Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about The Gitrog Monster!

The Gitrog Monster is a five mana 6/6 with deathtouch and at the beginning of your upkeep you sacrifice The Gitrog Monster unless you sacrifice a land, you may play an additional land on each of your turns, and whenever one or more land cards are put into your graveyard from anywhere, draw a card.

Game Plan

The Gitrog Monster is a fairly well known Commander that is fairly powerful. While the downside of losing a land is less than ideal, gaining the advantage of an additional land drop and when that land goes to the graveyard we draw a card more than makes up for it.

What’s even better is that we get the card draw whenever a land goes to the graveyard from anywhere, which leads to a wide variety of shenanigans that we can use to our advantage to get a massive amount of card draw.

Support

The first thing that we need are ways we can make use of the lands that do go in our graveyard, as well as additional ways to use those lands as resources.

Crucible of Worlds effects are pretty solid in the deck because they allow us to play lands from our graveyard, meaning that the lands that we sacrifice can come right back without any real downside at all.

One of the more premium versions of this effect is on Icetill Explorer which not only let’s us play lands from our graveyard, but also gives us an additional land drop and has a Landfall trigger of milling a card, which can potentially trigger The Gitrog Monster again.

Life from the Loam is also an amazing card for the deck because we can return up to three target land cards from our graveyard into our hand while also having dredge 3, which let’s us mill three cards to put Life from the Loam back to our hand and then has a chance to get us another trigger from The Gitrog Monster.

If we are in the need for more mana, Rain of Filth is a solid card to consider because it gives all lands we control the ability to sacrifice themselves to add an additional black mana until end of turn, making each of our lands provide two mana and draws us a card as well.

We can also use something like Titania, Protector of Argoth which when they enter returns target land from our graveyard to the battlefield, but more importantly has it so that whenever a land we control is put into the graveyard from the battlefield we make a 5/3 Elemental creature token.

There is also a case to be made to use Braids, Arisen Nightmare which at the beginning of our step we may sacrifice an artifact, creature, enchantment, land, or Planeswalker and if we do then each opponent may sacrifice a permanent of their choice that shares a card type with it and for each opponent that doesn’t, that player loses 2 life and we draw a card.

Ob Nixilis, the Fallen also happens to work really well in our deck since we are also ideally playing additional ways to get lands into play since the Landfall trigger that Ob Nixilis has is that whenever a land we control enters we may have target player lose 3 life and if we do we put three +1/+1 counters on Ob Nixilis.

Even if we do have a bunch of lands in the graveyard, we can use World Shaper to not only mill three cards each turn, but when they die we return all land cards from our graveyard to the battlefield tapped, which can get a bunch of Landfall triggers off.

Setbacks

The Gitrog Monster is pretty potent, but the deck isn’t unbeatable.

While getting a ton of advantage from having our lands get to the graveyard is great, The Gitrog Monster doesn’t win us the game by being in play. They allow us to draw cards that put us in an advantageous position to be sure, but they don’t provide an on board win condition.

What’s more, we do need have payoffs for us being able to get a ton of land advantage in play, or have some way to use all the mana that our land advantage provides for us. Ideally through the Landfall triggers we can gain a ton of advantage there, but we also need to make sure that they stay on the battlefield.

We also need to be aware of cards that affect our graveyard, because The Gitrog Monster explicitly wants our lands to go to the graveyard, so if for some reason our lands become exiled, we are in a less than ideal state.

More on that point, because we need to sacrifice lands in order for The Gitrog Monster to stay in play, we need to make sure we get some use out of them being sacrificed or we are losing access to mana.

It also becomes a struggle if we are not able to draw lands or get lands into the graveyard in order to get a draw to help us dig for more lands. We can make use of effects like Harrow or Crop Rotation to sacrifice lands to get more lands in play, but that is only a temporary solution.

We also suffer from cards that prevent us or punish us for drawing cards like Narset, Parter of Veils or a Sheoldred, the Apocalypse which makes it so our ability to draw cards is limited to once each turn via Narset or we lose a lot of life via Sheoldred.

Bracket Rating: 4

The Gitrog Monster is a powerful advantage engine that uses lands and lands going to the graveyard to great effect.

While our deck can struggle to deal with cards that prevent cards from going into the graveyard, the deck is resilient enough that there are enough ways to generate advantage through Landfall and additional land drops that we can find a way to pivot the deck if our graveyard is unable to be accessed. If we do have free reign of our graveyard, then we can get a ton of card draw and put ourselves in a position where we end up land positive by the end of our turns.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual