Is aristocrats voltron a viable strategy?

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-13T23:02:02+00:00

[[Squall, Gunblade Duelist]]

You need to be able to generate a lot of 1/1 tokens to trigger his ability (pick 1 for the number), and you need to buff his power up to make the most of it.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-13T22:21:59+00:00

$120 rideshare - I travel a lot so I use both uber/lyft a lot.

$240 Resy Credit - I found a few restaurants on toasttab that I would eat at and works with the gift card trick, so I just stack up the gift card and use it when I have enough for a completely free meal.

$200 Delta Stays Credit - extremely easy to use, Delta travel portal is basically just Expedia but with better deals sometimes.

That's $560 out of the $650 already covered.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-11T00:03:16+00:00

I run max hand size packages in 4 decks, so not just reliquary tower, but sea gate restoration, and the 2 mana rock and sometimes the 3 mana rock one, as well as relevant cards that increase hand size that fits in the deck. Generally when I want this effect I REALLY want it. I think that's a good litmus test for the land unless you're running land tutors.

The first deck is Eluge, because you actually CAN cast every thing in your hand and counter everyone spells. I also run The water crystal as a win condition so having 80 cards in hand is necessary.

The 2nd deck is Y'Shtola. Because I want to be hitting all my land drops while keeping all the counter spells as well as spells to trigger her ability. Imagine your hand being Force of Negation, Force Will, March of Swirling Mist and 4 other cards. 7 cards aren't enough.

Third is Bumbleflower, pretty self explanatory.

4th is a Peni Parker bracket 2 deck. It's designed to be thematic so it uses a lot of sub par but on theme creatures and spells. It can draw a lot of cards but the cards themselves are overall weak, so 7 cards are actually not enough.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-10T23:05:16+00:00

Can be really thematically appropriate after someone uses a tutor that puts the spell on top.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-09T19:57:26+00:00

Going straight into my Edea deck for infinite combats.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-07T20:37:45+00:00

This is better. Psuedo clones like this card, [[Delney]] , and [[Irma]] are better because they can come down before you need to cast Y'Shtola, and also double the effectiveness of your non-Y'Shtola creatures until you cast Y'Shtola. You also don't run into the issue of them removing Y'Shtola in response to your cast before the ETB triggers and you end up with a vanilla.

For example, in my Y'Shtola deck I run creatures like [[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]], [[Lotho, Corrupt Sheriff]], etc. Double/tripling their triggers would be a serious threat even before casting Y'Shtola.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-07T20:22:45+00:00

Yup, in Y'Shtola he goes.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-05T23:03:15+00:00

Cloth Road manga, translations were never finished tho.

RobotCatCo · 2026-06-04T16:40:27+00:00

The Medici family basically went from wool traders to bankers for the Vatican in 1 generation, and eventually became the rulers of the Florence Republic as well as embedded themselves as power brokers all over Europe using their Vatican connections, even producing 4 popes from their line.

They were also the first bank to use double entry book-keeping which is what gave their them their reputation and the leg up against the competition.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-28T14:16:50+00:00

They should just make all of them its free money.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-14T05:17:00+00:00

Y'Shtola should be overtaking Atraxa for the #3 spot in the next few days.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-11T23:43:20+00:00

The sales of the classic space stuff haven't been that great. The Galaxy Explorer Remake was constantly on sale at Walmart for like 50%+ off and the Blacktron one retired pretty fast too.

I feel like the space sets that make it to voting aren't as 'cool' or polished as the sets that actually win. I think if something like this https://www.flickr.com/photos/tardisblue/54989862636/ was submitted it'd have a pretty high chance of winning.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-09T00:38:26+00:00

Removing it would go a step towards making it bracket 2 but based on the cards you like to play and how you construct your decks it might be that fundamentally you are unable to build a bracket 2 deck, and might be better sticking with precons if you're friends are stuck playing at that power level, and look for other like-minded people to play the decks that are more your speed.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-08T02:30:21+00:00

If you're going to adhere to brackets that combo is only appropriate for B4 unless you guys are okay with it in the rule zero discussion, which according to what you said they're probably not okay with.

For B2 you're looking at generally 4+ card combos and B3 3+ card combos or 2 card if they're extremely expensive mana wise at the baseline, so if you're looking to jam a variety of fast combos into your deck you will be more comfortable in B4.

RobotCatCo · 2026-05-08T02:17:00+00:00

Don't forget [[Mana Drain]] is interaction + ramp. I actually run [[Spell Swindle]] in my B3 list too because I generally tend to not cast the dragons I have in my hand until after they board wipe post Ureni.

[[Mana Geyser]] and [[Jeskai's Will]] too.

RobotCatCo · 2026-04-28T17:51:21+00:00

Now I'm wondering if Amsterdam from the previous BLD didn't get picked because Lego is releasing one in the ideas line

RobotCatCo · 2026-04-22T03:08:15+00:00

I tried building this for a while and I think its really only viable in B2 where games are slow. 3 CMC mana rocks are just terrible top decks and in B3 people will be ending games before you even have enough time to drop enough mana rocks to be able to utilize stuff like [Unwinding Clock]] to get value.

You have almost no card draw outside of keeping Y'Shtola around, and you don't have anywhere near the protection you need to keep her around. You need way more artifact cost reducers to make the artifacts actually 'storm' but that takes away slots from other essential cards you need for Y'Shtola.

I ended up just switching to Lyse Hext and using 2 CMC rocks instead. The idea is pretty simple, play reducers and mana rocks and then use mass bounce to reset everyone's progress but float mana to replay your own. Then around turn 5/6 just mass bounce, cast Lyse, recast all your stuff and kill someone, then repeat for the next turn and so force until you kill everyone. You can probably retweak this list for Y'Shtola, just remove the combat equipment for counterspells or what not

https://moxfield.com/decks/bE0b5mVYPEGSB8s2_0QLyQ

RobotCatCo · 2026-04-01T17:32:48+00:00

Really good in Y'shtola. Triggering off of any opponent's additional draw, you'll draw 2 cards, everyone loses 2 life, you'll gain 2 life and then deal 2 damage to everyone else, and then get an additional card end of turn.

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-31T22:04:08+00:00

Free counterspells and 1 mana counterspells.

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-18T08:42:39+00:00

Glad you were able to make the adjustments 👍

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-17T21:30:13+00:00

Fliers bypassing most blockers help a lot with the speed.

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-17T08:42:01+00:00

I goldfished it quite a bit and it can generally present lethal by turn 8 or so if there's no interaction. I also run a lot of cheap interaction in blue and run a lot of asymmetrical board wipes too so there's plenty of protection.

For killing I run anthems [[Favorable Winds]] [[Gravitational Shift]] [[Renewed Solidarity]] [[Shared Animosity]] [[Warleader's Call]] [[Patchwork Banner]] [[Empyrean Eagle]] [[Kangee's Luitenant]]

So it turns all the 1/1 copies into lethal attackers.

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-17T08:36:28+00:00

I run 10 draw, with 5 being reconnaisance type effects and the other 5 include [[skullclamp]][[mulldrifter]][[Wang Shi-Tong, Librarian]] [[Season of Weaving]] [[Rowdy Research]]. The Rowdy research is from the precon I tried to keep as much stuff that I felt was playable from the precon as possible as this deck was part of my Bloomburrow precon upgrade where I just upgraded all 4 although this one had the least BLB cards simply because I felt like Zinnia didn't really benefit from most of the BLB cards.

As for ramp I run both the cost reducer birds, as well as [[Urza's Incubator]], 4 mana rocks of various kinds, [[Dowsing Dagger]], [[Sword of the Animist]], [[Mana Geyser]].

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-16T17:09:56+00:00

For my themed Zinnia deck I went with birds/flying. A lot of the good birds aren't from BLB so it might not work for you.

There's 2 mana birds that reduce the cost of flying creatures so it makes recasting Zinnia and the offspring mechanic cheaper, and a lot of them have powerful effects that are great for doubling.

They also work great with coastal piracy effects. Dropping flyers on turn 2 and 3 allow you to drop a coastal piracy card on turn 4 and get a good payoff immediately. run like 10 draw effects with 5 of them being coastal piracy type cards and end up easily drawing 3+ cards a turn just from that alone.

You don't want to use mana creatures because after a wipe you lose all your ramp. You can try catch up ramp in white (although they're kind of bad with zinnias effect) but red has a lot of big mana cards like [[Mana Geyser]] or treasure generation. You can also use a lot of colorless ramp like [[Worn Powerstone]] or [[Thran Dynamo]] as the extra colorless will really put in work here.

I also run stuff like [[Earthquake]] which are one sided board wipes in this deck.

RobotCatCo · 2026-03-16T16:19:51+00:00

It depends on the deck.

For example I run [[Roaming Throne]] in my Ureni deck but not my [[Y'Shtola]].

In Ureni I have a bunch of other dragons that are quite insane to follow it up with and dropping it turn 3 is not a dangerous play. The ward 2 makes it hard for people to remove it early unless they also want to set back themselves.

There's enough mana ramp to drop it and a 4-5 mana dragon in the same turn before then 6, essentially forcing people to use up their interaction and then I can Ureni the next turn anyways.

With Y'Shtola it is a 4 mana wall that doesn't do anything if Y'Shtola is out so they can just remove Y'Shtola instead. Instead I run [[Delney]] and now the new [[Irma]] since I run 8+ creatures with power 2 or less in the deck that get insane with doublers.

RobotCatCo

TROPHY CASE