Sweet and powerful decks in cube, Part 1: BW Aristocrats&Taxes, MARDU WINOTA

One of my drafters is notorious for his brews. His brews are either really good or really terrible. I want to feature two decks that each won him the draft with an easy 3:0 finish, respectively. These decks are what I call BW Aristocrats&Taxes and MARDU WINOTA.

 BW Aristocrats&Taxes

The core of the deck is formed by the recurring black creatures like Gutterbones, Gravecrawler and Bloodghast. These creatures are not only great for pressuring the opponent throughout the whole game they also provide infinite sacrifice fodder, especially Bloodghast. This deck only runs two hard sacrifice outlets in Viscera Seer and Hidden Stockpile. Viscera Seer is a classic aristocrats card that provides card selection. Hidden Stockpile was the most surprising card in the deck: Its ability to be a sacrifice enabler and a payoff felt really powerful. Especially with Gravecrawler one could easily make a token every turn. There a two pseudo sacrifice outlets, namely Diabolic Servitude and Doom Foretold. Diabolic Servitude is just a great card to get important pieces out of your graveyard if you really need them. Doom Foretold was one of the most oppressive cards in the deck.

Although you may not sacrifice tokens with it (which feels like a downside at first glance) its nontoken clause is exploited heavily in this deck with Bloodghast and Gravecrawler as these two are recurring permanents. With this combinations of cards, your opponent can't really add something to the board as it will be sacrificed eventually. We have seen the decline in Braids popularity because there are more and more token generators in random colors. Doom Foretold does fix that issue. Braids is still awesome though ("Yes, you have to sacrifice a land now.") The only remaining payoff for sacrificing creatures is good old Blood Artist. At this point, it is clear that Blood Artist is the most important card in any Aristocrats deck. For our playgroup, it is becoming one of the most picked cards in P1P1. 

The interesting part of this deck are the W cards. Especially the Death&Taxes bears like Thalia and Eidolon of Obstruction. This seems like high antisynergy because you do not want to sacrifice these creatures. I agree with you. On pen&paper, this seems bad, but it turned out that having this sort of disruption is great for pressure and for protecting your key creatures like Blood Artist. This deck taught me that you do not need that many creatures that can be sacrificed in an aristocrats deck, you only need a few really great ones. 

The rest of the nonlands are mainly removal spells besides one interesting card that is All that Glitters. It generally gave a creature +4/+4 in stats because there were a lot of enchantments in the deck but also free artifacts from Blade Splicer, Thraben Inspector, Hidden Stockpile, etc. It is also nice, that you don't really get two-for-one'd if you put auras on your recursive creatures because they come into play again for free later.

The last interesting cards I want to talk about are the two lands Westvale Abbey and Castle Ardenvale.

I initally put Ardenvale into my cube just because I wanted a mono W utility land. I expected not much but I thought that it was worth testing. Let me tell you how great it is. The ability to generate 1/1's in the lategame is firstly really powerful and secondly really annoying when you face a Blood Artist. Do you know what is even more annoying? Ardenvale together with Hidden Stockpile. The powerful part about this combination is that it can't really be interacted with unless you have one of the enchantment or land removal that are fairly rare to come by (and draw). If you can't remove either one you can't really win the ground battle anymore. Westvale Abbey does the same job as Ardenvale for more mana but has the insane upside of being a really good finisher. Westvale Abbey flipped a few times during the games.

(Grave Titan and Smuggler's Copter are so good that I don't have to mention them.)

The deck showed me that I undervalue a lot of Orzhov signposts in my cube. This deck makes me excited to pick a Hidden Stockpile which used to be a "whatever" card in my mind.

Rating:

Synergy: B+

Power: A-

MARDU WINOTA

Winota is a card that already broke Historic. Her ability is absolutely insane and can lead to massive turns where you put ten mana worth of stats that are all attacking and are all indestrucible on the board in one turn. In cube, there are naturally a lot of Humans, but rarely enough in draft to make a viable Human tribal deck. Hence, I thought that Winota could give Boros a little bit of spice and open up a Human/non-Human tribal deck, which often was the result of me forcing a Human tribal deck anyway. I drafted such a deck a few weeks ago and it was just okay. The main problem of my deck was that I did not have enough powerful Humans in my deck.

One time, I played Secure the Wastes in the endstep for four Solider tokens and I slammed Winota after that. No instant speed interaction? Sweet! I got 3 triggers. I got a Thraben Inspector and a Dragon Hunter. GG. I thought about cutting her because of this incident but I wanted to give my drafters a chance to draft her and see for themselves whether it is worth it or not. Gladly, she stayed in the cube, otherwise this masterpiece would not have seen the light of day:

We have 9 Humans (not counting Winota herself) and 5 non-Humans in the deck which seems bad at first glance. However, there are 3 additional ways to create non-Humans tokens in the Form of Kari Zev's Ragavan, Pia Nalaar's Thopters and Sram's Expertise. So, we have 9 Human and 8 non-Human sources. Very balanced. However, the amount of Humans is only the first necessary requirement for a great Winota deck, the Humans should be as powerful as possible. Agent of Treachery and other 5+ mana Humans would not fit into such a RWb deck because the deck also has to be somewhat viable without drawing her, operating as a standard Boros aggro deck. So what do we have here? Arguably the best Human in this deck is Benalish Marshal. It has a big body and pumps the whole squad if he is summoned by Winnota right away. In addition, it is just a great curve-topper and has neat synergies with Kari Zev, etc. The mana of this deck is also worth mentioning because it can support such restrictive mana costs with fetchlands and duallands. So, the Marshal could be played easily on Turn 3 or 4. The second best Human in this deck is Combat Celebrant.

It is nearly unfair that Combat Celebrant comes into play being indestrucible via Winota which means he can't be easily blocked and killed. Now, they have to kill Winnota and Combat Celebrant because otherwise they won't survive another combat phase. If both survive (which happened), your opponent dies. Combat Celebrant is not the best Human when played without Winota, but he is not terrible. Other noticeable Humans are Tasigur, Lannery Storm and Pia Nalaar. The great thing about Tasigur is that he is just a playable card in the deck because of fetchlands and the nature of Aggro decks having a lot of cards in their graveyard. It is also powerful to get a Milita Bugler off Winota.

The deck certainly has enough powerful Humans to gain maximal advantage of Winota. But what about the non-Humans? Historic showed us that we want low mana cost non-Humans, in the best case tokens. Zurgo and Stormkirk Noble are great 1 drops in general. Zurgo is especially nice, because you can Dash him onto the battlefield on the same turn you play Winota to get immediate value. In the 2 mana slot we have generally good creatures where the best one is Selfless Spirit as is protects your whole board which is especially insane if you got a good Winota turn (or a bad one so you need another shot).

The sweatest card in the whole deck (from a synergy perspective) must be Sram's Expertise. First, it gives you three non-Humans for your Winota turn. Secondly, it goes really well with Benalish Marshal. 

Another great tech in the deck was Mishra's Factory which is a non-Human and yes, although this is a 3 color deck, Mishra's Factory was fine in the deck and did not cost as much as one would expect from a mana perspective.

You might wonder that I am always talking about Winota but what if you don't draw her or she dies? For the first case, this is just a fine Boros Aggro deck. We have interaction in the form of Mana Tithe and even Nahiri (mainly for the enchantments), but also card draw with Light up the Stage. Another great tech was Necromancy as it gave the player another shot of making a huge Winota turn. Remember that Winota is almost never played on an empty board, so it can only be stopped by instant speed interaction, which is not always available.

This deck showed me that sweet cards that seem to niche are not always that niche. There are a lot of Humans in cube, but often not enough to get a real Humans deck. You have to play a few non-Humans. In addition, there are a lot of cards that create non-Humans while being Humans themselves.

Finally, this deck shows me what my playgroup likes most about cube: Fun. This has to be the coolest and sweetest deck that someone ever drafted in my cube.

Rating

Synergy: A

Power: A-