Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Taborax, Hope’s Demise!

Taborax is a three mana 2/2 with flying, gets lifelink as long as they have five or more +1/+1 counters in it and whenever another nontoken creature you control dies, you put a +1/+1 counter on Taborax and if that creature was a Cleric you may draw a card and if you do you lose 1 life.

Game Plan

Taborax is a neat spin on a typal Commander in that we want the preferred creature type, Clerics, to die in order for us to not only get +1/+1 counters on Taborax, but to also a good bit of cards draw. Because of this, one of the main deck archetypes that uses Taborax as a Commander are Shadowborn Apostle decks.

We can use that as a base in order to have a good number of cheap Clerics that have the ability to sacrifice themselves in order to create an advantage, while also having some other Cleric synergies that we can make use of.

Support

If Shadowborn Apostle is going to be the focus of the deck, we do need a solid balance of other Clerics along with other cards to help facilitate Shadowborn Apostle.

Since Shadowborn Apostle can have any number of copies in the deck and we can pay one black mana and sacrifice six creatures named Shadowborn Apostle to tutor any Demon from our library to the graveyard, we can make really good use of Rotlung Reanimator, who whenever they or another Cleric we control is put into a graveyard from play, we make a 2/2 Zombie. Switching six 1/1 creatures for six 2/2’s and a Demon is a pretty solid exchange.

If we want a more varied tutor effect we can also use Shadow-Rite Priest, who boosts other Clerics by +1/+1 and for five mana, tap, and sacrifice another Cleric we can search our library for a black creature and put it onto the battlefield, which while it is more expensive to activate, we have a much wider pool of creatures to look for.

Master of Dark Rites is also a great early Cleric we can make use of because we can tap it and sacrifice another creature to add three black mana that can only be used to cast Vampire, Cleric, and/or Demon spells. This means we can get Taborax in play as soon as turn two or three Shadowborn Apostles in play to get a Demon in play as soon as possible.

We can also make use of cards that are not as good in Commander because of it being a highlander format like Echoing Return, which returns target creature card and all other cards with the same name as that card from our graveyard to our hand, which helps us keep a healthy number of Shadowborn Apostles in circulation.

Secret Salvage is another such card we can make use of because we can exile target card from our graveyard and then search our library for any number of cards with the same name as that card, reveal them, and then put them in our hand.

As far as what Demons we can tutor out, that really relies on personal preference. Vilis, Broker of Blood can be a way to get rid of a small creature by paying two life and one mana and also makes it so that whenever we lose life we draw that many cards, which means that through Taborax we get an additional card whenever we sacrifice a Cleric.

Lord of the Void has it so that whenever they deal combat damage to a player you exile the top seven cards of that player’s library then put a creature card from among them onto the battlefield under your control, which can be really solid to help reinforce our battlefield while also stealing key creatures from more aggressive decks.

If we just want to overwhelm the battlefield we also have access to Abhorrent Overlord, which when they enter makes a number of 1/1 Harpy creature tokens with flying equal to our devotion to black and at the beginning of our upkeep has us sacrifice a creature, which Taborax can use to help us draw cards.

Setbacks

One of the tougher parts of having multiple copies of the same creature in a deck that does rely on a strategy of having a bunch of them in play is that we need to make sure that they stay in play.

If we only manage to get a four or five in play and then an opponent plays a board wipe, then we need to make sure we have enough card advantage to try and put some Shadowborn Apostles into play.

It isn’t an issue to get them in play because they are one mana to cast, but the issue does come from the fact that we need to have the right amount of them in the deck in order to not only get a good number into play, but to not clog up our hand that it keeps us from casting our other spell.

While we do want a good chunk of Shadowborn Apostles in play, we don’t always want them in our hand if we want a removal spell or a spell that draws us cards or boosts our other Cleric synergies.

Another difficult aspect of a deck like this is that we actually don’t want too many Demons in the deck, and that is because we want to reduce our chances at drawing them because the Shadowborn Apostles can only tutor Demons from our deck and not our hand, and we don’t have as many options to put cards from our library back into our deck.

It may not be a concern, but there is always the small chance that our opponent plays a card like Deadly Cover-Up, which destroys all creatures but if they collect evidence 6 then they can exile a card from our graveyard and then search the owner’s hand, library, and graveyard for cards with the same name. We do get to draw a bunch of cards from it, but that can be dangerous in that we may deck ourselves out from that much draw.

Bracket Rating: 3

Playing Taborax as a Shadowborn Apostles Commander can be a pretty effective way to make use of the Cleric synergies that the deck presents.

While we can still play Taborax as a solid Cleric typal Commander, having a solid base of a strategy that makes use of Taborax’s synergies with Clerics and Shadowborn Apostle helps make the deck more consistent in getting big Demons in play. The deck may struggle a decent bit against board wipes and our hand being clogged with Shadowborn Apostles, Taborax is still a pretty resilient deck and can get some pretty solid Demons pretty early if we play our cards right.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual