The Commander
Flying, lifelink
Whenever The Haunt of Hightower attacks, defending player discards a card.
Whenever a card is put into an opponent's graveyard from anywhere, put a +1/+1 counter on The Haunt of Hightower.
Guide
Gameplan
The Haunt of Hightower is a mono-black voltron commander that grows enormous by exploiting your opponents' graveyards. You force opponents to mill, discard, and sacrifice cards, then turn the resulting counters into a flying, lifelinking beater that closes games in a couple of swings. Protect it with evasion-supporting equipment and recursion, then connect for lethal commander damage.
Strengths
- Snowballs to huge sizes fast since counters trigger off any card entering any opponent's graveyard
- Built-in evasion (flying) plus lifelink stabilizes your life total while attacking
- Cheap to recast and easy to support in mono-black with strong tutors and recursion
- Doubles as removal and disruption via attack-trigger discard and mill effects
Weaknesses
- Classic voltron fragility — one removal spell or board wipe resets all your investment
- Mono-black struggles with enchantments and has limited ways to deal with fliers/blockers it can't kill
- Slow to come online without enablers; a 6/6 by itself dies to chump blocks and edicts
- Reliant on opponents filling graveyards, which graveyard hate or low-interaction tables can blunt
Key Cards
- Mind Twist — Mass discard dumps multiple cards into opponents' graveyards at once, piling on counters.
- Whispering Madness — Mills/discards all opponents heavily and with cipher can repeat, ballooning the Haunt.
- Lightning Greaves — Haste and shroud let it attack immediately while dodging targeted removal.
- Whip of Erebos — Extra lifelink redundancy and reanimation to recur the Haunt if it dies.
- Syr Konrad, the Grim — Turns all the graveyard fueling into direct damage, giving a backup win and counter triggers.
Upgrade Path
Add more graveyard-filling payoffs and protection: trample enablers like Whispersilk Cloak or Loxodon Warhammer ensure damage gets through, while reanimation (Reanimate, Animate Dead) and counterspell-style protection (Imp's Mischief, Heroic Intervention is off-color so lean on Swiftfoot Boots) keep the threat sticky. Tighten the curve with fast mana (Dark Ritual, Sol Ring) and efficient mill/discard so the Haunt is lethal-sized by turn 5-6. For higher power, include a tutor package to find protection on demand and a backup wincon like Syr Konrad to avoid being purely voltron-dependent.
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
- ▸Commander damage from an oversized flying lifelinker
- ▸Mill-fueled drain via Syr Konrad or similar damage engines
- ▸Beating down multiple opponents while gaining huge life buffers
- ▸Trample/double-strike enablers turning a single connection into lethal
Archetypes
- Voltron — Its self-growing counters and evasion make it a natural one-card kill via commander damage.
- Mill/Discard — Forcing cards into opponents' graveyards both disrupts them and grows the commander.
- Reanimator — Mono-black recursion lets you bring the Haunt back cheaply after removal.
- Aristocrats — Edicts and forced sacrifice send cards to graveyards while pressuring boards.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (B), by popularity.
