Standard: Orzhov Sacrifice - Deck Tech & Sideboard Guide

In 2013, an archetype category would make its way into competitive Magic at Pro Tour Gatecrash, where the tournament winner ran a list based around small creature interactions and a sacrifice subtheme with cards like Cartel Aristocrat, Falkenrath Aristocrat, Blood Artist, and Doomed Traveler - this deck became known as Aristocrats. Since then, the term Aristocrats has been adopted primarily in Commander as a way to represent mostly decks themed around slowly draining opponents' life and punishing removal against their creatures. Eventually, this strategy was rebranded as Sacrifice in competitive Magic due to the rise of Witch’s Oven and Cauldron Familiar decks in 2020.

Now, five years later, Sacrifice returns to Standard with a list that harks back to its 2013 origins, and in this article, we delve into Orzhov Sacrifice, which has gained some powerful tools with Aetherdrift!

This will likely be the most popular variant of Orzhov Sacrifice in the coming weeks. While cards like Deep-Cavern Bat help with interaction, Zahur, Glory’s Past directly interacts with our game plan and works as another sac outlet that feeds the graveyard for a Raise the Past, while Nesting Bot adds a bit more consistency to Vengeful Bloodwitch triggers and interactions with Bartolomé Del Presidio.

Maindeck

Our engine.

Not unlike the classic Innistrad-RTR Standard Aristocrats, our goal involves sacrificing creatures to slowly drain the opponent's life with the triggers of Vengeful Bloodwitch and Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim, and our best source of unrestricted sacrifice in Standard today is Bartolomé Del Presidio, which grows permanently with each creature we feed it to.

To fuel these interactions, we have creatures that put a token into play when they die, such as Infestation Sage and Nesting Bot, as well as the new Zahur, Glory's Past, which in addition to being another outlet, also allows filtering the top and, thanks to the interactions with Vengeful Bloodwitch, can consistently acquire Max Speed ​​to create 2/2 tokens whenever another creature dies.

Our plan is complemented by a self-mill subtheme, where we use Snarling Gorehound, Gnawing Vermin and Overlord of the Balemurk to put several creatures into the graveyard and return them to the battlefield with Raise the Past.

Raise the Past is the main driver for this deck to work because, in addition to giving us more consistency in closing micro-interactions and combos with LTB and ETB triggers, it gives us resilience to ignore most of the opponent's removals that are not called Temporary Lockdown.

Enduring Innocence guarantees a draw for each time we play a creature on our turn, and we can also take advantage of its ability on the opponent's turn by sacrificing Nesting Bot or Infestation Sage. Its body with Lifelink is decent against Aggro.

Our mana base is limited to the largest possible number of duals that interact with our game plan and without much space for utility lands. Bleachbone Verge was an excellent addition to Aetherdrift to add consistency, especially in a list that already runs Shadowy Backstreet.

Sideboard

The majority of our sideboard is made up of spot removals for games where we need to be more interactive.

Exorcise works against Midrange, helps out with Enduring Curiosity and could be a bit more useful than Destroy Evil if Afterburner Expert becomes more prevalent in the Metagame, or if we see more vehicles in Standard in the coming weeks.

Destroy Evil deals with similar card categories as Exorcise, but with the advantage of being played at Instant-Speed, while Get Lost also deals with Planeswalkers, but offers less favorable tradeoffs in creature-heavy decks.

Pile On is a removal that we can play for free, or almost for free due to the high amount of creatures we run in our list, and the Surveil makes a difference in our game plan.

Cut Down basically comes in against Aggro and can occasionally be useful against Esper Pixie or in the mirror.

Authority of the Consuls helps to hold the Aggro games for a few more turns, and in this archetype, it's common to need more time to set up a setup that the opponent can't respond to or come back after a Raise the Past.

Duress is our standard answer to removal and one of our ways to deal with cards like Temporary Lockdown, being extremely flexible.

Ghost Vacuum works perfectly against Azorius Oculus, but it also gained more traction recently with the rise of Gruul Delirium.

Esper Bounce

IN

OUT

Azorius Oculus

IN

OUT

Gruul Delirium

IN

Gruul Aggro

IN

Domain Zur

IN

OUT

That’s all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!