MTG Salvation

After playing EDH for a few years, one of my friends had built the first single colored EDH deck out of our play group; an Erebos, God of the Dead deck. But after playing it for only a couple months, he broke it apart, at which point I was inspired to recreate it with a couple twists. I liked Erebos as a commander because card advantage on a commander always seemed incredibly strong to me, and his indestructibility makes him a little hard to get rid of. The deck has a decent amount of control elements, with a not so huge creature base. But recursion is fairly heavy in this deck to allow me to get back the creatures I have lost along the way. Recently, I was suggested to try out Sidisi, Undead Vizier as my commander and she has been working great so far.

META NOTE: My playgroup heavily frowns upon playing combos, poison, and mass land destruction. Every deck we build, we try to prevent the possibility of it going infinite, winning with infect damage, or destroying a ton of lands. I know a lot of players who do enjoy these strategies, but I believe that excluding them provides for more interesting games.

I came to the conclusion some number of weeks ago that Sidisi, Undead Vizier is just way, way better.
I build a really, really sweet mono Black control list for a friend of mine. If you're interested I can show you.

At the very least, you 100% want her in the deck.

Thanks for the suggestion. I would definitely like to check that list out.

I have had this deck constructed for a little while now, and I haven't made any edits after DTK was released. Sidisi looks really great. I could see including her in this list. But I like the way she looks as a commander. I could definitely see tweaking a few cards here and there, and then have Sidisi as the general. I like how hard to remove Erebos is, but Sidisi's immediate value seems like it could be really impressive.

You can see the list I built for him here.
One of the most powerful plays the deck does is like:
Cast Sidisi, sac to herself, let her go to the grave, tutor up Dawn of the Dead. Now every upkeep is lose 1 life, tutor a card. Really solid.

This looks like a really awesome list. I decided to give Sidisi a spin as my commander and made a couple edits to work with her. I'm excited to test this out next time my friends and I play. Thanks again for the suggestion and letting me check out that list.

No problem, glad you liked the list.

How have your changes been working out for you?

They have been working fairly well. Sidisi doesn't get casted nearly as often as Erebos would, but the value I get out of casting her is superb. Odds are that I'm gonna keep the deck with Sidisi as my commander, but I do want to test more soon.

If you're not casting her frequently I think you're misusing her.
You should generally be casting her immediately, as soon as you get to five mana. The very first thing you want to do is cast her and end up with her in the graveyard, and tutor up some way to abuse her. This gets you way, way ahead.

I feel you need Dawn of the Dead and Phyrexian Reclamation to get Sidisi back from the graveyard, and Rings of Brighthearth and Deserted Temple to go with Coffers in order to make infinite mana to cast Sidisi from the Command Zone any number of times.

Ideally, once you cast Sidisi the first time, you only ever want to be casting her again if she gets exiled for whatever reason. Otherwise you essentially always want to be returning her from the graveyard. Dawn of the Dead is definitely ideal for this, as it's relatively cheap and an enchantment, which lends a little more inherent safety. Sheoldred, Whispering One is also really good for pulling it off, though. Or Chainer, Dementia Master. Any number of things that will let you easily bring her back every turn and just sac her to herself.

And even playing only a couple of ways to abuse her is fine, because she's a tutor! So you play her the first time and go find one.

I was playing with the Dawn of the Dead, but I decided against it because, although it has great synergy with Sidisi, there have been a couple games where I didn't ever need to cast Sidisi, and Dawn of the Dead did not end up doing much and just stayed in my hand. Plus, I have a ton of other recursion, like Sheoldred and Chainer that you mentioned, that still let me abuse her just fine.

There have been a few games where I don't end up casting her because there are a lot of other things I can cast, or need to cast in order to not other people get incredibly far ahead of me. There's a lot of board control going on in the deck, and with some of the other decks in my meta, sometimes I need to focus on slowing them down before I can really let myself get ahead. I'm definitely gonna keep testing and tweaking the deck here and there. But it has been successful for the most part.

If you throw in a Contamination and Bitterblossom, your opponents can marvel for the rest of the game at their intact, beautiful mana bases -- untapped -- forever. The best opponents are the ones who aren't playing. Nobody loses to goldfish.

Ever thought about trimming a little bit of the fat away from the mana base and playing Ad Nauseam? I'd argue that dead Sidisi is probably one of the most potent abusers of the card when you have the correct deck to build around it, because sometimes you just get enough mana where you fetch Sidisi, tutor AdNaus, and just draw most of your deck into your hand and win.