Forgive Me
Silumgar is a weird ass commander cuz he's a dragon whose colors don't have a lot your typical Dragon synergies. However, he has several qualities that are absolutely nuts to have in your command zone:
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He's Hexproof
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He has the potential to wipe your opponent's board
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He has a fat booty that's hard to kill via damage boardwipes and combat damage.
With this in mind, building a deck around him is very rewarding but also kinda tricky. He's explosive for sure, but he requires some setup to pull off his main move: Amassing a wave of dragons a big enough to constantly wipe your opponents' boards each turn. This is especially apparent since the only real Dragon token generators in Dimir colors are Feywild Caretaker, Maskwood Nexus, and Black Market Connections, the latter two only counting as Dragon generators because they generate generic Changelings that masquerade as dragons.
So, how do we consistently summon the patented Silumgar Tsumani? Well, it's simple; make tokens of other creature types before searching for either Arcane Adaptation or Maskwood Nexus to turn them all into dragons. The easiest type generators that comes to mind are zombie generators, as the tribe is already heavily supported in Dimir colors. Endless Ranks of the Dead and Curse of the Restless Dead are good contenders for this very reason, with Endless Ranks only needing something as dopey as Universal Automaton to get the snowball rolling. Other Dragons even support this zombie strategy, with stuff like Ebondeath, Dracolich already being a zombie or Necromaster Dragon creating more zombies.
However, the recently released Horn of Gondor has just as much swarming potential despite focusing on humans. Other generators like Cybernetica Datasmith and Skystrike Officer are less explosive, but provide flexible, incremental card advantage in addition to their tokens. Datasmith even adds good old commander politics into the mix by having an opponent get whichever option you do not choose for yourself.
Another way to summon the Silumgar Tsunami is by messing around with your opponents' creatures that are too big to drown in his waves. There are two main ways to do this:
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Stat modification. Spells and permanents such as Polymorphist's Jest, Vedalken Humiliator, Warkite Marauder and Sudden Spoiling all turn your opponents' creatures into either 1/1's, 0/1's, or 0/2's. This makes it easier to spread your army thin and attack multiple opponents at once while still being able to hit the creatures you want to hit. These spells also normally remove the abilities of the affected creatures, allowing the instant-speed variants to act as pseudo-disruption in the event you still can't use them proactively.
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Replacement Removal. Blue has a lot of removal that replaces your opponents' creatures with dinky little 1/1 birds, 2/2 pigs, or 3/3 frog lizards/apes. While Dimir wouldn't normally play these spells since the Black side of the color combo has access to true removal, Silumgar simply does not give a shit. The pigs and apes you give your opponents will die all the same. If anything, Silumgar actually welcomes Blue's replacement removal due to their efficient mana costs, permanent exile bonuses, and -- in the case of Resculpt and Ravenform -- ability to hit noncreature artifacts, a card type that Dimir usually struggles against.
Silumgar has a few death payoffs that greatly benefit from a constant source of creatures to feed on. The most obvious payoffs include Syr Konrad, the Grim, Massacre Wurm, and Dreadhound for their life loss. I would normally include Blood Artist as well in that package, but he's a little too frail and can drop in too early with nothing to do before the dragon ball can get rolling. Konrad, the Wurm, and the Hound drop in around the time I already have a few dragons to start the tsunami, and are generally beefier and can hit harder. Morbid Opportunist is in there for card draw. Black Market used to be in this list, but it felt too much like a "win more" card.
Other neat payoffs include Revel in Riches and The Meathook Massacre, although I don't have the money to drop for those. Eternal Thirst is a good aura to strap onto the hexproof Silumgar to help close games out with commander damage.
While obviously you can kill your opponents with combat damage after clearing their boards with the first wave of your "dragon" assault, it's no fun to keep your death payoffs starving while your opponents struggle to rebuild. To solve this, you can just...give your opponents more creatures to kill over and over again. There aren't a lot of good cards that do this while still benefitting you, but Forbidden Orchard is a must include due to its color fixing and the fact that it only takes a land slot in your deck. Genesis Chamber is another good option (although I wouldn't know what to replace for it), while the previously mentioned Cybernetica Datasmith gives your opponents Robots to kill each other with while you sit back and draw cards. The new Nettling Nuisance also looks good since the pirates it gives your opponents only have 2 toughness and are immediately goaded.
The sub-themes I included (but not focused on) in my personal Silumgar deck are incidental artifact and creature type synergies. Stuff like Shimmer Dragon and Vedalken Humiliator need artifacts to do their thing, while cards like Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator, Springjack Pasture, and Coveted Prize benefit from the various creature types my changelings end up having. I would include more, but those would take away focus from the main point of the deck.
As lethal as Silumgar is, he has quite a few weaknesses that you will have to keep in mind while playing him:
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Pillow Forts: Dimir only has access to Feed the Swarm and now Shatter the Oath for noncreature enchantment removal. This means that any opponent running a bunch of Propagandas and Ghostly Prisons will slow Silumgar's gameplan down to a crawl unless someone else is generous enough to remove those game pieces for him.
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Goading: While Goading generally provides benefits to attack-focused decks, goading a Silumgar player when they're about to do the dirty deed generally means that the goader gets to avoid the big dragon tsunami while their opponents' stuff gets wiped out in a single turn, giving them a chance to find an answer to finish you off while you recover from shooting your load. Given how prevalent Goading is as a mechanic in the modern casual Commander ecosystem, it will probably come up a lot more than you think.
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Superfriends: Unless a Superfriends deck focuses on Planeswalkers that produce a lot of creature tokens, Silumgar will not have a lot of things to kill and a lot of different targets he will need to prioritize besides the player.
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Enemy board wipes: Silumgar has a lot of difficulty recovering from board wipes in my experience piloting him, so you have to be careful not to overextend even if it looks super tempting.
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Anyone smart enough to remove from the field or snipe from hand/deck Arcane Adaptation or Maskwood Nexus before you can do the big nasty: This isn't so much of a weakness as it is a thing that hard counters the massive dragon wave, as all those "dragons" on the board will turn back into zombies or humans or whatever dumb creature type you had before. Obviously you'll still be pretty dangerous with all those tokens ready to charge, but you lose all those cool incidental tribal synergies you got going on. This is also why it's important to still include nontoken changelings and actual dragons in your deck to fall back on in case this possibility happens.
But yeah that's about it. I love this weird ass dragon a lot and recommend you folks to give him a shot.
