Standard

Aristocrats Primer

There are two types of decks I look into when I am unsure of what to play for a Magic the Gathering PTQ season. In smaller formats, when there are fewer decks, I like to play something with the best cards and the most powerful strategy, like Jace in Caw Blade, [card]Bitterblossom[/card] in Faeries, and so on. You will rarely have an unwinnable matchup based solely on your cards being inherently better than those you are playing against, and you get a lot of free wins from this.

Unfortunately, in this Standard format the number of powerful cards is at an all-time high with things like [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card], [card]Unburial Rites[/card], [card]Thragtusk[/card], [card]Angel of Serenity[/card], [card]Bonfire of the Damned[/card], and [card]Boros Reckoner[/card]. These cards, along with the amazing mana producers available, make it difficult to get an advantage. Everyone can just jam all the great cards they want into a deck, so there are many different decks packing many powerful cards. I played UWR [card]Flash[/card] in two Grand Prix this year, and after scrubbing out with it in Quebec City, I knew that it was not going to cut it. I needed to change my viewpoint on the format if I wanted to win.

The other type of deck, and what I usually end up playing in formats like this, is the aggresive deck. When playing an aggresive deck you tend to ignore what most of the decks in the format are doing because you are beating down with a [card]Frogmite[/card] or a [card]Burning-Tree Emissary[/card] or casting [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] or [card]Searing Spear[/card]. Burn spells and creatures are interchangeable, and all you are trying to do is execute the same plan every game: get your opponent to zero life as quickly as possible.

(As a quick aside on deck choice, you should also try to find a deck you enjoy playing and stick with it for the entire season. You will have a much better chance with a deck you know how to play optimally rather than picking up the best deck with no testing right before the tournament. Trust me; I know from experience.)

I tried lots of different aggro shells like Naya Blitz, Mono Red, and Jund Aggro. While they all performed okay in testing, and while I liked certain cards in each deck, none of them captured my attention because of their inability to grind through opponents. They would also drastically drop in power past turn four or five. Though this is nothing new for aggro decks, they usually have something that helps going into the late game, a card that gets better the longer the game goes on, like [card]Shrine of Burning Rage[/card] or a planeswalker. All these decks lacked any sort of late game, so I shied away from them. Opposing decks were gaining life with [card]Thragtusk[/card]s or [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card]s, so while being able to win before these got going was good, I also needed a way to win if things didn’t go according to plan.

Enter The Aristocrats!

I knew from the little testing I had done with The Aristocrats before GP Quebec City that it had a steep learning curve. Initially, even I didn’t think the deck was very good and wasn’t willing to invest the time to prepare with it. However, it was still surprising to me that the deck had won the Pro Tour and a Grand Prix but no one was talking about it.
Once I picked up the deck and put some effort into learning its ins and outs, I found that The Aristocrats had everything I was looking for in an aggro deck: super fast [card]Champion of the Parish[/card] draws that I wanted from Naya Blitz; the ability to fly over [card]Thragtusk[/card]s with Falkenrath Aristocrat; ways to eke out the last few points of damage with [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] in conjunction with cards like [card]Doomed Traveler[/card] and Lingering Souls; all combined with the capability of [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] to just take over the board by constantly making 5/5 demons.

Now that I figured out what I was going to play, I needed to get to work tuning the decklist. Fortunately for me, with the deck winning two high-level events and Act 2 starting to pick up in popularity, I had a good place to start. I tried all sorts of configurations of the deck, mishmashing different versions together, searching for what worked the best. The Aristocrats has a very strong core and can be built in many different ways: Act 2 with [card]Blood Artist[/card]s; Zombie- and Vampire-based versions; and even some Junk versions have been popping up lately with [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card] and [card]Varolz, the Scar-Striped[/card].

Finally, I stuck with something very close to what won GP Rio. It eschewed [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] from the original list while keeping the aggresive human component. Here is what I am currently running:

[deck title=Aristocrats by Justin Richardson]
[Lands]
4 Godless Shrine
4 Blood Crypt
4 Sacred Foundry
4 Isolated Chapel
1 Clifftop Retreat
3 Cavern of Souls
2 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Vault of the Archangel
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Champion of the Parish
4 Doomed Traveler
3 Skirsdag High Priest
4 Knight of Infamy
4 Cartel Aristocrat
3 Silverblade Paladin
4 Falkenrath Aristocrat
2 Zealous Conscripts
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
2 Tragic Slip
3 Orzhov Charm
3 Lingering Souls
[/Spells]
[/deck]

No [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] or [card]Blood[/card] Artist? Although [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] is a very good card, its mana cost can be awkward at times, and it lacks synergy with the rest of the cards in the deck. [card]Blood Artist[/card] I found underwhelming, and it alongside [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] turned the deck into more of a midrange combo-style deck with [card]Blasphemous Act[/card], while I wanted to have a more aggresive deck.

[card]Champion of the Parish[/card] is the main reason I have gone this route instead of the Act 2 version. With the exception of [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], every creature in the deck is a human, and Champion can get out of hand very quickly if not dealt with right away.

[card]Knight of Infamy[/card] is an aggresive card with two powerful abilities. Protection from white allows you to ignore cards like [card]Boros Reckoner[/card], Azorious Charm, [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card], [card]Fiend Hunter[/card], and [card]Angel of Serenity[/card]. (I could go on all day naming good white cards, but you probably get the idea.) Similarly, exalted lets you get in free points of damage here and there, which is important when playing an aggro deck like this, nicking away at them slowly until they are dead.

If you thought protection from white was good, how about being able to have protection from everything? [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card], one of the deck’s namesakes, might also be its best card. It reminds me of [card]Mother of Runes[/card] in legacy; while not the same since it only protects itself, it makes combat very awkward for your opponent and is very difficult to deal with as it chips away at their life total.

Try not to run out a naked [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] if you don’t have to. [card]Doomed Traveler[/card] and Lingering Souls’ main purpose in the deck is to protect your Aristocrats so you can grind out the long games if need be, so there is no real reason to throw away a [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] for no value unless your hand is very aggressive, with a [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card] or a [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card]. Then, by all means, you should just curve out and start attacking.

[card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] just ends games. It gives you the late-game reach that a lot of other aggro decks needed and is one of the reasons I turned to this deck in the first place. Against some decks, you just want to get this active as fast as possible because they lack removal. Against others, you will want to be more discerning and bait out their removal with other cards before dropping Skirsdag on the table where his horde of demons will just clean up shop. Playing three is a metagame call, and I could see moving one of them to the sideboard, but I would not go lower than two in the maindeck, as it is a key part of the deck’s power.

[card]Silverblade Paladin[/card] is just a great aggresive card to play in any white-based deck as it can deal a ton of damage out of nowhere, especially paired with The Aristocrats’ evasion creatures.

[card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], the other namesake of the deck, can survive almost any removal spell except for [card]Tragic Slip[/card]. It is one of the best cards an aggro deck can play against midrange or control decks that try to clog the ground with [card]Thragtusk[/card]s and [card]Huntmaster of the Fells[/card] as it can just fly over their creatures and deal damage quickly, especially paired with [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card].

[card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] looks a bit out of place as it is usually seen as a sideboard card, but in a format filled with midrange decks, being able to steal a [card]Thragtusk[/card] or an [card]Angel of Serenity[/card] and just kill the opponent with it is a common scenario thanks to how much early-game pressure this deck can put out. You can also steal a creature and sacrifice it as a pseudo removal spell. And if you steal and sacrifice a [card]Thragtusk[/card], you get the beast token!

[card]Orzhov Charm[/card] is a versatile removal spell. The most common mode, and the main reason it is played, is to destroy any creature-doesn’t matter its color or its manacost, just destroys it, no questions asked. There is the downside of losing life, which can be awkward if you have to play multiples and have taken damage from your lands, but the upside is worth it. The other two modes are not used much but still provide options for turning your dead removal spell into something more useful, whether it’s bringing back a [card]Doomed Traveler[/card] to use with an Aristocrat, bouncing a guy in response to a [card]Supreme Verdict[/card] or reusing [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card].

[card]Tragic Slip[/card], even without morbid, can kill important creatures like [card]Arbor Elf[/card], [card]Avacyn’s Pilgrim[/card], [card]Blood Artist[/card] and [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card]. However, with Standard being so creature-heavy, with lots of attacking and blocking and creatures dying, as well as having access to eight sacrifice outlets, triggering morbid happens frequently and turns [card]Tragic Slip[/card] into one of the best removal spells in the format. I run only two maindeck, compared to the four-of Act 2 because, drawn in multiples, it can sometimes be awkward to turn on morbid for both if you need to play them on different turns. I prefer the flexibility of [card]Orzhov Charm[/card]. However, I would definitely go up to four copies of Slip after sideboarding as it often just destroys any creature for one black mana.

[card]Cavern of Souls[/card] may appear to have been printed to make creatures uncounterable, but that is just a bonus; the real function of Cavern in this deck is to fix your mana. Name “human” in the early game because everything is human except [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], and you can play a [card]Doomed Traveler[/card] and [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] on turn three or pay double white for a [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card]. If you can afford to hold on to it, you should do so, especially if you haven’t drawn a [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] or [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card] yet and don’t have another source of red mana. This prevents naming the wrong creature type too soon and blocking yourself out of red mana and an uncounterable vampire. I have even declined to play it as a fifth land to activate [card]Vault of the Archangel[/card] or to play a [card]Lingering Souls[/card] and flash it back in the same turn so that I avoid any possible dead draws from naming the wrong creature type. If you are sideboarding in [card]Obzedat, Ghost Council[/card], and need to use Cavern just to cast it, remember to name “advisor” over “spirit” because [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] is an advisor as well as a human.

Sideboards can and should change depending on where you are playing, what decks you expect to face, and even what kind of event you are attending, so I purposely didn’t post a sideboard, but I will go over the important matchups and discuss sideboard plans and what cards are important after board. Also, a sideboard I might play should be different from that of someone who hasn’t played the deck as much as I and isn’t as confident in certain matchups.

Aggresive Decks (Naya Blitz, Mono red, RG and Bant Auras)

Aristocrats is slightly disadvantaged against other aggresive decks like Naya Blitz, RG Aggro and even Bant Auras because the deck is not well set up to be defensive game one. It relies heavily on chump blocking with one-toughness creatures, and oppnents have cards that have or give trample, like [card]Ghor-Clan Rampager[/card], [card]Rancor[/card], and [card]Unflinching Courage[/card], which make this plan a liability. The hexproof creatures out of Bant are also tough to deal with, especially if [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] is enchanted with [card]Ethereal Armor[/card].

Post-board against Naya and RG, I like to take out out [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] and [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card]s, considering they have nothing worth stealing, and racing them is not usually the best way to fight them. Also, if you have enough sideboard slots board out [card]Champion of the Parish[/card] or [card]Knight of Infamy[/card]. If they are a white deck you want to keep Knights to help block opposing Champions as yours usually won’t be big enough, but if they are straight RG, then Champion is better because it will be bigger than most of their creatures. Aim to make your deck a pseudo-midrange deck with cards like [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card], [card]Warleader’s Helix[/card], [card]Sever the Bloodline[/card], and [card]Sorin, Lord of Innistrad[/card], alongside some cheap removal like more [card]Tragic Slip[/card]s. Then try to control their early aggression and maintain a high life total while your bigger spells and [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] close out the game.

Against Bant Auras I would sideboard out the [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] and, depending on the sideboard, the [card]Orzhov Charm[/card]s for some [card]Tragic Slip[/card]s to deal with mana creatures, as well as [card]Fencing Ace[/card], [card]Duress[/card], or [card]War Priest of Thune[/card] to target the problematic auras.

Mirror Match (Act 2)

At first I thought this matchup looked really bad on paper. [card]Blood Artist[/card] is very good when we are trading [card]Lingering Souls[/card] tokens. They have four maindeck [card]Tragic Slip[/card]s, which is the best removal spell in the mirror. [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] is a must kill, and [card]Blasphemous Act[/card] is hard to play around. After playing the matchup a lot, though, I found it wasn’t as terrible as I had originally thought if you play it out properly.

You are the beatdown. You need to win quickly, before [card]Blood Artist[/card] can take over the game, so you either need to kill it right away or open with [card]Champion of the Parish[/card]. [card]Knight of Infamy[/card] is very good as well, letting you attack past Reckoner, [card]Lingering Souls[/card], [card]Doomed Traveler[/card], and [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card].

[card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card] is terrible in the mirror; they are maxed out on [card]Tragic Slip[/card]s and [card]Lingering Souls[/card] so it will rarely get through. [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] is mediocre as well. [card]Lingering Souls[/card] is the best card in the mirror, so you are going to want to bring in a fourth copy, as well as packing four [card]Tragic Slip[/card]s, a [card]Sever the Bloodline[/card] as an extra removal spell, or some [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card]s to gain some life and win [card]Lingering Souls[/card] battles.

Be careful of losing to [card]Blasphemous Act[/card] and try to have removal for a slow-rolled Reckoner into Act if you can afford to. Know that sometimes it is better to not play around it and just make them have the Act, as you are probably not going to beat it even playing around it.

Midrange Decks (Junk Reanimator, Jund, Naya)

These are all matchups I would be happy to play, with the possible exception of Naya, since [card]Domri Rade[/card] with [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] can be tough to beat if you don’t have an answer quickly.

Zealous Consripts and [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card] shine here. The opponent usually tries to hold off your early creatures with some big creatures like [card]Thragtusk[/card], [card]Huntmaster of the Fells[/card], or [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card], and you can just circumvent those by flying over or stealing them to clear the way. I would pack extra [card]Threaten[/card] effects in the board, [card]Mark of Mutiny[/card] or [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card], though I would be wary of adding too many five-drops as they can get stuck in your hand.

Junk Reanimator

Junk has cards like [card]Fiend Hunter[/card], [card]Thragtusk[/card], and [card]Angel of Serenity[/card] to halt our aggression and can ambush you with [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s that reset [card]Fiend Hunter[/card] or gain life from [card]Thragtusk[/card]. This matchup is in our favor as they don’t have much removal, so you can run them over or get [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] online. [card]Angel of Serenity[/card] is worse against us compared to other aggresive decks because [card]Knight of Infamy[/card] and [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] are basically untargetable. [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] also lets you ignore Angel in many situations.

Luckily for us, the main problematic cards Junk has, [card]Lingering Souls[/card] and [card]Craterhoof Behemoth[/card], aren’t seeing much play. [card]Lingering Souls[/card] slows us down as it chump blocks [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card] for four turns, and Craterhoof is basically unbeatable, especially with [card]Restoration Angel[/card].

Cards to consider bringing in include more [card]Threaten[/card] effects, [card]Sever the Bloodline[/card] to exile cards so they can’t [card]Unburial Rites[/card], and [card]Tragic Slip[/card] as some extra removal. [card]Doomed Traveler[/card] and [card]Lingering Souls[/card] are the weakest cards against Junk Reanimator as chump blocking doesn’t often come up, and you will rarely grind them out.

Jund

Jund is a much closer matchup than Junk but is still a good one. They play a lot of removal, including [card]Tragic Slip[/card] for [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], sweepers like [card]Mizzium Mortars[/card] and [card]Bonfire of the Damned[/card], and [card]Olivia Voldaren[/card] which can slowly pick away at creatures. Try not to get blown out by [card]Sire of Insanity[/card] if you can avoid it. [card]Huntmaster of the Fells[/card] and [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card] can also be annoying.

I have had the most success in this matchup by being very aggresive and applying a fast clock with [card]Champion of the Parish[/card]. Try to kill them before their late game takes over. [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] is very important thanks to Jund’s abundance of targeted removal spells. [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] is a must-kill threat, but you should try to bait out removal rather than playing him as early as you can.

[card]Assemble the Legion[/card] and [card]Obzedat, Ghost Council[/card], are good to bring in as they are hard to kill and will take over the board and give you more inevitability against a removal-heavy deck. Bringing in more answers to [card]Thragtusk[/card] and Olivia will help, as an unanswered Olivia will be very hard to beat.

[card]Knight of Infamy[/card] doesn’t do much here and is easily trumped by [card]Huntmaster of the Fells[/card], so that is an easy cut. Skirsdag also loses a lot of its power because it is easily killed, but it can still win games on its own. That’s something to take into consideration, depending on how many cards you want to bring in.

If they are tapped out, you should try to play around [card]Tragic Slip[/card] by sacrificing a Human to [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card] so it gets an extra point of toughness and they’ll need to trigger morbid to kill it.

Naya

There are many cards Naya decks can play, and not every list is the same, so they can be hard to play around. Some have Bonfire of the Damned; others have Mizzium Mortars; some have both. I have also seen [card]Selesnya Charm[/card]s. There are a lot of things to consider, and you need to play tight in this matchup to not get blown out.

Compared to Jund, Naya is much more creature heavy; instead of a ton of removal they just try to play better creatures. All their creatures are very good against creature decks. [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] and [card]Domri Rade[/card] can decimate your board, so killing Reckoner is very important, and [card]Thundermaw Hellkite[/card] kills [card]Lingering Souls[/card] tokens and can come out of nowhere to win a race. Watch out for possible [card]Blasphemous Act[/card]s out of their sideboards.

While it sounds tough, a lot of cards are strong in the matchup: Skirsdag is great as they have few answers to it; [card]Knight of Infamy[/card] has protection from a good portion of their deck; and they have no answer to Falkenrath.

I haven’t played this matchup much, so I am not exactly sure how I would sideboard. [card]Lingering Souls[/card] seems weak against a deck with four maindeck [card]Thundermaw Hellkite[/card], so I would start cutting there. Even though it is very good if they don’t have Thundermaw, getting blown out by it is brutal. [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card] could be hit or miss; I could see cutting them or bringing more in depending on what I see and know of their list.

Extra removal like [card]Tragic Slip[/card], [card]Warleader’s Helix[/card], and [card]Sever the Bloodline[/card] and some bigger harder to deal with threats would go a long way to turning the matchup in our favor, but I would need to playtest more before developing a concrete solution.

Sphinx’s Revelation Decks

Control decks are dipping drastically in popularity and not without good reason as they are poorly positioned in Standard. I don’t see that changing until Innistrad rotates out.

While [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] is an amazing card, blue decks simply cannot out grind all the regular decks anymore. They are trying to trade one-for-one then draw a bunch of cards and take over the game. The problem with this plan is that every other deck is trying to get value out of their cards. [card]Thragtusk[/card], [card]Huntmaster of the Fells[/card], [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card], [card]Lingering Souls[/card], [card]Unburial Rites[/card]: these cards can’t be answered with just one card, and each requires a different answer. How is a control deck supposed to fit cards to deal with these threats and still beat Naya Blitz or other control decks?

Most control players have gone the route of just surviving the first few turns then playing a big threat like [card]Advent of the Wurm[/card] or [card]Aetherling[/card] to kill their opponent before getting ground out. While this can be effective, from one blue player to another, I would advocate staying away from [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] until October.

That said, I think blue decks are good matchups for Aristocrats as I have lost only one match to URW [card]Flash[/card] since I started playing it, and I feel I both misplayed and got unlucky to lose. They don’t have many scary cards; you just have to know how to play around removal, Azorious Charm, and [card]Restoration Angel[/card], as well as not over- extending into [card]Supreme Verdict[/card]. [card]Cavern of Souls[/card] will also help resolves your creatures past any counterspells.

Outside of Azorious Charm they don’t have a good answer to [card]Falkenrath Aristocrat[/card]. Even Turn//Burn doesn’t deal with it (at least until they change the way indestructibility works when M14 comes out). [card]Cartel Aristocrat[/card] only really dies to [card]Supreme Verdict[/card].

Though there are many different types of control, I lumped them together because sideboarding is largely the same no matter which version they are running. They will probably bring in cards like [card]Izzet Staticaster[/card], if they are URW, or additional mass removal like extra [card]Supreme Verdict[/card]s. If they are Bant with [card]Thragtusk[/card]s, [card]Zealous Conscripts[/card], and [card]Skirsdag High Priest[/card] get a lot better, but UWR has nothing worth stealing, is less likely to tap out, and has a bunch of spot removal to kill the High Priest. Conscripts can also be good against planeswalker-heavy decks.

Removal, while traditionally bad against control, is still very effective at killing [card]Boros Reckoner[/card]s, [card]Restoration Angel[/card]s, or any other creature they might have.
Hand disruption is also very good, so bringing in [card]Sin Collector[/card]s or [card]Duress[/card] will help. Obzedat, [card]Assemble the Legion[/card], and Sorin will allow you to play a long game and are hard to deal with, so you will slowly grind them out. Just be careful of attacking with Obzedat as that is one of the few ways you can lose it: either to a flash-creature ambush or an Azorious Charm.

If you curve out with turn-one Champion, turn-two Knight, and turn-three [card]Silverblade Paladin[/card], it is often better to pair with the [card]Knight of Infamy[/card] so you don’t get blown out by Azorious Charm. Depending on what is getting Azorious Charmed, it is sometimes better to sacrifice the creature if you can, instead of letting the Charm resolve to put a useless creature on top of your deck.

At the end of the day, Aristocrats is a strong aggresive deck that doesn’t roll over and die once the game reaches turn five and that can attack from many different angles with no real bad matchups. The deck rewards careful play, and if you decide to pick it up and put in the time to master it, you will be surprised at how good the deck is. Maybe you will enjoy playing it as much as I do.

If you have any questions about the deck or anything else, please leave a comment or message me on Twitter, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading!

Justin Richardson
@JrichMTG

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