Archetypes
Best Budget Aristocrats Upgrades
The aristocrats engine, a sacrifice outlet, a supply of bodies, and a drain payoff, runs just as well on cheap cards as expensive ones. Here's a budget version of all three parts, mostly black.
Cheap sacrifice outlets
The outlet is the part of the engine you actually control, and none of these three needs more than a dollar or two of budget.
Viscera Seer ↗
A one-mana, free, repeatable sacrifice outlet. This is the cheapest card that actually does the archetype's core job, and it's rarely more than a dollar.
Carrion Feeder ↗
Grows itself every time you feed it, turning a one-drop into a real threat over the course of a game while still doing outlet duty.
Woe Strider ↗
Comes with a free token to sacrifice immediately, has escape to come back from the graveyard, and taps for scry on top. A lot of value packed into one three-mana card.
Cheap drain payoffs
Stack two or three of these and a single creature dying starts draining the whole table at once, which is where the archetype's real damage comes from.
Zulaport Cutthroat ↗
Drains for every creature you control that dies, not only itself. Two mana for an effect that scales with your whole board.
Cruel Celebrant ↗
The Orzhov version of the same effect, and it also triggers off planeswalkers dying, which most cards in this slot don't cover.
Bastion of Remembrance ↗
Ships with its own 1/1 token, so it's immediately worth sacrificing something into and never a blank card the turn it resolves.
Cheap card advantage from sacrificing
A deck that's constantly feeding creatures into an outlet needs a way to refill its hand, or it runs out of material by the midgame. These convert a sacrifice you were making anyway into real cards.
Village Rites ↗
One mana, sacrifice a creature, draw two. It turns a token or a dying creature into pure card advantage, which is what keeps a sacrifice deck from running out of gas.
Costly Plunder ↗
The same draw-two-off-a-sacrifice effect, but takes an artifact instead of only a creature, which matters in a deck also running a Treasure or token-making artifact package.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Ashnod's Altar to make an aristocrats deck work?
No. Ashnod's Altar is a strong mana-generating sacrifice outlet, but Viscera Seer does the same core job, free and repeatable, for a fraction of the price. The mana ramp Ashnod's Altar adds is a real upgrade, not a requirement to get the archetype's basic engine running.
What's the cheapest way to get card advantage out of sacrificing creatures?
Village Rites, one mana to sacrifice a creature and draw two cards. It's an instant, so it also doubles as a way to get value out of a creature that's about to die to removal anyway rather than losing it for nothing.
Is Blood Artist worth buying, or is it too expensive for a budget list?
Blood Artist is usually inexpensive, often close to or under a dollar depending on printing, so it's worth including in almost any budget list. Check the current price on TurnZero HQ before assuming it's out of range; the aristocrats staples with real budget concerns are the mana-generating outlets like Ashnod's Altar, not the drain payoffs themselves.
Build the deck and track what it actually drains.
TurnZero HQ's Deck Lab measures your deck against real card-count targets as you build, so you can see whether the engine is complete before you're at the table.
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