This deck is a labor of love. I started playing Magic around 2013, and that first 90-card kitchen-table-casual monoblack zombie tribal deck slowly morphed over the years into this. I've been using the same basic deck idea since 2013 (I'm writing this in 2019). It's just kind of who I am. When I played League of Legends, I played Veigar almost exclusively for over 3000 games. In FFXIV, I spent over five years only playing Black Mage, and only leveled a healer because I felt bad not being able to fill that role when people needed it. I've given that same amount of dedication to refining this deck. Is it perfect? Nah. But it's mine.
Also, you may have noticed that it's wicked expensive. As I write this, the Card Kingdom button lists it at $2967. Wowza. Now, I don't actually own all these cards. This is the decklist that I use when I play on Tabletop Simulator, which is actually my preferred way to play Magic. I do have an IRL version of this deck, and it's much less expensive. As you may have guessed, the biggest part of the price for this deck is all the fancy dual and fetch lands. You can easily sub those out and get some cheaper lands (e.g. Bounce Lands). You can find the budget version of this deck here: (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/sidisi-zombie-swarm-edh-budget/)
So, let's get down to it. How does it work? Well, it's pretty simple. At a high level, you mill yourself through various means, making a whole bunch of zombies. Then you use the zombies to win. That's pretty much it.
Major wincons:
- Loads of zombies + combat damage
No sense beating around the bush. This is a slap slap deck. It's really good at putting out loads of zombies, making those zombies Big Bois, and slapping people's tits off with them. There are a lot of tools to make this easier for you, like
Cyclonic Rift
to clear out blockers at instant speed,
Graf Harvest
to make your zombies into sp00ky b0is who can only be blocked by people using the buddy system, and
Wonder
to make super sp00ky flying zombies. Simple combat damage is probably the way I win with this deck the most frequently, but that's far from the only way to win.
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant
relies on your ability to mill yourself in order to win. Luckily, that means you have the tools to mill other people as a secondary wincon if they pull some kind of infinite life shenanigans. Phenax, God of Deception and
Altar of Dementia
are your two big tools to achieve this end, but all the zombie lords (
Death Baron
,
Undead Warchief
,
Cemetery Reaper
, etc.) also help out, since they make your zombies bigger and, thus, able to mill more cards.
Gravecrawler
is also invaluable to this effort, since you can sac him to
Altar of Dementia
repeatedly, letting you mill as much as you have the mana for. More on this later.
Basically, you pick up your whole graveyard with
Praetor's Counsel
, which should hopefully be pretty sizable. You then plop down loads and loads of zombies for free through
Rooftop Storm
, ending with my main man Merchant of Ass. Your black devotion can easily be 20+, which will often win you the game outright. Even if it doesn't, you'll be up a ton of life, especially in multiplayer. You'll probably also be able to sacrifice him when you do this (
Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
,
Altar of Dementia
,
Fleshbag Marauder
,
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
etc.), and since you just picked up an ass-load of cards, you probably have the means to recur him (
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
,
Victimize
,
Phyrexian Delver
, either Liliana, etc.)
This is one of my favorite ways to win. It's nothing particularly clever, but it's really funny when your opponent passes the turn and you make an ass-load of zombie tokens on their end step. The deck has lots of zombie lords (
Death Baron
,
Cemetery Reaper
,
Lord of the Accursed
,
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
,
Undead Warchief
,
Diregraf Captain
,
Lord of the Undead
,
Zombie Master
), so in most situations, these zombie tokens will be way bigger than 2/2. And
Doubling Season
and
Parallel Lives
can make this card just stupid. I wouldn't recommend exiling your entire graveyard to cast this, on the off chance that it gets counterspelled or you get hit with an
Evacuation
or
Cyclonic Rift
or something. Try to leave the really important cards in there just in case.
Note: It's incredibly important that you cast this on your opponent's end step rather than on your turn.
Empty the Pits
is an instant, unlike, for example,
Army of the Damned
. Take advantage of that! You don't even have to leave that much mana up to do it. Just four black-producing lands. Nobody's gonna be that concerned about someone with 4 untapped swamps. If you make fifteen zombie tokens on your turn, everyone is immediately going to focus all of their attention on you, and you're almost certainly going to get hit with a
Wrath of God
, leaving you with an empty board, an empty graveyard, and the unwanted attention of everyone at the table. The zombies come in tapped, so don't think of this as a way to make chump blockers. This is an offensive spell. Those zombies won't be able to do anything until next turn anyway, so it's best to get them out at the last possible moment.
This is the deck's only infinite combo (unless there's one I'm not seeing). I mostly play pretty casually, so I generally try to go out of my way to avoid putting infinite combos in my decks because I don't think it's terribly fun to be in the middle of a fun game and suddenly take infinite damage from
Triskelion
+
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
("Mike and Trike," a combo I purposely did not put in this deck). That said, there are a lot of people who don't share that philosophy, which is fine. You do you. But we need to have a response to those combos. If this deck is going to have one infinite combo, I think this is the most natural one, since each individual card fits into the deck perfectly, even ignoring the other combo pieces.
Altar of Dementia
is a no-brainer for a Sidisi deck.
Rooftop Storm
is a no-brainer for a zombie tribal deck. And no zombie deck is complete without a
Gravecrawler
. So it's nice that they work together to form an infinite mill combo, and it's a pretty simple one. You just sac
Gravecrawler
to
Altar of Dementia
, then recast him from the graveyard for free with
Rooftop Storm
and repeat. You do need another zombie on the field to recast
Gravecrawler
, but that shouldn't be a big problem most of the time. Making zombies is kinda the thing this deck is built to do.
Weaknesses
So unfortunately, this deck has kind of a slow start. You're probably not gonna do a whole lot until you get Sidisi out on turn 4, maybe turn 3 if you're lucky. But since this deck isn't really supposed to be a high-tier tournament-winning CEDH deck, it's not really a big deal.
- Expensive, important commander
Sidisi is a 4-drop, which is already kind of a high cost. That wouldn't be so bad if she wasn't so important to the core strategy. It's definitely possible to win without her, but it's gonna be a lot harder. Luckily, the deck is pretty resistant to getting mana-screwed with cards like
Crucible of Worlds
,
Life from the Loam
, and
Muldrotha, the Gravetide
, so recasting her even after she's been killed twice shouldn't be the end of the world.
It's really rough when you've built up a huge graveyard and then someone drops their
Bojuka Bog
on you. Unfortunately, graveyard hate is extremely easy to add to just about any deck and there just aren't a lot of tools for dealing with that. If you do really well with this deck one night, don't be surprised to see everyone running a
Tormod's Crypt
, a
Relic of Progenitus
, and a
Bojuka Bog
the next night. Hell, you might even see a
Leyline of the Void
, and that's really bad news for you. There are a few things you can do about graveyard hate, most notably
Orbs of Warding
and
Witchbane Orb
, which prevent you from being targeted for graveyard exile, but if graveyard hate becomes too prevalent in your meta, maybe consider playing other decks for a little while.
Notes on the Maybeboard
The Maybeboard here is pretty big, because it's basically just a bunch of cards that I think are pretty good in the deck, but just didn't quite make the cut due to constraints/openings in my meta or simply being outclassed by other cards. Here are some notes about some of the cards:
- Dealing with annoying blue players
That's what
Thoughtseize
,
Duress
,
Distress
, and
Mind Twist
are for. Protect your big plays by hitting the blue player with one of these. They'll either show you your hand and let you throw that
Swan Song
away, or they'll just use the
Swan Song
to counter the
Thoughtseize
. Either way, you get rid of their counterspell.
Defense Grid
is also a pretty nice card if you have a really annoying blue player, but it also kinda hurts your own efforts, so use sparingly.
Hooooo boy, this card is cool. It's also really risky. It's great in just about any tribal deck, but you have to be careful with it, since it affects the whole board, including your opponents. At 2/2, zombies are bigger than the tokens generated by most other token decks, and they have the benefit of a whole bunch of great lords to make them even bigger. The tradeoff is that you generally don't generate them quite as fast as, say,
Krenko, Mob Boss
or
Rhys the Redeemed
or
Marrow-Gnawer
or
Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons
. So you definitely don't want to be running this card against any of those decks, because they will get a much bigger benefit than you will. If you don't have a lot of other token decks to worry about, then
Coat of Arms
is a great card to add in.
This card is pretty great, too. The thing that makes it great is that each permanent creates its own trigger, meaning that you get a zombie for each creature that goes into your graveyard during your untap step, whereas Sidisi normally only makes one zombie when you mill yourself for any amount. The reason I don't normally run it is that it's kinda too good at its job. It can get out of control really quick, and it's possible (likely, even) to mill yourself to death. Because of that, it's kind of necessary to run cards like
Elixir of Immortality
or
Cranial Archive
or you could be an absolute madman and run
Laboratory Maniac
. And any time you have to empty your graveyard, especially in the lategame, is a sad time indeed. So I feel like it's more trouble than it's worth most of the time.
Got a rival token deck you're struggling to deal with? Those swarms of 1/1 goblins just too much to deal with? This is the card you're looking for. Take advantage of your zombies' superior toughness and decimate the efforts of that
Krenko, Mob Boss
deck.
Conclusions
So that's it. Mill yourself. Get zombies. Crawl in some graves. I know that this is kind of a lot to write about a deck, but I'm mostly writing this for myself. Like I said, I've put a lot of work into this deck, and I'd like to have some kind of record of how I play it for myself and possibly others to see. If you build a version of it yourself, I hope you find this useful. Have fun!
