Arcane Foundry › Commanders › Desmond Miles

Desmond Miles

Legendary Creature — Human Assassin · {1}{B} · Black commander

Menace Desmond Miles gets +1/+0 for each other Assassin you control and each Assassin card in your graveyard. Whenever Desmond Miles deals combat damage to a player, surveil X, where X is the amount of damage it dealt to that player.

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What Desmond Miles actually does

Read off the card by the same engine the Forge and Analyzer use — this is the mechanical classification, not a summary.

• Triggered ability · deals_damageWhenever Desmond Miles deals combat damage to a player, surveil X, where X is the amount of damage it dealt to that player.
• Keyword · menacemenace
• Keyword · surveilsurveil
• AbilityDesmond Miles gets +1/+0 for each other Assassin you control and each Assassin card in your graveyard.

What a Desmond Miles deck needs

Plays as assassin typal. What the commander asks of the other 99 — read from the card and checked by hand.

• self-mill, discard and recursion (the graveyard is a resource its text reads)
• assassin creatures (its text counts them)
• evasion and protection for the commander (the trigger needs its combat damage to connect)

The Desmond Miles deck plan

The roles the Forge fills for this commander, and how many cards of each.

• 7× Make the commander connect — a body that never deals combat damage never triggers
• 27× A body of the exact type the commander's trigger requires — the wrong type is worthless here regardless of quality
• 7× Put your own cards into your graveyard as a resource
• 5× Actually remove one problem permanent — preventing its damage is not removing it
• 9× Find the exact card the plan needs
• 1× Answer a whole board at once
• 7× Refill your hand
• 2× Keep a permanent you control alive through removal
• 11× Get ahead on mana

Best cards for Desmond Miles

Ranked by an engine that reads what each card does — its real cost, its delay and how reliably it works — rather than counting how often other people play it.

Build this deck in the Arcane Forge →

Arcane Foundry is free to join and every tool is included: the Arcane Forge deck builder, the ARCANE Analyzer that scores a deck by simulating games rather than counting staples, a card scanner, a collection vault, and live webcam Commander tables. Read the guide · Browse all commanders · Pricing