Weekly Sale Commander: Halloween Sale!

Posted on October 27, 2025

Hi folks! Welcome to the Weekly Sale Column! This column will be aimed at showing you some cards on sale that could give you some new ideas for your lists. They will *usually* be Commander lists in Bracket 3 as well so you'll be able to play these in any Bracket 3 (or higher) pods. If you want to play in lower pods, just swap out the Game Changers for other choices and/or add more along with some other competitive combos if you want to compete with Bracket 4 and 5 pods! Keep in mind that the game changers in your deck aren't the only thing that moves you up and down a bracket. Your intent with your deck; inclusions of other interactions, engines, and combos, and overall playgroup should also be factors in your bracket! Remember that the weekly sale ends on Sunday night at 11:59 PM EST, so you have until then to get your cards ordered!

For this spooky sale, we have a Mono-Black control deck, led by the creepiest possible thing I could think of in this sale, a Zombie Snake with as much aura as Jin-woo in Solo Leveling. Sidisi, Undead Vizier is a 5-mana, 4/6, Zombie Naga with Deathtouch and Exploit, and whenever Sidisi exploits a creature, you get to search for a card and put it in your hand! Basically, it Demonic Tutors for the cost of one of our creatures. Our goal is going to be to control the game with our cards, and end the game with a big finisher! This sale is full of Zombies, Vampires, Demons, and even some Skeletons, and we've got a good mix of them all here. Let's get into it!

"This is now the United States of Zombieland"

When he's not creating Facebook and doing dangerously impressive street magic, Jesse Eisenberg's making sure that he doesn't die in Zombieland, just like us! We've got quite a few zombies in our deck, including our Commander, Sidisi! To start, we've got the best merchant this side of the Mississippi, Gray Merchant of Asphodel (side note, this would have been a great Secret Lair choice for Gary from Spongebob). Gary is going to give us lots of value for our permanents because Gary hits all of our opponents for our devotion to Black, and then we gain that much. Murderous Rider will bring a Swift End to a creature or planeswalker, and then get recycled into our deck! It's conveniently a well costed card for Sidisi, curving from Swift End, into the Rider, into Sidisi + Exploit, only needing one card from the deck for a solid 3-turn line.

Acererak the Archlich will let you begin venturing into the dungeon, and he recommends the Tomb of Annihilation! You'll just repeatedly play Acererak until he stays in play, at which point he'll either give you zombies or make your opponent's sacrifice creatures! Accursed Marauder will make everyone sacrifice a nontoken creature, and his older brother, Fleshbag Marauder, will make everyone sacrifice any creature!

Lumping Skeletons in with Zombies for thematic reasons, we're starting with Tinybones, the Pickpocket! This little guy will let you cast your opponent's cards in their graveyard, provided he connects. He's got Deathtouch, which can basically be unblockable against a board with creatures that someone wants to keep. Reassembling Skeleton is our most reusable creature, always coming back when we need to exploit it with Sidisi, or sacrifice it to our marauders! We have many dies trigger payoffs, especially from the Vampire side of our deck, but we'll get to those in a bit. Death Tyrant is a skeleton that gives you zombie tokens when creatures in combat die, and Emperor of Bones gives you a little bit of graveyard control and reanimation utility!

Vampires!

Hey, what's a vampire's favorite workout?

Dead lifts!

We've got a whole plethora of vampires in this deck; the sale provides well for us! Let's just get this out of the way now: Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose is probably one of our strongest cards due to its ability to combo with another strong vampire, Bloodthirsty Conqueror. It says that an opponent just needs to lose life and then you win the game! Yes, that is a two-card combo, but remember that we're in bracket 3, so we're okay playing those! It's safe to assume that decks in this bracket will play interaction, just like you do! We also don't play the enchantment versions of these creatures that are harder to interact with (Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood), but feel free to include them if you would like!

Qarsi Revenant gives us some utility from the graveyard, which is nice with a Sidisi exploit, Nirkana Revenant will double our mana, Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet will prevent our opponent from doing graveyard shenanigans with creatures, Bloodline Keeper is a strong token engine and curves well with Sidisi, and Bloodletter of Aclazotz (award winner for most annoying card to read for the first time) puts a target on our head, but also makes it so our opponents die faster! Drana, the Last Bloodchief lets us reanimate something that we exploited with Sidisi, which allows us to get value out of dying from Blood Artist! Speaking of Blood Artist, we've got a good chunk of other creatures that give us value when creatures die: Agent Venom, Midnight Reaper, Zulaport Cutthroat, and Vein Ripper (yes they're not all Vampires, but Drana can change that if we want!).

"Set Your Heart Ablaze"

All right, now that we've all gotten emotional from losing Rengoku, let's talk about the demons! Demons in Magic usually cost quite a bit of mana, but they have super strong payoffs! Valgavoth, Terror Eater, a great reason to own bug spray, lets you use your opponent's cards that get exiled by it in a Bolas's Citadel sort of fashion. Archfiend of Despair does lots of great things with some of our life-draining vampires, like Bloodletter of Aclazotz and Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose. Rune-Scarred Demon gives us another good tutor option, and The Speed Demon (great choice for a Lightning McQueen themed Secret Lair) gives us awesome card draw utility with Aetherdrift's Max Speed mechanic. We've also included Avishkar Raceway as another option for some speed, to help that out easily in our lands. Reiver Demon is basically Plague Wind with flying in this deck, and Abyssal Harvester lets us recycle the creatures that we just ate with Sidisi!

Change the Game!

There was a recent change to the game changers list! I'd recommend checking that out on WotC's website, it's a big one for our format. It doesn't affect anything in this list, but you can be sure that we're going to add a few of those cards into our lists in the future (looking at you, Urza, Lord High Artificer).

In our Halloween list, we've chosen 3 great Black cards! I've opted to use none of the tutors, because our Commander is already a Demonic Tutor, so we don't need that one. To start, Orcish Bowmasters gives us value when our opponents want to draw more cards than they should be, and the token that gets amassed is useful as another thing we can eat with Sidisi.

Braids, Cabal Minion has a Halloween-level smile that can make even the bravest of trick-or-treaters falter, and gives us a way to level the playing field a bit, especially against decks that are a bit faster than us. Finally, we've got Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern. I'm partial to the front side in this deck, especially because of some of our zombie friends (Accursed Marauder and Fleshbag Marauder) that will give us value from the creature sacrifices, but Tergrid also gives us great value from our opponent's Black fetchlands. Basically, they crack a Polluted Delta and you get a Polluted Delta now and can grab a land!

Making this deck even more competitive for higher brackets is actually quite easy! There are other game changers that are much stronger here, like the low cost tutors and also Ad Nauseam. If you drop some of the higher cost cards and include Ad Nauseam, your Commander can guarantee that you'll find it, so you just need to resolve it and you'll draw a good chunk of your deck. You can also include Exquisite Blood, Sanguine Bond, and all the other versions of those cards that have been printed over the years to give you some redundancy!

Have a spooky Halloween, see you all next week!