Commander Deck Tech - Havi, the All-Father

Universes Beyond has brought many incredible franchises into the beloved Magic: the Gathering world. So far, Fallout, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth, Doctor Who, Warhammer, and a few others were adapted into the game. More recently, the iconic Assassin's Creed franchise made its way into MTG.

Assassin's Creed games are set around historical events, and thus they include many historical figures, like Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Exiled Pharaoh, and Sokrates, Athenian Teacher. However, this time, we'll work with a very popular Nordic God: Odin, the All-Father, who takes on the form of Havi, the All-Father in Assassin's Creed, in a deck that focuses on legendary creatures and the graveyard!

Havi, the All-Father, or Odin, is a Naya god who brings back legendary creatures when other legendary creatures die. This type of mechanic is not that common in this color combination, but, because Odin is now the blueprint, we just have to make him work!

We'll use, of course, many legendary creatures, and interact directly with them with cards like Annie Joins Up and Heroes' Podium. We'll also play cards that interact with sacrifice and the graveyard, like Birthing Pod, Birthing Ritual, Ashnod's Altar, and many others.

At the end of this article, you'll find a budget version of this list, as always. It will work in the same way, but cost a bit less if you have a limited budget.

Without further ado, let's dive into our deck tech!

At first, our main win condition is combat damage, which we'll deal with great, iconic creatures like Aurelia, the Warleader and Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. You can also win the game with poison counters, more specifically with a transformed Etali, Primal Conqueror.

Goblin Bombardment and Arbaaz Mir deal noncombat damage and creatures like Saffi Eriksdotter, Boromir, Warden of the Tower, and Hajar, Loyal Bodyguard trigger Havi's ability.

Now, let's see how we'll use all of these resources!

Acceleration

Havi costs 6 mana, so we may take a bit to cast him. We'll use the standard Commander mana rocks: Sol Ring and Arcane Signet.

Relic of Legends should give us a lot of mana, considering how many legendary creatures we play. We'll play some low-cost ramp (Farseek, Three Visits, and Nature's Lore) to get cards like Jetmir's Garden, Stomping Ground, Canopy Vista, Sacred Foundry (in Farseek's case), Cinder Glade, and Temple Garden.

Finally, we play Kodama's Reach and Cultivate to get our lands, and Delighted Halfling as a mana dork. It also makes our legendary spells uncounterable.

Sacrifice

To trigger Havi's ability, a legendary creature has to die, and a cheaper creature needs to be in the graveyard. To make this process easier, we added many sacrifice tools to our list, like Altar of Dementia, which we'll use on ourselves to feed our graveyard and create valid targets for Havi.

We also couldn't forget to add Ashnod's Altar to create mana, particularly because this list plays more than a few expensive creatures. Keep in mind, these sacrifice tools also help us save our creatures from spot or global removals - which, after all, is how our opponents will try to prevent us from reanimating them.

Then, we added lands like High Market and Lazotep Quarry, whose Eternalize ability forces us to sacrifice one card to our graveyard and spend two mana. Greater Good was also a must, as it draws us cards, feeds our graveyard by discarding cards, and triggers Havi's ability.

Birthing Pod and Birthing Ritual play similar roles: they get us the creatures we need if we sacrifice other creatures. Finally, we added Goblin Bombardment to deal damage and, of course, sacrifice something else.

Legendary Creatures

Interactions with the Graveyard and Other Useful Tools

We'll go through basically all the creatures in this deck now, so let's see what each of them do in this strategy. Let's start with a big threat: Gandalf the White. This is one of the strongest legendary creatures in the deck, particularly as he lets us cast legendary spells as if they have Flash and triggers legendary permanents an extra time, when he enters and leaves the battlefield. Many of our creatures have incredible effects, and Gandalf will boost them even more.

We can sacrifice many of our creatures with their own abilities, so, with them, using Havi's ability will be easier. Boromir, Warden of the Tower is a great defensive resource, and also prevents our opponents from playing cards with Cascade or cards that can be cast for free. Hajar, Loyal Bodyguard plays a similar role and also buffs our legendary creatures; it makes them indestructible as well. Saffi Eriksdotter was critical in a deck like this, precisely because it lets us return to our battlefield a creature we plan to sacrifice later on.

Six came out recently and is a great addition to our list. It is an engine that feeds our graveyard and lets us cast cards from there directly thanks to its retrace.

Speaking of reanimating creatures, Feldon of the Third Path truly shines in this strategy. It sacrifices a token at the beginning of our next end step, and, as this token costs mana because it is a copy, it triggers Havi. This way, we'll get to return another creature to the board.

Samwise Gamgee creates Food tokens. With them, we'll be able to retrieve important historic cards from our graveyard, or simply use these tokens to gain some life throughout the match.

Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle does something similar when we cast it, but brings the historic permanent in question straight onto our battlefield. Reanimating cards like Hajar and Boromir to get some extra protection with Teshar is a great strategy that our deck executes well.

Finally, we have Cadric, Soul Kindler. What could be better than a legendary creature if not getting another legendary creature for just one extra mana? That's what this Dwarf Wizard does, and he also sacrifices this token at the beginning of our end step.

Aggressive Legendary Creatures

And, of course, as any great combat-focused deck, we need options to be aggressive when we deal with our opponents. To deal non-combat damage directly, we play Arbaaz Mir, which, besides dealing damage, also gives us a reasonable amount of life whenever a nontoken historic enters the battlefield. With Gandalf in play, we'll get 2 life for each legendary creature that enters the board.

Gisela, Blade of Goldnight and Aurelia, the Warleader, which we mentioned before, let us deal double the damage and give us some protection as well as extra combats, respectively. Speaking of extra combats, Éomer, Marshal of Rohan also plays this role - and you can easily trigger his ability in this strategy; after all, you just need to sacrifice one attacking legendary creature.

Bayek of Siwa also lets us be quite aggressive, considering it gives double strike to our historic creatures in our turn. Combined with Gisela's double damage and Aurelia's extra combats, it can be lethal for your opponents - you'll simply deal tons of damage.

Ojer Kaslem, Deepest Growth creates problems really early on: for just 5 mana, we'll have a 6/5 body with trample as evasion. It can also ramp a land as well as bring another creature to the board.

Djeru and Hazoret also brings more creatures to the board and lets us be quite aggressive. We'll rarely miss our creatures when we play it.

Etali, Primal Conqueror also somewhat plays this role, considering it also exiles the top of our deck, but we play it because it lets us cast 4 spells at once. It also turns into Etali, Primal Sickness and will definitely scare our opponents.

Card Advantage and Removals

Finally, we also brought legendary creatures that get us ahead in card advantage. By either drawing or selecting cards, these tools will make sure we always have cards to play as the match goes on.

Jaxis, the Troublemaker's ability feeds our graveyard by discarding other cards, and creates a copy of a creature. With Cadric, we won't have to sacrifice the legendary copies we create. Blitz will draw us a card, and, of course, as this creature dies we'll also trigger Havi another time.

Reki, the History of Kamigawa certainly stands out because he draws us cards whenever we cast a legendary spell. As this deck mostly deals combat damage, we also added Toski, Bearer of Secrets to draw even more cards.

Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar will also draw us cards if we buff our creatures somehow (and, spoiler: we will with cards we'll show soon!). With it, we'll also have safer turns, considering it prevents our opponents from casting spells on our turn.

Kolvori, God of Kinship easily becomes a 6/6 creature with vigilance in this build, and also lets us pick a legendary creature among the top 6 cards in our deck and add it to our hand. It is not exactly card draw, but is as useful as one.

Torsten, Founder of Benalia plays a similar role, as it lets us pick any number of creatures and lands from the top 7 cards in our deck and add them to our hand. It also gives us 7 Soldier tokens when it dies. With Gandalf in play, we'll look at 7 cards twice and create 14 Soldiers.

Finally, to remove creatures, we play Éowyn, Fearless Knight. It removes an enemy creature and, at the same time, can make sure we win a combat thanks to the protection we'll get from her ability.

Loran of the Third Path removes artifacts and enchantments, and draws us cards in the long term. We can take advantage of it even if one of our opponent also draws a card with it. All creatures that have a relevant ETB effect are important in our build because we'll constantly reanimate them with Havi or other cards in this deck.

Utility and Miscellaneous

We play a few cards to interact with legendary creatures, like Heroes' Podium and Flowering of the White Tree, which buff them and thus make Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar better. They also get us more creatures from the top of our deck and protect them, respectively.

Rising of the Day also buffs our creatures and gives them haste. Rhythm of the Wild, besides giving them haste, makes our creature spells uncounterable. Haste is a viable choice if you want to be aggressive as soon as possible, and is critical precisely because our main win condition is combat damage.

Bard Class's level 1 buffs our legendary creatures. Its level 2 discounts our legendary spells by . Finally, its level 3 gives us card advantage by exiling and letting us cast the top 2 cards in our deck whenever we cast a legendary spell. All its three levels are incredible in this list because we can extract 100% of them.

Speaking of enchantments, Annie Joins Up, which we also mentioned before, definitely stands out among the others. It is a removal that triggers both Havi and many other creatures an extra time. Etali, Primal Conqueror will exile more cards, Aurelia, the Warleader and Éomer, Marshal of Rohan will give us extra combats, Reki, the History of Kamigawa and Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar will draw us more cards, and so on and so forth. All our legendary creatures with triggered abilities are great with Annie Joins Up.

We also play Garruk's Uprising to draw more cards and give trample to all our creatures.

Answers and Removals

And, of course, like any great Commander deck, we couldn't skip our spot removals, global removals, and protection. Respectively, we play Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile because they're cheap and don't favor our opponents too much.

Boseiju, Who Endures is a great removal that can easily go into any deck precisely because it is so efficient. It removes any popular problematic lands in Commander nowadays.

To hit a wider array of targets, we play Beast Within, Generous Gift, Stroke of Midnight, and Chaos Warp. Chaos Warp might not actually remove a card because it only shuffles it back into their owner's deck, but it can save you in critical moments. It can even save your own permanents.

As global removals, we play Austere Command because it is a modal spell, and Blasphemous Act because it is easy to cast and works almost 100% of the time. Other removals that make sense in our deck are Urza's Ruinous Blast, to keep our legendary permanents in play, and What Must Be Done, which can remove all creatures and artifacts or bring back a legendary permanent from our graveyard.

Finally, we have our protection. After all, a creature-based deck like this, despite its interactions with the graveyard, can't afford to lose a strong board. So, we use the most popular tools to protect our cards: Heroic Intervention, Teferi's Protection, and Boros Charm, which also lets us give double strike to one of our powerful creatures.

We have less common protection, like Dawn's Truce, Flare of Fortitude, and Naya Charm. Dawn's Truce works identically to Heroic Intervention. You can cast Flare of Fortitude without paying any mana by sacrificing a nontoken white creature. This alternative cost also interacts with our commander's ability, by the way. Finally, Naya Charm stops an enemy attack and makes sure our opponents have no blockers. It can also retrieve an important card from our graveyard and add it to our hand.

This budget version doesn't play the most expensive cards from the original version, but both decks have the same essence. They have the same strategies and mechanics, and want to do almost the same thing: play many legendary creatures and reanimate them to trigger many effects.

This commander is very fascinating, and I definitely want to test it out more in real life. Its mechanic and colors are different, and might just give us a new, fun, dynamic game style, all while letting us play many tricks to answer many situations. Despite expensive, Havi, the All-Father can be quite fun to pilot!

Did you like this list? Would you build it differently? Tell us all about it in our comment section below!

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!