Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on July 8, 2024

Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad | Illustration by Alex Negrea

It’s been a long time since I've booted up an Assassin’s Creed game; the series’ first release was way back in 2007, when I played it and the two follow-ups on Xbox 360. Since I wrapped up Brotherhood back in 2010, there’ve been more than 28 new titles in the series! Luckily, the classic assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad from the original game has his own legendary Magic card, and, being the only assassin I really remember from the series, I leapt at the opportunity to build around it. Plus, it’s in Mardu (), objectively the best colors.

The assassin cards have a typal theme, working best when there are lots of other assassins under your control. However, this creature type has been mostly under-served throughout Magic’s history. How do we go about building an entirely assassins deck with so few playable assassins to choose from? Let’s find out!

The Deck

Massacre Girl | Illustration by Chris Rallis

This Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad Commander deck revolves around either playing and sacrificing, or discarding assassin creatures into your graveyard. Altaïr’s triggered ability lets you stack up your graveyard with powerful assassins, exile them one at a time with memory counters, and then create an army of Assassin tokens whenever you attack with it. By changing the creature types of other powerful creatures in your graveyard with spells like Conspiracy and Maskwood Nexus, you’ll have access to loads of game-ending enters-the-battlefield effects. Then, you just swing in for damage or let the direct damage from your Impact Tremors and Goblin Bombardment do the work for you.

The Commander: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad

Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad is a 3-mana Mardu commander assassin, the protagonist of the first Assassin’s Creed video game, and one of the best commanders from the Assassin's Creed crossover. Whenever Altaïr attacks, it exiles one assassin creature from your graveyard with a memory counter on it. Then, it makes a tapped and attacking token for each memory-countered exiled creature. The ceiling for enters-the-battlefield effects you can get all at once here is pretty insane, especially when you combine this effect with Isshin, Two Heavens as One and Port Razer to trigger it multiple times per turn.

Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad is just a 3/3 with first strike, so it’s not all that protected when it goes charging into combat. Luckily, it’s cheap, and if it dies those creatures remain exiled with memory counters on them, so you’ll still have a full stack of creature tokens to remember when you recast your commander.

Bonafide Assassins

The smallest chunk of creatures in this deck are the bonafide assassin creatures – creatures with the assassin creature type already that won’t benefit from your type-changers. Many of these hail from the ACR set and have some synergistic abilities to buff up that creature type.

Arno Dorian and Desmond Miles are two of your best early-game plays. Desmond’s built-in evasion and triggered surveil ability makes it easy to put assassins into your graveyard from the get-go, while Arno is the only true assassin lord. Big Game Hunter and Nekrataal take the place of traditional removal.

Olivia, Opulent Outlaw, Merciless Harlequin, Queen Marchesa, and Thorn of the Black Rose act as advantage generators, letting you easily retake the monarch whenever Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad’s attack trigger goes off. Layla Hassan is the only real recursion effect outside of Altaïr, and you’ll use it to recover your Whispersilk Cloak or Isshin, Two Heavens as One if they’re destroyed.

Finally, Massacre Girl takes the place of any traditional board wipes you might’ve run; you’ve got more than enough 1/1s and 2/2s to destroy most of the board when it hits the field, but just be careful not to lock yourself into a Massacre Girl token on every Altaïr attack trigger (it’s not a “may” effect)!

Honorary Assassins

The meat of this Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad deck is the assortment of non-assassin creatures you plan to abuse. These creatures are present for their abusable enters-the-battlefield effects, as sacrifice outlets for your tokens, or their synergy with those effects.

Since you’ll be creating tokens of your memory-countered creatures each turn, you want those creatures to do something when they hit the field, regardless of whether they’ll survive combat. These ETB creatures make up the majority of your utility effects, plus more than a few card advantage generators.

Vile Entomber is the best way to tutor up just the right assassin you need or to throw Ashes of the Fallen into your graveyard for recursion with Layla Hassan. Scurrilous Sentry and Species Specialist can draw you a lot of cards, but only once you’ve hit one of your Conspiracys in the Survivalist’s case. Seasoned Pyromancer is similar, and it can help you discard ideal targets for your commander to exile.

Boltwing Marauder and Ambuscade Shaman are some rarely-seen tech for this deck that’ll greatly increase the amount of power Altaïr brings into play tapped and attacking.

Witty Roastmaster is our Impact Tremors on a body. Note that a copied Roastmaster token will see all the other tokens it enters the battlefield with when Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad attacks, and the same is true with Suture Priest and Corpse Knight.

The real juicy parts of this deck are Isshin, Two Heavens as One’s synergy to double up on Altaïr’s attack triggers, and Port Razer’s extra combat phases. Extra attack triggers mean you’ll get another copy of each of those exiled memory counter creatures, and suddenly you’re looking at three or more copies of each of those creatures. Now three Witty Roastmasters are entering at the same time as five other creatures, and you’ve got 15 damage to throw down before you even get to the declare blockers step during the combat phase.

Importantly, those tokens Altair makes don’t die at the end of the turn; they’re exiled. While there are a number of interesting triggers you could work around for when a creature simply “leaves” the battlefield, you’re much better off sacrificing them for some effect before they die.

To that end, classics Viscera Seer and Carrion Feeder are here, as well as their best friend Goblin Bombardment. Also notable is Bartolomé del Presidio, a better Carrion Feeder as far as I’m concerned, and Fleshtaker acts similarly with the bonus of already being an assassin.

The Assassin’s Creed

So, how do you initiate your creatures into the ancient order of Assassins? It’s been a while since I’ve played an AC game, but I assume there’s some sort of mystical and arcane training regime. Lucky for us, that regime can be boiled down to simply casting one of three type-changing permanents to make all your creatures into assassins, no matter whether they’re in your hand, library, or graveyard.

Conspiracy has got to be one of my favorite cards ever printed. Originally from the creature-type matters MTG set Mercadian Masques, Conspiracy has taken off in several off-the-wall combo decks since ‘99, one of my favorites being Rotlung Reanimator and any free sac outlet to make an infinite number of Zombie Cleric tokens. In this deck, it’s your best piece of type-changing effects, and it can and should be tutored up with Enlightened Tutor or Idyllic Tutor as soon as possible.

Maskwood Nexus works similarly but doesn’t require that you declare a type, instead giving your creatures and creature spells all types. It can also pump out a 2/2 Changeling (read: Assassin) each turn, which can help buff the surveil trigger from Desmond Miles or the draw from Pact of the Serpent.

Finally, the back-up and last-ditch effort for inducting your creatures into Assassin-dom is Ashes of the Fallen. Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad doesn’t care if the creature remains an assassin after it’s left the graveyard, so you really only need them to be assassins while your commander exiles them. This is slightly worse than making them assassins while they’re on the field, too, since the aforementioned Desmond and Pact won’t resolve nearly as strongly, but it's still an important tool for filling up your exile with memory counters.

The Mana Base

This Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad deck is running only 36 lands. That might seem a bit on the low end, but consider that the average mana cost in this deck is only 2.81 when you omit the lands. You have a really low mana curve, with most of your spells costing around 2 mana each, and you really only need to hit 4 mana consistently to really pop off.

Despite that, this still runs quite a few mana rocks to help smooth out your ramp and keep pace with the green decks at the table. The typical suite of Sol Ring and the Signets are here, plus the three Talismans in Mardu colors. Deadly Dispute is a great outlet for your tokens that’ll be exiled anyways while giving you a Treasure token, and Big Score can put the assassins you need straight from your hand into the graveyard.

The Strategy

The strategy for this Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad deck is very simple: Dump as many creatures as you can into your graveyard before playing Altaïr and protecting it while you swing in every turn, getting more and more creatures entering and leaving the battlefield as you do. Before long, you’ll have enough damage built up from your Impact Tremors effects that you should just win right there and then – if not, use Port Razer and Isshin, Two Heavens as One to press the advantage and try to wipe everyone in one big turn.

Your first few turns are focused on filling your graveyard with assassins, tutoring up a type-changer, or laying down some protection for Altaïr when it hits the field, depending on what your opening hand looks like. I’d recommend not being afraid to mulligan away a hand with a Conspiracy, as you’ll usually have enough tutors to fetch it back at some point, and finding important synergy pieces is crucial to actually turning those assassins into damage.

By turns 4 and 5, you’ll want to have your commander on the field and attacking each turn to start building up those memory counters. If you can stick one of your cheaper pingers like Corpse Knight and Witty Roastmaster, you’ll be well on your way to a threatening board state. Tutor for a type changer if you haven’t by this time.

Late game should see you bringing in five-plus “assassins” each turn. Multiple of these should either be sources for direct damage, or Port Razer. Extra combats will see you bringing in the entire batch of memory counter cards for every attack from Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, exponentially increasing your combat effectiveness.

Combos and Interactions

There aren’t any infinite combos in this deck, to my knowledge. If you find one let me know! This deck is fairly straightforward, uses combat damage as a win condition (more or less), and is easy to interact with.

Rule 0 Violations Check

I can’t think of any cards so salt-inducing in this deck that you should feel obligated to announce them in the pre-game discussion. I guess some folks are still vehemently anti-Universes Beyond, but unfortunately I agree with them so I can offer you no advice on what to say to change their minds.

Budget Options

We don’t know where the prices for many of the ACR cards will land yet, but without factoring them in, this deck still runs at about $240. That’s not too expensive for a complete EDH deck, but you can still fiddle with the budget to make it more wallet-friendly.

Much of this deck’s dollar value is concentrated on a few cards. Cover of Darkness is just the best evasion you can get for a specific creature type, but it’s also $45 on average and you can make do with just Goblin War Drums.

Cutting Enlightened Tutor and Ashes of the Fallen can save you another $30 or so, but that might start to affect the consistency of the deck. Species Specialist is another expensive card and can be cut and replaced with a Read the Bones for some cheap draw.

Other Builds

This is just scratching the surface on what Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad can do. In this Commander deck, I’ve built around changing your creatures’ types to assassin and creating tokens of anything and everything. Other Altaïr decks could skip the Conspiracy/Maskwood Nexus/Ashes of the Fallen combo and just run only changelings or focus on a token-doublers strategy with cards like Anointed Procession.

Commanding Conclusion

The Animus | Illustration by Nestor Ossandon Leal

The Beyond boosters take an underrepresented creature type and expand it into a thematic universe outside of Magic: The Gathering’s typical purview. Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad is one of the first truly assassin-based commanders, and its ability is unique enough yet still on-color for a Mardu creature. I, for one, am excited for a Universes Within version someday so I don’t have to mix my IPs to play a Commander deck I like.

What do you think of this Altaïr Commander deck? Are there enough useful Assassins to run it without the type-changers, or do you see yourself building around changelings instead? How well does Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad slot into other decks? Let me know in the comments, or over on Draftsim's Twitter/X.

Thanks for reading!