Weekly Sale Commander: Undercover Sale!

Posted on August 18, 2025

Hi folks! Welcome to the Weekly Sale Column! This column will be aimed at showing you some cards on sale that could give you some new ideas for your lists. They will *usually* be Commander lists in Bracket 3 as well so you'll be able to play these in any Bracket 3 (or higher) pods. If you want to play in lower pods, just swap out the Game Changers for other choices and/or add more along with some other competitive combos if you want to compete with Bracket 4 and 5 pods! Remember that the weekly sale ends on Sunday night at 11:59 PM EST, so you have until then to get your cards ordered!

Today, we go undercover in the... Undercover Sale! This sale has a lot of sneaky cards for decks that flip into face down cards. Think Morph, Megamorph, Cloak, Foretell, and Manifest! It also has a few assassin cards that coincidentally also use some of those facedown mechanics quite often. Our commander for this deck is Etrata, Deadly Fugitive, a Dimir 1/4 Vampire Assassin with Deathtouch and some delightful abilities. The first is a static ability that gives all of your facedown creatures the ability to flip up for (also letting you cast the non-permanents if you cloaked/manifested an instant or a sorcery). The second ability is a triggered ability that fuels our plan, making it so that anytime an Assassin that we control connects with an opponent, we get to cloak the top card of that opponent's deck.

Cloak is newest version of Magic's facedown mechanic (I'm not counting manifesting dread as new, that's just a fancy version of manifest), where the facedown creature has Ward 2, but otherwise the same as Manifest where you get to flip it up for its mana cost if it's a creature. Etrata as our commander encourages us to play lots of ways to play cards facedown and a good mix of cheap, efficient Assassin's as well. Let's get into it!

Not all Assassins have a Creed

There are a ton of cool assassins in modern media. From Jaqen H'ghar in Game of Thrones to Ezio Auditore da Firenze (not in this deck, but an amazing card still) from Assassin's Creed, assassins have always been a fan favorite in fantasy settings. In Magic, assassins tend to be lower-costed with either strong flip abilities or efficient stats. We've included Ruthless Ripper, Aven Heartstabber, Silumgar Assassin, and Mari, the Killing Quill, to name a few. Silumgar Assassin is especially nice, considering it has Megamorph, which synergizes with some of our flip cards we'll talk about later. Mari, the Killing Quill is another low-costed assassin that lets our creatures that connect provide us with card advantage. I like how that plays into the theme of assassins actually doing their job and killing before they get any value or payment for the job.

Along with the lower costed assassins, we also play Ramses, Assassin Lord (quite literally what he is, a lord for assassins, plus extra win-condition upside), Roshan, Hidden Magister (the only Assassin's Creed assassin in the deck) and Callidus Assassin, a clone that can get rid of whatever it copies, if you so choose.

Along with those assassins, we also have a few cards with the keyword Freerunning in the deck! This lets us cast the card for its cheaper freerunning cost, as long as we connected with an Assassin or a Commander in the same turn. Restart Sequence gives us some recursion, Petty Larceny yoinks from our opponent's deck while giving us a treasure, Eagle Vision is some nicely costed card draw, and Chain Assassination is removal with potential upside if another creature died as well! These all fit our deck's theme well as support for our somewhat cheaper and weaker creatures.

It's always Willbender. ALWAYS.

All right, let's get into our flip cards. No, I don't mean double face cards that transform, I mean cards that have an actual Magic back flipping facedown into 2/2 creatures. There are many iterations of this throughout our wonderful game, from Morph to Cloak, and we've included a little of them all!

To start with Morph, we've got Voidmage Prodigy (a mildly reusable Counterspell), Grim Haruspex (some solid card draw through a wrath effect), Riptide Entrancer (a way to yoink from our last deck!), and a few others that all of your opponents will mistake for Willbender. Remember, it's always Willbender, kids.

Next up with Megamorph, we've got Kadena's Silencer (to answer some pesky triggers), Stratus Dancer (a Negate with hands for you to catch) and Silumgar Assassin, which we mentioned earlier. For Manifest (and Manifest Dread), we've got quite a bit.

Manifest is a bit more generic, so it's easy to create a lot of support for it. Abhorrent Oculus, Glitch Interpreter, Thieving Amalgam, They Came from the Pipes, and Primordial Mist all appear in the weekly sale and are absolute bangers for this deck; I highly recommend them!

To round out with Cloak, we've got our Commander, Etrata, and one of my favorite cards printed, Cryptic Coat! It's a nice little engine that lets you keep cloaking the top of your deck, as long as you have extra mana!

Finally, we've also included a few cards to make your opponents feel welcome in your flipping strategy. Cyber Conversion and Reality Shift turn your opponents' cards into 2/2 facedown creatures, similar to Ixidron, the original facedown creator! This sale also includes many cards that steal cards from your opponents' decks and place them facedown into exile for you to cast later, like Siphon Insight, Gonti, Lord of Luxury, and Praetor's Grasp!

Change the Game from Undercover!

Our Game Changers for this deck were quite hard to decide! Being in Blue and Black, we have access to some of the strongest options on the GC List. I went with Notion Thief, since it fits the theme that some of our cards like Thief of Sanity and Thieving Amalgam have, plus there aren't too many decks I build that are only Blue and Black where Notion Thief is decent, so I want to include it. Alongside Notion Thief, I've included Demonic Tutor and Fierce Guardianship. Tutor is an overall great card that can find whichever assassin or flip card that we need in any given situation, and Fierce Guardianship is always good in creature-based strategies to protect your board. All that being said, this list is a prime choice for an easy downgrade, since the Game Changers aren't particularly impactful, they're just generally good, so changing them out to make this a Bracket 2 deck is quite simple!

Here's the list, don't get caught going undercover!