Aristocrats in Cube | Archetype Breakdown | #101

In this episode of Powerful Nothing, we take a deep dive into one of the most popular cube archetypes, Aristocrats. We touch on the key things you need to include to make it work in your own cube, and importantly what to avoid.

Timecodes:
1:04 - Archetype Overview
10:09 - What do you need to support aristocrats?
18:01 - What are our favourite token makers?
28:14 - What are our favourite sac outlets?
38:14 - What are our favourite payoffs?
43:59 - How can we add combos
49:43 - What is the deck like to play?
56:33 - Things to avoid?

Cards Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/U2agKO7iuU2JcwTabe3Inw

Video Version: https://youtu.be/uS91UdK0esc

Cube Skeleton Episode: https://youtu.be/92aS4ZU_nd8

My Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/2sweet
The Treat Yourself Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/treatyourself
James Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/ba642a54-a6c7-4587-b97e-1d95429c59b5
MTGO Vintage Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/modovintage

Social Links: https://linktr.ee/toosweetmtg

Substack: https://substack.com/@powerfulnothing

Runaway by Diamond Ace | https://soundcloud.com/diamond-ace-music
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

Transcript

0:03

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Powerful Nothing and Magic The Gathering Cube podcast. I'm your host, Dan, and as always, I'm joined by James James. How have you been this week? I forget I've been good. The UK continues to be very warm. We all can't cope with it, but we're carrying on now will be fine. It's only it's only 30 degrees. We've got another five degrees before we spend a full five minutes complaining about the weather. But no. Let's work on today. We have an awesome topic today we're going to be doing a bit of a deep dive into aristocrats in cube. It's always been a really fun archetype. And today, yeah, we're going to give some tips and tricks to support it and how to draft it in your own cubes. Before we get into that main topic, a quick bit of housekeeping. There will be a card gallery down in the show notes below. If you want to see any of the cards that we're talking about today, along with a link to a YouTube version, if you want to see the pretty pictures move around the screen. There will also be time codes. If you want to jump around to specific sections of the episode. And while you're down there, please consider giving the podcast a five star review. Thumbs up! All that good stuff greatly helps us out. All right, preamble out the way. Let's crack on with our main topic. So, James, let's talk about aristocrats. 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, RAF aristocrat. Maybe that's a name. But Ascot is an oxide based around sacrificing creatures for some sort of advantage. So this can be, just sacrificing to get a good sacrifice trick, or sacrificing to trigger. Some of you have other effects. But that might be drawing cards that might be dealing damage with something like a blood artist. But that's how we get to trying to guess ahead in this deck. It's by, by sacrificing our creatures. And it can, it can have quite a few different survival game plans. You can have very aggressive versions with with salt one mana creatures for cursed and looking to get in damage early and then train them out. Or you can have more grindy versions looking to solve a cue card advantage with your sacrifice triggers? There's even some combo stuff you can do as well. I think for, for grateful combos, for example, go, go! Very well in that aristocrats set. Yeah, definitely some nice overlap because I do like a lot of creature base combos revolve around like the three sacrifice outlets, which kind of you get inherently and you need an I've squared deck. So that's all nice. And in terms of like cubes. James, what type of cubes do you think an aristocrat deck can show up in? So say generally sort of mid to low power level. Well, it can be a really strong strategy. It, but the, the sort of full on aristocrat stack tends to not quite get them the highest power level cubes, just 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. But being set in sort of high power cubes, you do see you know, very little pockets of sacrifice synergy, you know, even you know some of the nice powerful cards and ice cubes, things like guts, board side bombardiers do involve sacrificing cards and you can build around those a little bit, but you certainly don't have anything that would you would call an aristocrat stack. But it is very common in sort of mid power level cubes, I think. Back to service stack. That has to be one of the most commonly listed archetypes when you look at those cubes. Yeah, it's kind of like, Azure Aureus fliers. So Lesniak plus one was on counters, racked or sacrificed that kind of stuff to us aristocrats. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think often you see it listed and it doesn't quite come together that much because, if, there's not deep enough support or sometimes the support just isn't, very all pushing in the same direction. So for example, you might see a bunch of v one manner aggressive creatures pushing you towards an aggressive aristocrats build. But then like a sacrifice that that said more of towards the climb d cards advantage end and you end up with not a particularly coherent game plan, even when you do get a bunch of the theoretically good aristocrats cards. So I think it is one where, you know, people often, I think, tend to default to building this by, just adding a bunch of cards they think of as good aristocrats cards and not really thinking through what they actually want the deck to look like. And, that can certainly cause some issues when you actually try and draft a thing. Yeah, definitely. I think this can kind of fall into a similar, sort of hole that kind of like when we talked about the graveyard deck a few weeks ago, kind of they can fall into the trap of, well, I'll just throw some graveyard cards in and let the players sort it out. It's kind of a similar thing with aristocrats like, yeah, the theory behind it is, oh, I want sacrifice, happiness. I want things to die. I want things that benefit. But kind of like actually tailoring it to what the deck is actually end up going to look like is going to be really important. Yeah. For sure. And, and you want to be thinking as well, like about how committed to you all to the aristocrats thing, like supporting this as a full fledged archetype of more just of a package, because if it's more of a package, you really want to emphasize sort of strong standalone cards, which just gets better with some sacrifice synergies. Whereas if if it's a full blown archetype, then you're going to want some more redundancy. So you might end up being okay playing some sort of slightly weaker standalone cards because they enable, you'll say that choose fairly well. And it's not that any of these approaches are vital. You just need to be thinking about these decisions upfront as you're building your cube. Not just hopefully not just like ruffling through your box and finding like 30 cards to look like, so good in that sequence. Exactly. I think my general rule with with an aristocrat deck. Oh, I with an aristocrat style environment is to like the lower powered the cube is the more it's like an archetype, the more it's like it's what ragdolls or a color combination involving black is doing. The more powerful the cube get, the more it's like a package, the more it's like doing cool stuff with goblin bombardment. That's kind of strategy. Adjacent to, oh, you kind of go along with that. James. Yeah, it can be cool stuff with, can be, you know, just in enabling some of these really high power level cards that involve sacrificing stuff, you know, like your own, you might have like, your own either peaceful psych outlet is like The Alchemist, for example, because you're just a super powerful card and it's, you don't have to build around it that much for it to be worth including. Whereas, you know, if you're like trying to include viscera here, for example, it's you need a lot more effort to make that card actually good. Yeah. And I sorry. I just think we touched we touched a little bit on colors, but kind of like in terms of colors, like we've mentioned black and we mentioned black dots. It's are we fair to say that kind of like if you want to support aristocrat. So you have to support it in black. But like how what colors can we compare? Can we combine with black James to kind of give us depth? And how do the different colors give us different options? Yeah for sure. So I think Victus is probably the most part the most popular. It tends to lead a little bit more leaner, a little bit more aggressive. But it doesn't have to that certainly brings that element. You can also certainly black white and black green are both very viable. Black Queen tends to lean a bit more into the cash and stuff. It's very grindy. Black white is really good at for like very new out stuff. There's a lot of really powerful black like gold cards specifically around that. Plus, white gives you really good token making, which is something aristocrats is definitely interested in to to get that farther sacrifice with, let's say blue. Black is for anyone you tend not to see very often. I guess that seems tough. Yeah, I guess you can do some, like, zombie tribal stuff. Can do a little bit of first. That's true. Generally it's, but that's not where it's at. About any of the other black color combinations can be viable. Certainly. Yeah. I'd agree. And like when I supported aristocrats in my cubes in the past, I like I think we mentioned this in our episode last week. They're kind of like, when I had aristocrats in my main group, it was it was kind of three colors. I and I tried to to the decks a little bit to just so it wasn't like, aristocrat schmalz and you didn't end up with, like, a suit style environment, but it was more like. Yet the dos aristocrats was way more aggressive. You had kind of like cars like Judas and like, Mayhem devil, that kind of like a leading you to kind of like, get as much damage and as quickly as possible. Whereas in also where I was also supporting aristocrats, I had someone like that, like some of the cool drain effects, like there's like a little core, but also like I called like Lloris can go quite nicely in, but like it's a more grindy style of card in an aristocrat deck because he kind of like, I suck my thing, I replay it. That's more grinding than like the, it's it's it's slower, but a bit more, a bit more resilient and like, and yeah, I found, like I found that to be quite nicely, I found that to work I quite nicely, but like you can definitely make it work with any kind of, any black X color combination that we've mentioned. Obviously apart from blue aristocrats I think is certainly the premier home for the non companions. Lowest. Right. It's you just have so much so many cheap creatures for your proactively putting in your graveyard of all that research and stuff actually works out very, very well. No, exactly. In terms of the deck itself, we've mentioned some different card types. Let's actually give some examples. James. Kind of broadly speaking, like what does an aristocrat deck need to function? What things need to exist in a cube. And if you're then drafting it, do you need in your deck to make an aristocrat deck actually work? Yes. I say get your synergies going this off three key categories three ingredients if you like, which are really necessary, but certainly some cards can fill multiple of these roles at the same time. I'd say the three things we really need. Sack fodder like disposable creatures. This can be tokens, or it can just be creatures that are worth less than a card. You know you don't want to be sacrifice thing. A creature which didn't do anything else for you. Like you don't want to just be playing my two mana card. It doesn't do anything when it enters the battlefield, and then I sacrifice it. That's generally not going to be a good deal for you, but if you're two mana cards, say through your card on the way in, or had a trigger when it did, it granted you some more value along the way, and that can be fine. I'll say just token generators are great. Obviously that's the source of of creatures, which, didn't cost you much to get into play so we can sacrifice them and still feel good. Pretty good about, like, I card, like, lingering souls goes so hard in our scratched deck because it's one card for four bodies. Exactly. And we love that so much that so much is sufficient. Then we obviously need sacrifice out that space to sacrifice our creatures. So yeah, you can really come the end up for a fantastic that says if all my creatures die, my opponent is dead. But I can't manufacture a way to ask for that to happen. So we we really need some sacrifice out. Let's ideally sacrifice out. That's the don't cost manner to activate. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Like no matter like that. This is it's kinda like a golden rule. No matter what the power level of your cube is, because there are commons that are free sack outlets, things like to go husk, that like, like, turn a black has a free sacrifice on it. We never want to be curtailed by manner with this deck. We want to be able to sacrifice them at instant speed whenever we want. And the free sacrifice outlets are so important to the stack. Like it's almost not worth running if you don't do that. Yeah, for sure. And a big reason why as well, if they have to be free by is, it's often not like I'm sacrificing one thing at ten. So a lot of times it's like I'm sacrificing nothing and then I'm sacrificing ten things in a turn, you know? And we don't want to be we don't want to be held back by mana for for bam, we can do that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then the final thing which we need, which sometimes the sacrifice outlet can double up as fast, but we need to pay off. Now, some of our sacrifice outlets are going to be their own payoffs. Think about something like Yakima. Two black, black, two for protection from humans has a discard ability we don't care about that can pay a life psychic feature to put a minus one minus one counter on a creature into our card. That is its own payoff, right? You're sacrificing creatures to kill that creatures and draw yourself cards? We don't need anything else to be trickling along the way. That, But, yeah, it's kind of expensive to cast. And if we want to look at the cheaper ones there, we might need a payoff. For example, if your, sacrifice outlet was this for a save, for example, which is, one mana one one, you can sacrifice a creature. Subscribe on. We're not going to feel good about just actively sacrificing a bunch of creatures to spy on top of our deck. That's that's generally going to be worth less from the creature we sacrifice. So if that's our suck out that we want some other payoffs along the way. So that might be something like a blood artist to drain them out. That's for two mana, zero one whenever a creature dies, we train our opponents. One Oh, it might be something like grim horror specs, maybe, or Midnight Viper vs, closet dwellers cards. When creatures die. And but yeah, we want something else that's triggering and going on the sac when we're doing our sacrificing. Mayhem devil. Also really powerful one here. Yeah. And those cards are really important because that's really what helps give this deck reach, like the the blood out of this or that or the payoffs. That's what actually makes the deck tick and make it scary. Like it's you're trying to make the math miserable for your opponent. Basically. Like if it's a blood artist in play, you're trying to get them to down, you're trying to get them down to just enough life. So that if you sack your whole board, that's the final five points of damage. Or if your payoffs like something I like the nantyglo like I mentioned, that's two in a black, 2 to 6 creature. This creature gets the supers two. And then to turn the kind of dream scenario in lower power level cubes is you have like two of these effects out. The opponent has one blocker, you attack with both of them. They can't block both. You sack your whole board to the one that's unblocked, and that gets through for an obscene amount of damage. It's kind of basically like like it's a different way of killing them to to a blood artist. But the point is, is that as James touched on earlier, we're going to sack our whole board in one go when it's really most optimal. And like, it's kind of almost it's like the final bits of damage to push us over the edge. That's kind of where we're kind of going with this. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You have a lot of different angles of attack as well, right? Because, the Natsuko two, for example, it is shocking how early in the game that card becomes must block. And at a certain point it just becomes like the abyss, right? Even if you can't kill them right away, they just having to face something in the way because you're always threatening to sacrifice your whole blood. And Kelvin, and that can be very powerful in a long game also. But like a lot of white blood access is so powerful. And why it's in my mind, like, still one of the best, if not the best to beat these effects. Despite lots of modern, more modern iterations on it is that it triggers off anything dying. You don't have. It's it's not like mayhem level where it has to be sacrificed. It's not like a lot of ones that indexes your creatures. So, if just combat happens, blood artist triggers so many times, you know, and you can you can win a lot of games that you have no right to win. Just because you're blocking loads. And you have a blood artist in play and your opponent, it's like, I've been winning this game for for the last ten tens. Yeah, you've been about to die all that time. But somehow, like the blood Arceus player, despite being on the back foot the whole game, the blood of this player is on 15 of their opponents on five. You know, and it's it can be really scary to play against. Yeah. No, I agree like like like like in my, in the current iteration of my cube, I'm not supporting full aristocrat's, but like there's a couple of things that oddly sacrifice creatures. Stuff like. Yeah, like we mentioned, Goblin bombardments and Yog more today. They're just in my queue because they're good cards. So I've kind of put Blood Artist and like, my apprentice back in my cube because, like, yeah, I like that. They're very powerful. They can close out our game and that with like a cup with, like, the tiniest of arrows of the tiniest of aristocrats energies can just lead to a deck. But like, I'm this is kind of so, so we've kind of gone in detail in some of those sections, but but it's actually kind of talk about things that we actually like in those different sections. So the three key parts of an aristocrat deck, the token makers, something that puts things on the board for us to sacrifice our sacrifice outlets and, kind of payoffs. There's actually deep dive into some different ones that we like. So kind of, I think, firstly, like this touch on token makers. I think they kind of missed out because it also kind of with the different colors, shows us what what they can offer. James. So like let's start with black for example. Because, because we know in our aristocrat deck we're going to have black. What are your favorite, repeatable ways of making tokens or bodies in black for an Ascot deck? Yeah. For sure. So we have a couple of really strong ones. Head and as with all of these categories, the best ones are the ones that are just good cards in their own right and instantly get a bunch better when we have these sacrifice synergies, right? So think about better. Blossom, like blossom is a card for, has seen a ton of play across a bunch of different formats in magic without anyone ever sacrificing a fairy. But if we do have a sacrifice fairies for value, it gets super, super powerful. It can just run away with game on turn two, but you can also play it on ten to. You've accumulated 4 or 5 fairies, and then you start sacrificing them. And that's how you close out the game. But if you're 1 to 1, a bit more redundancy for that. For this effects, you can look at creatures like, jade, dark color of Naphtali is quite good. That's for, That's one that makes a decayed zombie every turn. So the tokens don't do a lot on their own, but they do, that they get sacrificed. You'll get another one if you're getting a good payoff from that. They're quite strong. It's also quite nice for the fact that the decayed zombies can kill themselves by attacking. So, even if you're missing a sack out left. But you have a good trigger, sometimes you can just very ability to proactively kill your own creatures is quite nice. Then if we're looking outside of black like that, has a bunch of really good options. Like, for example, master variants are quite nice here. And are probably cards that are going to be in a bunch of your cubes anyway, rather than specific includes for, for aristocrats. Yeah, yeah. For for me, that's one of the key reasons why ragdolls actually, leans more aggressive is because its best way of making tokens is on things that are turning sideways, like the but like black, for example. Like, yeah, you mentioned, Jada, but you also have things like a fear monster that they get kind of like that almost want you to kind of like hold down the board, but like, you get you get their value by just like passing the turn. Whereas with red we get the value by turning things sideways. That so so therefore the whole deck is lent more aggressive because of that. Like, yeah, like the classic goblin robin monster is goblin rebel monster two in a red two two creature Goblin Moria. Other government creatures you control attack each combat available so it's not even a choice. At the beginning of combat. On your turn, create A11 red goblin creature token with haste and whenever Goblin run. Most attacks, I guess, was almost one until 910 for each of the goblin, for each other attacking Goblin. So this has the word attack on it. Like twice. It's telling you what it's. It's leading you down the rabbit hole of this is what we are doing in red. And that's why react is way more aggressive than some of the other guys, because to an extent, we don't have the choice. We are going in. Yeah for sure. And sometimes these decks can live in that middle ground right between aristocrats and just go wide aggro like you can have decks where it's like, sometimes I kill you with my tokens, there's a trumpet blast, and sometimes I kill you of my tokens because there's a suck out that in the blood assets, you know? And those can both be strong. I'm aware it's not actually trumpet blasts because we live in 2026. But, you know, some of some, some powerful not enough data to have that effect. And what other types of effects are that, James, that we could use in the slot of like want of like a card that is in our deck to die basically. Yeah. So enough one that works quite well is just recursive creatures. So creatures that return themselves from the graveyard to play or to your hand, there's a couple of different like, variants of this. There's certainly one which has a ton of redundancy for is very aggressive leading versions of this effect. There's so many specifically one mana black creatures with two power that come to terms themselves in the graveyard. Think things like guts of Bones, forsaken, Minor Blood Sect champion as a ton of redundancy hair, grave quality, even. And what these do for you is you play them on time on. They kind of get in a bunch of points of damage early, without requiring any synergies. Just cause they have two power of one mana. And that means that you know your blood off. This is so much scarier when your opponent's on ten because you attacked them a bunch of time with. And so with your dorky little creatures, you'll find to like, throw them away to get a toxin. So they're just going to come back. Just give you like, an example for you. So, Guts of Bones is a single black for a two, one and two taps in pay one a black for it from your graveyard to your hand. Like, say, only turn your turn. If an opponent lost slices, then, And these are just creatures. We're fine throwing into our opponents pockets to get some damage from that. Later on, we could start sacrificing them for value. We get that grind plan going off stack my guy, bring my guy back like we're not going to want to do it, Alex. It tends to be a bunch of mana investment, but later on that can be an engine. And if we're getting damage out of that engine, that can be for each. So we need there are like slower versions of things, things like reassembling skeleton. Which is definitely for lower power ones. But I do love that card. Yeah. Yes. Because, if you want to lean more into a vine kind of version, you can you can go more down that road. But of course, it is lower power level. But the these can be strong and especially if your payoffs and your stack outlets are also leaning aggressive, then the B one mana two one tribal can can certainly be a direction to go with these. Yeah, I do love a recursive aggressive creature. Like I'm kind of bummed out that I can't really run too many of them in my kitchen. Like, I think that the only one I've got is Grave Crawler, which is sort of for vibes, but also for some combo stuff. But yeah, I do. I do love those creatures. I just know that they're quite useful in a bunch of different decks. Are there are there any other creatures that kind of fill this role of, like, being fodder for our SAC outlets? Yeah. For sure. So we can play sort of non token creatures that don't need to occur themselves. If they just gave us some of a value before, before they died, you know. So for example a creature like Dusk Legion zealot this is one a black for one one when it expires. You talk about some of these life, but black Elvish visionary basically. Because this gave us most of the value we needed to, the way in, might we already gas our card? We're therefore just fine throwing this under the bus and sacrificing it for some more value. Can also be like interactive value creatures, right? Something like bone shredder of two and a black one one flying each beast. You destroy a creature and it has that. Oh, wait, I was going to go away next upkeep anyway, with the code no one wants to pay off. So on that card, so. Well, very happily sacrifice. So it gets way better between sacrifices of awesome value before it's going to die. Anyway. I'm one way you can, like, guess a lot of these end for free, right? Is, if you can find ways to sort of cut off of interactive spells for that effect on a creature can be very nice, you know, like, maybe instead of an actual remedial spell, you play like stupid cop that, you know, and just have it let's you get that creature density in your deck, which can be very, very strong for aristocrats. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Tailoring your, like, staple effects to be what deck wants is something that's very important in Cuban. Yeah, yeah, I completely right. Like so like. Yeah. And in like a similar vein if you're doing like like similarly in black, you might also want like a hand attack spell. So you could run a card like mesmeric fiend. This is one black for one one. When a creature enters target, opponent reveals their hand, and you choose an on that card, for example, that card, then as a second and then as a separate trigger. When this creature leaves the battlefield, returns the exact card to its own hand. So with with this, you can do the cool old card thing of. You can respond to the trigger and suck it so so the card never comes back. So you're turning this creature into a, duress style of effect. But you've also got a button, but you've also had a creature dying through that loop, so maybe you've drained them for one. Maybe you can get this creature back for more value later. That's kind of what you can do with this type of archetype. Yeah, for sure. Pretty powerful as an effect and gives your players the opportunity to feel clever, which we all know is very important. Yeah. Like that. Specifically that little trick. It's kind of like it's the same as like white brainstorm is still legal in legacy is like it makes people feel something. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. It's like I'm good at magic. I can do this nice and. Yeah. And. Yeah, kind of like like we've touched on like, different effects. But like, the other colors will have them as well. So like, we touched on like, for example, we touched on rabbit monster effects and like, red, but like, white does have them too, with things like Adalyn or like Brahmas. So like, don't just stick to what we have said. There's a, there's a bunch of other effects in the colors and like that you can run same as, like, cause that come in and get value. White has a bunch of those as well. You don't just need to stick to the cause that we've mentioned in black, but like that's basically where you're looking. Right. We've also touched on some of the good sacrifice elements change by kind of like, I think we can agree that, like, your more threatened position is kind of here are we put government bombardment up there as well just because like it's the sacrifice and the payoff all in one go. Goblin bombardment. I'll just read it as one red enchantment like a creature combo column. Apartment does one damage to any target that is your drain effect, as it were, and your sacrifice is in one card. That's very nice and neat, so kind of like if those are kind of like Esther James, what else do you like the the suck out that I, I think if we just want, if we flush for payoffs and all we want is a cheap, cheap way to get our creatures in the bin, then you can look at stuff like, visceral fear of, cat or Carrion Theater. Because these are just super efficient for only one mana. We didn't need to invest much in them and we can get our stuff. That's sometimes that's what we lump. But there's also a bunch where we, we get a little bit more of a payoff along the way, and that can be really nice. So that means it's basically filling two of those roles, right? There's also the issue with, with some of these ones like this for so bad, they themselves are quite vulnerable to removal. And if you've done the now too early and they get killed, then you can be left without that key sacrifice out later when you would actually want to sacrifice your creatures. Right? It's not like you cannot just spend all your stuff in response. You want to have flexibility. You on the stack. Sacrifice yourself at the right time when you have the right payoffs, when it makes strategic sense, maybe you've got a block in along the way before you sacrificed it. Stuff like that. So the sacrifice out, that's that. Resistant to a move forward. Also quite powerful. That's another big upside of something like, Goblin bombardment. Another one I think is actually really quite powerful and pretty underrated is greater Gargamel. I love that one. Read out for the listeners. James. Yeah, for sure. So great. Carcassonne is a bargain ten mana and nine and a red for a bargain. James absolutely crushes, efficiency. You get A97 creature beast, but crucially, it has to spend ten, single of that mana. So we suspended for that in a move, a suspend counter every turn, no upkeep. And after we've got rid of ten of those suspend counters, we're going to cast it and it's going to go in haste. So that's going to be quite, ten turns is quite a lot of sands. We can sacrifice an artifact, creature or land to remove a time counter for Matt and if correct, to go on and suspended, So this essentially is a free sack out there, right? We don't need to invest any money for it to move the time counter. We only needed to spend one. That amount of up front is completely resistant to removal because, they can't interact with this Violet suspended. I it's it's not on the board. It's it's. Yeah. They kind of trade the it's kind of an emblem, if that makes sense for sure. For sure. Plus once we've done this enough times, we're going to get this huge, hasty threat of the end of it. It's kind of it's annoyingly hidden and suspend if you don't know how suspend works. It's not obvious that it gives haste, but this this will come in with haste once you burn. That means the last time. Counter. A97 is huge. You know, it doesn't have trampled. So you want. Ideally, you'd like a way to get that stuff out of the way, but, it's a huge factor. No mana. It's also worth noting with this, but the way it's templated, even if you only have one suspend counter left, you can actually then sacrifice like ten creatures. If that's why you want to do. Because. Because you're sacrificing as part of the cost. But you'll be moving time counters as part of a resolution. You can just sacrifice a creature in response to the trigger. You sacrifice another creature and you can take your part if that's what you want to do. Also worth noting, obviously, is, you know, it's not just creature showing sacrifice our lands to. So we get in with, so we can really accelerate this coming out, even if we don't have a ton of, a ton of creatures left. Obviously. Exercise caution here if you don't want to sacrifice all your lands, and then they kill your creator, Carcassonne, and you're not really playing magic anymore, but, in in the right spot, that can certainly be something worth doing. Particular combo to call out with this is Mayhem Devil. Because unlike most of the other payoffs, Mayhem Devil triggers off any permanent. It's not just, yeah, it's any permanent being sacrificed. Yeah. And mayhem devil can kill their creatures, so it can be very nice to your mayhem. Devil. You start sacking your lands, your mayhem. Devil triggers going to get that block as out of the way. And then that clears the way for this to hit for nine. And at that point, if you've gotten any of a damage over the course of the game, your opponent's probably dead. Yeah, I do like that one. That one. That one's very cool. Let's keep it in like the, like, mid powered, cuz before we kind of go into some budget ones, like are there any other like higher powered ones you would look to run if you were trying to get this deck to be as good as it can be? Yeah. So another one that's worth calling out here and there. It's kind of just a busted card, but is, is particularly excellent. And that is that says skull clamp. Obviously here you need specifically one toughness creatures in order for this to work as a stack outlet. But it is very much a sack outlet. And the pay you gain two cards for each time you equip and kill your creature. That's super powerful. You can also, obviously you could equip to creatures with more toughness and then sacrifice them to another effect to to get your cards out of that. So that's for sure. You get really good. See, it's not free. It's a mana to equip every time, but you're getting such a strong payoff out of it that, that's more of an acceptable. You don't need me to tell you I still can't go to school. Comes good in lots of decks. It's not just aristocrats, but, this is a great, great home for that. This is obviously one for the mob. The higher power level cubes. You're not going to put a skull clamp in most if your mid to low power level cubes and then one less of the card. But I think it's worth mentioning just because I've been really impressed by it is Warren Sole Trader. This is two and a black three three creature zombie goblin wizard. Pay one life, sack another creature to create a treasure token so you can't go infinite with this one. Because like you all know that in theory there is a cost that is life, but they're not paying. Mana is amazing, and the fact that you go up in mana with the treasure is really good. And this is another one that's fantastic with a card like Mayhem Devil, because it's kind of doubling up your mayhem devil triggers every time you sack a creature, you ping them for one with the Mayhem Devil, and then you get a treasure that you can ping them again. Yeah, when you show, when you sacrifice that token. Yeah, it's really powerful. And especially worth noting again, mayhem, devil kicking hit creatures as well. It's not just about killing them. They it's that incremental value you're getting as the game goes on. If you have these two creatures in play, like, yeah, it's still a lot of creatures to actually Kelvin that just attack a combat is going to be a nightmare for your opponent. They're going to have to think so hard about all that blocks, about all of their attacks, because you can and point you can sacrifice your creature deal damage. Now, maybe it has that creature has some damage marks on it from combat. You can finish it off and because there's no manner attached to any of this, so you have so much control to do this whenever you want, you're really dictating the terms of combat. It's, it's a lot of way out of sequence. Tends to have quite a good match up against, against the more aggressive Dex actually is first. Just you have a lot of tools to make combat go very well for you and very badly for your opponent. Yeah, that one's awesome. Yeah. And then when we kind of come down the power level a bit, a little bit into more like, more budget and more like beginner friendly cubes, you have like, I think cars like, like that's what I call like, the carrion for you to get a bit more what you're looking for. So like the carrion feeder or the tentacle husk, like cards that you use, you are the creatures to make them get bigger or get into more damage through combat. So you have cars like Bartolomé del Prado and Hammerhead from the recent Marvel set, which are effectively two mana to one with sacrifice. Another creature or artifact put a counter on it. I think those are quite solid. They're like like it's it's not as broken in any way as something, but it's why these are less impactful and more for those kind of lower power. I it's slightly lower power environment is because like the you're having to attack to get the value out of these creatures, if that makes sense. Whereas like with Goblin bombardment you just have to have a creature. Whereas with whereas it's a bit it's like an extra step in your chain, and that's why it's a bit lower down the power level basically. Yeah for sure. For sure. They can be very powerful in the Viper state. But they need a lot. They need a little bit more to be going their way than an attack outlet. So that gives you give you a lot just maximizing them, you know. No I completely agree. And as we kind of wrap up the sacrifice out of the part, like there will be other ones out there, but the key takeaway listener is the free part. Everyone we've mentioned we don't have to pay any mana for that. There will be other ones printed in the future as well. If they're free then they can be considered. Basically, it's kind of I think the line that we're kind of falling on, right. So we've got, stack up and we've got, fodder. Let's, let's talk about some more payoffs, with payoffs we've already touched on, like the blood artist mayhem devil like, kind of like drain or ping effects. But there are other things you can do to win a game. For example, like the last time I went to go, husk was in standard. The payoff for that deck was rally the ancestors x white y instant return each card with mana value x or less. You go back to the battlefield, those creatures at the beginning of your next upkeep, exiled right of the ancestors. So this is an example. Like it doesn't have to be this card, but this is some mass recursion. You can sack your whole board, then bring it all back. This is also an instant, which is quite nuts, so you can do it all at instant speed. You can like again, think about that final turn where we're trying to like we know the math, our opponent doesn't know the math. We're trying to build that situation where we can kill them out of nowhere and a card like right. And that's said like like there's a bunch other like this, a bunch of other bring things back from the graveyard so we can stack them again. They're also payoffs. Like James. Are there any ones that kind of in this sort of vein, vein that you quite like? Yeah. Vacation can be very strong in these decks, partly because, it's good in that final turn when we're going for it, but it's also good in those fine games, right? We don't want to get sucked into a mentality of thinking of putting too much emphasis on what happens when we've disrupted and we get to excuse our game plan, with all our pieces in play. If reality is our parents going to be killing our pieces and we want ways to bring them back, another very nice thing with recursion and, in our stack that stacks is the often the weakness of the cache espousing. And cube is that, opponents like a bunch of unknowns and before is going to exile and then that kind of breaks up recursion. And the this is actually insulated from that a little bit, because if you have your sacrifice out that in play and your opponent goes to. So it's the plowshares, your mayhem that will say you can just sack your mayhem level and then you get it. Minutes in your graveyard ready to be returned later, which is actually actually pretty meaningful. I've found, so this that can be excellent homes for things like, the carrying nightmare or colonial nightmare, the newer one. Let's go. Really? Well, here, I think love, as we also mentioned earlier, even just something like unearth the, reanimate something which CMC failed last, but, but cycles can, can have a really nice time than these stacks because, it's powerful when we're actively putting stuff in our yard, but it's also powerful. By now town has has been leave some like, key pieces. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think that's really cool. And then sort of following on from that, I think just the other key thing to emphasize is, probably the easiest way to make this stuff effective is to really lean into, the sort of strong individual cards for Get Better with the sacrifice synergies rather than, so thinking entirely about the synergies and ignoring the individual standalone power level of the card like this isn't, this isn't a combo deck in the vein of something like Storm or Reanimate. So where we're really just focusing on executing our powerful game plan and kind of ignoring what other parent is doing. This is attack where we're looking to play a game of magic with functional magic cards, that make each other better, but we're still interacting with our opponent. And you should be prioritizing good interaction in this stack. Like, we're not going to go quicker than the quick combo decks. We're not going to kill you faster than the best aggro decks. So we need to be interacting with our opponent. So good for movable. Hand attack is really important in these attacks. As we mentioned earlier, it's best if you can get these effects on creatures, but that's not essential, right? You'll happily play. And I want to ask what, a doom blade. We. These are fine to include in your deck, and you need some amount of them, but other than just how do you feel about a board wipe and an aristocrat deck? Because it's sort of the base of an your deck is kind of combo adjacent in that we're trying to build an engine, but then we also want things to die, just like, how would you feel about potentially having a board wipe the raft? Everything in there? I tend not to like it because the thing is, we want actual we want our creatures to die, but mostly we want our creatures to die and we're killing our opponent. At which point we don't actually care about killing our opponent's creatures. So the board wipe is kind of just worst than a sack out. And if we're not killing our power, then sure. Like, of course there'll be spots where the board wipe is powerful, but, all the rest of our cards that we play subsequently are much weaker when we don't have a board. Right? Like the way our stock that's works is, you sort of need a bunch of creatures in play to make 3 or 4 cards function. And, once we've wiped our board, it can be difficult to rebuild. It's. I'm not saying you can never do it like that. You might want to bring one in out of the sideboard, but my default would be to not main deck of board white and just stack. Yeah. No that tracks. Yeah yeah that does make sense. And then one of the nice thing that can come with with with with with touch on a little bit, that can come from running in our script deck because you have a bunch of these we sacrifice outputs in them is combos. This can definitely be something that I think kind of pushes up up the power level a little bit with this deck is is leaning into the actual the combo becomes the wing con. It's a nice little like power lever you can run to like up, up, up the deck a little bit. And like, what combos do you like? Especially James if we're already running some of these keycards yeah for sure. So why don't you get on those for free? Why is the very popular stuff? Because they've call as good photo mistake. It's not hard to get some zombies in there. One stall trader we talked about is a very powerful sacrifice outlet. And these two cards combine phenomenally well together. One soul trader is a zombie. It makes us a mana. We go not quite infinite. We're paying a life each time. If we have a blood assets, for example, it's infinite and our opponent is dead. But even without fast, it's, You know, it's a lot of death triggers. We only need if we have almost anything else going on. That's that's going to be very powerful. There's other enablers feel crave quality stuff. For example, if you have a zombie and fast that works at a fast state champion where you can tap your creatures to untap land, actually, let's just get a man off our grave crawler on the way through, and then we can cast it again, so that we have a good stack outlet where, we're getting instead of, assist combos and also really good. I think this is often one of the better homes for them because we have those, like, outlets that we're running anyway. Plus the possessed creatures are just quite good because you get to sacrifice them twice. That's, that that that's great for now. Stack that stack. And then the the combo part is kind of just for gravy on top of that. Right. And we can the curve has creatures like. So it's it's a nice way to, close out the game with cards that all have a utility and attack. Yeah. I'd agree like so. So I think, yeah, I just kind of touched on and in our last episode, like, I'm not the biggest fan of possessed combos in higher power level cubes, but in slower cubes it is a viable combo. I'm like, if you're and it really does flourish if you're going ham with aristocrats, like if if you already have those three sacrifice outlets, then it's almost I'm not gonna say free to like sprinkle in a couple of possessed creatures, but it becomes, what is it like? You can sprinkle in a kitchen things you can sprinkle in the murderous red cap, and then all you need is a is a card. Like, like those cards are fine in the sacrifice decks, but they'll just go in anyway for value. And then all you have to do is again, sprinkle in a creature or an effect that removes the counter, and then you've got a combo like that. That's a nice little touch that you can add. You don't have to go. I don't have to add every possessed creature and every combo card. If you have aristocrats, you can sprinkle in a bit of these combos and it's a nice yeah, they they will they will compete with the other combos at this power level. I'm thinking splinter two and I'm thinking kind of like basically some combos. We were running like five, ten years ago. They will be very good in these like lower power level environments and like Pacific combos is very good there. Yeah for sure. Therefore one which I think is kind of fun is luminous fruit moth. Yeah I love this card. Can you read it out for the the audience shames because it a little bit of a nation but it is fun. Yeah for sure. So luminous fruit moth is two white white for a free creature. Flying insect says whenever a creature you control without flying dies, return it to a battlefield under its same as control with a flying counter. The first. This is actually kind of just a very powerful card. Yeah. It's an on right creature. Yeah. Three for fire. Yeah. Your non fliers just tying into fliers is really powerful. Like, imagine you just have some ground creatures. You play this, you attack your ground creatures, you're going to get in some damage. And the ones that die just come back as fliers, like, that's kind of cracked. It's busted with the evoke elementals like, you play this. You. Oh, Jesus. If you take a card for grief, comes back, takes another cards, and you have a flying menace to go within minutes. Flying menaces. Yeah. So that's really cool. I like cyclones just like this card. And quite a mystic. That's anyway. And then on top of that, there's some, like, kind of wacky combos stuff you can do where you prevent the flying counters coming on, like something like solemnity or that some weird effects which just prevent your creatures from getting flying. It's kind of interesting. I don't know if that's like a combo you need to lean super hard into and powerful cubes, but it's a cool card. It's powerful cards and, I'm kind of interested in trying a cylinder. See, if you're running this, you know, for example. Yeah. Like, oddly, it's like, it's it's kind of like rallying the ancestors. It's like a good way of doubling up or your sack triggers because it's giving you like it's it's own. You double dip on all your creatures, but it's on a decent rated flier that's going to get in for some damage anyway. Like, that's actually pretty solid. I do quite like that card model. And then then kind of like once the deck is actually built and then and then once the package or archetypes in our cube kind of like, what does it like to play giant Center, like what are its good matchups or it's bad matchups. Like, like what does it like, how does it perform. Yeah. So it's going to depend a lot on the specifics of of what you've built. But in general, I'd say you do pretty well against people who are trying to attack you on the ground. So like you're like very match up for that actually tends to be pretty solid. This is mostly just because we're very good at coming up the ground with lots of blockers. And to a certain extent, blocking is a sack out that, you know, it does count. Yeah. Yeah. And against the aggressive decks, they kind of don't have a lot of choice but to play into that. Right? Like the aggressive decks can't really choose not to attack you because, you know, you'll get you could, you want your creatures to die. So we tend to be able to put the accurate attacks into a pretty tough spot with all of, extra bodies for, like, I'm coming up to ground with. The other thing we tend to do quite well against is actually very controlling decks where they're not closing the game quickly and have a lying on the move little spells, because to answer all of our threats, because so many of our cards make multiple bodies, it's very hard for them to grind through it just with a bunch of removal spells. So that's that tends to be pretty good. So the flip side of that is the more mid-range attacks are actually a bit tougher because, because they tend to have a clock to go with a description, they don't need to answer all of your fats. They're just going to use that disruption to break apart your synergies, at which point you're just left with some kind of suboptimal standalone cards where if you can't get your synergies going and then they just have like more powerful mid-range standalone fats. Right. The contend, the corner, so that can be a little bit tricky. Fast combo is also pretty challenging unless you've got a good hand attack because, we're just not going to be able to go. We're often not going to be able to race. Right? Like unless we have a very, very aggressive version. This just isn't the fastest attack in most cubes. So basing it can be tough. It's going to be hard to get enough disruption to, to beat. So that that can certainly be a tricky matchup. Yeah, definitely. I agree with that. I think it is important with this deck to remember that, like it is still a cube deck. You still need your ways of interacting. You need like it's you can't just have everything be an engine piece that you have to have a you have to have your removal. You have to have your like cards, filtering and selection, that kind of stuff. You have to draft your lands well, you can't just draft every sacrifice out. You can't just drop all three of the bits that we've touched on. You can't just draft only sacrifice outlets, only token makers, and only pay offs, because that's not a deck. That's just you've just drafted the screenshot of the package. You haven't drafted a deck, if that makes sense. And then I think kind of one key thing just to finish up on James is like, what can people do to tune it? So say someone listening already has an aristocrat deck in their cube, and they've listened to this episode and maybe it's not firing on all cylinders. Like, what advice would you give them to, like, tune up the aristocrat deck? Like, like, how can we turn that lever to give it a bit more juice, to make it more focused? Yeah. So I think one trap people often fall into slightly with, with this sort of archetype is. A ritual for cards and cube coper. And they have this sort of vision in their mind of how it's going to play out by assembling all these very powerful synergies. And obviously that is a thing that the deck can do. But it's important not to get sucked into that best case scenario mentality where all the games are going to be about us maximizing these very powerful synergies, that come together when the deck is, disrupted. Because in reality, most cube games are very interactive. Pone is going to be breaking up synergies. And we need ways to fight through that. And the kind of the easiest thing I think you can do to make your aristocrat stack do a bit better is, Focus more on strong standalone cards, which can function on their own, but get better when you, when they start, synergize with each other and the sacrifice synergies rather than, some cards which only work when your your synergies will be popping, you know, Bonuses for kind of the easiest way to build aristocrats as an effective deck is like a red black mid range deck with good interaction and the fact that some have some sacrifice synergies with each other rather than my deck has. Its like all stack outlets and fodder and payoffs by Not that you can't lean into that stuff, but it's, but I'd say if aristocrats are struggling in your cube, maybe the cube is like on the higher end of the power level spectrum, whereas stick Fast works. It's maybe worth like pulling back a little bit on the very, very, very synergy focus cards and maybe luck looking to cut them. So, some more generically powerful stuff which has some synergistic elements but doesn't rely on the stitches as hard. So it's just going to mean you can play in, do well in different sorts of games. You know, you will still have those, there's games where, your engine comes together and it lets you go over the top of your opponent. And that is an important part of the puzzle, but it's not the only thing that's going on. And you want to equip yourself to also win the, like, low resource games where we're once wanting a bunch. But my standalone threat is, is going to be hard for you to interact with. And, like, my one thing that sticks is actually going to, give me a meaningful advantage. You know, I don't need, like, these four different pieces to get my engine going all the time. Yeah. And the final thing for me, anyway is like, I think I say this on every episode where we talk about a archetype is remember, it is cube. Try not to go full commander. And I mean that lovingly, but I mean that in a way of like, because, like, sources like track are like, really good at kind of like giving you like, oh, here are all the cool cards for an archetype. And like, it puts cards like ash, not Zoltar, or like pitiless plunderer or a commander like Tater Tactical or these are all kind of like super cool, synergistic synergistic cards. I that can go in an aristocrat deck, but they are slower, they don't affect the board as much, and they're not what the aristocrat deck and cube is trying to do in formats like commander, where you can build these big Rube Goldberg machine engines, like, yeah, I can have my asteroids all to and make a bunch of infinite mana combos, but in cube, someone's going to be your opponent. You're going to be beating you down with a Savannah line. And if you don't, if you don't play a creature on 1 or 2 and you play your actions all two and three, and then your synergy piece on for like you've lost that game. And no matter the power level of the cube, you need to be impacting the board. You need to be doing things that are actually trying to progress you forward and kind of like some of the commander traps are just too slow and think like, I think that's one reason why I, why I abstract deck may not function in a cube. If you take in your like, but when you're looking at like cards to go in, look at like standard decks that have sacrifice themes in them. I look at Canadian Highlander decks, try and avoid the like the commander style of environments. If you can. Yeah, I that's sort like a golden rule for any type of cube archetype or strategy. Try and focus on the one on one formats because they're way more relevant. Yeah for sure. I think we've because like I astronauts also is a great example of like powerful built around the card. The zero fact some of bars and commoners play. It's not that you can never make these cards work in cube, but you really have to solve and the right stuff. But it's also not like, you know, you have to surround it with a bunch of stuff that's keeping you alive, in order to actually have the time to get that, that sort of engine piece going. You know, you can't just, chuck a bunch of astronauts also type cards into your deck and, and see what works out, because, sure, they would assemble something powerful on ten, 7 or 8, but you will be dead by then. And it's, and it's and certainly I would I would like it. I think it's a very simple as I say because yeah, it's a powerful card, but like, what does it actually do. It gives us manner that's not winning us the game. Like you compare it to a card like Altar of Dementia, the mill can the mill on that card can win us the game or the paying off a goblin bombardment, like like even, viscera said it's one manner and it's surveilling us to our next thing. It's doing something the deck wants. It's not just spouting out mana into the ether to like to do what you know, in theory, low to the ground. But deck, what do we need? Five mana for? We've already got your mouth in play. It'll be fine. Yeah. For sure. It's. This is also like a creature, right? You know, and you can play it on turn one and block with it if you want. And we can sacrifice it to itself to ping that last point of damage with the blood artist. Like, these are all important things to kind of keep in mind 100% the I think the final thing to just emphasize is, You should have some idea of whether you want the aristocrat stack in your cube, Selene, more aggressive or to be more mid-range, maybe even looking to go in a combo direction. And not to say you can only do one of those, but you need to think about it, and you need to make sure that your card choices are actually coherent. You don't want it to be all pulling in different directions, because that's how you end up with, with and how scout cyphers not really all trying to achieve the same thing. And you can end up with something that's very, very disjointed, even when someone gets a bunch of a good aristocrats card. So, yeah, you can have multiple avenues, but you just need to be aware of what they are and take any of those faces accordingly. Yeah, that's a great point, I think. So that's why when I had it in my cube and I had it in rack DOS is the aggressive one and also was the more, grindy one. It was specifically the gold cards that were pushing it in that direction. It was the gold cards that were making the ragdoll stack more aggressive. It was the goal because I thought making the ores of deck slower and more grindy, the cards in the middle were cause they could go into both. I wasn't trying to double dip too much on either. And yeah, I think that's very important. Very good point there. All right. Marvelous, James. I think that's where we're going to end it for today. Thank you. Man, that was a good little chat on a very cool and very popular archetype that yeah, I always love seeing in the cube. Oh yeah. Lovely stuff. Thanks, Sam. Oh, good. Right. Just leads me to thank you all very much for listening. You have been listening to power for Nothing. Do make sure you like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff. And until next week. We'll see you all soon you'll take a goodbye.