Commander Deck Tech - Sigurd, Jarl of Ravensthorpe

Universes Beyond: Assassin's Creed brought us many iconic characters from this great Ubisoft game franchise as legendary creatures. And, of course, if we have legendary creatures, that means this set is a full-course meal for Commander players.

Today, we'll show you how to build a deck for the most beloved Assassin's Creed storyteller: Sigurd, Jarl of Ravensthorpe. He has an incredible design and flavor, and goes perfectly in this deck themed after Sagas and enchantments!

Sigurd, Jarl of Ravensthorpe is a storyteller in the Assassin's Creed franchise, and can remove or add Lore counters to Sagas. This makes a lot of sense considering his story in the game, and makes him an incredible card for any fan - his design is incredibly flavorful.

Sigurd is a Naya commander, a color combination that goes well with an enchantment theme. There is a lot of card draw in green and white, which is already a great foundation for X enchantment decks.

We took advantage of this and built a deck entirely around making Sigurd shine with all the stories he can tell!

This build's win condition is simply combat damage, so it's very straightforward. It also includes a few tricks if you want to deal 21 commander damage with Sigurd and play it almost like a Voltron deck, but, in all, it focuses on enchantments and Sagas. Your creatures will support the entire deck strategy with card draw and recursion.

Accelerators

Sigard is cheap and easy to cast. Still, ideally, you should play a good amount of ramp to develop your game plan more easily.

We have the classic mana rocks Sol Ring and Arcane Signet. As ramp, we also brought the most popular cards, Farseek, Three Visits, and Nature's Lore, to get lands like Sacred Foundry, Jetmir's Garden, and Temple Garden, for instance.

Cultivate and Kodama's Reach, our 3-costs, will get us our lands, and, finally, we added a peculiar card that makes a lot of sense in this build: Expand the Sphere. You can ramp up to 2 lands with it, and, if you don't, you can Proliferate up to two times. In a deck with this many Sagas, Proliferating twice can trigger many effects at once with just one card.

Sagas and Enchantments

Let's start with the non-Saga enchantments in our build: Sphere of Safety, Enchantress's Presence, and Mirari's Wake. They'll give us some protection, card draw, and more mana, respectively. These tools will be incredibly helpful throughout the matches.

Besides these, we also play Historian's Boon, which will give us many Soldier tokens when our enchantments enter play, and also creates 4/4 Angel tokens with Flying and Vigilance whenever the final chapter ability of a Saga we control triggers. It is great whether you want to be aggressive or defensive.

Finally, let's see our Sagas! We'll start with the ones whose chapters are also removals.

Arni Slays the Troll forces two creatures to fight, and, if you pick a creature with Lifelink, like the many we play, it will sustain you throughout the game. It also buffs a creature and gives you mana in chapter 2, and, in chapter 3, it gives you life, so, with it, you'll survive a little bit longer.

Battle at the Helvault's first two chapters are useful as temporary removals. If you manage to control its counters well, you can use it as a giant Oblivion Ring. However, if you want to go forward to chapter 3, you'll create an indestructible 8/8 Avacyn token with Vigilance and Flying. This token will be a great threat for your opponents and a great defensive resource for you, particularly because of its Vigilance.

Elspeth Conquers Death

Elspeth Conquers Death is another Saga whose first two chapters will be a big headache for your opponents, either because they exile their permanents or tax their non-creature spells by another 2 mana. Its third chapter isn't that relevant for our game strategy, but it can return to us some of the essential creatures we mentioned before.

Fall of Gil-galad's chapter 3 also forces creatures to fight, and can, potentially, draw you cards. Its first chapter also lets you manipulate the cards you draw with Scry, which is particularly great for this build because you'll draw many cards with it, and its second chapter will be great to buff Sigurd.

Fall of the Impostor works similarly: its first two chapters buff our creatures, and its final chapter lets us exile the enemy creature with the greatest power. Finally, as removal, we added Fall of the First Civilization. Its first chapter draws us cards, its second chapter exiles an artifact, and its third chapter is useful as a global removal. You'll need to play this Saga at the right time to not lose a well-built board to your own Saga as you play.

Showdown of the Skalds's first chapter will give you some nice card advantage because it exiles 4 cards of your library and lets you play them until the next turn. As for its second and third chapter, they buff your creatures considerably, particularly if you manage this Saga well and keep using it forever with Sigurd.

Showdown of the Skalds is another great Saga in this sense, particularly because its second chapter Reanimates creatures, and basically makes sure Sigurd is indestructible for as long as it is in play.

The Mending of Dominaria will return some of your resources to you, particularly if you play it with Eivor, Wolf-Kissed.

The Aesir Escape Valhalla returns life and permanents to you, and also buffs a creature. If you recall any high-cost permanent with it, like Excalibur, Sword of Eden, you'll gain 12 life and 12 +1/+1 counters to put on a creature. If you put them on Sigurd, you'll end up with a 15/15 with Trample, Vigilance, and Lifelink, and if you equip the Excalibur you just got back in this situation, you'll end up with a 25/15 with all the keywords above. It will definitely be a great threat on the board for your opponents.

Azusa's Many Journeys's chapter 1 ramps, and, when you turn it into a Likeness of the Seeker, you can untap up to three lands with it.

And, speaking of ramp, you can use There and Back Again to ramp mountains like Sacred Foundry, Stomping Ground, and Jetmir's Garden thanks to its chapter 2. The Smaug token its chapter 3 creates is also interesting because it gives you 14 treasures when it dies. If you go over chapter 3 over and over, the "legendary" rule states that you'll always have one Smaug and get 14 treasures whenever this chapter resolves.

Finally, as Sagas, we play The First Iroan Games, which has many great chapters - the best are chapter 2 and 3, which will buff your creatures and draw cards for you, respectively.

Oath of Eorl creates board presence because it creates Human tokens, and, with its third chapter, you can make Sigurd indestructible, besides also becoming the Monarch and drawing even more cards. War of the Last Alliance can get you great creatures, like Sythis, Harvest's Hand, Yenna, Redtooth Regent, Calix, Guided by Fate, Barbara Wright, and many other incredible legendaries. Its third chapter also gives Double Strike to your creatures.

And, lastly, we have Jugan Defends the Temple. It creates one mana dork token, and buffs creatures by giving you +1/+1 counters to put on them and by becoming Remnant of the Rising Star, as its ability buffs any other creatures that enter your board afterward. When you consider Sigurd's ability and the number of cards you have that give you +1/+1 counters to put on creatures, you'll easily set this Dragon's power to 7/7.

Interactions with Sagas and Enchantments

As we said before, and are great colors for enchantment decks. A great example of that is Sythis, Harvest's Hand, which is usually the commander in this archetype. We added it to this build because of how many cards it will draw us and because it will sustain us with its life gain.

Satyr Enchanter works similarly, but it doesn't give us life gain. Eidolon of Blossoms's card draw mechanic works similarly, but it draws you cards when cards enter your board, instead of when you cast them. Setessan Champion is similar and also gains +1/+1 in the process.

Furthermore, we play many great cards that discount costs, like Starfield Mystic, which buffs itself with +1/+1 counters when the last chapters of our Sagas resolve. Jukai Naturalist and Herald of the Pantheon offer us life gain besides discounts. Jukai Naturalist, in particular, is a great target for Sigurd's +1/+1 counters, and will sustain us throughout the match because of its Lifelink.

Sanctum Weaver doesn't discount the cost of our cards, but it creates just as much value. After all, this is an enchantment deck. This card will create a lot of mana for us precisely because of how many enchantments we play.

We play a few cards that copy enchantments, and this way get us even more resources from our Sagas or let us copy useful enchantments like Mirari's Wake, to get more mana, or Sphere of Safety, for more protection. Calix, Guided by Fate, Yenna, Redtooth Regent, and Ondu Spiritdancer are these cards, and each copies an enchantment in their own way.

Calix does that with combat damage, Yenna with her activated ability, and Ondu whenever an enchantment enters your battlefield. If you copy Sagas like Elspeth Conquers Death and manipulate their effects with Sigurd and other cards that move counters around, you'll be able to control your opponents really well. For instance, you can do that either with its first chapter, which removes a card from play, or its second, which makes noncreature spells cost 2 more mana.

And, speaking of cards that let us remove counters from our Sagas, we also play Power Conduit and Scholar of New Horizons. Because we don't have any artifact with charge counters, Power Conduit will only give us +1/+1 to put on our creatures. Scholar of New Horizons, on the other side, can add Plains like Temple Garden, Jetmir's Garden, and Sacred Foundry to our hand or our board, depending on the game state.

Even if you can't use it to add these plains directly onto your battlefield, making sure you have lands to play every turn is always great in Commander, particularly if you're using Lore counters to do it. After all, we want to keep our Sagas' best effects in play for as long as possible.

We added many cards that interact directly with Sagas. Satsuki, the Living Lore, for instance, adds a Lore counter to every Saga we control all at once, and gives us some recursion for our enchantments when she dies.

Straight from Doctor Who, we added Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. Ian gives Replicate to our Sagas and thus lets us copy a Saga when we cast them. If you play him alongside Mirari's Wake or Sanctum Weaver, you'll be able to Replicate cards more than once. Barbara gives our Sagas Read Ahead, so you'll be able to pick any chapter when you play them on your board. You can use her to create an Avacyn token directly on your board with Battle at the Helvault or to create a Smaug token directly on your board with There and Back Again. Barbara is incredibly interesting for our build, as she enables some fascinating plays.

Birgi, God of Storytelling is often played in Spellslinger or Combo decks because she creates a lot of mana. However, in this list, we use her to activate Sigurd's Boast twice and remove or add more Lore counters to our Sagas.

Eivor, Wolf-Kissed returns to us the Sagas we already used or Sagas that we milled with her own ability, and can also ramp one land for us in the process. She is a great card if you want to play more aggressively.

Finally, straight from Bloomburrow, we added Wildsear, Scouring Maw so we can give Cascade to the enchantments we cast directly from our hand. We have over 20 enchantments in this deck, so this Elemental Wolf will be a great help, as it'll let us cast two spells with just one of them.

Removals and Answers

We have many types of removals to deal with a wide array of possible threats in Commander. Beast Within, Generous Gift, Stroke of Midnight, and Chaos Warp are incredibly common in Naya decks precisely because they can target practically any type of permanent.

Path to Exile and Swords to Plowshares are cheap and quite effective to remove a potential threat fast and efficiently.

Austere Command is still one of the best white removals in this format, so we added it. Blasphemous Act is efficient, and, in most situations, you'll cast it for 3 mana or less. It is also another great Commander removal we were able to add to our build. Finally, to protect our enchantments and other permanents, we use Heroic Intervention, Boros Charm, and Teferi's Protection - these are popular and cheap protections that answer enemy spells efficiently.

Utility and Miscellaneous

For this part, we added some utility cards that give us recursion and other tools. Even though this is an enchantment deck, we play two incredibly useful equipment cards: Swiftfoot Boots and Excalibur, Sword of Eden.

Swiftfoot Boots adds more safety to our Commander and Excalibur, Sword of Eden often costs 0 because of how many Sagas we play. It also makes our Sigurd 13/3 and gives him Vigilance, Trample, and Lifelink. So, you'll have a way to sustain yourself throughout the game, loads of damage, and will even be able to kill an opponent with 21 commander damage.

And speaking of our commander, his second ability, which gives us +1/+1 counters, may not be the focus of our build, but it interacts nicely with Evolution Witness. This card returns permanents from our graveyard to us when we add counters to it.

You can also use Nesting Grounds to get these counters, but you'll mainly use it to transfer Lore counters from one Saga to another. Keep in mind: when you remove a Lore counter from a permanent, you won't trigger the Saga's previous effect.

Other useful lands for this build are Karn's Bastion, Hall of Heliod's Generosity, Rogue's Passage, and Boseiju, Who Endures. The first Proliferates our Sagas, the second gets us permanents from our graveyard, the third makes sure Sigurd deals damage and "protects him" from blockers, and the fourth is a useful removal in land-form.

Besides Evolution Witness, we also have other ways to get our Sagas back from our graveyard. For instance, Brilliant Restoration returns all of them at once, and Resurgent Belief returns them to us eventually. Having recursion like this is critical so we can reuse our cards and keep using Sagas as engines in our game strategy.

As usual, here's an alternative version of this deck, but budget. We kept most of our Sagas and answers, so we altered it very little. The most glaring difference is the mana base, but it won't change the way the main strategy works.

This is a very unusual Naya list! There are many great commanders for Saga decks, namely Tom Bombadil. But exploring other similar commanders is interesting precisely because of their color limitations. We can see exactly what their limits are when we build lists like these!

Did you like this list? Would you add any other Saga? Tell us in our comment section below.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!