Mortician Beetle is common in MM17! Yay for the supplemental Masters sets! To celebrate, here's Aristocrats!
So I struggled with whether or not to include White in this deck, as Aristocrats wants basically everything but Blue. The advantages to White were Doomed Traveler and Unruly Mob, but with MOrtician BEetle rendering Unruly Mob redundant, I decided to go with Jund. May play around some, who knows.
Beyond that, this functions much like any other Aristocrats deck: You sacrifice creatures, get value off their death triggers, and ideally create tokens to continue the cycle. It's not an infinite combo (which is just not possible at common), but it's still accruing a whole lotta value in very little time. Redundancy is our friend here, and that makes the deck frighteningly consistent. It also has the advantage of being quite low to the ground, so the taplands aren't total dead weight. I carved up the deck into three types of cards: sac outlets, death (sac) triggers, and sac targets. And also Gurmag Angler.
SAC OUTLETS
Some of the best sac outlets in the whole game are at common: Carrion Feeder and Viscera Seer among them. All of these are instant-speed and cost no mana, so they can be activated as many times as you have creatures to feed them. Also, they say "Sacrifice A creature", not "Sacrifice ANOTHER creature", which means you can sac them to their own abilities if a single death trigger is all you need to win.
Carrion Feeder: Easily the best of the bunch in this deck: He's cheap as can be; his ability has an immediate impact on the board; and the effect is permanent (so long as he isn't removed). Blocking Schmocking, this guy is arguably the best sac outlet in the game (he's certainly up there).
Viscera Seer: Like Carrion Feeder, he's cheap, but his impact isn't immediate. And the fact that you can only scry 1 repeatedly rather than scry X for each creature sacrificed is a pain. Still, he's a free sac outlet that can use himself as fodder while filtering garbage off your topdeck. There's no way to make an infinite scry such that you can just look for whatever you need, but hey.
Bloodthrone Vampire: Also the best of its ilk, as the 1 CMC reduction is well worth the price of the loss of P/T compared with the Blood Bairn/Vampire Aristocrat/Nantuko Husk/Phyrexian Ghoul quartet. The drawback is, of course, that the boost is temporary, but as I'm sure you gathered, that's less important than repeatable, free activations.
DEATH TRIGGERS
The other third of any aristocrats deck. Now, pauper doesn't have access to Zulaport Cutthroat or Blood Artist, but we still have something. If the lack of White is gonna hurt this deck anywhere, it'd be here, as we don't have access to Unruly Mob. Still, Hissing Iguanar is criminally underrated and does a surprisingly good impression of Blood Artist. And I'll not dwell to much on this section as all the best death triggers are token generators, which we simply don't have access to at pauper.
Hissing Iguanar: A Blood Artist that doesn't gain life and costs 1 more is still a Blood Artist. Plus, it can turn sideways for more damage if your opponent is at the end of their rope.
MOrtician BEetle: Technically this lil guy isn't a death trigger, but rather a sac trigger, but we're gonna be doing the bulk of our own creature-killing anyway, so who gives a damn?
SAC TARGETS
But of course, this engine needs something to run on, so here we have the ideal targets for these sac outlets. All of them make their own friends to sac in turn, so each one can be used for two (or, in the case of Mogg War Marshal, three) sacrifices at once.
Blisterpod: Only complaint is that it has devoid and makes a colorless token, so I can't tap either to Gleeful Sabotage. Otherwise, this is exactly what this deck wants out of a sac target, not to mention that the token can kill itself.
deck:Tukatongue Thallid: Like Blisterpod, but minus the token's self-sacrificing ability, plus ability for both to tap for Gleeful Sabotage. Still good.
Brindle Shoat: For an extra mana, the token this 1/1 produces is now a 3/3. Worth.
card:Mogg War-Marshall: The best sac target in the deck, this guy is basically Dragon Fodder, but that one tiny bit better, even if we weren't in a deck that threw away its own tokens like used tissues.
Myr Sire: I used to run Penumbra Bobcat in this slot, but found that the 3 CMC was genuinely burdensome on the mana base. No, really, 3 CMC is too much for this curve apparently. And yeah, this guy doesn't produce another token on etb like card:Mogg War-Mashall, but the generic cost is easy on the mana base, and it replaces itself. Really, that's all you need. I may cut this guy in turn for Doomed Dissenter, though.
Gurmag Angler: Big Zombie Fish. I'd consider card:Hooting Mandrils for the evasion, but the basic idea remains of a fatty that can be cheapened significantly by cards in the graveyard, which we will certainly have a lot of.
LAND
Bloodfell Caves: Best duals in pauper.
Rugged Highlands: Same as above, but for .
Bojuka Bog: You don't get graveyard advantage; only I get graveyard advantage!
Khalni Garden: Creates a token! Y'know, those things that we throw into the mouths of our Vampires and Zombies? Except on a land for literal free.
Rakdos Carnarium: The Ravnica Karoo lands are also great, especially if we have lands with etb effects, which we certainly do.
Gruul Turf: Second verse, same as the first.
SIDEBOARD
ECHOING DECAY: Tokens? What tokens? You mean those that I just smote into the ground?
ELECTRICKERY: See above.
ECHOING RUIN: Mass artifact destruction is the best artifact destruction.
ANCIENT GRUDGE: Sees Modern play in some Jund lists for a good reason.
GLEEFUL SABOTAGE: While this is a great Naturalize, and a better fit for this deck than Nature's Claim, I don't run enough Green creatures to make this wholly abusable. It's really only here for the enchantment removal.
ABYSSAL GATEKEEPER: While I would prefer hat this guy's death trigger force only opponents to pitch creatures (we want to be getting more value than that), this is pauper and one needs edicts.
CHAINER'S EDICT: No pauper deck with Black is complete without this in the sideboard. Period, end of story.
