BlackLegendary Creature — Human AssassinRoshan, Hidden Magister
Mana value4Rank#6,176
The Commander
Other creatures you control are Assassins in addition to their other types. The same is true for creature spells you control and creature cards you own that aren't on the battlefield.
Face-down creatures you control have menace.
Whenever a permanent you control is turned face up, you draw a card and you lose 1 life.
Guide
Gameplan
Roshan turns your whole board into Assassins and rewards you for flipping face-down permanents, so you flood the field with morph/disguise/manifest creatures, attack with menace-laden unknowns, and turn each unmorph into a card and a payoff trigger. You grind value by repeatedly cloaking and flipping cards while leaning on Assassin tribal synergies to close games.
Strengths
- Every unmorph or disguise flip draws a card, building a powerful repeatable engine
- Face-down creatures gain menace, making your cheap attackers genuinely hard to block
- Anthems your entire board into Assassins, unlocking strong tribal lord and payoff support
- Mono-black gives consistent access to tutors, removal, and recursion
Weaknesses
- Life loss on every flip adds up fast against aggressive or burn-heavy tables
- Disguise/morph creatures are individually weak until flipped, so a board wipe is devastating
- Lacks color access to counterspells or efficient artifact/enchantment removal
- Engine stalls without enough face-down cards or mana to keep flipping each turn
Key Cards
- Kadena's Silencer — A disguise/morph creature that protects your face-down army from targeted removal while you flip for value.
- Ghostly Pilferer — Lets you cloak cards from hand and turn excess lands or spells into face-down threats to flip with Roshan.
- Cover of Darkness — Granting fear to your now-universally-Assassin board makes your whole team nearly unblockable.
- Coppercoat Vanguard — An Assassin lord that buffs and protects your entire board since everything is an Assassin under Roshan.
- Skullclamp — Turns your cheap face-down creatures into a relentless card-draw engine.
- Sengir, the Dark Baron — A black Assassin payoff that snowballs off the kills your evasive board racks up.
Upgrade Path
Add more cheap morph/disguise/cloak enablers and ways to flip them for free (Kadena, Ghostly Pilferer, Cloakwood Hermit-style cards) to maximize Roshan's triggers, and trim do-nothing vanilla creatures. Layer in mono-black staples—Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Phyrexian Tower, and a couple of fast mana rocks—plus lifegain like Bontu's Monument or Sword of Hearth and Home to offset the life loss. For a higher ceiling, lean into Assassin's Trophy-tier interaction and a tutorable combo finish such as a Skullclamp/recursion loop or an Assassin lord alpha strike.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
- ▸Swarm the table with menace-laden Assassins backed by tribal anthems for combat damage
- ▸Out-card opponents with the draw engine, then close with overwhelming board presence
- ▸Assassin payoffs like Sengir, the Dark Baron snowballing on kills
- ▸Evasive commander damage and chip damage from unblockable face-down attackers
Archetypes
- Morph/Disguise Tribal — Roshan directly rewards turning permanents face up with card draw, making cloak/morph the core engine.
- Assassin Tribal — He converts every creature you control into an Assassin, enabling lords and assassin-specific payoffs.
- Aggro/Evasion — Universal menace on face-down creatures lets a wide cheap board push lethal combat damage.
- Value Midrange — Repeated face-up triggers plus mono-black tutors and recursion grind out incremental advantage.
Combos
- Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad + Port Razer + Roshan, Hidden Magister
→ Infinite LTB, Infinite ETB, Infinite combat phases
- Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad + Éomer, Marshal of Rohan + Isshin, Two Heavens as One + Roshan, Hidden Magister
→ Infinite LTB, Infinite ETB, Infinite death triggers
- Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad + Bloodthirster + Roshan, Hidden Magister
→ Infinite LTB, Infinite ETB, Infinite combat phases
- Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad + Éomer, Marshal of Rohan + Windcrag Siege + Roshan, Hidden Magister
→ Infinite LTB, Infinite ETB, Infinite death triggers
- Éomer, Marshal of Rohan + Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad + Goblin Bombardment + Roshan, Hidden Magister
→ Infinite LTB, Infinite ETB, Infinite sacrifice triggers
Combos via Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (B), by popularity.
