INTRO TO THE DECK
This is a semi-competitive modern deck I've been working on for a couple of years, adding and cutting cards as sets rotated in and out.
The general gist is that you use the amusing interaction between Haakon and changeling to endlessly cast nameless inversion/crib swap out of your graveyard to be the jankiest of control decks. The rest of the deck is draw/discard spells to get you to the combo and stall to keep your face not beaten in.
WHY PLAY HAAKON?
It's a fun budget deck (tribal tap-lands are WAY less expensive than normal dual-lands)
It can be fun both at the kitchen-table and at an FNM.
There is almost always that moment of "Wait what" from your opponent when you first cast a nameless inversion/crib swap from the yard and they realize just what Haakon does.
You can make Akon puns about how Haakon is "locked up" in your hand and they won't let him out until the day he dies. Additionally you can make wrath of khan puns. Just ALL of the puns.
EARLY GAME
For your early game protection you have nameless inversions, crib swaps, vexing sphinxes, and griffin riders which when paired with their moth-dust changeling buddies become 4/4 flying beaters. Even if your moth-dusts get sniped and they drop down to 1/1 chump blockers you don't care too much because they'll be coming back once you can stabilize with Haakon. Block anything that will put you in the red zone, but if a few 2/1 creatures punch you it's fine. Life is just another resource.
MID GAME
Haakon's mid-game comes right around turn four. With four mana you can pop supreme verdict, silumgar + nameless, or gift's ungiven if you haven't yet gotten Haakon into the yard. This is your sweet-spot where the decisions you make win or lose you the game. Can you afford to wait a turn to verdict? Do you Gifts now or later? Do you nameless and not have a silumgar enabler? This is the point in the game that I find most fun.
LATE GAME
By the time you have 6 mana or so, you should be sitting pretty against pretty much anything. 6 mana gives you enough to pop out a Griffin Rider from the yard and still have Nameless/Silumgar's mana up. It also is the sweet-spot where you can recast Haakon, and get a knight and a moth-dust out all in the same turn in the event of a field wipe. Pretty much the only thing you are worried about at this point in the game is graveyard exile and burn directly to your face.
STRENGTHS
Haakon is a very entropic deck. He just gets stronger and stronger as the game goes on. Additionally discard is pretty much useless against you as everything important gets played out of the yard anyway. The large amount of draw allows you to filter out the gunk and get what you need most of the time and having Silumgar's Cruelty acting as an OG counter-spell almost all of the time is great for your tempo.
WEAKNESSES
The deck has the obvious weakness of folding to graveyard hate. But you also don't like getting Haakon path'd if you don't have another one in the yard. Extirpate and Syncopate also do good jobs of ruining your day and if the opponent happens to be running slaughter games you are very likely just SOL.
Note: Path can be responded to with a nameless inversion from the grave to kill your own Haakon. You end up paying two life and don't get to search for a land but if it's your only Haakon you probably don't want him wandering off into exile.
OH GOD THAT LAND BASE
While I recognize the land base is a bit... strange, since the deck is budget we don't have the luxury of running fetch/shock-lands to give us easy access to whatever colors we want with just a few non basics. However the tribal tap-lands (which changelings activate easily) combined with the pain-lands give us a solid mana base which very rarely will screw us out of our colors. As an additional benefit, the entirety of our land-base can be bought for the same price just a single play-set of shock-lands would run you. How's that for value?
We run four islands instead of 2 islands, a swamp and a plains because both the original deck and the merfolk deck love to have double blue on turn two.
WAIT MERFOLK?
Part of life is accepting our weaknesses. The weakness of Haakon is that you completely fold to graveyard hate. There's sadly no way around denying it. Luckily our deck has the curious benefit of running 6 merfolk in the main-deck. It also has great 2/3 drop 4/4 flying beaters that let us put the opponent on a quick clock if the need arises. This unique aspect of the deck led me to create a "transformational" side-board. If you go to game two and see the opponent slamming 8 cards into their deck with a smirk you can bet your bottom dollar that some of those cards are graveyard hate. Why not make those cards dead draws by completely sideboarding out of Haakon and turning into merfolk aggro instead? Merfolk gives access to some of the most reliable lords in the game as well as the great value of silver-gill adept to keep our hand from puttering out. Another alternative being looked into is Human tribal, but their draw engines aren't nearly as reliable as silvergill adept.
