NOTE: This was originally written in 2016, it has been slightly modified for 2020
One of the more common problems that I've seen new cube designers run into is finding ways to bring enough support to aggressive archetypes to thrive in a midrange-leaning environment like Cube. The core idea behind drafting an aggressive deck is to apply pressure to your opponents life total with early threats (usually 2 or 3 power) that will allow you to peck away before they can set up their defenses. The problem ends up being that the aggressive 2/1 for one or a 3/1 for two mana will quickly be outpaced by the mid-game, maybe as early as turn 3 or 4. There is a very limited window where you can maximize your damage output with traditional aggressive threats like a Carnophage or Vampire Lacerator before they become stonewalled completely. It could be a creature like Courser of Kruphix on Turn 3 capable of blocking with a 2/4 body that will eat up low toughness one drops while providing incidental lifegain from land drops. Maybe the opponent plays a pushed midrange threat with stats above the typical curve like a Polukranos, World Eater that pulls off its best impression of The Abyss each combat phase. You think to yourself, forget that, I'm just gonna blitz them before they can get there! You try to go extra wide and curve out with three 2 power one-drops within your first 3 turns to maximize your damage ouput and end up playing yourself into a Wrath of God that undoes your game development. Cue Sadness.
R/x Aggro decks seek to mitigate this issue by providing you with a form of reach in burn spells. Either aim that Lightning Bolt directly at your opponents face to push them closer to zero or use them to clear out large blockers and allow your smaller threats to get through for more damage. But even then, you may be taxed into attacking with both a Goblin Guide and a Falkenrath Gorger into a Courser of Kruphix just to push through more damage or to clear a big blocker with the help of a 2 damage burn spell. The larger problem arises within colors that do NOT have access to direct damage for late game reach. A white weenie deck is usually a boardwipe or beefy midrange creature away from being shut out of the game completely. Aggressive black creatures usually have low toughness or "can't block" clauses making them even more narrow in a back-and-forth affair.
How do you fix this and make non-Red aggro more viable and attractive? The most common approach has been to bring Swords of X and Y into cubes in order to give aggressive decks bigger teeth and a means of maximizing their attacks, but the issue then ends up being a lack of interaction. Quite often the Sword may not even reach our Aggro player at the table and ends up being gobbled up by Midrange decks due to how generically powerful they can be. Protection effects lead to less engaging gameplay, outright warp many games around themselves, and in the worst case scenario can end up invalidating an entire players drafting strategy. If the goal is to design an environment looking to maximize fun and the quality of gameplay, we cannot rely upon such a flawed design strategy. There are just too many scenarios where this can lead to frustration for your players and gameplay complaints. So what can we do?
Lucky for us, we can utilize the ideas behind the Recursive Black Aggro introduced by Jason Waddell years ago as a base. From this, we can develop an aggressive BW Humans archetype that will allow for interactive gameplay, more decision oriented combat, and a deck with the ability to function just as effectively into the late game. We can create an aggressive deck that wins games through a maximization of synergistic interactions that makes combat interesting again.
There are two key ideas to focus upon when designing this archetype: maximization of pressure with recursive and scale-able threats and providing late game reach.
I. Pressure Maximization
As an aggressive deck, you need a critical mass of cheap creatures to deploy during the early part of a game. You normally want the majority of your threats to be one-drops and your curve to top out around four or five at the most. The following threats help to form the core of the archetype:
Champion of the Parish is the most impactful one-drop within white if you can curve out from T1. Within White and Black, there are a ton of aggressively leaning humans available within the 1-3 CMC range. It's not uncommon to grow the Champion to a 4/4 or greater if you are on the play, representing a potent threat that can't be ignored or taken down that easily on curve. Thalia's Lieutenant is another copy of the Champion for one more mana with the additional benefit of performing as a later game anthem effect providing your humans with a permanent +1/+1 counter. Often times it may be correct to sandbag the Lieutenant for a turn or two before you develop a wide enough board to maximize distribution of counters. Opponents will need to prioritize the use of targetted removal if either the Champion or Lieutenant grows too quickly for their blockers to contain. There is no better feeling than forcing your opponent to use premier removal on your 1 or 2 drop creature. I would look to include 2 Champions with your cube prior to including the Lieutenant (be it via breaking singleton or introducing a voucher system, both topics I'll cover in a later article!) as it is much more important to curve out from T1 onwards.
Bloodsoaked Champion is the aggressive one drop of choice and what you're looking for in a given draft. This is the card that made this archetype possible in the first place. It is an amazing attacker that will keep coming back and forcing blocks or will continue to chip in for 2 damage all throughout the game. If you combine it with a sac outlet (Ex. Carrion Feeder or Grafted Wargear) alongside Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat, you can have turns where you swing in for 2 or occupy a blocker, have it die in order to trigger the life drain effect, then just recast it via its own Raid trigger. If it's the later game where you've amassed 6+ lands, far beyond what you'd typically need you can keep on saccing and recasting off the raid trigger and build your own mini-Fireball effect. I would want to have 2 of these within the cube; they slot into just about any B/x Aggro deck.
While these cards aren't human, they help to solidify the core ideas behind this style of play. Gravecrawler is the 3rd card I look for when drafting this archetype. It provides another aggressive one drop with a recurrable body and can be summoned back to play from the graveyard with any future zombies you deploy. Alongside Carrion Feeder, you can build your own large threat capable of going toe-to-toe with midrange monsters constrained only by your access to 
sources. Dread Wanderer has a more restrictive means of returning, but performs a similar role as a recurrable threat. It's nice to have an option that you'll be able to redeploy late once you've run low on resources and it can even be used to restart a Gravecrawler chain!
Bloodghast ends up being a value 2 drop who just won't disappear unless met with an exile effect. It's usually not my first choice to play on T2 if I have more action, but it does perform its job well and will continue to harass opponents with each Landfall trigger down the road. Scrapheap Scrounger is just a very strong card that will relentlessly return to haunt your opponent provided your graveyard is stocked with enough bodies to allow it to recur. Say you run into a wrath effect that decimates your boardstate. For R/x lists that would be close to a death knell if you're lacking the burn to cross the finish line, but with these kind of recursive bodies located all throughout the archetype it's only a matter of recasting after untapping. This card is best used as a 3/2 early in the game and only brought back once you've begun to completely run dry of resources. You almost never want to eat a Crawler or Bloodsoaked Champion in your grave, but many of the white creatures that die are just fine to exile since it's unlikely you'll have a means of recursion for them. Remember, the ability can be activated at instant speed, so take full advantage!
The disruptive creature suite; they have the primary goal of extending your window to apply pressure in the early game. One of biggest problem facing aggressive decks are wrath effects that can clear the board and leave you without any meaningful threats to deploy. As the aggressor you are likely dumping your hand quickly to establish a board presence, but this opens up the chance of being thoroughly punished for overextending and often met with a 3 or 4-for-1 flip of the boardstate. Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Vryn Wingmare add a crucial tax component to your opponents' spot removal or 4+ mana wrath effect, effectively opening the window for you to chip in another 3-4 points of damage before they can answer you. An opponent may have been sandbagging the wrath effect until T4 hoping to eke out maximum value once they saw an early start with multiple bodies, but now their plans are derailed and their spot removal rendered inefficient in the face of aggressive low cost threats. Stemming off the likes of Wrath of God and Languish until the 5th turn is a major boon and might just provide the opening you need to win the game.
Thalia, Heretic Cathar allows you to strand their stabilizing fatties for a turn and set back the mana development from any fetch or dual land for an entire turn. This is critical when dealing with greedier mana bases as their threats and answers are far more varied. Imposing Sovereign creates problems on similar axis to Thalia by setting your opponent's defenses back a turn and allowing you the window to push through a few more crucial points of damage. Kitesail Freebooter serves as a disruptive effect on a body, provides the relevant creature typing for growing your Champions, and it is an evasive body that can peck in for a few points of damage over the course of a game. Finally, Ranger-Captain of Eos gives you the ultimate protection by serving as a Silence effect to turn off your opponents sorcery speed answers on a critical turn. All of these options are a great supplement to an aggressive early curve.
Other aggressive roleplayers may include the following creatures:
Your gameplan is to curve out the first three turns and look into deploying 4-6 power on board across 2-3 bodies. You leverage pressure by attacking continuously with recursive threats, then push through for the final points of damage by going very wide to occupy multiple blockers or with Artist and Cutthroat triggers. This leads us right into our next topic:
II. Late Game Reach
These are the creatures that will allow you to get past opposing defenses and finish off your opponent. Every point of life drain is crucial towards victory and kamikaze attacks with Gravecrawler and Bloodsoaked Champions are encouraged. You make every trade of an x/2 with a Crawler or Bloodsoaked less enticing when you have the option of draining AND just recasting the threat on your next turn. Brutal Hordechief is this archetype's version of Hellrider and can lead to some insane swings out of nowhere. While Hellrider may be a bit too powerful for certain cubes (outright representing an additional 5-6 damage on strong curve), this curve-topper hits the sweet spot by providing a static form of reach while allowing you to stabilize as well. It plays equally as well with a tokens strategy or a curve of 1/2/3 drops. This is the best curve topper for this archetype by far; the glue that really brings it all together.
An alternative option that I've run in the past is Plague Belcher if you lean more into the zombie parts of this archetype. It's a great care to help provide more teeth to B/x Aggressive decks featuring Gravecrawlers where you can maximize its abilities, but it is also great as a 5/4 Menace that you can plop on T3 by trading up one of your outclassed tiny creatures. If you've developed a good enough board that you don't want to diminish or topdeck this post-wrath, a base case of Boggart Brute is perfectly passable if a bit unexciting. It's been a solid roleplayer for me in the past and a slam dunk inclusion if you have any further zombie synergies to exploit.
A lot of people will draft Bob just as a generically powerful card, but I feel like this is the one archetype where he truly shines. Your curve is skewed towards one and two drops so you can assume somewhere between 1.4-1.7 damage on average which quickly becomes negligible if you've set up a way to gain life with aforementioned support. Aggressive decks need a way to keep the gas flowing and Bob is the best at it while also being a human that can pump a T1 Champion of the Parish. Asylum Visitor may not have the same guaranteed effect as Bob, but I can envision it drawing one or two extra cards once the game has stalled and you've played out your hand in certain matchups. At worst, it is a 3 power creature for 2 mana that will Bolt your opponent with an attack and trade with another card. Glint-Sleeve Siphoner can play a role as a dollar store Bob and requires surviving for two turns before it can pull off a Phyrexian Arena impression and net you a card. The 2/1 Menace body will likely get in for at least two points of damage in most matchups, will likely have removal pointed at it, and it wears equipment like a champ. All that makes for a very solid card.
This suite of cards serves the purpose of providing vertical growth to your boardstate. Drana, Liberator of Malakir is an impressive attacking creature at 3 mana that can rapidly distribute +1/+1 counters across your side of the field if your opponent is unable to provide a flying blocker in time. The first strike ability ensures that the rest of your creatures will be the beneficiaries of her anthem-like ability prior to engaging your opponent's blockers on the ground. Growing herself allows her to rapidly outpace many threats and pieces of common removal with a sturdy 3/4 body after the first swing that just grows larger and larger throughout the game. Collective Effort was a fine addition from the Shadow over Innistrad block that does a number of things that I love as a modal spell that can function as removal or an anthem for you team depending upon the board state. A big dumb 4/4 fatty keeping you from attacking? Kill it with Collective Effort. Opponent rapidly falling behind and can't keep up with the boardstate? Grow the team with Collective Effort and kill them. Basri's Lieutenant is a relatively new addition and checks a ton of boxes. Helps another creature grow? Check. Human typing? Check. Pseudo-wrath insurance and synergies with aforementioned counter synergies? Check plus! In the absolute worst case scenario it comes in as a 4/5 Vigilant creature with some evasion that leaves behind a 2/2 upon death. It's just an excellent card all-around.
Personally, I've long had an issue with white-based planewalkers being too goodstuff-y or just flat out gamewarping in the cases of Gideon Jura and Elspeth, Sun's Champion. Generically powerful walkers don't provide much guidance when it comes to archetype design, but we've had a slew of decent cards that slot more readily into specific archetypes in the last few years. I'm a huge fan of Gideon Blackblade as a great 3 CMC beater who can pump up a buddy and eventually (if needed be) cash himself in to remove a troublesome obstacle. The smallest Ajani is the perfect tool for aggressive decks. He can buff up your guys one counter at a time to force one-sided trades with recursive threats or allow you to charge in there with a single threat for 5-6 damage in one shot in the air. The -3 plays amazingly well with grown Champions or creatures wielding equipment.
Speaking of equipment, how about two of the best designed ones we've ever had? Bonesplitter is one of the earliest yet best designed pieces of equipment you could be running. Low cost to deploy and equip, but a big impact almost every time. Grafted Wargear can turn negligible 2/1 creatures into legitimate 5/3 threats and doubles as a sac outlet. It's pretty demoralizing for opponents to trade with a recursive threat only to see you bring it back in the 2nd main phase, re-equip, and have a 4 or 5 power threat ready to attack the very next turn. For instance I wouldn't want to have to face down something like a 5 power Toolcraft Exemplar wielding a Bonesplitter on T2 if I were a slower deck. The jury is still out on the newest equipment from Zendikar Rising, but I have high hopes for it. Sometime all you need is an avenue to punch through the final points of damage to really send your opponent into survival mode and being able to take to the skies is exactly what you need. I can't image there being too many flying threats capable of rumbling with a Maul-wielding creature in the early parts of the game.
The Stax suite. Perhaps the most appealing part of this strategy is that I get to play with one of my favorite creatures of all time. Braids, Cabal Minion and Smokestack introduce a unique Stax effect to a game of Magic and turns those games into a more intricate puzzle to navigate through. By forcing your opponent to choose between sacrificing one of their meaningful permanents, you are able to force them into a position where you limit their mana or board development. Support Braids with spot removal to pick off threats and limit your opponents choices and you've established a perilous position for your opponent. While your BW deck can thrive off 4 lands and continue recasting and sacrificing Bloodsoaked Champion and Gravecrawler, your opponent may be facing a tougher decision with their expensive creatures that may just be stranded in hand. Need to break out of the lock or deploy something like Brutal Hordechief to attack on a different axis? Just sac Braids and move on with your gameplan! Rankle, Master of Pranks performs similarly as a means to grind down resources, but also come with a hasty evasive body to help chip in more damage over time. Start firing off those edicts and discards and watch your opponent slowly die inside as your recur the Gravecrawler you just sacced.
I've had a handful of games where I have won just off the back of a Tangle Wire on curve after playing out 4-6 power in the previous turns. Often times opponents are fine with taking the 2-4 damage in the early game because their gameplan is based around stabilizing with a larger body around Turn 3 or 4. They're already planning to just take the early damage, maybe fire off a ramp spell, then look to stabilize quick. However, it's not that easy with a Wire in your hand. It could be as simple as a T1 Champion of the Parish, T2 Bloodsoaked Champion, T3 Tangle Wire, follow it up by playing out some other cheap threats to grow the Champion. This will strand the majority of decks deploying more midrange-y bodies or holding onto reactive cards locking up their turns worth of mana very early. On the other hand, your handful of 1 and 2 cost creatures is good to go.
Not as crucial to make the archetype function, but this might be one of the bigger draws for those us who love disruption is attacking a mana base. With the lack of many cards with or 
mana costs and such a low curve, I've found this to be the most effective archetype for leveraging the pressure of Wasteland effectively. You don't mind using up your land drop for the turn to disrupt your opponent's curve since you'll usually be fine operating off just 3-4 mana in the first place. Ever since I bumped up to a 420 cube, I've found that Wasteland has been most effective (and most often picked up) in a Utility Land Draft when multiple are available. This allows the aggressive player a realistic chance of wheeling it back and having the opportunity to pick up a 2nd copy to further supplement and refine their deck.
Other cards that help provide later game reach may include the following:
III. Strategy
I find most of these decks end up having a majority of creatures, maybe 1-2 pieces of equipment, and then 2-3 pieces of removal. Those removal spells are used tactically to take out certain threats that might warp the board or just completely shut you out. Being able to curve out a board of three 2 power creatures by your opponents third turn (where they might not even have anything relevant deployed) is a huge amount of pressure. Not to mention that aggressive decks can extract the most value out of a Wasteland or Stax effect since they can function off just 3-4 mana effectively.
This archetype lives off of its 1 drops. Often times I will have 9+ one mana cards in the deck (though I guess [[Bonesplitter] is usually just a T2 play + equip). I almost always go 16 lands since the decks tend to top off with one or two 4 drops. An ideal sequence is something like:
T1: Plains, Champion of the Parish
T2: Swamp, Bloodsoaked Champion, Bonesplitter, swing with a 2/2 Champion
T3: Land, Equip Bonesplitter to the Bloodsoaked, play a 2 drop Human to grow Champion to 3/3, swing with a 3/3 and a 4/1
At this point, unless your opponent has played something like an early Wall of Omens, you've likely hit them for around 5 points of damage. If they drop a blocker in your path, it's not really a big deal since your Champion of the Parish will likely be able to punch through x/4s on the following turn. If it dies? Just bring back a Bloodsoaked Champion and re-equip the Bonesplitter. You usually save any of your removal spells for T4 or T5 and fire it off if they've stuck some midrange-y threat that you can't attack into profitably.
Similarly, you can also start off with Gravecrawlers and Carrion Feeders for another aggressive early curve, this time saccing Crawlers during combat to grow the Feeder to sizes that allow you to punch through annoying blockers. Where this becomes really fun is when you can force your opponent into tougher decisions with a Feeder out. Take for instance this scenario:
A1: Swamp, Bloodsoaked Champion
B1: Fetchland
A2: Attack with Champion, Swamp, Gravecrawler, Carrion Feeder (opponent EOT cracks fetch for tapped dual land)
B2: Forest, Sylvan Advocate
A3: Attack with Feeder, Champion and Crawler
What does your opponent do in this scenario? The Feeder can eat the Advocate if it blocks through saccing the Crawler and Champion. If the Advocate blocks either the Crawler or Champion? Just sac it to the Feeder to grow it with a +1/+1 counter. They still take 4 damage in total and you can recast the threat. This is a scenario that happens FAR more often than you'd think. If you can average around 3 points of damage from each threat you deploy (akin to how Burn decks value their spells in Constructed formats), I think you're in great shape for the late game.
With R/x Aggro, once you've knocked the opponent below 10 life you can usually just stockpile burn in hand to finish them off little by little if you've been shut down on the ground. The reach you get from the Hordechief, Cutthroat and especially Blood Artist in this archetype perform that same role and are crucial towards draining out the last bits of life from your opponent. Combat becomes more intriguing when you can represent some loss of life no matter what block an opponent makes.
Any token producers like Bitterblossom or Lingering Souls can help supplement this theme further by providing evasive bodies that can peck in for damage or can be converted to a drain of 1 life whenever they die. Those tokens end up becoming FAR more valuable if they can average around 2 points of damage to your opponent over the course of their lifetime.
IV. Conclusion
Among the many archetypes that I've incorporated into my own Cube, this one is near and dear to my heart and the one that I have spent the most time tweaking over the last 6 years. I try to draft it as often as I can when it's open. I mean, somebody's got to keep the greedy manabases in check, right? I find it to be a powerful strategy that gives aggressive players a great alternative to the typical R/x archetype and it is laden with a ton of interesting decisions to make all throughout the game.
Give it a try in your cube, and let me know what you think. Feel free to check out my cube if you'd like to see sample decklists or try to draft this beast on your own. Thanks for reading!
@Shamim | /u/Karametric | shamizy at Riptide Labs