OrzhovLegendary Creature — Zombie Cat WarriorZahur, Glory's Past
Mana value2Rank#11,359
The Commander
Start your engines! (If you have no speed, it starts at 1. It increases once on each of your turns when an opponent loses life. Max speed is 4.)
Sacrifice another creature: Surveil 1. Activate only once each turn.
Max speed — Whenever a nontoken creature you control dies, create a tapped 2/2 black Zombie creature token.
Guide
Gameplan
Zahur is a cheap aristocrats engine: sacrifice creatures to surveil and fuel your graveyard, push opponents' life totals down to ramp your speed to max, then convert every nontoken creature death into a 2/2 Zombie. You grind the board with sac fodder, recursion, and death triggers, snowballing into a wide army or a drain-based kill.
Strengths
- Two-mana commander gives early board presence and a repeatable surveil sac outlet
- Max speed turns creature deaths into a token army, generating value from removal and combat
- Black-white access to premium recursion, reanimation, and aristocrats payoffs
- Surveil fills the graveyard to enable reanimator and self-mill synergies
Weaknesses
- Speed mechanic stalls if you can't reliably make opponents lose life
- Sac outlet is limited to once per turn, capping explosive combos through the commander alone
- Token generation only triggers at max speed, so early game is slower
- Vulnerable to graveyard hate that shuts down recursion and reanimation
Key Cards
- Blood Artist — Turns every creature death from your sac outlet into life loss that ramps speed and drains the table.
- Zulaport Cutthroat — Stacks with Blood Artist as another death-trigger drain that pushes opponents' life down for speed and wins.
- Pitiless Plunderer — Generates Treasure on each death, fueling more sacrifices and explosive reanimation turns.
- Reassembling Skeleton — Recurs itself to feed the surveil sac outlet every turn for steady value.
- Liliana, Dreadhorde General — Each nontoken death makes a token and draws cards, doubling Zahur's death payoff at max speed.
- Bastion of Remembrance — Enchantment-based drain that's hard to remove and keeps speed climbing.
Upgrade Path
Add efficient free or repeatable sac outlets (Viscera Seer, Carrion Feeder, Ashnod's Altar) so you aren't bottlenecked by Zahur's once-per-turn ability, and pack multiple Blood Artist effects to maximize speed gain and drain. Tighten the mana with fast rocks and tutors like Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor to assemble combos, and lean into reanimation targets plus protection like Teferi's Protection to defend the engine.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
Archetypes
- Aristocrats — The sac outlet plus death triggers make drain-and-sacrifice the natural core.
- Reanimator — Surveil and sacrifice load the graveyard so you can cheat big creatures back into play.
- Tokens — Max speed manufactures a 2/2 Zombie on every nontoken death to go wide.
- Combo — A persistent sac outlet enables loops with Blood Artist effects and reanimation engines.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (BW), by popularity.
