Hashaton, Scarab's Fist "It's Just Cycling, How Bad Could it Be?" - Plot Twist #31

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that looks like it'll tell one kind of story only to throw out a twist for our opponents mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense of the types of stories we're looking to tell.

Last time on Plot Twist, we took a look at Ketramose, the New Dawn and built a deck that tried to exile one thing as many times as possible to draw a bunch of cards and lower our life total before swapping lives with our opponents. It was the perfect blend of a fiddling deck that took a lot of game actions, drew at lot of cards, and put its life total in danger while going for a win.

This week, we're looking at one of the most popular commanders to come out of the Aetherdrift pre-constructed Commander decks: Hashaton, Scarab's Fist. Hashaton has gotten some hype as a potential cEDH commander, and it definitely seems poised for higher powered tables with combos using discard outlets, like Tortured Existence, and mana-generating creatures, like Peregrine Drake.

How Does Hashaton, Scarab's Fist Work?

Hashaton is another straightfoward commander with only one ability that reads: "Whenever you discard a creature card, you may pay . If you do, create a tapped token that's a copy of that card, except it's a 4/4 black Zombie."

Doing the Twist

Hashaton, Scarab's Fist is the backup commander to Aetherdrift's Eternal Might precon, and the decklist itself is chock full of something near and dear to my heart: cards with cycling. Since cycling allows you to discard cards like Archfiend of Ifnir or Timeless Dragon, they pair nicely with Hashaton's triggered ability.

If you've been following along with Plot Twist, then you know I've got a Karador cycling-reanimator deck that I play in paper and love to death, so this week we're doing a bit of a thought experiment and seeing what a cycling-reanimator deck with Hashaton at the helm looks like! I envision it'll end up somewhere between a deck upgrade for Eternal Might and a deck built out of leftover draft chaff.

We'll start by using cycling staples, like Fluctuator and Shadow of the Grave, to quickly churn through our deck and fill up our graveyard with cyclers, like Gloomfang Mauler and Monstrosity of the Lake, before reanimating them all with a timely Herald of the Forgotten or Living Death.

Meanwhile, we can create a bunch of 4/4 Zombie copies thanks to our commander! Of course you know we're packing an extra twist or two, so this week's decklist is built to trigger Emeria, the Sky Ruin (something we did back in Plot Twist #21 to great effect) and make great use of Bone Miser while we're at it.

Hitting Our Land Drops

One thing you'll immediately notice about this week's decklist is that we're only running 28 lands, a significant drop from what we normally run on Plot Twist (though still WAAAY more than the 20 lands I run in my Karador deck). This is mostly due to the 22 creatures we're running that have some form of 'land cycling' where we can pay one or two mana to search for a land in our deck.

For most of the early turns of the game, we'll be cycling creatures to hit our land drops and fill our graveyard. While we won't really be able to ramp and get ahead on land drops, we should be able to reliably hit all of our land drops provided we have two or more lands in our opening hand and we'll have plenty of creatures in our graveyard when the time comes to go on offense.

A hypergeometric calculator like this one can be really helpful when trying to calculate the probability of drawing a certain number of lands or type of card in your commander deck (something we did in Plot Twist #20 for a Templar Knight deck). I used that hypergeometric calculator while building this week's decklist to see how many lands we should be running.

If we have 28 lands out of the 99 cards in our deck and we want to have at least two lands to start cycling, then we have a 64.1% chance of drawing two or more lands in our opening hand. If we factor in our free mulligan, then our odds of finding two or more lands in our first two hands rises to 87.1%, and if we're really daring and willing to mulligan to six cards then we have a 95.4% chance of finding two or more lands.

It's certainly not for the faint of heart, but you'd be surprised by how much cards like Eagles of the North, Eternal Dragon, and Jhessian Zombies can do to ensure we hit our land drops reliably.

Poppin' Off

One huge advantage of running blue in our cycling deck is we get access to multiple ways to essentially cycle cards for free. Fluctuator reduces the cost of our cycling abilities by , so we're able to cycle most creatures in our deck for free with it in play. There are a couple of exceptions, like Horror of the Broken Lands and Void Beckoner, to watch out for, but they're often serving other purposes.

New Perspectives allows us to cycle any card in our hand for as long as we have seven or more cards in hand, PLUS it draws us three cards when it enters. With New Perspectives out, we should be able to cycle to our heart's content. Especially since about two-thirds of our deck, including lands, has some form of cycling.

Since we're not paying any mana (or at least hardly any mana) to cycle most of our deck, we can fill our graveyard while digging for Living Death, make a bunch of Zombies with Bone Miser, or create a bunch of 4/4 Zombies with Hashaton, Scarab's Fist. We're free to pop off however we want with Fluctuator or New Perspectives in play.

Staying Alive

This is definitely a deck that's going to take some time to get set up; fortunately, we're able to run more interaction than you might otherwise think!

Astral Drift and Astral Slide both allow us to blink an opponent's attacking creature out of combat, or rebuy a creature with an enters ability of our own. Angelsong is a Fog that we can cycle if we don't end up needing it, and Gallant Strike and Cast Out can help us remove a problematic threat at instant speed.

We even have a surprising number of board wipes we can run. Archfiend of Ifnir helps shrink our opponents' creatures every time we cycle a card, while Spectacular Pileup, Decree of Pain, and Akroma's Vengeance are Wrath of God-effects that we can cycle away. Using a Decree of Pain to give every creature -2/-2 at instant speed always swings the game in a new direction and makes for memorable moments.

Grinding Out Value with Our Lands

Like I mentioned in the intro, we're running a suite of lands with 13 Plains to support Emeria, the Sky Ruin. Since so many of our 20+ land-cyclers can let us tutor up lands with basic land types, we're running as many Plains-Islands and Plains-Swamps as we can fit.

The surveil lands, like Meticulous Archive and Shadowy Backstreet, are almost always going to be the first ones we find since we can surveil an extra card into our graveyard with them. We can also get Raffine's Tower as a land that taps for all of our colors, and Godless Shrine or Hallowed Fountain can come in untapped and provide two colors of mana.

Mistveil Plains is a Plains we can tutor up and use to protect a card in our graveyard from being exiled, and we're even incidentally running enough Islands that we should be able to use Mystic Sanctuary too. We'll likely want to choose our moments with these two lands though because they require quite a bit of setup on our end to pull off effectively.

In my experience, these are often a backup gameplan if we tried to reanimate a graveyard full of cyclers and somehow got stopped.

Reanimating the Friends we Discarded Along the Way

As we're filling our graveyard with Imposing Vantasaur, Striped Riverwinder, and friends, we'll be looking for a handful of cards that will let us return them all to the battlefield at once.

Living Death is the cheapest option available to us, but it's a sorcery and allows our opponents to return any creatures in their graveyard as well. We can cast Twilight's Call as an instant as long as we have so we can attack with our creatures first, but it still returns our opponents' creatures as well. Rise of the Dark Realms will let us get EVERY creature from every graveyard and we'll always be happy to see it.

Herald of the Forgotten is tailor-made for a deck like this since it gets any permanent with cycling, so we can get back a Fetid Pools or Astral Drift that we cycled earlier. And while Wake the Dead only gets creatures back till the next end step, we can use it to bring back a bunch of blockers or on the end step before our turn to get in a surprise attack.

A Few Additional Twists for Good Measure

This week's decklist did not disappoint with the gems it uncovered as I did some Scryfall searching:

Ancient Excavation allows us to double our hand size and then discard a bunch of cards for us to reanimate. Plus it's an instant with basic landcycling! If we need to rebuy our Rise of the Dark Realms or Herald of the Forgotten, Possessed Skaab can do both, giving the deck some much-needed recursion alongside Archaeomancer.

Monument to Endurance and Currency Converter both give us a little extra value when we cycle cards and are two cards we'll almost always be happy to see in our opening hand. I'm also excited to try out Rhet-Tomb Mystic since it can turn our land-cyclers into regular cyclers and sometimes we'll need to draw more cards but not more lands.

Songs of the Damned can make a lot of mana for us, allowing us to cast an instant-speed Twilight's Call when it appears we are otherwise tapped out. I've pulled off this interaction once myself and it was such a swingy play that helped me quickly close out the game.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to Dismantling Wave. Since we're running so few artifacts and enchantments this week, being able to destroy all artifacts and enchantments by cycling Dismantling Wave is going to be a blowout. Especially since our opponents can't use counterspells to stop it!

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring Hashaton, Scarab's Fist. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction. I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. I recently put together Kirri, Talented Sprout deck from Plot Twist #21 and it has been an absolute blast to play in paper. I've also started dabbling in cEDH with a relatively stock Tymna & Thrasios list, let me know if the comments below if you'd like to see a Plot Twist deck that's designed for more competitive pods.

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.