At the last minute before one of my local game store's weekly modern tournaments, I decided to throw together a BW Aristocrats deck out of cards I happened to have. Aristocrats had always been one of my favorite archetypes in standard ever since I discovered how powerful Blood Artist was. With the recent printing of Cruel Celebrant, I realized that there were 3 2-drops with that powerful effect available in modern, so I wanted to see what it was like to play a deck with the full 12 copies. I did it mostly for fun, but much to my surprise, it was... actually really good, killing as early as turn 4. I won most of my matches and felt very competitive in the one I lost. I figured I should share it since it was so powerful and incredibly cheap for a modern deck.
The deck consists of 3 main components: Sacrifice Outlets (Carrion Feeder and Cartel Aristocrat), Fodder (Doomed Traveler, Hunted Witness, Lingering Souls), and Blood Artists (Blood Artist, Zulaport Cutthroat, Cruel Celebrant). When all 3 of these components come together, you create an unstoppable force that drains the opponent for all of their life in a brilliant combo finish by repeatedly sacrificing your own creatures. The deck's only okay with just 2 of the 3, but with so much redundancy it can often stall until all 3 are assembled. Turns out fodder and Cartel Aristocrat make excellent blockers and blood artists gain you a lot of life. And even if your opponent exhausts resources stopping the combo plan, you'll often be able to just overcome them with an army of 1/1s.
As for the other cards: Vesperlark acts as a 2-mana reanimation spell that can bring back pretty much any of the 3 components that an opponent may have killed, and even triggers blood artist effects off of its evoke for added value. Rally the Ancestors is frequently a 4-mana "I win the game", even on an empty board. Tragic Slip just seemed like the most efficient removal spell for this type of deck.
Be wary, as cards such as Rest in Peace and Leyline of the Void stop the entire deck. Sideboard enchantment hate is a must. Cards like Anger of the Gods aren't incredibly potent against us since you can sacrifice everything in response (and chances are your sacrifice outlet will survive). Aside from graveyard hate, the deck proved surprisingly resilient even against decks like Tron, Mardu Pyromancer, Phoenix, etc. Moving forward I may try to add some Viscera Seer since 1-drop sacrifice outlets are really good, but I really like the staying power of Cartel Aristocrat. The mana base can be adjusted based on budget, this is just the one I had.
