Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 3 of 6: Black!

Posted on December 12, 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!

For the Deck the Halls sale over the next couple weeks, it's broken up into six total parts over the course of the sale. Each part ends in a couple days, so be sure to get your orders in before we move to the next color! Part 3: Black ends on Sunday night at 11:59 PM before we get to the first multicolored deck of the sale with Red/Green!

Parts 1 and 2 can be located here:

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 1 of 6: White!

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 2 of 6: Blue!

Welcome to Part 3, Black! One of my favorite parts about Marvel's Spider-Man is how there are cards that people just absolutely love from the moment it is spoiled. Gwenom, Remorseless fits that bill for me. Anyone that knows me knows that I was so hyped for this card and its possibilities! Gwenom, Remorseless is a 5-mana 4/4 Symbiote Spider Hero (only Spider is relevant here, thanks Swarmyard) with Deathtouch and Lifelink. From a stats perspective, that's already awesome. Her true ability to shine though comes from her attack trigger, which lets you look at and play cards from the top of your ability. Instead of paying its mana cost though, you pay life. This sounds an awful lot like a certain black game changer...

Doh! Bolas's Citadel!

That's right, this is Bolas's Citadel in the Command Zone. It's not quite as fast acting as the citadel, but it's cheaper, and guaranteed to be castable, so it's awesome. It also doesn't have that useless activated ability that the citadel has, but that's okay! The key with Gwenom, is that she doesn't need to connect or even survive, she only needs to attack. In other words, if you untap with her and make it to your Declare Attackers step, then chaos can then ensue! Let's get into it!

Is that Gwen Stacy?

For those that don't know, Gwen Stacy is Spider-Woman, or rather, she ended up becoming Ghost Spider, because there was already another Spider-Woman in the multiverse. On Earth-65, however, that Gwen Stacy combined with the Venom Symbiote and became Gwenom! Similar to her Jeskai variant, Gwenom, Remorseless also provides card advantage. Like a Symbiote though, she does it in a bit of a dramatic and flair-filled way! Our goal for Gwenom is to get Gwenom attacking as soon as possible! From there, we want to be able to cast as much of our deck as possible, even if we use almost all of our life. This is because we play many cards that do a thing, but then also gain us some life, or gain some life when a thing happens, or even cause our opponents to lose life in the process of us gaining life! The more life we have, the more cards we can play after an attack!

First, we want some value cards that are lower-costed and help further our plan of making life totals go haywire. The pair of Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat will make it so that creatures dying will give us a little bit of life to use on more cards. Dauthi Voidwalker and Emperor of Bones are great, cheap ways to control graveyards and play our opponents cards! Warren Soultrader and Umbral Collar Zealot make great sacrifice outlets for either our creatures or our opponents, giving us value when we sacrifice them. Surveiling through Umbral Collar Zealot is especially nice with Gwenom, Remorseless in play, as controlling the top of our deck makes it so we can bin an extraneous land that is stopping us from continuing to play spells!

Going up the costs, we have cards like Gray Merchant of Asphodel, which is just a solid Black card to be playing, especially when we play such high devotion cards like Ayara, First of Locthwain, Bloodletter of Aclazotz, and Phyrexian Obliterator! If you've never had the pleasure of sacrificing a Filth in play to a Warren Soultrader, just to get in with your swampwalking Gwenom, Remorseless (due to Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth), then I recommend giving this a shot! At the top end, cards like Noxious Gearhulk and Sepulchral Primordial have super strong ETB effects, and Hoarding Broodlord works well with cards like Saw in Half or even just good ol' classic Reanimate!

We also play a few mana payoffs and X-Spells as well! Crypt Ghast and Nirkana Revenant both pair well with the Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth in our list, along with its friend, Cabal Coffers! Black Market will also net you tons of mana after you've found a way to wrath the board; I'm sure we play a few of those here that you'll see. As far as payoffs, we play Exsanguinate and Torment of Hailfire! Both of these are powerful on their own, but Exsanguinate is especially great to play off of a Gwenom trigger because we're going to get our life back from the cast!

Attack!

We want ways to attack efficiently with Gwenom. All of my favorite shoes, between Lavaspur Boots, Swiftfoot Boots, and Lightning Greaves, all give haste and some form of protection. Cards like Imp's Mischief will protect from single-target removal spells, like Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, etc., while also being relatively cheap for us to cast. We also play a whole host of cheap removal spells that help us get into our opponent's life totals easier, which is both good on the first Gwenom attack and also good later on when we just want to start turning everything sideways! Malicious Affliction is a 2-for-1 with quite an easy condition in our deck. Deadly Rollick is a free spell as long as we have Gwenom, and Lethal Scheme can be a free spell if we've got enough creatures out! Feed the Swarm has the benefit of also targeting enchantments (a rare target in Black, I might add), and Infernal Grasp, while the most basic of our removal spells, is also one of the most efficient. For some mass board wipes, we play Damnation, Toxic Deluge, and Mutilate, all of them castable off of Beseech the Mirror (sacrificing a creature that was already going to die from it, of course)!

Speaking of Tutors...

We play some of Black's most useful tutors! Demonic Counsel has a couple targets in the deck with The Speed Demon and Bloodletter of Aclazotz, but if we have Delirium, it's just a Demonic Tutor that doesn't use up a game changer slot! Dark Petition is sort of another Demonic Tutor, you just have to have Spell Mastery active and it initially costs , but that's okay with me. Diabolic Tutor is just an overall well-costed tutor for our deck, and then we also play a couple game changing tutors as well! Urza's Saga is another tutor-esque card we play that we can use to find Lavaspur Boots or even Sensei's Divining Top!

Now to address that elephant in the room, yes, we play Sensei's Divining Top and Aetherflux Reservoir. The way that interaction works is that once you have your Bolas's Citadel effect active from Gwenom, then with Top, you can draw the top card of your library with Top, then draw with Top to put Top on top. You then recast the Top for 1 life, and then rinse and repeat. Without the Reservoir, you can basically draw cards equal to as much life as you want to pay, basically a Yawgmoth's Bargain. If you add Aetherflux Reservoir in though, you're casting Top on every draw, so after just two cycles, you've already netted 1 life, and you'll go semi-infinite! At least, you'll have enough to kill your opponents with Aetherflux Reservoir and win the game! This is acceptable in Bracket 3, in my opinion, as it takes 3 cards to set up, and is easily interactable with removal of either Gwenom or the Reservoir. It's also why I don't include Tendrils of Agony, as that is harder to interact with than Reservoir and bumps us up to Bracket 4, in my opinion.

The crazy part is that none of these cards are our game changers! We play Imperial Seal and Vampiric Tutor as two of them, as both of those tutor to the top of our deck. This is great early on if we need to hunt for land, but it really shines once we've gotten to use Gwenom, as it guarantees we get to play whatever we need. Our third game changer is Orcish Bowmasters, and that's simply because I like the card and I have yet to kill a Wan Shi Tong, Librarian with one, so I need to do that as a personal goal!

Here's the list, enjoy going off. See y'all next week for Gruul-Day!