Erasing APFS container in terminal

So, I know how to do it in terminal under High Sierra. What I am trying to accomplish is better control of APFS containers under Sierra. To do this I was thinking it may be possible to copy the terminal app from a machine running High Sierra and any binaries it may use to a Sierra machine and have it work.

What I am ultimately trying to accomplish is to have a bootable copy of Sierra on a flash drive with an asr compatible High Sierra restore image on the same flash drive. This should allow me to restore an APFS container to a machine that is currently not running High Sierra. The issue now is the --erase flag has to be on the end of the asr command in terminal and Sierra cannot erase an APFS container this way.

If I can get this far I will be able to install necessary firmware using package installer so I don't have to run an entire install of High Sierra if I just want a clean High Sierra install on a machine that wasn't upgraded yet.

Thoughts?