Broadly speaking, the deck has cards of seven different types that work together to generate a series of win conditions: either draining their life from Aristocrats outlet effects, direct damage from key impact cards; or a combo finish for infinite damage.
We’ll look at each of these win conditions in a later section, but first let’s go through the seven deck elements that lead to these win conditions. These elements are: (1)
mana acceleration; (2)
creature generators; (3)
sacrifice effects; (4)
sacrifice enablers; (5)
card draw effects; (6)
drain effects; and (7)
payoff cards.
Taking each in turn:
1. Mana Acceleration: To help assemble our various deck elements on the board, we want to generate as much mana as possible. Mana rocks such as
Sol Ring,
Thought Vessel,
Mind Stone and
Jet Medallion help us do this, as well as potentially explosive lands like
Cabal Coffers,
Cabal Stronghold,
Crypt of Agadeem and
Phyrexian Tower.
Sword of the Animist,
Pitiless Plunderer and
Crypt Ghast are also helpful for efficiency.
Black Market is an all-star in this deck, as our creatures are dying left right and centre.
2. Creature Generators: As well as playing our own creatures to fulfill various roles in the deck, we want ways of generating expendable creatures that we don’t mind sacrificing.
Bitterblossom is the perfect token generator here. Some of our creatures also offer graveyard recursion –
Gravecrawler,
Nether Traitor and
Relentless Dead for example - so we don’t mind sacrificing them if we know we’re going to get them back later.
Phyrexian Reclamation and
Whisper, Blood Liturgist can return any creature from the graveyard if we don’t mind paying a bit of life (or sacrificing creatures), which is usually easily gained back by our drain effects.
3. Sacrifice Effects: As we’re a deck that doesn’t mind our less valuable creatures dying, we’re quite happy to see them go to the graveyard. We run numerous sacrifice effects to help them on their way. Bonus points if they help us do something useful too. We also want our opponents to sacrifice their creatures so we get extra Zombies when Kalitas is on the board. Standout cards here include
Anowon, the Ruin Sage,
Fleshbag Marauder,
Gravelighter,
Merciless Executioner,
Plaguecrafter,
Innocent Blood,
Dictate of Erebos,
Grave Pact and
Vona's Hunger – basically anything that gets either us or our opponents sacrificing their creatures.
4. Sacrifice Enablers: Ideally we want to choose when we sacrifice our creatures, so we can get the best value out of them. Because of this, we run a series of sacrifice enablers that allow us to trigger our various drain effects (see #6 below). Examples of these are
Viscera Seer,
Whisper, Blood Liturgist,
Yawgmoth, Thran Physician,
Ashnod's Altar,
Phyrexian Altar and
Phyrexian Tower.
5. Card Draw Effects: We’re quite a resource-hungry deck because we cycle through creatures quickly and we want to assemble a number of key permanents on the board. To keep us in gas, we run various sources of card draw, either as one-time tools, or as repeatable effects. These include
Sign in Blood,
Necropotence,
Night's Whisper,
Corrupted Conviction,
Ayara, First of Locthwain,
Grim Haruspex,
Undead Augur and
Yawgmoth, Thran Physician.
6. Drain Effects: These are the engine room of our deck as they turn our creatures dying – normally a disadvantage – into potentially game-winning effects. These are commonly known as our “Aristocrat” effects, which gives the deck archetype its name. Having several of these cards on the board at the same time is usually back-breaking for our opponents, especially if we’re able to fuel them with our sacrifice fodder. As they’re so central to our strategy, we really want to see them throughout the game. They are
Blood Artist,
Falkenrath Noble,
Syr Konrad, the Grim,
Vindictive Vampire,
Zulaport Cutthroat and
Bastion of Remembrance.
A special mention here has to go to how well
Mindcrank works with
Syr Konrad, the Grim. Having both in play isn’t quite an infinite combo or instant win, but it’s absolutely lethal for our opponents. Usually we’re able just to sacrifice one creature to get things going and we can always send another creature to the graveyard if things grind to a halt, so we can start the fun again.
Another key card that is just OP in an Aristocrats strategy is
Tombstone Stairwell. I'm old enough to remember when it first came out in
Mirage and not understanding how good it was. Here it absolutely shines, especially played in the late game when everyone's graveyard is full of creatures. As it generates Tombspawn (ie. Zombie tokens)
every upkeep even one turn cycle can be crazy as every player puts a bunch of tokens into play each turn that are then sacrificed at the end of that turn. If we have
Syr Konrad, the Grim or other Aristocrats in play, the amount of damage that can be caused by ETB and/or death triggers is often overwhelming. It's a bit of a niche card but it's definitely worth seeking out if you're running an Aristocrats deck.
7. Payoff Cards: We run a set of high impact payoff cards that offer potentially game-breaking effects. Some of these are covered below in Win Conditions, but they include
Exsanguinate and
Gray Merchant of Asphodel. We often rely on these cards as finishers to help close out games and they’re often the targets we seek when we use our tutor effects like
Demonic Tutor,
Vampiric Tutor and
Grim Tutor.
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