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Captain Sisay (cEDH)

Commander / EDH* Competitive GW (Selesnya)

Crystal_Quarry

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Land (30)

Enchantment (5)

Planeswalker (1)

Creature (28)

Sorcery (6)

Commander (1)

Commander: foil Captain Sisay

Artifact (15)

Instant (14)

Welcome!

This decklist is intended for competitive settings (i.e. cEDH) and is an attempt to restore Captain Sisay to some of her former glory back when Paradox Engine was legal. The new combo isn't as good as Paradox Engine was, but it's the closest we've been to that level since. If you're a fan of Captain Sisay, then I hope you'll enjoy this deck and find ways to further optimize it for cEDH games.

The main gameplan of this deck is to find Emiel the Blessed and Village Bell-Ringer to create infinite mana off of a sufficient amount of mana dorks and infinite legendary tutors off of Captain Sisay. This allows you play out all the legends in the deck and all the creatures if Vivien, Monsters' Advocate survives thanks to Vivien's passive abilities (infinite Sisay searches allow you to keep shuffling the deck endlessly until you find a creature on top to cast with your infinite mana). Then simply win by infinite combat damage through blinking Rishkar, Peema Renegade or with an infinitely large Walking Ballista.

Check the "Combo Lines" section for more detail and explanation.

Being in Selesnya, we do not have access to Blue to offer a suite of counterspells to protect our game plan. Thus we need a handful of cards to ensure we're able to resolve our key pieces and to protect ourselves when it's combo time.

  • Allosaurus Shepherd is an amazing new 1-drop that makes all our green spells uncounterable. Late game it can be a mana sink to turn an army of mana dorks into a large army to pressure opponents' life totals. This protects basically all our key pieces on casting except Emiel the Blessed and Village Bell-Ringer.
  • Destiny Spinner is also a relatively new form of protection that makes all our creatures and enchantments uncounterable. It can also be used to animate big mana lands like Gaea's Cradle and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx to help generate the required mana to go infinite during the main combo. It protects all the cards of our combo with the exception of Vivien, Monsters' Advocate.
  • Grand Abolisher cleanly shuts down all our opponents during our turn to let us execute our game plan unimpeded.
  • Sylvan Safekeeper can help ensure Sisay sticks on the field in case someone tries to use spot removal on her.
  • Silence can be used defensively to protect our combo or aggressively to shut down opponents trying to combo or storm off.
  • Veil of Summer is another versatile card that can be used to protect our spells on the combo turn or keep Sisay in play against certain types of spot removal. The card draw is just icing on the cake.
  • Ranger-Captain of Eos can find useful combo cards like Walking Ballista and shut down our opponents when we're ready to go off. The activated ability is quite hard to stop too as a plain counterspell will be insufficient.

Importantly these cards do not stop the other players in a pod from interacting with each other like Dosan the Falling Leaf would do. We definitely do not want to hamper our opponents' ability to lob counterspells and interaction at each other.

Captain Sisay decks are usually known as toolbox decks thanks to Sisay's ability, but we need the ability to find many other cards including some nonlegendary cards that Sisay can't find. Since we don't have access to Black we lose the best tutors that can find any card type, but still have some useful tools available to us.

Since we don't have access to Blue we will struggle to disrupt the game plans of our opponents without some form of disruption. This part of the deck could be greatly expanded to focus much more heavily on these cards, but for this build I didn't want to distract from our own aggressive game plan too much. The chosen stax pieces are generally asymmetric and still allow opponents to interact with one another.

Our deck isn't as interactive as Blue generally speaking, but we still definitely want to retain the ability to disrupt what our opponents are up to and stop them from winning to the extent that we can.

We may not get counterspells like Blue or unconditional tutors like Black, but Green certainly gets the mana dorks and ramp, which this deck has plenty of. The mana dorks are important in order to be able to generate enough mana to combo with Emiel the Blessed and Village Bell-Ringer.

To ensure our blink engine can get going it may be necessary to give some of our dorks or Sisay haste. The following cards are used to facilitate this so that our combo turn will be a game ending turn.

  • Concordant Crossroads is a symmetric effect, but for 1 mana is worth it to combo off. Just don't play it too soon if it will benefit your opponents too much (e.g. Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow).
  • Lightning Greaves offers protection for Sisay and offers haste for free to all our creatures from passing it around.
  • Thousand-Year Elixir is a simply card that allows Sisay to tutor and dorks to their thing immediately. If you've got a mana to spare, getting two Sisay searches off in a single turn is excellent and will set you up well to go off the following turn.
  • Earthcraft is a nice choice that allows any creature, even one with summoning sickness, to be tapped to re-use a basic land.
  • Hall of the Bandit Lord can cause tempo loss, but being able to activate Sisay immediately and get that first search off is worth it in my opinion.
The basic combo involves having mana dorks that can generate at least 4 mana, Emiel the Blessed and Village Bell-Ringer. Simply blink Village Bell-Ringer with Emiel for 3 mana to untap all the mana dorks and add 4 mana from them, before blinking again, netting 1 mana each time. The main way to get Village Bell-Ringer into play is from using the -2 ability on Vivien, Monsters' Advocate. In this way Village-Bell Ringer can tag along for free with Emiel the Blessed.

If Captain Sisay is in play and not summoning sick or you have a haste enabler, then each round of untapping allows you to go searching for another legend. In this way all the legends in the deck can be dumped into play directly. Usually one of the first legends to grab will be Rishkar, Peema Renegade which can turn Emiel the Blessed and another creature into a mana dork, making the combo easier to execute.

If Vivien, Monsters' Advocate is in play, then we can abuse her passive abilities each time we go searching with Sisay. We can shuffle our library whether we have any legends left to fetch or not, and we can do this endlessly until the top card of our library is any nonlegendary creature (e.g. Walking Ballista) which Vivien lets us cast thanks to her passive abilities.

If Walking Ballista gets discarded/dies/exiled there are back-up infinite combos to abuse.

  • Rishkar, Peema Renegade can be infinitely blinked to give an infinite number of +1/+1 counters to all our other creatures in play. If they don't have haste already from Concordant Crossroads, then we just need to get it out of our deck. But how do we do that when it isn't legendary or a creature? See the next point to find out.
  • Heliod, Sun-Crowned isn't just in the deck to combo with Walking Ballista. Once the blink engine is online we can use Captain Sisay to fetch Heliod and put him into play along with Selvala, Heart of the Wilds. Ideally a 5/5 should be large enough to trigger Selvala's draw ability each time it ETBs. So simply blink Heliod enough to draw the entire deck. This gives us access to all the non-creature cards the basic combo didn't unlock such as Concordant Crossroads and Finale of Devastation which allows us to swing for lethal without passing the turn.
  • Eternal Witness can also create an infinite draw engine with Veil of Summer if it is in your hand or graveyard once the blink engine is online. This is a nice back-up to draw your deck if Heliod is not big enough to trigger Selvala's draw ability.
  • The deck already includes interaction to deal with a variety of permanents like Swords to Plowshares for creatures, Force of Vigor for artifacts and enchantments, Beast Within for anything, but these are one-time use only. Except we can actually cast these an infinite number of times thanks to Emiel the Blessed. If we've drawn our whole deck as illustrated in the previous point, then not only do we get access to all this interaction, but we can recast them as many times as we want by blinking Eternal Witness. With our key protection pieces in play like Allosaurus Shepherd and Grand Abolisher our opponents will be quite unable to stop us. This should clear the way for a lethal swing or simply remove all opponents' permanents with Beast Within and Swords to Plowshares.
There are some fancy combos we can execute and some impressive value engines we can get going with our deck, but only if our opponents allow it to happen. So what stax pieces are horrible for us and prevent us from going off?

  • Cursed Totem and Linvala, Keeper of Silence are absolutely kill-on-sight stax pieces against our deck. They stop our mana dorks, they stop Captain Sisay from searching for legends, and they stop Emiel the Blessed from blinking Village Bell-Ringer. In short, we cannot abide them. If you see these stax pieces at your table, then save a piece of removal for them.
  • Hushbringer and Torpor Orb both shut down creature ETB effects, which stops our blink engine with Village Bell-Ringer cold. If you see one of these hit the table, then you're going to have to remove it or assemble Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Walking Ballista as the back-up win condition.
  • Stranglehold and Ashiok, Dream Render can both be major thorns in our sides, preventing Captain Sisay from searching and making many our of tutors dead cards. Thankfully we do have a number of dorks with which to pressure early planeswalkers like Ashiok. For Stranglehold you'll simply have to find removal like Nature's Claim.
  • Containment Priest is quite a scary card for our deck. An opponent who flashes one in right when we go to blink Village Bell-Ringer for the first time is going to make us incredibly sad. Make sure there isn't one of these in play before you attempt the combo and try to assemble some protection like Grand Abolisher so you don't get blown out by one during your turn either.
  • Taxing effects like Suppression Field and Leonin Arbiter make our life more difficult, but don't outright prevent the combos. We simply need to be able to make enough mana with our dorks to pay the taxes too and we can still combo through them.

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Casual

96% Competitive