[SCD] The Gitrog Monster

[monovfox]

It's a neat card for its mana cost with a super neat effect.


Legendary Creature — Frog Horror
Card Text:
Deathtouch
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice The Gitrog Monster unless you sacrifice a land.
You may play an additional land on each of your turns.
Whenever one or more land cards are put into your graveyard from anywhere, draw a card.
P/T:
6 / 6

Wins you the game on the spot with dakmor salvage and a discard outlet, and in conjunction with Squandered Resources (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=3744) and Splendid Reclamation (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=414474) You have the ability to cycle through your deck due to the raw card draw. It's also just a really good card by itself.


Part of me really wants to find some sort of gifts or intuition package that wins the game off of the git gud toad, but I'm not sure of one that exists.

[HdH_Cthulhu]

Its too expensive to cast naturally and too cheap to cheat into play.

Well you can replace all spiritmonger from your casual lists...

[Echelon]

Yup. Even Nic Fit doesn't bother with it (mostly). It'd be a lot better if it had trample though.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

It's pretty good in EDH, though.

[Crimhead]

It's pretty good in EDH, though.
I run a Lands deck in EDH (linked in my sig), and Gitrog is insane!

With a Loam engine going and Gitrog in play, basically every turn you sac a land, return Loam to hand, mill three cards and draw two cards. If you have eight plus cards on the clean-up step, which is easy with Loam, every land you discard draws an with card and triggers another clean up step!

Can all this awesomeness be ported over to a Legacy Lands deck? I think it's too slow for R/G, and certainly not worth a splash. RUG Lands could easily enough make room for a single Gitrog and a Volrath's Stronghold, which would make for lovely Intuition piles. The deck is slow enough to take advantage of the engine, and it could even serve as a back up win-condition. The problem is it doesn't really help the deck in the match's it needs help.

Gitrog is too slow to help us vs fast decks that we might need to race against; and it's not very good in the face of graveyard hate, particularly RIP or Leyline. Where it is good it might actually be a little bit "win-more", or at the very least not as good as just running Tireless Trackers.

One of these days I might give it a spin in RUG Lands. Sometimes things work differently in practice than in theory, but I really wouldn't really expect it to be good for anything besides a few laughs (and a lot of groans).

[slave]

I run a Lands deck in EDH (linked in my sig), and Gitrog is insane!

With a Loam engine going and Gitrog in play, basically every turn you sac a land, return Loam to hand, mill three cards and draw two cards. If you have eight plus cards on the clean-up step, which is easy with Loam, every land you discard draws an with card and triggers another clean up step!

Can all this awesomeness be ported over to a Legacy Lands deck? I think it's too slow for R/G, and certainly not worth a splash. RUG Lands could easily enough make room for a single Gitrog and a Volrath's Stronghold, which would make for lovely Intuition piles. The deck is slow enough to take advantage of the engine, and it could even serve as a back up win-condition. The problem is it doesn't really help the deck in the match's it needs help.
Agree with all the above.
With a Loam engine going, Gitrog for me is a casual card that can be dominant. But here in Legacy land I don't think it's as good as it needs to be to be a maindeck optimal choice.