The 35 Best Aristocrats Cards in Magic Ranked

Last updated on December 9, 2024

Woe Strider | Illustration by John Thacker

Each color in Magic has something it excels at and does almost exclusively, even if they share the mechanical space with other colors. One of black’s marque mechanics? Sacrifice outlets! Black decks love throwing creatures into the woodchipper for all sorts of value.

It’s common to find these effects stapled to creatures themselves, which are colloquially known as aristocrats thanks to a heater from Tom Martell. Today, I’m looking at the best aristocrats in Magic for when you need to sacrifice the world!

What are Aristocrats in Magic?

Falkenrath Aristocrat | Illustration by Igor Kieryluk

“Aristocrats” is a slang term for creatures that sacrifice themselves or other creatures, like Cartel Aristocrat. These are often cheap creatures with activated abilities that sacrifice one or more creatures for a boon, though the exact nature of both the cost and the reward varies greatly from card to card. These are a predominately black effect, with the majority of aristocrat cards fitting within the Mardu wedge ().

In addition to creatures with activated abilities, this list includes creatures with enters abilities that sacrifice other creatures; while the former tend to be stronger since you get repeated value, the latter have their uses. I primarily focused on Commander and Cube for these rankings.

#35. Vampire Gourmand

I can’t pretend that Vampire Gourmand has a home outside of Peasant Cube and pEDH, but I love the card dearly. The combination of pressure and card draw provides a formidable clock once you add a Blood Artist effect to the mix. 

#34. Cartel Aristocrat

A 2/2 that gains protection from colors isn’t quite the threat it used to be, but Cartel Aristocrat still has a place in lower-powered cubes and EDH decks. Free sacrifice outlets are always in demand to make these strategies tick.

#33. Sawblade Skinripper

The rate on Sawblade Skinripper’s sacrifice ability leaves a bit to be desired and signals that this was mostly designed for Limited play, but that last line of text intrigues me. That ability can deal significant amounts of damage alongside cards like God-Eternal Bontu and free sacrifice outlets that sacrifice loads of permanents at once. It’s like a Vengeful Bloodwitch that stores up all its damage for one go and controls the board.

#31. Teysa, Orzhov Scion

You need tons of sacrifice fodder to fuel Teysa, Orzhov Scion, but interactive aristocrats have incredible potential. It sounds like a terrible deal when you sacrifice three creatures to remove one, but remember that an aristocrat decks layer synergies based on creatures dying. On top of removing an opposing threat, you’re likely to draw a card and deal some damage, and maybe more.

#30. Whisper, Blood Liturgist

I like Whisper, Blood Liturgist, perhaps more than it deserves, but the rush of turning a few tokens into an Archon of Cruelty or similarly stacked threat makes up for this being rather slow. It also works as a recursion piece; sacrifice decks often go wide, which makes them vulnerable to board wipes, so a synergistic way to get your best cards back has value.

#29. Pashalik Mons

One of the most threatening cards on the list, Pashalik Mons’s greatest weakness is its restriction: It only works with goblins. But pumping out a horde of goblins while pressuring your opponents makes this a nasty threat and aristocrat decks can dabble in goblin synergies; cards like Empty the Warrens, Hordeling Outburst, and Beetleback Chief provide plenty of sacrifice fodder for your aristocrats.

#28. Akul the Unrepentant

Akul the Unrepentant provides an interestingly divergent aristocrat. These cards often encourage you to play cheap cards to overwhelm your opponents, but Akul puts its sacrifice ability towards cheating cards like Valgavoth, Terror Eater and It That Betrays into play. That makes it more of a build-around than a seamless addition to a traditional aristocrat strategy, but it’s always nice to come across a bit of spice.

#27. Smothering Abomination

The promise of card advantage makes Smothering Abomination an appealing card, especially since it’s self-enabling and counts tokens dying, but it can be slow if you rely on its upkeep trigger to get things going.

#26. Braids, Cabal Minion

What I wouldn’t give to slap Braids, Cabal Minion in my command zone!

This nasty legend tips towards a stax piece more than an aristocrat, but it works in both strategies: You get to sacrifice random bits of fodder to trigger Morbid Opportunist and Vengeful Bloodwitch or whatever while eating away at your opponents’ resources. This pairs best with cards like Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nephalia and Lord Skitter, Sewer King that produce a token each turn.

#25. Ghoulcaller Gisa

Though Ghoulcaller Gisa is terribly slow, it's also inexorable. This takes over games provided you have time to exploit turning a big creature into a shambling horde. It works well with cards like Shallow Grave that get something big into play for a turn. If you pair it with blue for Intruder Alarm and other untap effects, you can churn out zombies faster than Geralf could ever hope to.

#24. Bartolomé del Presidio

Bartolomé del Presidio earns its spot not by being flashy or overwhelmingly impactful but for simple functionality. It’s cheap, the ability costs nothing, you have no timing restrictions, and you can even eat Treasure and random artifacts like Mycosynth Wellspring for extra value. It’s also worth noting that as an uncommon, it can be a pEDH commander for a sacrifice deck.

#23. Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim

Aristocrat decks and lifegain decks overlap significantly since sacrifice payoffs like Blood Artist often result in you gaining life. Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim firmly forces that Venn diagram into a circle with a combination of lifegain and interaction that gives you plenty of chances to sacrifice other creatures for varying amounts of mana. Only costing 2 makes it an excellent, efficient commander.

#22. Chittering Witch

Any creature that makes multiple bodies has value in an aristocrat deck; when those bodies come with an aristocrat that controls the board, I become very interested. Chittering Witch’s value craters outside of Commander since you don’t get three tokens, but I love it within Commander to handle small creatures.

#21. Plaguecrafter + Friends

Plaguecrafter and other Fleshbag Marauder variants are excellent interactive spells for aristocrat decks. They work with all your sacrifice synergies, and in Commander they remove three cards for the price of one.

Plaguecrafter is the best since it hits planeswalkers and has no fail case, but Accursed Marauder deserves a nod for being the cheapest variant and having the nontoken clause that combats a weakness of the edict effect.

#20. Colonel Autumn

Colonel Autumn turns your legendary creatures into honorary aristocrats by spreading exploit across the team. It works best in a token-based shell with plenty of fodder to throw beneath your legendary creatures and enough bodies to maximize all the counters the Colonel spreads around.

#19. Rakdos, the Muscle

You typically want cheap aristocrats, but Rakdos, the Muscle is worth investing the mana into. Gaining indestructible takes the edge off the mana cost since it’s much harder to remove, but this card’s charm lies in its immense card advantage. This is one of the better aristocrats to pair with threaten effects.

Since it exiles the cards it swipes, you can utilize Rakdos’s (’s) many cast-from-exile synergies, like Wild-Magic Sorcerer and Party Thrasher.

#18. Disciple of Bolas + Disciple of Freyalise

Disciple of Bolas and the later riff Disciple of Freyalise are a little different than your typical aristocrat since they encourage you to sacrifice something rather large as opposed to many smaller things. They aren’t for every sacrifice deck, but the burst of card draw makes them quite useful, especially if you can recur the sacrificed creature for further value.

#17. Falkenrath Aristocrat

Falkenrath Aristocrat dominates the skies with hasty power. It lacks toughness, but the sacrifice ability makes up for that by protecting the noble and even growing it, assuming you throw plenty of humans into your deck to feed the nobility.

#16. Woe Strider

An excellent aristocrat for many cubes, Woe Strider provides a grindy, recursive threat that requires exile-based removal to handle for good. Coming with a Goat for that first sacrifice trigger makes this an excellent card and even gives it legs in a more aggressive strategy interested in flooding the board with creatures to pump with counters or anthems.

#15. God-Eternal Bontu

God-Eternal Bontu only gives you one crack at sacrificing things, but it refills your hand and lets your sacrifices extend well past your creatures to include extraneous mana sources to combat flooding. A 5/6 menace creature also provides a formidable threat that’s nearly impossible to remove effectively, so it gives your opponents all kinds of trouble.

#14. Wight of the Reliquary

Ramp isn’t your typical reward for sacrificing creatures but that just makes Wight of the Reliquary special. This works best with cards that produce creatures off landfall triggers like Springheart Nantuko and Scute Swarm. It’s also a nasty combo with Bloodghast since many sacrifice payoffs only see nontoken creatures die.

#13. Krav, the Unredeemed

Krav, the Unredeemed gives you tons of control over what you sacrifice. You can go all-in in response to a board wipe or throw away a card or two at a time to build a steady supply chain. The counters are what makes this powerful; backing up card draw with a growing threat puts you very far ahead since you’re gaining more resources than your opponent while actively killing them.

#12. Commissar Severina Raine

Commissar Severina Raine excels in aggressive aristocrat decks that leverage the first ability for a clock that your opponents can’t match. The sacrifice ability comes in clutch here, providing lifegain and card draw to ensure you have the resources to win the race.

#11. Caesar, Legion’s Emperor

All of Caesar, Legion's Emperor’s text is good, but the token production ability looks the strongest. Converting one piece of fodder into two gives a sacrifice deck an absurd amount of value and lets your other sacrifice outlets take over the game twice as fast.

#10. Priest of Forgotten Gods

Requiring two pieces of sacrifice fodder is a pretty steep cost, but Priest of Forgotten Gods pays dividends with its ability. Mana and card draw are the most important resources in Magic, so getting both from one trigger plus whatever rewards you get for sacrificing your creatures is a massive advantage.

#9. Erebos, Bleak-Hearted

Erebos, Bleak-Hearted converts your random junk into removal while drawing plenty of cards. Two life per card is a lot, but this one’s worth it. Erebos serves as both a sacrifice outlet and a payoff for sacrificing cards since it triggers off anything that dies, plus it’s hard to remove and becomes a massive threat later in the game. That’s an absurd amount of value for a mere 4 mana, so I’m happy to include this in any aristocrat shell.

#8. Warren Soultrader

Warren Soultrader converts your sacrifice fodder into Treasure, which is just absolutely ludicrous! Imagine cards like Bitterblossom, Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nephalia, and Ophiomancer just saying “create a Treasure every turn or upkeep.” It’s even an okay card in the face of a board wipe since you get more than enough mana to rebuild afterwards.

#7. Siege-Gang Lieutenant

An aristocrat that provides its own sacrifice fodder? Sign me up! Even if you never activate Siege-Gang Lieutenant‘s sacrifice ability, just having it hang around and pump out tokens to feed into commanders like Korvold, Fae-Cursed King and Akul the Unrepentant would be fine. Toss in a Basilisk Collar or another way to give this deathtouch and your opponents have a serious problem.

#6. Viscera Seer

Scrying feels low-impact, but controlling what you draw gives you legs in a game because you aren’t relying on blind luck to draw into gas. The player who scries 10 times over the course of a game simply has an edge over the player who doesn’t. But the real draw to Viscera Seer is its mana cost. Sacrifice combo decks sorely need aristocrats that aren’t restricted by mana and Viscera Seer provides that at as cheap a cost as possible.

#5. Carrion Feeder

Carrion Feeder has all the efficient benefits of Viscera Seer except it becomes a nasty threat that your opponents have to deal with before it slaps them into the dirt—or you Fling it at their faces.

#4. Ayara, First of Locthwain

Between the mana cost and the restriction on what you can sacrifice, Ayara, First of Locthwain works best in mono-black or near-mono-black lists. It provides incredible value over a longer, grindy game thanks to card draw and damage, plus a life buffer; it also adds a ton of devotion for cards like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and Gray Merchant of Asphodel.

#3. Braids, Arisen Nightmare

Braids, Arisen Nightmare has an incredible ceiling at Commander tables. Causing your opponents to sacrifice three creatures, or lands, or enchantments, or whatever? Excellent. Drawing three cards? Fantastic. And I’m happy with any combination therein, especially when sacrificing cards like Ichor Wellspring for additional value.

#2. Korvold, Fae-Cursed King

One of the most busted sacrifice commanders in the game, Korvold, Fae-Cursed King tends to exploit Treasure more often than other creatures, but it’s still lets you sacrifice your Shambling Ghast and similar cards while rewarding you with plenty of card draw for taking the game actions your deck wanted to do anyway. And you get a giant threat with all that!

#1. Yawgmoth, Thran Physician

Card advantage is one of the most important resources in Magic and Yawgmoth, Thran Physician provides it in spades. Simply sacrificing as many creatures as you like to draw cards at any time would be a good enough card, but this came out in a Modern Horizons set, so it’s got tons more text.

Spreading -1/-1 counters around gives you potent board control to go with your card advantage; this reduces your opponents’ pressure, giving you more time and life to sink into the sacrifice ability. The proliferate ability doesn’t come up as often, but you can set up incredible blowouts, exploit planeswalkers, or discard something to reanimate later. Yawgmoth covers most of what black does in Magic in a single, compact package.

Best Aristocrats Payoffs

Now that you've selected your aristocrats, you need to consider how sacrificing a bunch of creatures actually wins the game. While most of these cards reward you for sacrificing creatures, you can go even deeper with cards that trigger when you sacrifice a creature or when a creature dies.

Blood Artist and similar effects that ping or drain your opponents when creatures die are the standard payoffs. These effects are scattered throughout red and black, with notable variations including Mayhem Devil (which works really well with Treasure), Bastion of Remembrance (it’s nice since it survives most board wipes), and Vein Ripper (the biggest variant, both in creature size and damage dealt).

Card draw is another common payoff. Cards like Morbid Opportunist and Midnight Reaper fill your hand as you toss creatures into the woodchipper.

There’s also a variety of cards that get larger as you sacrifice permanents like Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher and Elenda, the Dusk Rose that provide essential board presence as you churn through creatures on board.

How Do You Play Aristocrats Decks?

If you want to build and pilot a functional sacrifice deck, you need to understand the trifecta of sacrifice fodder, sacrifice outlets, and sacrifice payoffs that are the essential building blocks of your deck.

Sacrifice fodder refers to the cards you actually sacrifice. Common sacrifice fodder includes tokens from cards like Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nephalia, recursive creatures like Reassembling Skeleton, or creatures that reward you when they die, like Greedy Freebooter. Since some sacrifice outlets sacrifice artifacts in addition to or instead of creatures, you can use cards like Experimental Synthesizer and Treasure tokens for a similar effect.

The sacrifice outlets are cards like the aristocrats above or noncreature cards like Goblin Bombardment, Ashnod's Altar, and Deadly Dispute. These are what you’ll sacrifice your creatures to and often overlap with the final category.

Sacrifice payoffs reward you for all that sacrificing. They may specifically reference sacrificed permanents, like Mayhem Devil, or just trigger when creatures die, like Blood Artist and Homicide Investigator.

You must make sure your payoffs align with your sacrifice fodder. Some payoffs don’t care about tokens; you don’t want to build a deck based on sacrificing Bitterblossom tokens and add Midnight Reaper because it just doesn’t work.

You have to balance all of these effects. If you don’t have enough sacrifice fodder, your outlets won’t do anything. Too few payoffs, and your outlets might not close out a game, though it’s important to consider that a sacrifice outlet can double as a payoff.

How Do Aristocrats Decks Win?

Yawgmoth, Thran Physician | Illustration by Greg Staples

Aristocrat decks often win via combat and draining their opponents. Prominent aristocrats like Carrion Feeder, Falkenrath Noble, and Korvold, Fae-Cursed King become quite large as a result of their sacrificing abilities.

Additionally, your best payoffs are Blood Artist effects that damage your opponents as your creatures die, which excel at forcing through the last couple points of damage even if your opponents stabilize with blockers.

While aristocrat decks often focus on an aggressive curve out, the lifegain that often comes with your Blood Artist effects and the card draw from cards like Deadly Dispute and Midnight Reaper allow them to grind very well.

You also have combo variants which assemble various combos that win in a single, explosive turn. For example, a persist creature like Putrid Goblin, First Day of Class, and a free sacrifice outlet let you sacrifice the Goblin as many times as you like. That might be to Altar of Dementia and Goblin Bombardment for a win or you can throw in a Mayhem Devil so that any sacrifice outlet works.

Why Are Sacrifice Decks Called Aristocrats?

Cartel Aristocrat | Illustration by James Ryman

The name Aristocrats comes from this Mardu deck Tom Martell piloted to a win in Pro Tour: Gatecrash back in 2013. It was a classic sacrifice deck that leaned on Cartel Aristocrat and Falkenrath Aristocrat chewing up cards like Doomed Traveler, tokens from Lingering Souls, and the occasional stolen creature from Zealous Conscripts to fuel them and enable Skirsdag High Priest. The deck requires a lot of concentration to play well, but it’s very rewarding when you know what you’re doing with it.

Wrap Up

Blood Artist | Illustration by Johannes Voss

Aristocrat decks are one of my favorite strategies to mess around with if only for their complexity and the interesting decision trees they open. It can also be fun to just play a deck that goes infinite at the drop of a hat, plus it’s always cool to play an archetype with a good history in the game.

What are your favorite aristocrats? Do you keep things traditional with creatures or try sacrificing noncreature permanents? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe and thanks for reading!