Shadowborn Diva

When the Ravnica Allegiance previews started coming out, one of the most exciting cards to be previewed was Judith, the Scourge Diva.

A three mana 2/2 with a few abilities may seem to be a little bit below the curve for a legendary creature, but the abilities weren’t bad. First, you get the front end of an Anthem effect:

The second effect at first glance looks something like this:

But it only works for nontoken creatures. Now wait a minute, there’s a big difference here—it’s not life loss, it’s damage, and you can do it to any target. Not just a player, but a creature, or a planeswalker! That’s quite a bit different, so it’s no wonder people are trying to do some work with Judith in competitive Standard decks. It’s a little tough, though, since there aren’t too many cards where you can sacrifice nontoken creatures for profit efficiently.

Luckily for us, we have a wide variety of options in Commander for setting off Judith’s triggered ability.

While searching through Gatherer, one card in particular jumped out at me.

Judith seems like the perfect commander for a Shadowborn Apostle Commander deck! Shadowborn Apostles have a built-in sacrifice effect for a huge profit, searching up a Demon and putting it onto the battlefield. Their ability doesn’t require tapping, so you can use it right away. And getting six Judith triggers all at once will be some highly flexible damage you can sling around the table.

Let’s dig into it!

Sacrifice

Every Judith deck is of course going to use Goblin Bombardment, since the enchantment basically lets you have double the Judith triggers. If your opponent doesn’t let you get up to six Shadowborn Apostles before killing some of your creatures, you can send them hurtling through the air with Bombardment. Westvale Abbey is another way to cash in five creatures if you don’t get a chance to activate six Shadowborn Apostles.

Dies Trigger

If we want our creatures to be dying with regularity, there are other cards that will provide us with additional profit for the trouble. It’s pretty easy to trigger morbid on cards like Skirsdag High Priest. Rotlung Reanimator takes advantage of the fact that Shadowborn Apostles are Clerics so you get a 2/2 Zombie for your trouble each time a Cleric dies, though when Judith is on the battlefield they are 3/2 Zombies. Open the Graves doesn’t care what creature types die; so long as they’re nontoken, you get 2/2 Zombie tokens.

The beauty of having access to red is Vicious Shadows—just imagine sacrificing six Apostles with Judith and Vicious Shadows on the battlefield! That’s some serious damage to spread.

Recursion

Exchanging six small creatures for a Demon will be fun, but we’ll want to keep the party going for Judith. Thankfully, black provides us with quite a few ways to do just that. Balthor the Defiled, Patriarch’s Bidding, and Twilight’s Call give us a way to reload from our graveyard directly back to the battlefield. No Rest for the Wicked and Garna, the Bloodflame lets us reload our hand.

Boost Judith

Basilisk Collar on Judith is particularly brutal since each trigger is effectively a death sentence for any creature you can target. Plus, you gain some life for your troubles. Giving Judith infect with Glistening Oil means you can permanently shrink indestructible creatures with her triggers, or defeat an opponent with poison counters.

Demon Stuff

When it comes to searching up a Demon with Shadowborn Apostles, the first choice is likely Razaketh, the Foulblooded. He’s a sacrifice engine himself, and you can sacrifice any other creature still lying around to search up a recursion card to bring back all the Apostles. Rune-Scarred Demon and Overseer of the Damned are also good targets. I added some other Demons to the mix for good measure, along with Blood Speaker.

Removal

Outside of Basilisk Collar, there will be lots of creatures Judith triggers can’t handle, but luckily for us there is no end to the options for red and black. I like new card Bedevil’s added flexibility for artifact destruction.

Card Draw

It’s certainly possible you don’t draw enough Shadowborn Apostles to get a Demon online, in which case it’s perfectly acceptable to cash them in with Skullclamp for additional cards. And for a slow and steady supply of fuel, old school Phyrexian Arena and new school Theater of Horrors can keep the party going.

Mana Ramp

Even though the mana curve on our deck is really low, we do still have some expensive cards in our deck that can end up in our hand rather being targets for Shadowborn Apostle activations. We’ll want some cards to help us accelerate our mana development. Aether Vial on one charge counter does a good job of getting extra Shadowborn Apostles onto the battlefield, and at instant speed it could raise the number to six as a surprise.

Tribal Stuff

Even though this isn’t a tribal deck per se, the fact that we’re going to run a ton of Shadowborn Apostles means that we have a lot of Humans in the deck, including Judith, so cards like Cavern of Souls, Path of Ancestry, and Mana Echoes can do some good work.

Thrumming Stone isn’t exactly tribal, but it obviously works great with cards like Shadowborn Apostle, potentially triggering a bunch if not all copies of Shadowborn Apostle onto the battlefield.

Sweet deck! But wait, there are too many cards. I’ll start by looking at our mana curve:

75 total cards plus 38 lands equal thirteen cards too many, so we need to make some cuts! Let’s see what we can trim, starting with the top of our curve.

Of the Demons, I think Belzenlok is probably the most expendable, since it’s not really something you’ll sacrifice Shadowborn Apostles to find. Patriarch’s Bidding is a great card in our deck, but given the popularity of tribal decks in Commander these days I can see times when you’d not want to cast the spell due to helping out an opponent more than yourself.

These are all tough choices, but the decklist is already quite lean with 30 copies of Shadowborn Apostle. I went with Deathrender over Mana Echoes since Deathrender can surprise opponents by putting a Demon or Garna, the Bloodflame onto the battlefield as a surprise. Basilisk Collar gives Judith lifelink already, so I think Loxodon Warhammer is a safe cut too.

If I had to rank the cards at two mana from most wanted to least, these three would end up at the bottom. Combing through the rest of the deck, I can’t see anything else I’m willing to cut, so for the last five:

I hate going down to 25 copies of Shadowborn Apostle, but I feel that the deck has enough other things going on that it’s not necessarily critical that we activate Shadowborn Apostles to advance our game plan. 25 is still a quarter of our deck, so we can likely get a fair number of ripple hits with Thrumming Stone.

Okay, so here’s how the deck ended up:

Judith, the Scourge Diva

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 02-11-2019

Commander

Creatures (35)

• 1 Blood Speaker
• 1 Balthor the Defiled
• 1 Rotlung Reanimator
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 1 Reaper from the Abyss
• 1 Skirsdag High Priest
• 25 Shadowborn Apostle
• 1 Overseer of the Damned
• 1 Razaketh, the Foulblooded
• 1 Garna, the Bloodflame
• 1 Krav, the Unredeemed

Lands (38)

• 13 Swamp
• 4 Mountain
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 High Market
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Rakdos Carnarium
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Graven Cairns
• 1 Dragonskull Summit
• 1 Lavaclaw Reaches
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Cavern of Souls
• 1 Opal Palace
• 1 Temple of Malice
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Smoldering Marsh
• 1 Westvale Abbey
• 1 Foreboding Ruins
• 1 Canyon Slough
• 1 Path of Ancestry
• 1 Luxury Suite

Spells (26)

• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Aether Vial
• 1 Goblin Bombardment
• 1 Terminate
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Black Market
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1 No Rest for the Wicked
• 1 Twilight's Call
• 1 Rakdos Signet
• 1 Thrumming Stone
• 1 Damnation
• 1 Deathrender
• 1 Door of Destinies
• 1 Vicious Shadows
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Glistening Oil
• 1 Tragic Slip
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Vandalblast
• 1 Open the Graves
• 1 Bedevil
• 1 Theater of Horrors

So, what do you think? What sort of choices do you disagree with? Are there any cards that I overlooked?

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Deck Database

Below I’ve got links to decks I’ve written about going back to January 2017. If you want to read the associated article, just put “Bennie Smith” and the commander name into the Google and it should pop right up. I’ve written a lot about Commander — and Magic in general — so if you want to explore further, the Star City Games article archives have my articles all the way back to January 2000!