The remaster of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag was released last week for current platforms, marking the most love this landmark pirate simulator has gotten since the franchise’s Universes Beyond tie-in.
In hindsight, that Assassin’s Creed set flew slightly under the Magic community’s radar. Certainly not for a lack of power, but perhaps in part because it was so narrow in focus: with a small card count devoted mostly to assassin typal and some historic card synergies.
Personally, getting so many new legendary assassins at the same time, mostly with similar mechanics, did make all the cards blur together a little. But when we have an excuse to focus on one above the others – say, Black Flag’s protagonist Edward Kenway – things come back into focus.
Edward also gives us plenty of reasons to revisit other Assassin’s Creed legends and see if any of them are worthy to join his pirate crew! So, what are we waiting for? Let’s set sail on this brewing voyage.
MEET THE CAPTAIN
Edward Kenway isn’t the most obvious commander for an Assassin’s Creed theme deck (hello, Ezio!) but his leadership skills are surprisingly valuable in the right setup.
His two triggers generate both mana and cards, potentially in large quantities, and the deckbuilding and gameplay hoops he asks us to jump through are manageable. Probably the biggest limitation to be overcome just his casting cost: three colors and five mana is kinda hefty for a card which we want to cast ASAP to start generating resources.
At least we don’t need to have Edward be our first play to maximize his returns: we can curve out with pirates, vehicles and assassins before playing the commander and he will immediately witness and reward us for having them once he arrives.
Being able to add value for each pirate, vehicle OR assassin we control obviously opens thrice as many deckbuilding paths. Not only are we able to use the assassin synergies from Assassin’s Creed cards, but we can cash in on the impressive suite of pirate typal support available in Commander.
A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME (AND THEE!)
The pirate type actually might be the most important for an Edward deck, as the mechanical themes of that type happen to align perfectly with his two triggered abilities.
The treasure mechanic has been linked to pirates thematically since it first appeared in Ixalan. As a result, many pirate cards have abilities explicitly linked to treasure; others synergize indirectly by scaling with artifacts, sacrifices or tokens. Considering how much treasure Edward can produce, any of these abilities has the potential to be very impactful if their effects are relevant in Commander.
A slightly more exotic but flavorful pirate mechanic is stealing cards owned by other players. This includes any spells Edward plunders from the top of opposing libraries, and any booty captured by other pirates with similar effects (such as Beckett Brass).
The utility of “drawing cards” from opposing decks should not be underestimated; most Commander decks play generic effects like removal, equipment, ramp, or actual card draw which can benefit us, even if their creatures don’t suit our typal build.
Of course, if we happen to get out Don Andres then even our press-ganged recruits can suddenly become pirates, generating more treasure from Edward and potentially unlocking some nasty combinations with other cards in our deck. The Don is such a perfect complement to Edward Kenway that I view him as almost a secondary commander for the deck. I would even play a few extra tutors specifically to get him out of the deck more consistently.
Despite pirates being probably the strongest typal pairing with Edward, I don’t quite think it’s worth building our deck around them exclusively. Vehicles in particular have a few critical roles to fill in Captain Kenway’s gameplan (and there’s some assassins that are just too good to pass up).
CAN’T BE CAPTAIN WITHOUT A SHIP
Vehicles are a bit of a fringe card type in Commander. Oftentimes they just read like worse creatures, and if they happen to be playable it’s down to having a nice ETB or static ability rather than their combat potential.
But Edward really puts his thumb on the scale (or tiller?), with BOTH his abilities relying heavily on vehicles to reach their full potential. After all, pirates tend to be fragile creatures; we need them to be tapped for Edward’s treasure rebate to kick in, but attacking with them is very risky on most boards. But if we have even a single vehicle available, we can safely tap down our whole crew (even those who just entered) without risking their life or limb!
Vehicles are also somewhat pirate-adjacent and so there’s a few with specific pirate synergies or at least synergies with the same mechanics as pirates
The role of assassins in our gameplan is slightly less clear. They aren’t any more useful than pirates for the sake of Edward’s treasure generation, and while a few creatures have both types (mostly other Black Flag characters), adding most assassins to our deck is just diluting the pirate synergies and vice versa.
Mechanically, assassins specialize in destroying creatures. It is nice to be able to get removal on a creature body that also generates treasure, so the best assassins are probably those with re-usable tap abilities which make triggering Edward easy. But even with those treasures factored in, only a few assassins compete with more efficient, traditional removal spells.
The Assassin’s Creed set does also feature support for legendary and historic cards as another possible theme, and by focusing on those we could make a stronger argument for a mixed assassin/pirate creature base. However, I prefer to just stick to the absolute best assassin, those which are easy to justify on their own effects and enjoy any incidental synergy around the type while keeping the deck mostly pirate focused.
If you’re really set on balancing out the two types you can always play more changelings and/or global type modifiers like Arcane Adaptation, Conspiracy, or Maskwood Nexus. Roshan, Hidden Magister is not quite as good simply because the pirate synergies are more numerous and powerful – we want to teach our assassins to be buccaneers, not turn pirates into landlubbers!
CHARTING A COURSE
We’ve weighed up the roles of the card types Edward’s text mentions by name, but there’s still a lot of viable directions we can take this commander. I prefer to think of these deckbuilding options in terms of “packages” based on a shared mechanical theme. It’s not worth trying to mix in cards from every package at once, but by picking a couple to include you’ll add personal flavor to your Edward deck and ensure consistent synergy between your pieces.
Another potent mechanic pirate cards often dabble in (seriously, pick a sea-lane) is draw-discard – or as you move from the blue towards the red/black part of their color pie, payoffs for discarding more generally.
The pirate connection here probably comes from the informal names for these effects: looting (when you draw, then discard) and rummaging (when you discard then draw). Both are excellent when you don’t fear running out of cards in total (like Edward) and just need to rip through your deck to find the right answers for your current situation.
Of course the best thing to do with discard is often to set up your graveyard with cards you want to reanimate, or otherwise recur. And thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (surely a future Universes Beyond candidate) linking pirates and the undead in our cultural zeitgeist, there are quite a few reanimation effects to consider even within our typal speciality. I personally like this package just for how it allows us to more rapidly find key synergy pieces (which are often moderately expensive creatures) and cheat them back onto the board to speed up our early-mid game.
Artifact synergies in their various forms are always among the most powerful things you can do in basically any Commander deck. Simply by our commander making a lot of treasures, we can pretty much immediately splash in as many excellent artifacts-matter cards as we want and they’ll just work off Edward alone. That’s not even mentioning the various pirates who just love having artifacts around, like Captain Storm, Cosmium Raider.
The other axis of synergy which treasure decks are primed to exploit is sacrifice engines – particularly things which trigger when a permanent is sacrificed. But even cards that require us to sacrifice treasure to them instead of for mana (such as Shadow, Mysterious Assassin) are very strong, since treasures are much cheaper to produce than most other permanents.
Regardless of which of these packages you dip into, I think it’s important to stop and consider how they convert to victory. Most of the best candidates in my mind are individual creatures which convert accumulated resources (be they cards, treasures, or creatures in play) into direct damage to players. Glinthorn Buccaneer, Broadside Bombardiers, Shao Jun, Sawblade Skinripper, even off-type solutions like Mayhem Devil or Ghirapur Aether Grid are all nice tools to accelerate games and give you and out if the table is a bit too strong to chip down with random pirate and vehicle swings.
TIME TO RE-SYNC OR SWIM
My favorite type of commander is always the kind which serve as a bridge to the rest of your gameplan, rather than a gameplan unto themselves. By pumping out a ton of treasures (plus some extra cards) Edward is a perfect example of this archetype, while still retaining a strong identity through his signature creature types.
That said, you’re not actually required to go for a typal build with Edward, even if I’ve decided to make that the focus for extra Black Flag flavor. Treasures are perhaps the most universal and flexible mechanic in Magic, and you could just as readily play this as a hard-nosed Grixis Control list running a relative handful of utility-focused pirates; just enough to keep Edward generating treasures so you can out-resource the opposition.
Tom’s fate was sealed in 7th grade when his friend lent him a pile of commons to play Magic. He quickly picked up Boros and Orzhov decks in Ravnica block and has remained a staunch white magician ever since. A fan of all Constructed formats, he enjoys studying the history of the tournament meta. He specializes in midrange decks, especially Death & Taxes and Martyr Proc. One day, he swears he will win an MCQ with Evershrike. Ask him how at @AWanderingBard, or watch him stream Magic at twitch.tv/TheWanderingBard.