The unstoppable archetype in Commander | Deck Driver MTG | Arche-Techs

in Commander there are so many different ways that you can build your deck you can build your deck around so many different themes and archetypes which is what makes this format so amazing there's so much variety all the time there's so much flexibility in the format the commanders you can use and there's so many different ways you can go about building your decks at all different power levels speeds and goals that your deck wants to accomplish ladies and gentlemen this is Architects a series that I have on this channel where we talk about different archetypes in Commander if you guys enjoy this content make sure to like and subscribe it really helps out the channel the archetype we'll be talking about today is Aristocrats an aristocrat strategy is trying to sacrifice and use its own permanence to gain value for itself this could be either through death triggers enter the battlefield triggers or a mixture of both in most cases you're going to be in the colors black and typically white as well and you typically find creatures in this orz off combo that give you a bunch of value from both of those things happening you might see other Decks that like to sacrifice a lot but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are Aristocrats decks there are sacrific themes and a lot of different colors especially when you're using black but that doesn't often mean that they are Aristocrats Aristocrats in most cases either like to combo off through these death triggers either by making a ton of tokens or maybe triggering a death over and over and over again or they want to slow the game down to almost a grindy halt where they're taking just a couple life each and every turn and using their value to slow you down as much as possible other sacrifice decks sometimes like to Sacrifice from big Power payoffs Aristocrats is usually a lot more low to the ground a lot more token focused and a bit more complicated in its strategy so today we'll be talking about what makes this strategy so good the concept of holding the gun in commander and we'll look at two commanders that can help us build an aristocrat strategy ourselves so without further Ado let's get into it the Aristocrat strategy is really good primarily for the reason that it is resilient in most cases in Commander no matter the power level removal is always a great answer to most of your opponent's strategies players want their permanence to stick around and provide residual value either through combat damage or maybe a Mana syn or just being on the battlefield and getting passive effects that happen removing these is typically a great option however for Aristocrats decks this typically is exactly what they want you to do an Aristocrats Deck with a cruel celra on the battlefield does not care if you board wipe their 30 tokens away because they know that it will be such a huge life swing that it's never worth it but on the flip side they still are holding up a sack outlet that can do that damage to you anyway so in most cases removal is a really tricky subject when it comes to how to deal with these decks not only that but most of these decks have a lot of recursion in them themselves that allow them to get their creatures back anyways when going up against an Aristocrats player I definitely would recommend you try and get rid of their sack Outlets to begin with and you try to get rid of their payoffs as best as possible in most cases they'll be able to get them back but just having them get out there allows you to do the rest of your work from there so like we said in that previous example if they have a cruel celebrate on the board and 30 tokens you want to get rid of the cruel celebrate first and then wipe the board it's going to cost you more Mana but it's also going to save you 30 Health in a lot of ways you really want to sequence your removal properly playing against them and it's good to learn about what their key pieces are when you are playing against them astronauts alter and basically any sack Outlet any kind of token maker and of course the payoffs like a Zula for Cutthroat or a blood artist these are the three key factors that typically make an aristocrat's deck function so if you can find good ways to get rid of these or Exile them you'll be in a good spot and as the aristocrats player you want to protect these pieces as much as possible you want to be able to run multiple of these payoffs so that you can have more resilience and redundancy in your strategy if you just ran one blood artist Effect one you most likely won't get the payoff as much as you might want and two if it gets exiled or gets permanently removed from the game it's going to be hard for you to recover in some cases impossible for you to recover so you want redundancy in both your sack Outlets your payoffs and your creature makers or regenerators so the biggest thing that makes these Aristocrats decks really good is their resiliency another thing that's so great about Aristocrats decks is that everything that you can see is on the board There is almost no hidden information ever now this can be good for your opponents but it's also very bad for your opponents this is the concept of holding the gun in Commander when you're playing the the game and you have those three pieces that we're looking for in most cases removal is really hard to come by and removing the pieces at the right time is just as hard especially as an Aristocrats player you have all the pieces there and your opponents are going to have to sequence properly in order to make sure that you can't get the payoffs you want but because you have all those pieces you can just hold the gun which means that you basically can use politics and you can use your leverage of having such a good board state in ways that you might not normally get to do in in other decks in other decks typically you have the best board State you're going to get targeted the most but in Aristocrats decks if you have the best board State you're probably just straight up in the lead and there's nothing your opponents can do because most of these triggers are at instant speed anytime they try to remove something you can almost always in response do your combo because of this resiliency in Aristocrat strategies holding the gun often happens more than other strategies you want to use this to your benefit because now your opponents both have perfect information on your board but they still have hidden information of what might be in your hand you want to use your out in the open strategy to try to convince your opponents to do other things do things for you or typically just avoid your board State altogether holding the gun is an interesting strategy and allows you to really take advantage of your powerful deck and Powerful board State whereas in other decks you might not be able to having the best board State and having political power in the game is incredible cuz like I said in any other deck in any other aggro deck if you have the best board State it's easy you you just board wipe holding the gun in Commander is a super interesting concept I love talking about it all the time because I do find in-your-face kind of strategies very impressive and very cool I love my combat tricks and I love being able to hold up things and Bluff my opponents out and have the almost fourth dimension of Commander but sometimes it's really awesome to just have a great board State on the battlefield and know your opponents can't do anything about it and leveraging that board state in order to get what you want in the game it's a really cool concept and I think more people should try to utilize it in their gameplay so we've talked about why Aristocrat strategies are so powerful and we've talked about the holding the gun concept that typically Aristocrats decks can use the most so now that we know what Aristocrats decks are kind of looking for let's try to build a deck around something like this so I have two decks for you today the first one we're going to talk about is my Alinda The Dusk Rose deck Alinda The Dusk Rose is an incredible commander and she's a very fast strategy I like to play her very quickly to try to combo off as fast as I possibly can in Aristocrat strategies I personally prefer to have one of those three key factors that we're looking for in the command either a sack Outlet a token SLC creature generator or an enabler because of this I really think Alinda the dust grow is a great option and because she can make so many tokens so easily it's a very fast strategy so let's get into it with something like Linda since we're trying to go fast we want to basically put in the normal just kind of aristocrats good stuff strategies we want to have the visera seers the blood artists the ashnod Alters we want all of those things because we're making one one tokens something like a skull clamp is really nice as well and the two really really powerful cards are blade of the blood Chief and cordial vampire these basically double the one- one counters that you might normally get on Alinda blade of the blood Chief is actually tripling it too as a Linda will see something die and blade of the blood Chief will see something die so you'll get three plus one plus1 counters we then want to make plenty of mana and have plenty of ways to make sure that Alinda sticks around even after we sacrifice her to some of these effects things like not dead after all and Supernatural stamina is awesome these effects allow us to sacrifice Alinda get the token entering the battlefield payoff and then immediately have her come back an enchantment that's really awesome is gift of immortality as Aristocrat strategies are already hard to deal with gift of immortality forces your opponent to have to remove Alinda twice in one turn if they want to get rid of her for good and I say for good but you'll just recast her for six the next turn if she does anything like a fian alter or ashn alter basically means you win the game in this kind of strategy as you can constantly sacrifice a Linda make a bunch of tokens and have that Mana be able to recast a Linda which then makes more tokens which then makes ainda bigger which then you can sacrifice ainda again and repeat the process almost like a food chain combo but with no green because of this you can get near infinite blood artist and cruel celebrant triggers and you'll typically win the game from there it's not NE necessarily a combo deck none of this is usually actually infinite unless of course you have an ashnod's alter out and a fian alter out and your Linda is already at a 10 power in which case you'll be able to probably net enough Mana to do this infinitely but in most cases you're not going to have that you're going to have to be good enough to string together these combos control the game until you get there and make sure you're protected enough when going for it this deck is extremely powerful it's extremely fast and because you're not really casting spells during the combo you're usually un interactable anyways the only time they'd be able to interact is by removing something in which case you can just stack Triggers on top of the removal and keep going this is a deck I own in person and it's an extremely cool deck I love playing Alinda all the time now the next deck allows us to slow it down a little bit as well as bring down the budget quite a bit as well balom is the commander of choice and we make sure to have lurus as a companion this deck is much cheaper you might have actually seen that Taran Community College segment on it they did a strategy very similar to this and we have a very similar strategy as well but I have my own takes on it and I have just a bit more cards in there that can keep the consistency up as best as possible in this deck we are going pretty greedy we're only running 32 Lance now before you kill me okay you just have to Mulligan properly if you Mulligan to three lands you have your Mana curve set you might be able to Only cast a couple spells per turn but in all of my test hands I have never once run into the problem of being land dry balom or Mr Bart from now on is a lot more grindy of an aristocrat strategy this is the strategy that wants to control the board as best as possible this strategy allows you to keep the board at a halt grinding halt almost and has plenty of outs with tutors and board wipes the tutors are here to help set up your combos as best as possible and this is the true aristocrat's function of sacrificing something recurring it for Value sacrificing it again recurring it again and just looping certain value pieces over and over until you can eventually assemble either enough death triggers from grinding the game out some extort triggers through blind obedience or even the infinite combo of metallic mimic and lesser mastor or putur Goblin now these are now this combo will allow you to get infinite one counters on balom and infinite death triggers which is really nice and the rest of the deck is just trying to be able to Loop all these valuable pieces until you can find this combo or until you can kind of get the game to a halt we have things like a curs Marauder to make sure that your opponent's board stay as low as possible stuff like selfless Savior and selfless spirit that allow you to things protected this deck can go both ways but your main goal should be to grind out the game as much as possible you might want to use your tutors to go find the combo immediately but the more effective strategy is to use your tutors to find a value piece like an eor Wellspring eor Wellspring for draw card or prize statue for mana and finding your blood artist and cruel celebrate effects that you're looking for this will provide you residual value over the entire game game and your other tutors can go find your combo from there or you might just stumble upon it as the game goes on this deck is only $100 and it still is very effective at what it needs to do you have plenty of ways of getting rid of creatures getting rid of artifacts and enchantments and you have easy ways to win throughout the game I highly recommend you look at both of these decks and determine which one you might want or which one you're just most interested in I think both of them are really cool and I love playing them all the time to conclude about Aristocrat strategies Aristocrats are incredibly resilient and they offer a lot of fun gameplay that typically you don't have in other decks it's a very in-your-face strategy as you will be an opponent to the strategy you'll see things happening and you know you just can't do anything about it but as the aristocrats player you love this you're able to use your advantage as leverage against your opponents to help you get further into the game and maybe allow your opponents to do your bidding for you because there's so many Loops in Magic the Gathering now often times Aristocrats decks can turn into kind of combo decks and while that's not necessarily the best thing ever it is just a fact of life I think Aristocrats is a really cool strategy you don't have to go with orz off you can pick up other strategies in this ratos is also a great one mardu is also another one if you want to add red and absen and esper are really great options if you want to slow the game down even more personally I don't know why you would want to do that but you certainly can anyways ladies and gentlemen that has been my video about Aristocrats thank you for joining Architects if you guys have enjoyed this video make sure to leave a like and subscribe thank you so much