to be sacrificing our creatures for value, don’t be in a hurry to do so. Leave them around as long as possible. Only sacrifice when you have to, or when you’ve reached a critical mass to close out the game. That’s exactly why we choose our sacrifice outlets with such care. So that we can always react with the most information available to us.
The only real exceptions to this rule are when you need to dig to find an answer that you can only use on your turn (for example, you know your deck has a Nevinyrral’s Disk in it and you need to find it quick to deal with an enchantment), or if you can loop at instant speed (for example, you have 6 black mana open and a Reassembling Skeleton and Ashnod’s Altar. Loop the Skeleton 6 times because when you untap, your board state is the same and you have only gained).
Winning the Game
We usually look to win the game by the incremental value afforded to us from our payoff cards. Drain and gain is the most prevalent way actually win the game and the cards we draw and mana we make along the way helps us to get there. That being said, it is not our only avenue to victory. If we hit one of our Grave Pact style effects, we can keep the board clear and use our army of tokens to deal some good old fashioned combat damage. If we are in Mono Black we can look to make use of things like Gray Merchant of Asphodel to finish off our ailing opponents.
Ultimately though, Aristocrats remains a slow, control based, incremental deck, and so it is usually a good idea to include one or two big finishers to help close out the game. Fortunately, there are a few cards that can perform as big finishers while playing into our strategies at the same time. Some of the best big finishers for these kinds of strategies are cards like:
- Torment of Hailfire
- Exsanguinate
- Debt to the Deathless
Big X spells that drain our opponents and gain us life. These are particularly effective when our sacrifice outlet produces mana. We wipe our board to Ashnod’s Altar / Phyrexian Altar / Thermopod, generating a huge amount of mana while at the same time triggering our Blood Artist / Grim Haruspex / Moldervine Reclamation / Zulaport Cutthroat, then we pump all of that mana into one of these big X spells and finish off our opponents.
The other upside to these spells is that they scale with the game. If you have one early on the in the game, you can use it if needed with the mana you have available to keep you alive. Especially useful if you’ve been a target of early aggression.
An Example
Here is my pet deck. I love it so.
https://deckstats.net/decks/132604/1592789-naturellement-les-aristocrats#show_description
So, that just about sums up Aristocrats in EDH. I think I’ve covered all of the most important information. I’ll update as necessary if anything has been missed, needs changing or becomes out of date.
As ever, all feedback is welcome. If you feel I’ve got something wrong, missed something important or just spelled something wrong, please just let me know and I’ll look at getting it updated.
WWolfe:
Good read!
WizardSpartan:
Absolutely fantastic, CleanBelwas. Love it. What would you call Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, if not an Aristocrats commander? Do you not consider her an Aristocrats commander because she doesn't provide any of the 3 key components you mentioned? I would argue that, while she doesn't inherently provide fodder creatures, she can "make" more by getting them back from your graveyard.
Overall, I love it. Rather than focus on a single deck, you made a fantastic resource for any player looking to build an Aristocrats deck in EDH.
Edit: I really hope one of the many, many EDH products this year will contain a Mardu commander with some sort of the Aristocrats strategy stapled onto it. I especially would love it in a precon, as a good way for someone to enter the format.
Edit 2: You wanted us to point out spelling errors, so under the Orzhov color combination, you spelled the Aristocrat in Cartel Aristocrat wrong. Cheers! :D
CleanBelwas:
--- Quote from: WizardSpartan on March 30, 2020, 05:15:00 pm ---Absolutely fantastic, CleanBelwas. Love it. What would you call Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, if not an Aristocrats commander? Do you not consider her an Aristocrats commander because she doesn't provide any of the 3 key components you mentioned? I would argue that, while she doesn't inherently provide fodder creatures, she can "make" more by getting them back from your graveyard.
Overall, I love it. Rather than focus on a single deck, you made a fantastic resource for any player looking to build an Aristocrats deck in EDH.
Edit: I really hope one of the many, many EDH products this year will contain a Mardu commander with some sort of the Aristocrats strategy stapled onto it. I especially would love it in a precon, as a good way for someone to enter the format.
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the positive feedback guys.
I wanted to keep it more generic as I know more than I own. My decks are deliberately kept reasonably budget and casual so as to not alienate my playgroup, so while my Yahenni deck employs these strategies, it's certainly not the best example of them.
With regards to Alesha, I thought about mentioning her but I personally don't feel she quite suits the Aristocrats strategy. I personally see her as more aggression and value. Her recursion is nice, but the need to attack and the narrowness of what she can return all make for a different experience in my opinion. She'd have been amazing in that old Innistrad deck, which was hyper aggressive, but in EDH I don't think her strengths lie in Aristocrats. Especially in the late game, Aristocrats wants to be sat back doing nothing. Being forced into unprofitable attacks so that we can get our recursion is not something we want to be doing if we can avoid it. I'm not saying she can't be build with an aristocrats strategy in mind (I really am an advocate for playing what you love, and she can get back some key pieces like Viscera Seer and Blood Artist), but it's not where her strengths lie in my opinion. I don't think she suits the long game and Aristocrats wants to see the long game.
I'm with you man, I'd LOVE a proper Mardu aristocrats Commander. Just someone in those colours that can sac a creature for free at instant speed. That's all I want. I don't even care what the effect is. "Sacrifice a creature: You gain 0 life" is good enough for me.
WizardSpartan:
Hehe, "non-profitable attacks in the late game."
It's sort of sad how hard it is to set Alesha up. I have to get fodder (only 1 source of it, though), a sac outlet, a payoff, andddd some way to make her able to attack. The shell is solid, in my opinion, she is just lackluster (just talking about Aristocrats, I've seen Alesha stax & it's disgusting). I don't even necessarily need a commander that is a sacrifice outlet, since many of my creatures can self sacrifice (Siege-Gang Commander, Sling-Gang Lieutenant, Mogg War Marshal, etc.), but please just give me a better recursion engine. Please. Mardu Aristocrats has almost all the cards you would want for an Aristocrats deck (as you have pointed out) and the removal is phenomenal also.
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