MTG Salvation

I started seriously playing magic around the start of 2013. I was given a standard Golgari deck by a friend and since then I have stayed true to colors as a Green Black mage. My first exposure to EDH was when my friend showed me his Merieke Ri Berit list from long long ago. At that point I owned one legendary creature (Yeva, Nature’s Herald) and literally not enough unique cards to put in the deck, so I shelved the idea for some time. A few months later, I pulled a Sphinx’s Revelation and traded it in for a huge stack of cards to boost my collection, one of these cards was Sek’kuar Deathkeeper. Seeing as I now had a multicolored legend I built what I affectionately referred to as “Jund Rares”. The deck was terrible and eventually I shaved red to become Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord. Jarad was put on hold to test out Sidisi, despite having full intentions to rebuild Jarad within a week or two, she continued to pique my interest. Sidisi moved in as commander of my main EDH deck and Jarad had since been reborn out of the ashes as my more casual and fun EDH deck (Insert joke about sacrificing a forest and a swamp). Meren then took over the role of my casual Green Black deck as I now maintain a 95% similar version of Razzliox’s Jarad list.

This deck is primarily my own creation and I actively post on the r/comeptitiveedh subreddit along with Razzliox who is one of the people who both inspired and encouraged me to make this a primer.

Sidisi is the deck for you if you want to go a more nontraditional graveyard/reanimator route. To me it seems like she has the most interesting approach of the most common generals and you get to utilize small pieces of each of them. SBT was built as an upgrade to Jarad to combat a fast and spellslinging meta. Jarad is notoriously weak to storm (less so thanks to Void Winnower) and considering I sit down regularly with Doomsday Zur, Jeleva Storm, and Food Chain Prossh…
I do have a full Jarad list that i play in slower metas, but I found myself wanting to go faster and have more ways to dig for the Buried Alive combo. which is what solidified the deck for me, so if you enjoy the playstyle of Jarad, but either want to be faster for personal or meta reasons I think SBT is definitely worth considering.

The deck itself:

Tapped Out

Reserved for official update business.

Moved to Multiplayer Decklists.

Thank you, sorry I'm not familiar with MTGS.

No Coffers or Crop? C'mon man

So Crop Rotation got cut during the mulligan changes, but I'm looking to add it back in.
Coffers on the other hand is not great in a deck with only non basic swamps.

Glad to see you added the memories journey I think you should add flip jace the filter lets you dump Druid combo prices like dread return it lets you set up natural reanimates smooths your draws and you can sav the body to a dread return and getting to double cast a tutor reanimate or any other card for that matter is pretty good and while I do t think you need to be running standard reanimate tech it's hard to pass up on Jin git as you have ways to dump it out of your hand and there are plenty of times you would want to entomb it over something else co side ting how many non haste Rez spells your using alternatively you could focus more on heir Druid and run cards like postmortem lunge and apprentice necromamcer

Yes, I played one game with it where Dread Return got countered and I proceeded to Journey back Yogmawth's Will and win anyways, so I'm sold. I agree with JVP being a strong inclusion so I will be looking to find room. More and more I'm considering cutting the Crucible Loam package to add in more tutors and support for Hermit Druid such as Postmortem Lunge and Muddle the Mixture. I'll draft up a more "HD Dedicated" list and post it soon. I have been considering adding in Jin Git as a value reanimate creature for some time and I certainly like it better than something like Apprentice Necromancer.

You have an interesting take on Sidisi, Brood Tyrant. You have a wonderful reanimation package and alternate wincons thanks to the ever broken Hermit Druid (which I ran in my original build but eventually decided to go a different route after many games) who's even more broken when you add Laboratory Maniac. I like how your deck is very intricate to pilot - those tend to be very fun and rewarding.

However, I don't notice you have much support for Sidisi's abilities. Do you have any strategy with how she produces tokens with self-milling? It appears the she's used more for the color pie than her actual card. If that were the case, wouldn't Damia, Sage of Stone be a better general for this? I've seen a lot of very dedicated reanimator decks with Damia at the helm. She fills your hand quite wonderfully when you're constantly discarding. I also don't see a lot of self-milling cards in order to warrant Sidisi. Again, you only have 18 creatures in your library so the odds of milling a creature to trigger Sidisi's zombie-making ability is less than 20%. So it's very improbable that blinking, casting, or attacking with Sidisi will produce you a token. Sure, she self-mills you for 3 each time and your deck loves the graveyard, but if Sidisi were just in it for the self-milling, she's kind of inefficient on her own. I've found that most of the times, I shouldn't (or can't) be attacking with her to get the self-mill; I'd have to use other methods.

Also, I notice the Mesmeric Orb. This card is super broken on its own but with a lot of support can just outright win you the game. However, I only really see two cards that would support it: Basalt Monolith and Fatestitcher - and even then, Fatestitcher on its own can't make untapping chains epic enough to really abuse the orb. Is the Mesmeric Orb + Basalt Monolith combo a backup plan to produce an infinite number of zombie tokens with Sidisi out? Is it just for the giggles?

The reason I have a lot of questions is that I'm always interested in how others play with Sidisi, Brood Tyrant. I have three versions in my [Primer] and throughout the thread lots of other strategies are being discussed. I also discuss abandoned strategies that I tried and played with since Sidisi was spoiled. I don't know about you but I'm pretty psyched for what Shadows Over Innistrad has to offer this deck with all the attention to discarding and graveyard love the set (and hopefully, the block) is gonna have. I haven't started discussing the cards yet because the spoiler season is still in its childhood and I would like to wait until more attention-grabbing cards have been spoiled to start pondering their possibilities in the deck. However, the thread is pretty well-maintained and as up to date as it could possibly be. So I invite you to check it out and add some of the things you know to its discussion.

Thank you, I appreciate the praise for my unique take on the list.

I am aware that Sidisi (SBT) is not well supported in the list. The cards that synergise with her are more incidental as she is by no means a primary plan. My playgroup knows that if I am casting SBT I have run out of gas. The Basalt Monolith + Mesmeric Orb is used as an alternate way of emptying my library which used to produce infinite zombies with SBT when Vigor was still in the deck. Overall I do not rely on her trigger succeeding whenever I factor numbers in because it is so unlikely.

I have seriously considered testing the deck with other generals such as Tasigur or Damia, but I like SBT for the time being because she is unique and unassuming but also because I regularly play with Ad Nauseum Decks so a 3/3 can run in and really mess them up. The most likely change would be cutting the LftL/Crucible + Wasteland/Strip Mine Package for being too slow and adding in more tutors and draw effects so I can go more all in on my combos.

I will be reading through and commenting on your primer, thank you for sharing it. I am pumped for SOI potentially having strong playables for this deck, but I'm getting into Pauper with GB Tortured Existence so that holds my interest and hopes a little better.

Yeah, Ad Nauseum decks can be pretty fast - though I've seen Hermit Druid decks be even faster. The good thing about Tasigur is that he's potentially cheaper to cast (thanks to delve) and much easier for being only a single color (as far as casting cost is concerned). He could also possibly recover key spells from your deck if you trim the fat from your graveyard.

Thing with Sidisi's unassumingness is that people know your deck is gonna have graveyard shenanigans regardless of the particular strategy so graveyard hate will hurt you and will be any oposing deck's goals. So far it's been the only weakness to my deck (apart from decks that win before turn 3 - then again, if you're in that kind of meta then standard use Sidisi is definitely gonna be too slow).

However, since BUG legendary creatures are few and far between (been there) I can understand your settling for Sidisi, Brood Tyrant. Hopefully we'll get some more options in the future.

The thing about Ad Nauseum decks is that pressuring their life total is relavent and I think Sidisi is better at punching in for little chunks of damage because she creates more bodies. I will be testing Damia and likely Tasigur soon though.

I play against the decks that people usually herald as the fastest decks in the format (Zur, Prossh, Jeleva) so standard SBT is definitely out of the question. We are soft to graveyard hate and Blood moon just do to the nature of Hermit Druid but those decks have been showing up less and less.

You mean my buddy Vorosh isn't in the top tier?

Lol, Vorosh wasn't that disappointing when it first appeared. The only disappointment was the lack of a lair land for each of those 5 dragons. A bigger disappointment was the 5 elder dragons from Dragons of Tarkir that weren't wedge-colored to at least mirror the original shard-colored elder dragons from Legends. Also, the existance of so few wedge-colored legendary creatures is also a bummer. But Vorosh has good backup colors for its abilities. I just doubt people are gonna use it for reanimator, lol.

The one Vorosh Deck that I've seen that really makes sense was using him as basically GU commander that dealt with +1/+1 counters and go to splash B for tutor effects which I thought was a really good use of his abilities and colors.

This is a great list and I will absolutely model my own list by it.

A useful tip is to sort your decklist by function, i.e. ramp/acceleration, tutor, draw, reanimation, combo, utility, etc. It makes decklists a lot easier to read and understand. You can sort by mana-cost, by type, or even both. An example:

I like the list alot, but I am curious why you don't utilize food chain+eternal scourge. In my experience it is the easiest to assemble "2 card combo" that sidisi has to win the game the turn it is assembled with no additional cards in hand or mana needed. It is a strict upgrade to mesmeric orb shenanighans since you don't need sidisi in play beforehand to combo off. You go infinite with the combo and then cast and exile sidisi enough times to mill your library dread return into eternal witness. Grab tidespout tyrant from the graveyard with e witness and cast him with food chain mana, you then can bounce eternal witness back to your hand by using tidespout tyrants trigger when you cast and exile eternal scourge to assemble mike and trike. You already are using triskelion for necrotic ooze so adding mikaeus is not much of an extra strain and it gives you another easy to assemble combo. Even if you don't go all in on the combo as I have described you should definitely replace mesmeric orb with the food chain combo since it is just better in a number of ways. Here is a link for my deck that uses many of the same combos you do but with food chain as a primary combo:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/a-heart-three-sizes-too-small-turn-1-win-copy/