Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Gisa, Glorious Resurrector!

Gisa is a four mana 4/4 that when a creature an opponent controls dies, they are exiled instead and at the beginning of your upkeep you return those creatures that were exiled onto the battlefield under your control with the decayed ability, meaning that they can’t block and they are sacrificed when they attack.

This is weirdly a somewhat fair Commander in the grand scheme of “steal your stuff” Commanders, in needing those creatures to die and then you needing to wait on your upkeep to get them to your side of the field.

The creatures also don’t gain haste, which means that they’ll stick to field not doing anything until the next turn.

Weird that Gisa is fair in that regard, but this is something that I can work with.

We’ll need to pack the deck with all sorts of creature destruction, of which black is really good at.

Now when taking board wipes into consideration, that’s where things get tricky. From how I understand the rules, If Gisa dies in board wipe, then the creatures will get exiled, but won’t come to the battlefield under your control because Gisa is no longer on the battlefield.

This is where my knowledge of the rules is spotty, so let’s operate on that assumption just to be on the safe side.

We’ll keep a board wipe or two just in case, but we need to be mindful of when we use them.

Now, we have all of these creatures that can’t attack when they come in, and the next time that they do attack they’ll get sacrificed at the end of combat.

We make use of the creatures and get rid of them at the same time. Speaking of rules interactions, Nightmare Shepard is quirky in that when you take an opponent’s creature, and controlled it when it died, you can exile it to make a 1/1 copy.

So not only do you take an opponent’s creature, but you also get to exile it and create a longer lasting copy to make more use of in the future.

Yeah, the copy is a 1/1, but there are still a plethora of ways to make use of that creature while also potentially getting rid of a problematic threat.

Now of course, we still need to be wary of board wipes, but with Nightmare Shepard can mitigate it somewhat if a board wipe occurs if we don’t mind exiling our own stuff on occasion.

The question then becomes how do we win the game?

Well we need to make use of all of the dying creatures that we control, which leads us to the old standby of Blood Artist effects.

While this isn’t the most creative way to win the game, it is something reliable in a deck that in and of itself is pretty unreliable.

Focusing on single target removal or limited board wipes is something that is very narrow while also needing to have Gisa stay around and not immediately destroyed is going to be a task and a half.

Black has plenty of abilities to return a creatures from the battlefield with effects like Not Dead After All, we will run of those as well as removal.

Gisa is a tricky build that has a solid enough payoff, but is quite difficult to execute well. At least this Gisa, maybe the others would be easier to build around.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From J.M. Casual