Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist is one of the many commanders introduced inMagic: The Gathering’sAetherdrift set. It was the alternate commander available to use in the Eternal Might preconstructed deck. While you’re able to play it in the precon, Hashaton is much more powerful outside of the constraints of the set decklist.
Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist offers a unique take on reanimator, opting to create token copies of powerful creatures as opposed to reviving the cards themselves. Since it doesn’t exile the tokens, you even have the option to do both to create a very threatening battlefield that can handle just about any situation.
Angel of the Ruins
Prophet of the Scarab
Key to the City
x6 Island
x5 Plains
x7 Swamp
Underground River
Unholy Grotto
The decklistcontains 29 creatures, six sorceries, ten instants, 13 artifacts, seven enchantments, and34 lands. The deck is primarily discard outlets, powerful creatures, and counterspells.
Key Cards
Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist
Hashaton is the commander of the deck and also the best card in it. It’s what allows you toturn any discarded creature card into a 4/4 Zombie token. While the primary use for this is getting an expensive creature onto the battlefield early, itcan also turn a weak creature into one with a solid statline.
Hashaton on its own is a fairly weak creature with low stats and no keyword abilities. As such, you should wait to cast it until you’re able to start making use of its effect.
Thetokencopies that Hashaton makes are Zombies, which allows them to take advantage of the plethora of generic Zombie support cards. You do need three mana to use Hashaton’s effect, so you’ll want to have an excess amount of mana available before you start making your tokens.
Tortured Existence
Hashaton needs a way to discard creature cards constantly, and no card is better at that than Tortured Existence. With Hashaton on the battlefield, it turns both effects intopaying four mana to create a 4/4 Zombie token of any creature.
The strength of Tortured Existence is that itallows you to keep recycling your best creatures. So long as it’s on the battlefield, you can bring any creature back from the graveyard, so long as you have a creature card in your hand. Mixed with Hashaton, you can stack the battlefield with your best creatures.
Peregrine Drake
Peregrine Drake is one of the stars of the deck. It’s one of the best creatures to turn into Zombie tokens, asit essentially refunds you the three lands you tapped to make a Zombie token with Hashaton. It generates two extra mana on top of them.
Peregrine Drake is vital to a combo with Hashaton and Tortured Existence that lets yougenerate infinite mana and an infinite number of tokens. This combo can be done at instant speed, letting you catch your opponents off guard and lose to an army of Drakes.
The combo is done as follows.
Prerequisites: Hashaton and Tortured Existence are on the battlefield. Peregrine Drake is in the hand. Any other creature is in the graveyard. Can make four mana with lands (including at least one blue and one black).
Step 1: Activate Tortured Existence with one black mana, discarding Peregrine Drake to the graveyard and returning a creature to the hand from the graveyard.
Step 2: Hashaton triggers, paying two generic mana and one blue to create a token copy of Peregrine Drake.
Step 3: The token copy of Peregrine Drake enters, untapping five lands.
Step 4: Activate Tortured Existence, discarding the creature you added before, returning Peregrine Drake to the hand.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1-4. This gives an infinite number of Peregrine Drake token copies and infinite mana.
Skirge Familiar
Skirge Familiar is normally a pretty bad card. However, in a Hashaton deck, it becomes excellent. Five mana is normally a lot to pay fora mana dork, but Hashaton can make a copy for just three mana. Theability to discard a card to add one black mana turns Hashaton’s effect into one that ultimately only requires two mana, as you’re able to use the black mana to pay for Hashaton’s effect.
Since you don’t have to tap Skirge Familiar for its effect, youcan keep using Skirge Familiar for as long as you have cards to discard. Even if you’re not using it with Hashaton, you can use it to push your mana generation further to get your most important permanents on the battlefield quicker.
How To Play The Deck
A Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist Commander deck isall about flooding the battlefield with Zombie tokens of your best creatures and keeping those creatures coming. There are a ton of discard outlets in the deck to easily trigger Hashaton, along with a variety of mana rocks to ensure you have the mana to pay for Hashaton.
The token copies that Hashaton makes become Zombie creatures. Theylose all other creature types they once had(but keep all abilities).
There are ways to get extra tokens as well. Renewed Solidaritygives all your Zombies a stat boost and creates an extracopy of all Zombie tokensthat enter, On Wings of Goldgives you a 1/1 Zombie token whenever a card leaves the graveyard,and Bone Miseroffers you the ability to draw a card, generate mana, or create a 2/2 Zombie when you discard certain cards.
Theprimary win condition of the deck is winning through either combat or combo.There are “soft combos"such as Maha, Its Feathers Night, and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite being on the battlefield that’ll kill any creature your opponents control, leaving them defenseless. More direct combos include the Peregrine Drake and Tortured Existence loop, whichis the best way to win.
Thebiggest downside of the deck is its speed. While the deck can be explosive, it takes a while to get to that point. Esper (white/blue/black) struggles a lot with ramp, making it hard to always have mana available. The mana rocks help soothe this downside, butyou are going to be low on defenses at the early stages of the game.
