Hello and welcome to Commander Bites

Today we are going to be talking about The Gitrog, Ravenous Ride!

Gitrog is a five mana 6/5 with trample, haste, saddle 1, and whenever it deals combat damage to a player, you may sacrifice a creature that saddled it this turn and if you do then you draw X cards and then put up to X land cards from your hand onto the battlefield tapped where X is the sacrificed creature’s power.

Game Plan

As opposed to Vehicles and other saddle creatures that want to get active by using a creature that has just enough power to crew or saddle the, Gitrog wants us to have creatures with larger power in order to draw more cards and get more lands into play.

This is an interesting curve ball for this type of deck and adds an interesting layer into how to build the deck, as well as take advantage of cheaper creatures that would have normally had some sort of downside due to them being cheaply costed but have a higher power.

Support

The first thing we need to look at are those very creatures: cheaply costing creatures that happen to have very high power for their mana cost, but also have some sort of downside.

A very classic example would be Daemogoth Titan, where for four mana we can get an 11/10 into play, however whenever it attacks or blocks, then we must sacrifice a creature. That won’t matter as much when we draw eleven cards and can put up to eleven lands into play.

Pugnacious Hammerskull gets a stun counter if it attacks and we don’t control another Dinosaur, Shakedown Heavy can let an opponent draw us a card in order to stop it from attacking them, and Hunted Bonebrute gives an opponent two 1/1 Dog creature tokens when it enters but it does make each opponent lose 3 life when it dies.

Wall of Blood can get real nuts with Gitrog because for 1 life we can give Wall of Blood +1/+1 until end of turn, and since it has defender it can’t attack anyway so we can put a good chunk of life into it to saddle Gitrog in order to draw a ton of cards while also getting a ton of land into play.

Once we have all of those lands in play, we can use all of that mana for whatever we want.

Unnatural Growth doubles or creatures power and toughness until the end of turn at the beginning of each combat, Death’s Presence can put X +1/+1 counters on a creature whenever a creature dies with X being the power of the creature that died, In Garruk’s Wake to destroy all creatures and Planeswalkers we don’t control, Rise of the Dark Realms to bring all creatures from all graveyards under our control.

If we happen to borrow a couple of Landfall creatures like Lotus Cobra to make us one mana of any color and Tireless Provisioner to make a Treasure token or Food token, then we can get even more mana to make X spells even stronger.

Torment of Hailfire can be a win condition by making our opponents lose 3 life unless they sacrifice a nonland permanent or discard a card that is then repeated X number of times. Even if that doesn’t win us the game, then we are still in a favorable position.

If you want a much cleaner win, then there is also Exsanguinate, which has each opponent lose X life and you gain life equal to the life that was lost this way or even Iridescent Vinelasher to make use of its Landfall trigger of dealing 1 damage to target opponent that we can get an additional copy of through its Offspring ability.

Setbacks

We are going to be making value out of creatures that are normally not very good to play. The consequence of that is that we need those creatures to survive in some capacity until we get Gitrog into play.

Some of these creatures can’t be used to defend ourselves from other big creatures that they may be able to trade favorably with, some of them need us to give up a resource whether that be sacrificing a creature or discarding a card or paying a mana cost in order to keep them in play for at least defend ourselves.

With our ability to ramp out pretty quickly, Gitrog getting destroyed a couple of times is not actually that much of an issue when compared to other Commanders, especially when considering that Gitrog has haste and trample. Plus, with access to black we also can use cheap reanimation options to bring Gitrog back fairly efficiently.

We are going to potentially struggle against decks that can churn out a lot of bodies that can block Gitrog if we can’t get their power high enough to even get a bit of chip damage in, which is all we need in order to make use of Gitrog’s ability.

There is also the “too much of a good thing” problem, where if you manage to get a draw a lot of cards from Gitrog’s ability and you need to discard to hand size every turn or you accidentally draw yourself out of cards.

Hopefully you have a Reliquary Tower or a Praetor’s Counsel in hand to use.

Bracket Rating: High 3

I think that this particular Gitrog can be built pretty powerfully, though I do think that there are some things that prevent it from breaking through into a higher bracket.

The fact that you need to rely on creatures that happen to have a major downside to get the most out of them is one, that Gitrog needs to connect in order for their ability to proc, and that either one big creature or a lot of little creatures can get in the way of it to stop it from triggering are indeed downsides.

However, unlike some other Commanders, Gitrog becomes an immediate threat because it has haste, meaning that if your opponents want to stop it, they need to spend removal in order to do so, otherwise we’ll be gaining so much card and mana advantage that we will be in a stronger position.

Gitrog won’t directly win us the game, but we will have a stronger advantage the longer they stay in play and keep getting in.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual