Universes Beyond - Assassin's Creed: Top 10 Commanders + Lists

The Assassin's Creed and Magic: The Gathering love child is real, and will be available in stores soon. This special set, released to celebrate the rich history behind Assassin's Creed, will bring us a selection of cards inspired by characters, scenes, and artifacts from this Ubisoft franchise.

As every Universes Beyond set, we got plenty of legendary creatures based on characters in this series - each one featuring abilities and strategies that reflect their personalities and stories.

In this article, we'll see the top ten best commanders in this set, and analyze their unique abilities, synergies, and potential in the game. From wise Brotherhood leaders until the most skillful and determined Black Flag pirates, this list will show you the top ten best legends to lead your decks. Each one also perfectly captures the essence of the most memorable characters in this series.

There are many Boros artifact commanders around, and they're all a pretty boring solution for this color. Kassandra, Eagle Bearer is a bit, but not a lot, different from most of these legendary creatures because of her ability, which gets The Spear of Leonidas from your deck, hand, or graveyard, and puts it directly in play.

The spear in itself is a great card that offers the creature it is equipped to many abilities whenever you attack with it. Effects with several modes and a lot of versatility are always incredible in commander, and this equipment definitely follows this rule.

Kassandra also solves the biggest weak spot in white and red, and draws you cards whenever you deal damage with creatures equipped with legendary equipment, which is even better if you use abilities that give you evasion and double strike.

As we move on from a predictable equipment commander and go towards a more interesting and unique one, here's Ratonhnhaké꞉ton. This creature's biggest strength is that it reanimates equipment from your graveyard and attaches them to a brand-new 1/1 Assassin token with menace. This makes certain equipment cards even easier to use.

With this effect, we can put in play extremely expensive equipment cards, like Kaldra Compleat and Batterskull relatively easily, or take advantage of this effect to ignore expensive equip costs, like Hammer of Nazahn, Worldslayer, and, obviously, Colossus Hammer.

Usually, these types of lists become a bit better when we reach our 8th spot, and Cleopatra, Exiled Pharaoh is a good example of that. She has two abilities, each representing one of her real-life skills: one represents how easily she attracted and made political allies, and the other represents how she was willing to sacrifice them for her own advantage. It is clear that this commander is incredibly resilient, as she grows the creatures on the board and gives us value even when we lose them.

Cleopatra, Exiled Pharaoh requires a careful strategy, and you'll have to balance the power you gain and your card advantage with the life points you'll potentially lose in the process. She might be useful as the center of a commander deck that focuses on legendary creatures and counters, offering you both support and a way to punish your opponent when your allies die. Other styles, like an Aristocrat deck, are also a good fit.

Or you can play her as one of the 99 cards in a Meren of Clan Nel Toth deck focused on legendary creatures, which also works.

On one side, Ezio Auditore da Firenze is considered by many one of the best commanders in this set, but, on the other side, he is also extremely one-dimensional. He discounts the costs of your Assassins and even lets you remove from the game an opponent with 10 or less life, which a creature deck would be able to do anyway. Furthermore, he is a five-color commander that lets you play all the Assassins in the game, which isn't a creature type you find in many colors.

He is, arguably, the best Assassin commander in the game, which makes a lot of sense for fans of this franchise, but he only does that: he makes the most out of this creature type. If that is your goal, and you're fascinated by this type of creature, or by Ubisoft games, this is the perfect commander for you.

This commander lets you move around lore counters on saga-type enchantments, and thus speed up their effects or rewind their chapters. He does all of this while also buffing your creatures throughout the game.

Furthermore, any time you put a lore counter on a saga, Sigurd rewards you with a +1/+1 counter on another target creature. This synergy between sagas and creatures will give you an ever-growing board, in which your creatures get stronger as your sagas and their useful abilities happen. And, to top it all off, Sigurd, Jarl of Ravensthorpe has three incredibly useful keywords: trample, vigilance, and lifelink.

As a last observation, you can use sagas with read ahead or that got this ability through Barbara Wright a bit more carelessly, once Sigurd lets you rewind their previous abilities if you need to.

It is quite weird, but now we have not only Cleopatra, but also Leonardo Da Vinci in Magic: The Gathering. Leonardo's first ability turns your Thopters into threats, buffing their power and toughness according to the number of cards in your hand. This ability is even better with cards like Thought Vessel, which removes your hand limit. If you time it just right, this will be devastating, as your Thopters will be huge.

Leonardo's second ability creates Thopters tokens itself, but also has a few other interesting abilities, as it recycles your resources and creates value with the cards you discard.

Leonardo da Vinci is perfect with many cards, like Cybermen Squadron, which gives myriad to your non-legendary artifact creatures. Darksteel Forge, for instance, will make your artifacts indestructible.

With Havi, the All-Father as your commander, you want a good number of artifacts, legendary creatures, and sagas in your deck. Focus on playing these cards and, eventually, putting them in your graveyard to make Havi's indestructible.

The second part of your strategy is to make the most out of his second ability. Use several legendary creatures with different mana costs to make sure you have a proper target to return to the battlefield when one of your legendary creatures dies.

So, this effect is similar to Birthing Pod, but in the other way around. You'll constantly recycle your creatures and swap them for smaller creatures, which will make it harder for your opponents to deal with your board.

Just like Ezio Auditore da Firenze, this commander is considerably worse because it only interacts with Assassin-type creatures. As Altaïr creates a good number of Assassins attacking whenever he attacks, he gets a lot of value from the Assassins in your graveyard, and gives them a true second life and recursion.

This deck is even better with cards like Maskwood Nexus and Ashes of the Fallen, which change the types of creatures in your graveyard and exile them. Altaïr checks for creature type only when you exile a creature in your graveyard with him, and not after. However, this will make your deck extremely dependent on these cards.

Finally we have another Grixis commander that interacts with Pirates, and can use all Pirates - it is also the third of this kind in the entire game. Decks with Edward Kenway as your commander want two things: aggression and manipulating resources. His first ability gives you treasure tokens at the end of each turn, one for each tapped Assassin, Pirate, or Vehicle you control. This gives you a lot of extra mana, and thus lets you play more cards to keep pressuring your opponent.

His second ability is even more disruptive: any time one of your Vehicles deals damage to a player, you get to look at that player's top card and exile it. Then, as many blue and black decks, you get to play that enemy card as well.

He is way ahead of Ezio Auditore da Firenze in this list because you can build him in several ways, and not only focus on Assassins. Not to mention, Pirates are more popular as a creature type, with more clear interactions and support than Assassins, even if Assassins are older than Pirates in MTG.

The Capitoline Triad was one of the first cards in this set we saw, and motivated me to break one of my rules: never rank colorless commanders too high in these types of articles.

One factor that really convinced me to put this commander on our first spot is its ability to cost less (even going so far as costing less than the commander tax), according to the number of historic spells in your graveyard. But its greatest strength is its second ability: when you exile historic spells in your graveyard with a total mana value of 30 or greater, you get an emblem that makes all your creatures 9/9s.

Getting an emblem, an object that exists outside the game and alters its rules, (and which, to this day, is impossible to interact with), is a huge plus to your game state, and will probably get you ahead of everyone else at your table.

Because this set is themed after Assassins and historic cards, I felt most of the designs were quite limited. Commanders that would simply be incredible if they mentioned creatures, artifacts, or enchantments instead of specific card types have turned out quite boring.

Still, many of these new designs are also interesting, like Sigurd, Jarl of Ravensthorpe, which lets us rewind saga chapters, and The Capitoline Triad, which gives us an emblem.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!