Archetype Spotlight: Black White Humans (Aggro)
One of the more common problems that I've seen new cube designers run into is finding ways to bring enough support to aggressive archetypes to thrive in a midrange environment. The core idea behind drafting an aggressive deck is to apply pressure to your opponents life total with early threats (usually 2 or 3 power) that will allow you to peck away before they can set up their defenses. The problem ends up being that the aggressive 2/1 for one or a 3/2 for two mana will quickly be outpaced by the mid-game, maybe as early as turn 3 or 4. There is a very limited window where you can maximize your damage output with traditional aggressive threats like a Carnophage or Vampire Lacerator before they become stonewalled completely. It could be a creature like Courser of Kruphix on T3 capable of blocking with a 2/4 body that will eat up low toughness one drops while providing incidental lifegain from land drops. Maybe they play a pushed midrange threat with stats above the typical curve like a Polukranos, World Eater that pulls off its best impression of The Abyss each combat phase. You try to go extra wide and curve out with three 2 power one-drops within your first 3 turns to maximize your damage ouput and end up playing yourself into a Wrath of God that undoes your game development.
R/x Aggro decks seek to mitigate this issue by providing you with a form of reach in burn spells. Either aim directly at your opponents face to push them closer to zero or use them to clear out large blockers to allow your smaller threats to get through for more damage. But even then, you may be taxed into attacking with both a Goblin Guide and a Falkenrath Gorger into a Courser of Kruphix just to push through more damage or to clear the blocker with the help of a 2 damage burn spell. The larger problem arises within colors that do not have access to direct damage for late game reach. A white weenie deck is usually a boardwipe or beefy midrange creature away from being shut out of the game. Aggressive black creatures usually have low toughness or "can't block" clauses making them even more narrow.
How do you fix this and make non-Red aggro more viable? The most common approach has been to bring Swords of X and Y into cubes in order to give aggressive decks bigger teeth, but the issue then ends up being a lack of interaction. Quite often the Sword may not even reach our Aggro player at the table and end up being gobbled up by Midrange decks due to how generically powerful they can be. Protection effects lead to less engaging gameplay, outright warp many games around them, and in the worst case scenario can end up invalidating an entire players' drafting strategy. If our goal is to design an environment looking to maximize fun and the quality of gameplay, we cannot rely upon such a flawed design strategy. So what can we do?
Lucky for us, we can utilize the ideas behind Recursive Black Aggro as a base and can develop an aggressive BW Humans archetype that will allow for interactive gameplay, more decision oriented combat, and a deck with the ability to function just as effectively into the late game. We can create an aggressive deck that wins games through a maximization of synergistic interactions that makes combat interesting again.
There are two key ideas to focus upon when designing this archetype: maximization of pressure with recursive and scaleable threats and providing late game reach.
I. Pressure Maximization As an aggressive deck, you need a critical mass of cheap creatures to deploy during the early part of a game. You normally want the majority of your threats to be one-drops and your curve to top out around four or five at the most. The following threats help to form the core of the archetype:
The Champion is the most impactful one-drop within white if you can curve out from T1. Within White and Black, there are a ton of aggressively leaning humans available within the 1-3 CMC range. It's not uncommon to grow the Champion to a 4/4 or greater if you are on the play, representing a potent threat that can't be ignored or taken down that easily on curve. Thalia's Lieutenant is another copy of the Champion with the additional benefit of performing as a later game anthem effect providing your humans with a permanent +1/+1 boost. Often times it may be correct to sandbag the Lieutenant for a turn or two before you develop a wide enough board to maximize counter distribution. Opponents will need to prioritize the use of targetted removal if either the Champ or Lieutenant grows too quickly for their blockers to contain. There is no better feeling than forcing your opponent to use premier removal on your 1 or 2 drop creature. I would look to include 2 Champions with your cube prior to including the Lieutenant, it is much more important to curve out from T1 onwards.
The aggressive one drop of choice. This is the card that made this archetype possible in the first place. It is an amazing attacker that will keep coming back and forcing blocks or chip in for 2 damage all throughout the game. If you combine it with a sac outlet (Ex. Carrion Feeder or Grafted Wargear) alongside Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat, you can have turns where you swing in for 2 or occupy a blocker, have it die in order to trigger the lifedrain, then just recast it via its own Raid trigger. If it's the later game where you've amassed 6+ lands, you can keep on saccing and recasting off the raid trigger and build your own mini-Fireball. I would want to have 2 of these within the cube, they slot into just about any B/x Aggro deck.
While these cards aren't human, they help to solidify the core ideas behind this style of play. Gravecrawler is the 3rd card I look for when drafting this archetype. It provides another aggressive one drop with a recurrable body and can be summoned back to play from the graveyard with any future zombies. Alongside Carrion Feeder, you can build your own large threat capable of going toe-to-toe with midrange monsters and are constrained only by your access to
. Bloodghast ends up being a value 2 drop who just won't disappear unless met with an exile effect. It's usually not my first choice to play on T2 if I have more action, but it does perform its job well and will continue to harass opponents with each Landfall trigger down the road. Scrapheap Scrounger is just a very strong card that will relentlessly return to haunt your opponent provided your graveyard is stocked with enough bodies to allow it to recur. Say you run into a wrath effect that decimates your boardstate. For R/x lists that would be close to a death knell, but with these kind of recursive bodies located all throughout the archetype it's only a matter of recasting after untapping. This card is best used as a 3/2 early in the game and only brought back once you've begun to completely run dry of resources. You almost never want to eat a Crawler or Bloodsoaked Champ, but many of the white creatures that die are just fine to exile since it's unlikely you'll have a means of recursion for them. Remember, the ability can be activated at instant speed! Dread Wanderer is the newest addition but does a fine job as a 2/1 body that can return in the later part of the game once you've run out of resources in hand. Being a zombie opens up cool synergies to take advantage of with Gravecrawler and Plague Belcher.The disruptive creature suite; they have the primary goal of extending your window to apply pressure in the early game. One of biggest problem facing aggressive decks are wrath effects that can clear the board and leave you without any meaningful threats to deploy. You are dumping your hand quickly and can be thoroughly punished for overextending, often met with a 3 or 4-for-1 flip of the boardstate. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Vryn Wingmare add a crucial tax to your opponents' spot removal or 4+ mana wrath effect, effectively opening the window for you to chip in another 3-4 points of damage. An opponent may have been sandbagging the wrath effect until T4 hoping to eke out maximum value, but now their plans are completely derailed and their spot removal rendered inefficient in the face of aggressive low cost threats. Stemming off the likes of Wrath of God and Languish until the 5th turn is a major boon and might just provide the opening you need to win the game. Thalia, Heretic Cathar allows you to strand their stabilizing fatties for a turn and set back the mana development from any fetch or dual land for an entire turn. Imposing Sovereign creates problems on similar axis to Thalia by setting your opponent's defenses back a turn and allowing you the window to push through a few more crucial points of damage.
Other aggressive roleplayers may include the following creatures:
Your gameplan is to curve out the first three turns and look into deploying 4-6 power on board across 2-3 bodies. You leverage pressure by attacking continuously with recursive threats, then push through for the final points of damage by going very wide to occupy multiple blockers or with Artist and Cutthroat triggers. This leads us right into our next topic:
II. Late Game Reach :These are the creatures that will allow you to get past opposing defenses and finish off your opponent. Every point of life drain is crucial towards victory and kamikaze attacks with Gravecrawlers and Bloodsoaked Champs are encouraged. You make every trade of an x/2 with a Crawler or Bloodsoaked less enticing when you have the option of draining AND just recasting the threat on your next turn. Brutal Hordechief is this archetypes version of Hellrider and can lead to some insane lifeswings out of nowhere. While Hellrider may be a bit too powerful for certain cubes (outright representing an additional 5-6 damage on strong curvouts often), this curve-topper hits the sweet spot by providing a static form of reach while allowing you to stabilize as well. It plays equally as well with a tokens strategy or a curve out of 1/2/3 drops. This is the best curve topper for this archetype by far, the glue that really brings it all together. Plague Belcher is a relatively new inclusion, but I've had some success with it in both AKH Limited and my own cube sessions. Provides more teeth to B/x Aggressive decks featuring Gravecrawlers where you can maximize it's abilities, but it also great as a 5/4 Menace that you can plop on T3 by trading up one of your outclassed tiny creatures. If you've developed a good enough board that you don't want to diminish or topdeck this post-wrath, a base case of Boggart Brute is perfectly passable if a bit unexciting. It's been a slam dunk inclusion for me.
A lot of people will draft Bob just as a generically powerful card, but I feel like this is the one archetype where he truly shines. Your curve is skewed towards one and two drops so you can assume somewhere between 1.4-1.7 damage on average which quickly becomes negligible if you've set up a way to gain life. Aggressive decks need a way to keep the gas flowing and Bob is the best at it while also being a human that can pump a T1 Champion of the Parish.Asylum Visitor may not have the same guaranteed effect as Bob, but I can envision it drawing one or two extra cards once the game has stalled and you've played out your hand in certain matchups. At worst, it is a 3 power creature for 2 mana that will Bolt your opponent with an attack and trade with another card. Glint-Sleeve Siphoner is the newest addition to this suite of creatures and requires surviving for two turns before it can pull off a Phyrexian Arena impression and net you a card. The 2/1 Menace body will likely get in for at least two points of damage in most matchups, likely point your opponent's removal at it, and it wears equipment like a champ. Solid card.
This suite of cards serves the purpose of providing vertical growth to your boardstate. Drana, Liberator of Malakir is an impressive attacking creature at 3 mana that can rapidly distribute +1/+1 counters across your side of the field if your opponent is unable to provide a flying blocker in time. The first strike ability ensures that the rest of your creatures will be the beneficiaries of her anthem-like ability prior to engaging your opponent's blockers on the ground. Growing herself allows her to rapidly outpace many threats and pieces of common removal with a sturdy 3/4 body after the first swing that just grows larger and larger throughout the game. Collective Effort was yet another fine addition from SOI block that does a number of things that I love as a modal spell that can function as removal or an anthem for you team depending upon the boardstate. A big dumb 4/4 fatty keeping you from attacking? Kill it with Collective Effort. Opponent rapidly falling behind and can't keep up with the boardstate? Grow the team with Collective Effort and kill them. Sorin, Lord of Innistrad has long been a staple inclusion for BW Tokens strategies, but he's just as effective in this archetype as the source of a permanent unremovable anthem effect. That +1/+0 boost seems innocuous on first glance, but when paired with recursive beaters it can rapidly change the boardstate. All of a sudden those x/3 blockers aren't nearly so capable or reliable when the threats they're trading with can just come back in subsequent turns.
White walkers have long had the issue of being too goodstuff-y or just flat out gamewarping in the cases of Gideon Jura and Elspeth, Sun's Champion, but the smallest Ajani is the perfect tool for aggressive decks. He can buff up your guys one counter at a time to force one-sided trades with recursive threats or allow you to charge in there with a single threat for 5-6 damage in one shot in the air. The -3 plays amazingly well with grown Champions or creatures wielding equipment.
Speaking of equipment, how about two of the best designed ones we've ever had? Doubling up on Bonesplitter was one of the best decisions I made giving aggressive decks more of a punch. Grafted Wargear can turn negligible 2/1 creatures into legitimate 5/3 threats and doubles as a sac outlet. It's pretty demoralizing for opponents to trade with a recursive threat only to see you bring it back in the 2nd main phase, re-equip, and have a 4 or 5 power threat ready to attack the very next turn. I wouldn't want to have to face down a 5 power Toolcraft Exemplar wielding a Bonesplitter on T2 if I were a slower deck.
The Stax suite. Perhaps the most appealing part of this strategy is that I get to play with one of my favorite creatures of all time. Braids and Smokestack introduce such a unique Stax effect to a game of Magic and turns those games into a more intricate puzzle to navigate through. By forcing your opponent to choose between sacrificing one of their meaningful permanents, you are able to force them into a position where you limit their mana development or board development. Support Braids with spot removal to pick off threats and limit your opponents choices and you've established a perilous position for your opponent. While your BW deck can thrive off 4 lands and continue recasting and sacrificing Bloodsoaked Champion and Gravecrawler, your opponent may be facing a tougher decision with their expensive creatures that may just be stranded in hand. Need to break out of the lock or deploy something like Brutal Hordechief to attack on a different axis? Just sac Braids and move on with your gameplan!
I've had a handful of games where I have won just off the back of a Tangle Wire on curve after playing out 4-6 power in the previous turns. Often times opponents are fine with taking the 2-4 damage in the early game because their gameplan is based around stabilizing with a larger body around Turn 3 or 4. It could be as simple as a T1 Champion of the Parish, T2 Bloodsoaked Champion, T3 Tangle Wire, follow it up by playing out some other cheap threats to grow the Champion. This will strand the majority of decks deploying more midrangey bodies or holding onto reactive cards locking up their turns worth of mana very early. On the other hand, your handful of 1 and 2 cost creatures looks good to go.
Not as crucial to make the archetype function, but this might be one of the bigger draws for those us who love disruption. With the lack of many cards with
or mana costs and such a low curve, I've found this to be the most effective archetype for leveraging the pressure of Wasteland effectively. You don't mind using up your land drop for the turn to disrupt your opponent's curve since you'll usually be fine operating off just 3-4 mana in the first place. This also allows for the easier splashing for the effects of cards like Eldrazi Displacer or Thought-Knot Seer in the main deck since there are not major color requirements. Since moving to a 420 cube, I've found that Wasteland has been most effective as an inclusion within a Utility Land Draft as a multi-pick.Other cards that help provide later game reach may include the following:
III. Strategy I find most of these decks end up having a majority of creatures, maybe 1-2 pieces of equipment, and then 2-3 pieces of removal. Those removal spells are used tactically to take out certain threats that might warp the board or just completely shut you out. Being able to curve out a board of three 2 power creatures by your opponents third turn (where they might not even have anything relevant deployed) is a huge amount of pressure. Not to mention that aggressive decks can extract the most value out of a Wasteland or Stax effect since they can function off just 3-4 mana effectively.
This archetype lives off of its 1 drops. Often times I will have 9+ one mana cards in the deck (though I guess Bonesplitter is usually just a T2 play + equip). I almost always go 16 lands since the decks tend to top off with one or two 4 drops. An ideal sequence is something like:
T1: Plains, Champion of the Parish
T2: Swamp, Bloodsoaked Champion, Bonesplitter, swing with a 2/2 Champion
T3: Land, Equip Bonesplitter to the Bloodsoaked, play a 2 drop Human to grow Champion to 3/3, swing with a 3/3 and a 4/1
At this point, unless your opponent has played something like a Wall of Omens, you've likely hit them for around 5 points of damage. If they drop a blocker in your path, it's not really a big deal since your Champion of the Parish will likely be able to punch through x/4s on the following turn. If it dies? Just bring back a Bloodsoaked Champion and re-equip the Bonesplitter. You usually save any of your removal spells for T4 or T5 and fire it off if they've stuck some midrange-y threat that you can't attack into profitably.
Similarly, you can also start off with Gravecrawlers and Carrion Feeders for another aggressive early curve, this time saccing Crawlers during combat to grow the Feeder to sizes that allow you to punch through annoying blockers. Where this becomes really fun is when you can force your opponent into tougher decisions with a Feeder out. Take for instance this scenario:
A1: Swamp, Bloodsoaked Champion
B1: Fetchland
A2: Attack with Champion, Swamp, Gravecrawler, Carrion Feeder (opponent EOT cracks fetch for tapped dual land)
B2: Forest, Sylvan Advocate
A3: Attack with Feeder, Champion and Crawler
What does your opponent do in this scenario? The Feeder can eat the Advocate if it blocks through saccing the Crawler and Champion. If the Advocate blocks either the Crawler or Champion? Just sac it to the Feeder to grow it with a +1/+1 counter. They still take 4 damage in total and you can recast the threat. This is a scenario that happens far more often than you'd think. If you can average around 3 points of damage from each threat you deploy (akin to how Burn decks value their spells in Constructed formats), I think you're in great shape for the late game.
With R/x Aggro, once you've knocked the opponent below 10 life you can usually just stockpile burn in hand to finish them off little by little if you've been shut down on the ground. The reach you get from the Hordechief, Cutthroat and especially Blood Artist in this archetype perform that same role and are crucial towards draining out the last bits of life from your opponent. Combat becomes more intriguing when you can represent some loss of life no matter what block an opponent makes.
Any token producers like Bitterblossom or Lingering Souls can help supplement this theme further by providing evasive bodies that can peck in for damage or can be converted to a drain of 1 life whenever they die. Those tokens end up becoming FAR more valuable if they can average around 2 points of damage to your opponent over the course of their lifetime.
IV. Sample Decklists Finally, the fun part. Let's take a look at some of the decks we can assemble!
BW Aggro from CubeTutor.com
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Your typical build with a plethora of aggressive one-drop creatures, a few removal spells, and larger threats to allow you to push through more damage. Lingering Souls curves out beautifully into Brutal Hordechief providing you with a squad of evasive fliers who can now represent 2 damage with each unblocked attack in the air.
BW Staxggro from CubeTutor.com
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This one is a little spicier introducing Stax elements and even more explosive early turns with the potential of Toolcraft Exemplar capable of becoming a 5 power attacking threat as early as T2.
But why stop at only BW, why not extend it to Mardu colors as well?
Mardu Humans from CubeTutor.com
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Mardu Aggro from CubeTutor.com
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V. Conclusion Among the many archetypes that I've incorporated into my own Cube, this one is near and dear to my heart and the one that I have spent the most time tweaking over the last three years. I try to draft it as often as I can. I find it to be powerful, gives aggressive players a great alternative to the typical R/x archetype, and it is laden with a ton of interesting decisions to make all throughout the game. Give it a try in your cube, thanks for reading!
