Meme or Dream? The Sibsig Ceremony Does WHAT? (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Meme or Dream?, the series where we take decks Wizards published on Magic.gg that got at least six wins in a row at Platinum rank or better in best-of-three and put them to the test to find out if they are are just as janky as they look, making them a meme, or if there's some secret power hiding behind the janky exterior, making them a dream.
Normally, when it comes to decks—even Meme or Dream? decks—I have a pretty good idea of what the deck is trying to do. But today's deck just has me confused. It initially caught my eye because it's built around one of the coolest enchantments in Standard: The Sibsig Ceremony. Once we get The Sibsig Ceremony on the battlefield, all of our creatures cost two less, but they blow themselves up when they enter the battlefield and replace themselves with a 2/2 Zombie token. While it's obvious the deck is trying to do something with The Sibsig Ceremony, I'm not exactly sure what.
The creatures in the deck are a bunch of mana dorks; two ramp spells that do work pretty well with The Sibsig Ceremony in Summon: Fenrir and Solemn Simulacrum; Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER, which could be a win condition but only if we manage to stick it before we play The Sibsig Ceremony (otherwise, it basically becomes a one-mana cycler that drains our opponent for one); and Summon: Primal Odin for removal, I guess? When we played The Sibsig Ceremony when it first came out, our plan was to play a bunch of creatures that would essentially cycle for free with the enchantment on the battlefield and play it like a combo deck. But this deck is going a different direction.
The best that I can tell, the plan is as follows: play The Sibsig Ceremony and then ramp into Liliana, Dreadhorde General, so we draw a card whenever one of our creatures dies, and then chain together as many creatures as we can, taking advantage of the discount from The Sibsig Ceremony to make a bunch of Zombies and hope that will win us the game. The other synergy I can see in the deck is ramping into Virtue of Persistence so we can cast creatures on the cheap, have them die to The Sibsig Ceremony, and then reanimate them the next turn. Neither of these plans seems all that practical, considering that Liliana costs six mana and Virtue seven.
The other issues I see with the deck, apart from being confused over its actual plan for winning the game, is that the mana base is incredibly questionable. We're playing four Llanowar Elves and seven basic Forests even though we're trying to play the triple-black The Sibsig Ceremony on Turn 3. We're also playing Poison Dart Frog as an additional mana dork, for some reason. Meanwhile, the deck does have a sideboard, which is nice because a lot of Meme or Dream? decks don't (and I always say that putting 15 random cards of your colors in the sideboard is better than no sideboard at all), but this sideboard is super weird. I can sort of see what it's trying to do—we have Momentum Breaker and Reclamation Sage for removal and Ojer Kaslem, Deepest Growth and Unstoppable Slasher as creatures that can be played through The Sibsig Ceremony. But just how useful these cards will actually be in practice is another question altogether.
Wrap-Up
After playing the deck, I can pretty confidently say that this one is a meme. We ended up 1-4 with the deck, and honestly, I'm not sure we should have won the one match that we did win. For some reason, our opponent scooped game three from what looked like a winning position, although it's possible their hand was dead and they just got out early as a result.
We pretty quickly improved the deck's mana base since having so much green mana was making it impossible to cast The Sibsig Ceremony on curve. While this did help with consistency, the deck's plan was still super hard to pull off, although we eventually did have a game where we did the thing by sticking our namesake enchantment and a Liliana, Dreadhorde General. While this didn't lead to a game-ending combo, we were able to make enough Zombies and generate enough value to win the game eventually.
As far as improving the deck, I'm not exactly sure what to do. Every time I go to rebuild it, I end up building something that looks similar to the combo deck we played for Against the Odds a while ago, rather than an updated version of today's deck. While The Sibsig Ceremony is a super-cool card and can even be a powerful card in the right deck, I can't for the life of me figure out how this deck managed to win six matches in a row at Platinum rank or better. It must have involved some absurdly good running to avoid mana issues, and maybe a few opponents like the one we faced who scooped early for whatever reason. But I wouldn't recommend spending your wildcards on this deck. It's too inconsistent, and even when it works, the payoff isn't especially high.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
