It is time to retire Aristocrats.
Sad to see something that's been part of my cube since day 1 leave, but it's been a tough nut to crack.
As my format gets more and more fair over time, the endless supply of 2/1s offered by black is becoming a real issue for the rest of the archetypes, especially reactive ones.
There's a few options I could take to try and make this work: Maybe
Bloodsoaked Champion costs 2 to cast so the combo angle is still there, but the agressive gameplan is worse.
Maybe have the creatures be 1/1s rather than 2/1s, forcing the deck to lean harder on anthems or the combo angle.
It's also possible that you could balance this by hitting just the right number of payoffs/enablers and bringing everything down just enough to feel fair, but my group is just kinda tired of it.
I think this is a sweet archetype with interesting drafting decisions, especially when you're limited to printed magic.
Blood Artist and
Goblin Bombardment are narrow cards to be sure, but they're way less narrow than some other cube archetype cards like
Entomb or
Deceiver Exarch. Me? I can do whatever I need to for cards to overlap however I want, so the flexibility offered here actually feels low compared to my other archetypes.
Anyways, time for a scene change. I've decided the new direction is an artifact angle, specifically in
. I also considered white, but while there's a ton of ways to generate clues and servos and golems in white, there's not a ton of ways to pay people off for having artifacts.
Anyways, post archetype shuffle my cube now includes:
+1/+1 counters
Prowess
Graveyard
Artifacts
The plan was originally to offer each archetype as having 3 functional 2 color decks or a 3 color variant for spice. This has worked with moderate success, both prowess and counters work like this, but the graveyard deck has only ever had a solid showing in GB. Mixing in a 3rd color only ever happened for 1-2 cards (typically generic power cards as well) and any variant with just black or just green just...didn't work. There were a few individual blue cards that worked well (
Search for Azcanta,
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, various looting effects) but never really enough to actually justify having a heavy presence of blue in your deck.
I'd tried switching it to red with...disastrous results.
Mostly this idea was built off the RG lands in graveyards matter theme from modern horizons, and while all these cards say the word graveyard on them, there's a philosophical conflict in what the deck is trying to do.
See grindy graveyard based decks take a lot of mana to operate. Loops are often bound by mana, and a lot of the payoffs are expensive. Cards like
Molten Vortex,
Throes of Chaos,
Tectonic Reformation,
Living Twister etc all end up taxing your mana when you'd much rather just be hitting land drops. A Huge disappointment was
centaur vinecrasher, who demands a really insane number of fetchlands and self mill to be close to on curve.
So that angle doesn't really pan out. I think the better approach is to handle this like a 5 color green archetype, where it's solidly BG, but you can kinda splash around for whatever works (
Spitebellows +
Oversold Cemetary, Recurring
Hydroid Krasis, or whatever. Maybe there's some sweet white cards I haven't thought of.
Sun titan?)
As well, we also had the Artifact deck debut! Hilariously both players drafting hard in this archetype played white for artifact count support, and some of the cards in red and black I added (the more aggressive ones) ended up in other decks and had no synergy reason to exist there.
I kinda knew that going in, as I didn't have quite enough ideas that all fit in a midrange shell, so a few aggressive cards were added.
Embraal Bruiser is a cool card, but I don't think it really fits.
I'd doubled up on
Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas and
Karn, Scion of Urza, and our own Dominic Harvey stole many a game with unblockable 5/5
blurry beebles.
Thopter Spy Network was a solid overpreformer, but that card is so near and dear to my heart that I'm willing to give it a lot of leeway. (notably better because of the addition of 8 signets to my cube)
However, the strongest card of the night definitely goes to my custom Karn:
A few things about this card need to change. The theme is there, but it's just a bit too strong in a few too many places. This is my first custom planeswalker in ages and it shows
After some analysis with my drafters, we've decided on this:
Karn, the Corrupted 3BB
Whenever an artifact you control dies, each opponent loses 1 life.
+1: investigate
-2: create a 0/0 construction token with "This gets +1/+1 for each artifact you control"
Starting Loyalty: 4
Gaining life really was the big thing on the passive: A lot of this deck involves pumping out a bunch of servos, thopters and clues and exploiting them, and this provided a lot more wiggle room than necessary.
the + adding black was an idea of mine thinking the + was too weak initially. I'd underestimated the passive, and it's not
Also, going up to 6 and accelerating you also proved a bit much.
Slightly adjusting the CMC and starting loyalty rounds out the changes. I wish he could mirror
Karn, Scion of Urza, but at least now he's a mirror
If it needs further nerfing, I'll probably adjust the Karnstruct to a -3.
Also I should probably
Tezzeret the Schemer his clue and have him make a unique token with a different name because clue doesn't make a ton of sense. (That tezzeret basically makes treasures, but there's no flavor in them being called that)