Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Gideon the Oathless!

Gideon is a three mana 3/3 that has a ward of discard a card and whenever a creature an opponent controls enters, Gideon deals 1 damage to that player and whenever an opponent activates a loyalty ability, Gideon deals 1 damage to that player.

Game Plan

Looking at some of the Echoverse cards, this Gideon fascinated me for how decent this was at working against token decks and creature decks in general, and I thought that there existed a few other cards that could actually work in our favor.

We can also make use of other synergies that work well with our opponents losing life as well as other ways we can make use of our opponents getting creatures.

Support

The first thing we need are ways to make sure that we can creatures on our opponents battlefield, especially if they happen to be playing a deck that doesn’t make a lot of creatures.

Tribute to Horobi is a great card in this regard because it is a Saga whose first two chapters has each opponent make a 1/1 Rat Rogue creature token and then transforms into Echo of Death’s Wail which gains control of all Rat tokens and whenever it attacks we can sacrifice a creature to draw a card. We damage each opponent twice and then we can take control of up to six Rat Rogues that we can sacrifice for card draw.

Akroan Horse also plays well into this play style because when it enters an opponent gains control of it and at the beginning of that opponent’s upkeep, each opponent creates a 1/1 Soldier token. Again, we have it so at least two of our opponents get hit for 1 damage each turn.

Genesis Chamber is probably the cheapest way we can get creatures under our opponents control because whenever a nontoken enters the battlefield and Genesis Chamber is untapped, that player’s controller creates a 1/1 Myr creature token.

Now we should take a look at cards that work well with Gideon dealing damage and one that works well is The Master of Lake-Town, which has it so that whenever a player loses life, they mill that many cards and when it dies we draw a card for each graveyard that has seven or more cards.

If you happen to have opponents draw a ton of cards and don’t mind losing your hand, we can use Awaken the Erstwhile, which has each player discard all cards in their hand and then they create that many 2/2 Zombie tokens.

This can actually work pretty well with Tombstone Stairwell, which at the beginning of each upkeep, each player creates a 2/2 Zombie token named Tombspawn with haste for each creature card in their graveyard. It does have cumulative upkeep, but for a full turn cycle you can deal a ton of damage, especially if your opponents have a full enough graveyard.

Which also happens to pair even better with Wound Reflection, which at the beginning of each end step, each opponent loses life equal to the amount of life they lost this turn. To add in a bit of redundancy to Gideon’s effect we can play Blood Seeker, which also has it so that an opponent lose 1 life whenever they have a creature enter.

So with Blood Seeker, Gideon, and Wound Reflection in play, if we are able to even get one creature on our opponent’s side of the battlefield then they lose 4 life each turn at minimum, with massive potential for a lot more.

Setbacks

And that is one of the issues that the deck has, it is a lot of potential and what ifs. If we are playing against a token deck then we are doing gangbusters, and Gideon does have some protection in the form of forcing our opponent to discard a card.

However, since we are giving creature to our opponents, we have to understand that they will be sending those creatures our way. The previously mention Tombstone Stairwell gives those tokens haste and while we also get tokens, there is the chance that we don’t have a lot of creatures in our graveyard to get many of them.

Our deck is a control deck for all intents and purposes, meaning that we happen to fold against fast and aggressive decks, which we happen to be fueling since we are giving our opponents creatures, which also stands to reason that they either have some sort of anthem effect to make the creatures they control bigger or an Impact Tremors effect so that we also lose life when a creature enters under their control.

Since we are a control deck, we also happen to be a deck that is slower to get going. We need several pieces in play in order to get our position secured, and while we have access to plenty of removal and draw, we will be needing to stay on the defensive until we have all of our pieces in play.

Bracket Rating: 2, maybe low 3

I think Gideon is a Commander that has a good amount of potential, but needs a lot of help in order to be really good consistently.

Being able to punish players from going too wide is great, however we need to be aware that they will likely have a way to kill us as well so we need some form of protection. We can punish control players from utilizing Planeswalkers, but we need to do a bit of work to make sure they can get small creatures so we can be more effective.

Gideon has the abilities that can help supplement other strategies very well, and can do fairly well on his own, but still needs work in order to become effective at higher brackets.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual