Pointed Discussion

A 3/3 for 3 mana is good but the play only from your graveyard thing is anoying but then you can play ALL of your knights from your graveyard and that is realy cool so he gets a 4 in my book

Hakkon + crib swap, allows you to replay the instant as many times as you want in a turn because its an instant with the changeling type, turning a creature on your opponents side of the field into a 1/1 changeling per 3 mana.

Awesome card, run him in my black/white flanking deck, also lets you play stuff like nameless inversion as many times as you wish. Tons of potential =)

Yawgmoth's Will for Knights? Sounds tempting!
Buried Alive is simply amazing with him since it effectively acts as triple-creature tutor thanks to his ability - consider adding Judgement's incarnations (Filth - along with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, Anger, Brawn, Valor, or Wonder) or Dredge creatures like Golgari Grave-Troll (since that one allows milling a lot of cards - possibly Knights rather than drawing a card).
Intuition is a cheap tutor and can also get him into your graveyard by searching for two Haakons and a third card (e.g. Bridge from Below).
Your possible mana accel of choice is Lion's Eye Diamond, since it allows you to both discard and cast Haakon at the same time and lets you play each Knight card discarded that way.
He also synergizes greatly with Mercenary Knight since it's a cheap creature of the same tribal type which lets you discard him (or another knight which doesn't matter once he's in the graveyard). Putrid Raptor might be worth considering since it has Morph and can be turned up to the same big body by discarding a Zombie card in particular - Haakon...or other Zombie Knights like Stillmoon Cavalier.
Changelings like Cairn Wanderer, but especially instants like Nameless Inversion, Crib Swap (which might synergize with Knight of the Mists) or those from Velis Vel also do a great job since those can be used repeatedly.
Cateran Summons may find use both to grab those spells or the Mercenary Knight.
Talking about tutor cards, Survival of the Fittest will do an awesome job with Haakon to grab your most desired creatures and at the same time provide some sort of cheap card advantage, since Knights in your graveyard will be just as useful as those on your hand.
Since sacrificing Knights is also less severe, Diabolic Intent might be your choice if you do not want to include green.
Gamble also is an incredibly cheap tutor here since it's sometimes even handy if you randomly Entomb a card on your hand.
A suspended Greater Gargodon can be used to protect him (or any other knight) from getting exiled.
Locket of Yesterdays will reduce Haakon's cost automatically, and reduces your other creatures' and the changeling spells' cost as well. This will be especially handy with Court Hussar, which enables card advantage and topdecking for a single blue mana when put into the graveyard with Buried alive or Intuition. Another cost-reducing cost is Urza's Incubator (or Jet Medallion in case you're playing mainly black).
Since you can discard any knights without notable drawback try adding cards which profit from discarding cards (for example Sellshapers or some famous cards from Madness decks)
Therefore hellbent cards might find use with him as well - Infernal Tutor,
Mindstorm Crown for card advantage, Gibbering Descent (which again synergizes with Mercenary Knight), Taste for Mayhem or Rakdos Pit Dragon (which are both even more fun with Filth)
Recurring Nightmare could be used repeatedly without notable drawback by saccing a Knight to return any fatty or non-Knight (which you get in your graveyard by discarding it or by using Buried Alive)
Ashes of the Fallen will allow you to cast just any creature desired from your graveyard. (Conspiracy might be used as well in case you want them to have the same type on the battlefield as well, but when making use of Haakons ability in particular the Ashes are much cheaper.)
Cheap creatures with saccing abilities also do a great job, like Saffi Eriksdotter, Sakura-Tribe Elder or also Blood Pet to create an infinite saccing loop, or (to let this card finally have a use) Pardic Miner to prevent your opponent from playing lands.
Finally a last thing that crosses my mind is Aluren which allows recasting your creatures for free once they are destroyed and enables saccing loops - e.g. by using Court Hussar to skim through your entire library, and when you plan on using spells with storm Knight of the Mists or Mercenary Knight.

Comboes well with Nameless Inversion, but for added offense, combo with Wings of Velis Vel and Nameless to make any creature a 7/1. Running both and Stonybrook Banneret in my UB Haakon Control

The only thing I don't like is the life loss when he's sent to the grave from play.... (Though against WHITE not an issue given Path to exile, Unmake , Journey to nowhere and Oblivion Ring are the most common white removal and they all remove it from the game so the life loss becomes null and void on the bright side lol :P Yeah, you don't get to play it again til you get another copy in your grave but still, life points kept lol)

But I'd love to see the kinds of decks people build around him any day!
He must make for quite the power play :D

So if you cascade him, you can't play him, right?

how would you cascade him? you can't play him from anywhere but your graveyard. you have to pull a buried alive or something to start using him. though, by using cascade he would automatically cancel himself, thus go into the graveyard.

He is really fun if you have null profusion on the board as well.

This is a good card, I have a black and white knight deck that revolves around this guy. I have several discard cards that I use on myself if I have him, some allowing me to only reveal 3 cards instead of them all, since most discards are multi or target opponent. I use the Paladins as a way to remove just about any permanant from play, then use the pentarch paladin and choose blue so i can kill anything except lands, artifacts, and white and green and enchantments for 2 mana a pop. The best part is if one dies i can just bring it back. it only fails if they get exiled really. 5/5 for his beastliness.

If you cascaded into him, nothing would happen.
It wouldn't be countered because it can't be cast.
You would just have to put him on the bottom of your library.

Aluren. That is all.

I returned Tresserhorn Skyknights with this.

Hm I have no idea if you can use this in EDH or not... do you technically cast the general? I have no clue.

with Knight Exemplar there are now three 'Knight Lords' including Kinsbaile Cavalier. Maybe it's time to make a BW Knight deck.

great edh general!

@drp527: Aluren doesn't work. You can't cast it except from your graveyard. Mana cost or not.

The second best General for an EDH deck. Next to the mighty Phage.

You can't cast Haakon from the command zone, so how could he be used as a general?!?

What a power stance.

I wouldn't have thought that you'd be able to use him in edh, as you will never be able to cast him from your graveyard - the commander zone is more like your hand...

great everywhere else, though

Corpse Connoisseur has a new friend.

run with crib swap! replace all of their creaturs with freaky green babies!

Actually this is an even worse general than Phage, since you could at least in principle cast her if you had a Torpor Orb or Platinum Angel out. It'd still be a terrible deck idea, of course, but it could be done. This, though, there's just no way.

And you can use this in EDH, just not as the general.

This guy is pretty sweet, but it's easy to get similar effects from a mono white Knight deck, like with Emeria, the Sky Ruin or (although they aren't Knights) Reya Dawnbringer or Sun Titan without having to even pay their mana cost. It is worth noting this guy has a considerably cheaper cmc than Reya or the Titan though, but it's harder to cast him since you have to get him to the graveyard first.

There aren't really that many black knight cards to go with him, though Phyrexian Crusader is awesome.

This card is not worth splashing black for in your average Knight deck. Still, he can be outright evil in a deck built around him.

Only just realised how good Buried Alive is with Haakon, after trying him previously with Cunning Lethemancer and Rotting Rats. As someone else mentioned, it pretty much acts a triple creature tutor - Haakon + 2 others, very possible Knight Exemplars if you're running the awesome white/black knights deck.

He sucks

He is only good in the graveyard.

in theory this is a great card for a knight deck, to combine with buried alive. it can lead to major card advantage because not only do you have your hand to play from, but also your graveyard. however in practice, I have found that to orchestrate everything correctly (get haakon out of your library, into your graveyard, then get him onto the battlefield so he can do his thing) it can take quite a few turns if you don't have the perfect opening hand. meaning by the time you get it rolling, you're already....dead.

Interestingly, Haakon / Nameless Inversion decks got a new toy in Innistrad, Burning Vengeance. Splashing red allows you to deal 2 damage to anything every time you cast a Nameless Inversion or a knight? I smell a fun (for you anyway) casual deck here.

Dear people, imagine if haakon could be played from command zone, its gonna be most broken general even in EDH! I guess its right that he cant be played as general cause of his ability, cause if he could be played there gonna be a lot of deathless knights and EDH would never be the same...
On other hand, this card is cool since you put him somehow into your graveyard, so than, the game is easy, but till there, you need to use a lot of discards, tutor than mill your deck or using spells as entomb or burried alive.
Nice card, and to play with him, you need to make entire deck around him otherwise, he isnt so strong as appears in first look.

Can you use Mirror of Fate or Pull from Eternity to cast him from the command zone?

Well... you could use him as your general for Commander/EDH. You just wouldn't be able to cast him. Nothing prevents you from making him your general though; I bet he's pretty in foil :b

Someone pointed out the somewhat unfortunate synergy that Changeling tribal instants and sorceries can be cast from your graveyard with this. Over and over and over and over. Like Nameless Inversion. Repeatable removal does not get any more efficient than 2 for +3/-3, and it's a potential power boost to boot, AND it hoses tribal, AND it sets off anything you may have that goes off on instant casting (unlikely in a black deck, but eh).

This is the absolute worst commander for Commander/EDH in all of Magic, and always will be. ...unless they go crazy and errata Haakon to say you can cast him from the command zone, at which point he'll be the best commander in all of Magic.

I love this card anywhere else, including in both my Knights and my pseudo-Dredge decks for Commander. He's a casual play dream card. The Nameless Inversion combo makes Merfolk decks cry; removing their Lord of Atlantis-type bonuses is almost as important as the +3/-3.

My all time favorite card. I pulled 3 when I got a Coldsnap fat pack and I knew it was fate telling me I needed a Haakon knight deck. Once he's out, Zombie Infestation lets me dump out my hand for basically free zombies, since I just then cast the discarded cards. At first graveyard hate and bounce were both super duper annoying, but then I got three Puresteel Paladins. The deck is good enough to win without ever getting Haakon going, so he's basically become my bomb, in the sense that him getting active without my friends having effective removal will usually just cause them to quit. It's been put on the "Decks I'm Not Allowed to Use" list.

@SinforSanity No, the Command Zone and Exile are two completely different zones, unfortunately.

Seeing a lot more of this "cast from graveyard" stuff in Dark Ascension. I like it. So does my Burning Vengeance deck.
Other than that, Ashes of the Fallen

Combos well with Mercenary Knight...

I run a black/white knight deck with this guy and the card advantage is brutal. As previously mentioned Buried Alive is a great card to fetch him and other knights to cast. I also like Raven's Crime, Locket of Yesterdays, a couple people have mentioned Nameless Inversion and Crib Swap. The new(ish) knight "lords" work well with him too, Kinsbaile Cavalier and of course Knight Exemplar.
This guy turns knight decks into zombieknight decks... Awesome.

Hmmm... I wonder if there is ANY way to use him as a general? Is there something that kills whatever's in the commander zone?

Not much talk about how to get this guy into the graveyard. I'm thinking one of the many reusable discards like Skull Fracture or Raven's Crime? Unless you think running Bazaar of Baghdad makes you cool. Works even better with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth.

EDH commander? Oh wait...

I'd like to have him as the general of an EDH deck JUST to mess with people.

Yes, it's a waste to have a general you'll never be able to cast, but I think it's worth it to be able to, well, have a general you can't cast. The means justify the ends.

The door to haakon edh exists. The key is death wish and for a second a yawgmoths bargain.

@patronofthesound: The command zone is not outside the game. You can't fetch your general with Death Wish.

400.1. A zone is a place where objects can be during a game. There are normally seven zones: library, hand, battlefield, graveyard, stack, exile, and command.

I'd laugh if wizards released a card for putting generals into the graveyard, and made it white.

@blurrymadness

Zombies and Rooftop Storm. Same combo as with Rooftop Storm and Gravecrawler, just now everyone can join in the fun. Like say... Geralf's Messenger.

He's completely broken with any sort of Changling instant or sorcery, since you can cast it as many times as you want (no, it's not removed from the game after casting.)

You can give him psuedo-vigilance by playing another copy of him out of your grave/two-life. Tortured Existence is a good way to not only get him out in the yard; but a good way to play him next to creatures who aren't Knights as well. You swap him into the grave for them; getting another use out of Shriekmaw or similar.

Combos with Gerrard's Verdict in a B/W Knight deck, makes Wrath of God incredibly good in a weenie style deck, great synergy with Buried Alive and Mirror Entity, among other changeling cards. A casual player's gold mine.