This is my attempt at a fun, budget Aetherborn deck, utilizing efficient creatures, +1/+1 counter synergies, sacrifice, and Indestructibility to beat your opponents in a game of attrition.
First, we have our aristocrats: Yahenni, Undying Partisan and Westvale Abbey
. These are our primary win conditions and feeding them sacrifice makes life very difficult for our opponents.
Next, we have our sacrificial victims:
Weaponcraft Enthusiast
and the servos from Animation Module. Servos are our best sacrifice targets since they're fairly plentiful, but we can also use the Clerics from Westvale Abbey
to keep Yahenni alive in a pinch.
Then, our value engines: Gifted Aetherborn, Animation Module, and Gonti, Lord of Luxury. These cards are just gas in our deck, with Gifted beating down early and trading favorably late while Animation Module keeps us topped up on +1/+1 counters and Servo tokens. If you have Animation Module, 4 mana available, and a Yahenni with at least one counter, you can pump him up and make him Invulnerable at instant speed. Gonti may seem a bit odd but he helps shore up our weaknesses as a mono-colored deck on the fly, plus he's still a decent body.
There's also some removal mixed in: Grasp of Darkness is a very efficient and clean answer to most threats in the format, leading Dead Weight to deal with small threats and Murder to deal with big ones. Harsh Scrutiny is an efficient way to keep the board clear while fixing our next draw. Truth be told, Fatal Push would be a fantastic inclusion here, but it's still pushing $5 a card so I left it out for budget reasons.
Finally, our lords tie it all together: Metallic Mimic and
Midnight Entourage
. The former helps enable Animation Module while also turning all our other Aetherborn into serious threats early on while the latter helps vault us through the midgame. There's also a single copy of Herald of Anguish to give us a strong top-end; you probably won't be able to cast it especially early, but there are just enough artifacts in the deck to make this a good way to end games.
For the sideboard, we have Lost Legacy for shutting down Combo decks, Ruinous Path for dealing with pesky Planeswalkers, To the Slaughter for decks with Hexproof, Transgress the Mind for playing against spell decks, and a bit more Murder and Harsh Scrutiny when our opponent plays vehicles and big creatures that we absolutely must answer.
Anyway, all suggestions are welcome! The Aetherborn are still a small tribe but I think there may just be enough support for them to survive, at least for a little while.
