$100 Budget Sidisi Ad Nauseam (now $150? courtesy of lack of reprints >_>)
This deck is an extremely budget competitive deck -- it won't hold a candle to actual cEDH decks, but it will give you a taste of what fast combo is capable of. The general game plan is the same: Find Ad Nauseam (usually through exploiting Sidisi), then cast it. After resolving Ad Nauseam, there are three win cons. Begin by playing Chrome Mox/Lotus Petal/land drop, playing some rituals (Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, 0CMC creature + Culling the Weak, Rain of Filth, etc.), then play Skirge Familiar. Skirge Familiar lets you discard a card to generate 1 black mana; the total CMC of the deck hovers around 35, so odds are you've drawn most of your deck. Use this mana to:
Play Aetherflux Reservoir and Shimmer Myr. Shimmer Myr gives your artifact spells flash, so cast them at instant speed, in response to each other (holding priority). Aetherflux Reservoir checks the spell count upon the spell's resolution, e.g. assume spell count = 0. Filling the stack with ten artifacts spells will gain you 10 x 10 = 100 life. Given the number of 0 and 1 CMC spells, generating 150 life to kill the table shouldn't be hard.
If, for whatever reason, Aetherflux Reservoir isn't an option, use Skirge Familiar to discard 40 cards, and pump that into Exsanguinate the kill the table.
If, for whatever reason, the first two aren't options, you're kinda screwed. However, you can try to salvage this by using Mind Twist and retracing Raven's Crime to have the rest of the table discard their hand. Afterwards, reset your deck with Feldon's Cane/Elixir of Immortality and try again.
I've built this deck for a local league that enforces a $100 limit. Sidisi Ad Nauseam is a powerful (but fragile) and competitively viable deck when built without a budget. Here is one such example. Unlike my list, this deck will not draw the entire library. However, storming off should not be a problem, as you have access to many more mana rocks that don't fit the $100 budget. There are some land heavy builds floating around, but they look to be out of date. They should be quite similar to this list, except with some more mana rocks (Mana Crypt, Mox Diamond, Mox Opal, Grim Monolith), and perhaps some tutors (Imperial Seal, Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Diabolic Intent). As a side note, Aetherflux Reservoir/Paradox Engine are fairly recent cards that are incredibly strong and warrant testing/inclusion.
As it stands, there's only so much you can do with $100. Other options that I'm currently testing are:
Remove the Aetherflux Reservoir/Shimmer Myr/Skirge Familiar package, and instead go all in on Sickening Dreams. This also frees up a bit of space for some stax/interaction pieces like Defense Grid and Winter/Static Orb. However, going this route will almost certainly require Glacial Chasm. This means you need to have a land drop or include something like Ghirapur Orrery. There's also the constraint of budget, as many stax pieces are a couple bucks each.
Remove Aetherflux Reservoir/Shimmer Myr/Skirge Familiar to add Krark Clan Ironworks. KCI will allow you to sac all your artifacts (of which there should be around 30) for 2 mana each. Songs of the Damned would also give you another 8-10 black mana to play with. With this mana, we use Mind Twist/Raven's Crime to clear hands, then cast a big Exsanguinate. Reserve Sickening Dreams and some 40 cards to force a draw if Exsanguinate gets countered. The downside of this plan is that Krark Clan Ironworks currently costs ~$11 (Modern price spikes, ladies and gentlemen!), so we'll probably be cutting a piece of ramp (Mana Vault/Lake of the Dead) or Slaughter Pact + utility.
Try and fit Boseiju in. If Boseiju makes the list, it's possible to convert this deck into a multi-turn win. Use Boseiju to cast Ad Nauseam, play Spellbook and pass the turn, and use Boseiju for Exsanguinate/Sickening Dreams the turn after. Unfortunately, Boseiju is even more expensive than Krark Clan Ironworks...
That's all for now, I suppose. Any comments, criticisms, and questions are appreciated. This is definitely experimental and a work in progress, so keep an eye out for changes. I'll probably build the no budget version too at some point, or at least mock up a list. Thanks for reading!
