Loyal Guardian

Lieutenant was the keyword that tried to write "control your commander" into the rulebook as a repeatable condition, and this Rhino is the anthem that idea produces. The design gates a genuinely powerful effect behind an intervening "if" check each combat: keep your general on the battlefield, and every creature you control gains a permanent +1/+1 counter every turn. Those counters are the durable kind, sticking to the survivors rather than evaporating the way a static lord's bonus does; whatever crawls out from under a targeted answer keeps every point it has already banked, so the team that reassembles after a stumble is bigger than the one that went down. The trample on the 4/4 body is not decoration but the personal payoff: as its own counters stack turn over turn, the Guardian becomes the one creature guaranteed to push damage through a wall of chump blockers while the rest of the growing team still hunts for its own evasion. What makes the clause pointed is that it taxes the exact instinct Commander players fall back on: hiding the general in the command zone, or refusing to swing for fear of a two-for-one. Because the condition is an intervening "if," failing it means the ability never triggers at all: with your commander gone, the Guardian is simply a plain trampling beater until it returns. Meet the condition and the whole board compounds. That reward for the aggressive, general-forward line over the cautious one is the keyword's entire argument, and this is one of its cleanest expressions.