I have to say that I've been really pleasantly surprised with the legendary creatures from March of the Machine. There are a lot of options in a lot of color combinations and I've enjoyed spending the past few weeks picking commanders, building decks and writing about them. Today's commander is one that has a lot of potential and can be built at a range of power levels up to and possibly even including cEDH - or at least fringe cEDH.

Today we're looking at Thalia and the Gitrog Monster. This card is a mashup of a well-known stax piece and a notoriously complicated cEDH combo commander.

The inspiration for the first half of this mashup was clearly Thalia, Heretic Cathar, a mono-White legendary Human Soldier with first strike who forces your opponents' creatures and nonbasic lands to enter the battlefield tapped. The Gitrog Monster is a legendary Frog Horror with deathtouch who forces you to sacrifice him or a land on your upkeep. When one or more lands are put into your graveyard you get to draw a card.

Thalia riding The Gitrog Monster is a sight to behold and gives us a wall of text to read. This card is a 4/4 for four mana in Abzan colors. It has both first strike and deathtouch, lets you play an additional land on each of your turns, and forces your opponents' creatures and nonbasic lands to enter the battlefield tapped. If that wasn't enough, when this creature attacks you have to sacrifice a creature or a land and then you draw a card.

This card is just brimming with potential. Today I'd like to share a few ideas around different ways to build it before I share the list I ended up with. These different themes are viable at different power levels, and would probably all be fun to play, or at least fun for you.

The central pillar around which we'll be building is the fact that you have to sacrifice a creature or land when your commander attacks. If you're not building this deck with that in mind, I think you're probably doing it wrong.

Voltron

The Gitrog Monster has first strike and deathtouch. Those are powerful abilities and would benefit from adding trample and/or vigilance. Trample is key because you'll get to assign one point of damage to any blocker to kill it and the rest of the damage will trample over. You're starting with just a 4-power body, but your ability to inflict 21 commander damage will be a real possibility once your commander has been suited up with enough auras and equipment. Vigilance is great because you'll be able to attack and still be able to block on your opponents' turns. First strike and deathtouch let you block and kill any non-indestructible attacker without your commander taking damage, so your commander could easily be the best blocker in your deck.

You still want to draw cards off of those sacrifice triggers. Beyond whatever voltron staples you want to include, I'd consider running cards like the following.

Any equipment with "living weapon" creates a 0/0 Black Germ creature token when it enters the battlefield. You'll want to play the equipment, attack, use a Germ as your sacrifice fodder and then equip it to your commander either in the second main phase or before combat on your next turn. It's not perfect. If you have the mana it would be nice to equip before combat, but it's not terrible and you know you won't miss that Germ.

Captain's Claws will have you attack and create a 1/1 White Kor Ally creature token that is tapped and attacking. Since these are your triggers, you can stack them and create the creature token first and then sacrifice it to your commander's attack trigger to draw a card. The extra +1/+0 is nice, but this card is all about dodging those sacrifices.

Nemesis Mask is a delightful card for a commander with first strike and deathtouch. You want to swing at someone with creatures that you want to kill. That might be anyone, but the higher your commander's power is, the more blockers you'll be able to kill. If you can get up to 8 power, you can swing at someone with 8 untapped creatures, force them all to block, assign one point of damage to each of them and thanks to that deathtouch keyword those blockers should all die.

This commander is in colors that can give you lots of options for enchanting and equipping your commander. Both Bear Umbra and Sword of Feast and Famine will untap your lands when you attack. Given how many lands you might get with those extra land drops that could give you a huge mana advantage. Rancor can give you trample and will go back to your hand if it were to hit the graveyard. Blackblade Reforged will give you a +1/+1 for each land you control.

There's no reason a voltron build couldn't be fun, though I would expect it to work best at low to mid power tables. If you really invested in the deck you might be able to hang at high powered tables. Built-in card draw and forcing your opponents' creatures to enter tapped are both powerful abilities.

Tokens

If you were to build Thalia and the Gitrog Monster around a go-wide strategy, you'll always have tokens to sacrifice to your commander's attack trigger. This might not seem like an obvious build path, but in White and Green you have access to plenty of token doublers and when you add in Black you'll have access to the best tutors in the game. There are lots of cards with populate, which let you make additional tokens, and creatures like Chatterfang, Squirrel General, that reward you for making tokens.

You can dig pretty deep into the past for token generators like Snake Pit and Monkey Cage. The former will give you a 1/1 Green Snake whenever an opponent plays a Blue or Black spell. Monkey Cage gives you x 2/2 Green Monkey creature tokens when a creature enters the battlefield where X is that creature's mana value. You have to sacrifice your Monkey Cage, but on the plus side - you get to play a card called Monkey Cage!

If you are more interested in playing "good" cards, Bitterblossom is well-costed at 2 mana and will give you a 1/1 Black Faerie creature token with flying on your upkeep. Tendershoot Dryad costs five mana, which seems like a lot until you remember that you're getting extra land drops each turn. This Dryad will give you a Saproling on each player's upkeep and they'll get +2/+2 if you have the "city's blessing". That means you have 10 or more permanents, which isn't hard to do in a commander game.

There are lots of great token generators and cards that care about tokens in White, Green and Black, whether you are looking to play old janky cards or the more powerful cards Wizards of the Coast has been printing in recent years.

Landfall

When your commander already gives you extra land drops, it's hard not to at least think about building a landfall deck. My first experiment with this commander had 47 lands in the list. I decided that was too many, but this is the kind of commander that can support an abnormally high land count in the 99.

There are a lot of cards with landfall triggers. While you might not see much point in running a card like Kazandu Nectarpot, which gains you 1 life when a land enters the battlefield under your control, you can probably play more of these cards than most decks ever would.

This deck has a fairly reliable sacrifice outlet in its commander, and if you have Titania, Protector of Argoth on the field each of those lands hitting the graveyard will give you a 5/3 Green Elemental creature token. If you decide to lean towards land sacrifice you'll want to run cards like Ramunap Excavator, Crucible of Worlds, Splendid Reclamation and World Shaper. Those first two let you play lands out of your graveyard. Splendid Reclamation will return all lands in your graveyard to the battlefield and World Shaper will do the same when it dies. You've got a commander that will let you sacrifice a creature or land when it attacks, so World Shaper fits very nicely into this deck.

Avenger of Zendikar is well-known and often paired with Craterhoof Behemoth. Avenger will give you 0/1 Plant creature tokens and will give them +1/+1 counters with landfall triggers. Both of these cards are mana intensive, but this commander should be very good at getting lots of lands into play so you might well be able to hardcast them. If you decide to cheat them into play with an entwined Tooth and Nail you'll probably end up winning, but you won't earn any points for originality.

One more landfall card worth mentioning is Seer's Sundial. This artifact costs four mana and doesn't do anything until you play a land. The landfall trigger is that you can pay 2 mana and you get to draw a card. Normally I don't play Seer's Sundial but I expect this deck to have more mana than it knows what to do with. Turning two extra mana into card draw seems pretty good for the late game and if I'm lucky that could be four mana and two cards, as I get an extra land drop with my commander on the field.

You'd probably also run Rampaging Baloths, which give you 4/4 Beast creature tokens when you get a landfall trigger, and Scute Swarm, which reproduce like crazy. You could even combine a landfall strategy with land creatures (lands that can become creatures) if you really want to get janky, but this game plan is probably going to be a mid-to-high powered strategy depending upon how highly tuned your deck is.

Stax

Any discussion of a "stax" deck should come with the caveat that I am not an expert in building and playing stax decks. This type of deck is designed to deny your opponents access to resources and slow down the game as much as possible. Thalia and the Gitrog Monster is already going to be doing that by forcing your opponents' creatures to enter the battlefield tapped.

White might be best known for resource denial, and Thalia and the Gitrog Monster will lean on that color to gum up the works and slow down the game pretty well with access to tutors, recursion and plenty of headaches to share with your tablemates.

Drannith Magistrate will prevent your opponents from casting spells from anywhere other than their hands. This not only locks commanders out if they haven't been cast yet, but also prevents casting spells from the graveyard or from exile. Food Chain combo and cascade can't be played with a Drannith Magistrate on the field. The First Sliver still sees play in cEDH and Drannith Magistrate shuts down that deck pretty nicely.

Collector Ouphe is spectacular in this deck as you'll likely be leaning on lands for your mana and this will shut down all of your opponents' treasures and fast mana, both of which are everywhere in cEDH. Opposition Agent and Dauthi Voidwalker are great examples of what Black can add to the mix. The former lets you control your opponents when they are searching their libraries and the latter will keep cards out of your opponents graveyards. That causes problems for anyone trying to combo off with Underworld Breach.

These colors are well placed to be able to put together a very solid stax package. You'd probably be looking for a combo win to close out games in cEDH but there are aggro decks at that power level so there might be a way to reliably win through combat. I don't know for sure that this is going to become a popular and effective cEDH stax commander, but I think it's hard not to see this card's potential to have that kind of impact.

Combo

This commander has an attack trigger sacrifice outlet. That means if you want to find some combo to try to pull off that uses that trigger, you won't be able to do it more than once per turn. A few years ago a very powerful card came off the EDH ban list that plays into that kind of combo very nicely. That card would be Protean Hulk.

You start by playing Protean Hulk, going to combat and sacrificing it to the attack trigger.

Your opponents could just hit your Hulk with an exile spell like Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile or Deadly Rollick to stop the combo.

You use Protean Hulk to tutor up two cards to the battlefield.

You get the 1-mana Viscera Seer and the 5-mana Phyrexian Delver. You use the Phyrexian Delver's enter-the-battlefield trigger to bring Protean Hulk back to the battlefield at the cost of 7 life. You then sacrifice Protean Hulk to Viscera Seer.

At this point your opponents could just kill or exile Viscera Seer before Hulk returns to momentarily stop you until the next time you go to combat.

You use your second Hulk death trigger to go get the 6-mana Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and the 0-mana Walking Ballista. The former is a 0/0 and will immediately die, but it's not a human so it will return thanks to the fact that "Mike" gives it undying. It will return with a +1/+1 counter and also has a +1/+1 pump since "Mike" also gives it +1/+1.

Your opponents could kill or exile Mikaeus when Walking Ballista is in the graveyard to stop you.

At this point you can try to win the game. You remove the +1/+1 counter to ping someone for 1 damage, you sacrifice Ballista to Viscera Seer, Ballista returns because of undying (it no longer has any +1/+1 counters) and you repeat this until your opponents are all dead.

It's worth mentioning that this commander could pair nicely with creatures like Heartmender, Kitchen Finks and Safehold Elite, all of which have persist. If a creature with persist dies and it did not have a -1/-1 counter on it, you return it to the battlefield with a -1/-1 counter. You can use persist creatures with cards that put +1/+1 counters on your creatures when they enter the battlefield, so they can just be recurred as many times as you like. The +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters cancel each other out. The Great Henge and Mikaeus can both give out +1/+1 counters to allow you to do this combo. You only get one attack trigger to sacrifice a creature, but you could still run persist combo as an extra wincon - you'd just need additional sacrifice outlets and some sort of payoff for executing each loop.

There are other combos you could go get with Protean Hulk. You can also win with Reveillark combo and I'm sure there are others. The key is to use Protean Hulk as the starting point and to plan out a winning line from that initial Hulk death trigger.

My Thalia and the Gitrog Monster

My own build ended up being fairly typical for my playstyle. I like building in the mid-to-high power range and this is no exception. I have the Protean Hulk combo line in there because it's a way to end the game, but I don't have a ton of tutors to go digging for it. I'd rather draw into it than be tempted to go for the win really early in the game. Most non-cEDH players want games to go a little longer and I see no point in loading this deck up with ways to tutor Hulk up and see how early I can attempt the win.

This deck wound up being made out of cards from a 4-color Omnath, Locus of Creation deck that I pulled apart for this project. I ended up playing 41 lands, which is a far cry from the 47 that I started with, but is still way more than I usually run in a deck. I'm playing a lot of landfall-oriented creatures and have a land recursion package in place so that if the game goes long I have a chance at pushing for a win the "fair" way. That means in the trenches, slugging it out with Beasts, Elementals or whatever I can get into play. I have a decent number of cards that let me interact with the board, but the deck isn't intended to be oppressive. My expectation is that I'll just see what the deck is giving me and pivot to whatever strategy makes the most sense for that game.

Thalia and Gitrog | Commander | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Thalia and the Gitrog Monster

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Beast Whisperer
• 1 Borderland Ranger
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Elvish Visionary
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Gamekeeper
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Heliod, Sun-Crowned
• 1 Karametra, God of Harvests
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Phyrexian Delver
• 1 Pilgrim's Eye
• 1 Primal Druid
• 1 Protean Hulk
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Ramunap Excavator
• 1 Satyr Wayfinder
• 1 Scute Swarm
• 1 Skittering Surveyor
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Tireless Provisioner
• 1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 1 Triskelion
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Walking Ballista
• 1 Wall of Blossoms
• 1 World Shaper

• Instants (10)
• 1 Anguished Unmaking
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Despark
• 1 Eladamri's Call
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Teferi's Protection
• 1 Utter End
• 1 Vanishing Verse

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Debt to the Deathless
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Splendid Reclamation
• 1 Three Visits
• 1 Worm Harvest

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Moldervine Reclamation
• 1 Pattern of Rebirth
• 1 Zendikar Resurgent

• Artifacts (8)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Captain's Claws
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Nemesis Mask
• 1 Seer's Sundial
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 The Great Henge

• Lands (41)
• 13 Forest
• 10 Plains
• 10 Swamp
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Isolated Chapel
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

Buy This Deck Export text format

This list is a bit loaded up with some pretty good cards. Crucible of Worlds and The Great Henge aren't budget options, but you could take this base list, drop out the most expensive cards and probably get yourself to a fairly budget-friendly deck that would still play pretty well.

You could also push up into cEDH from this starting point by loading in fast mana, tutors, stax pieces and more interaction, but it would be a much more substantial overhaul. You'd drop out the landfall package, with the likely exception of cards like Tireless Provisioner and Lotus Cobra. Deckbuilders that are more familiar with cEDH might be able to point you towards better combos than what I came up with. The cEDH meta is less broad and wide ranging than casual EDH and there may be wincons in these colors that just make much more sense.

Early Results

I was able to play this deck once before writing this column. I built it in paper, brought it to my LGS and have a few takeaways to share. The game was me on Thalia and The Gitrog Monster against players on Avacyn, Angel of Hope, Henzie, "Toolbox" Torre and a third player on Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir.

The Avacyn deck was a powerful build for casual play, more than happy to wipe the board, leave you with nothing, and swing for the win. Avacyn gives your permanents indestructible so boardwipes are the way to go and the deck's pilot is one of the LGS' more experienced players. The Henzie deck was all about blitzing creatures in and if I remember correctly, the Sidar Jabari deck was a modified precon.

One takeaway from the game was an unfortunate one. Forcing your opponents' creatures to enter the battlefield tapped happens to shut down a lot of things, including any deck that is centered around using creatures with blitz. Creatures cast with blitz enter the battlefield with haste and get sacrificed at the beginning of the next end step. It wasn't my intention to shut down his deck on its very first game but that's what happened. He didn't draw into any removal. He was a good sport about it, but it was clear he didn't expect his first game out with this deck to be a non-game.

The Sidar Jabari player had a slow start and never really got going. I don't know how modified that precon really was, but it felt like he never really got to do much in the game. I don't remember if the Avacyn player got his commander out but I'm pretty sure he didn't boardwipe as I would have remembered that - and probably would have died shortly thereafter.

My own game went well. I played lands, creatures, got my commander out and proceeded to swing every turn so I could dig into my library. I did dig into Protean Hulk, played it and sacrificed it. The Avacyn player had removal but I chose not to remind him of exactly when and where to use it. I ended up being able to tutor up Viscera Seer and Phyrexian Delver, sacrifice Delver to bring back Protean Hulk, and then tutored up Miakeus and Walking Ballista for the win.

It felt good to luck into that in the deck's first game but I'm hoping to get tables where the deck gives me more of a landfall game or a land recursion game. If I hit that Hulk win a few more times I may well take those cards out of the deck and add in more equipment and auras. I don't want this to just devolve into a deck that does the same thing every game.

The Henzie player headed off to another table, possibly thinking I was going to play Thalia again, though that wasn't the case. I couldn't blame him. The Avacyn player might have been a little annoyed that I hit my Hulk and won off of it. In the very next game I was a little annoyed that he got his Avacyn out and then wiped the board. These things happen and we've been playing long enough to know that occasionally being a little annoyed by what your tablemates' decks are doing is par for the course when playing Magic.

The deck played well with 41 lands but I don't think I'd want to run a lot more. The last thing I want is to be drawing land after land without much to do, so I'll nearly always run my manabase a bit on the lean side.

Final Thoughts

I would not be surprised if this deck becomes a popular high-powered or even fringe cEDH option in Abzan colors. It's up against a range of Tymna the Weaver partner decks and Tayam, Luminous Enigma in these colors. Without being in Blue, it's hard to think that it could get into the top tier of cEDH lists, but with a stax gameplan and combo finishes there's no reason to think a fully tuned list couldn't be playable at the highest levels of play. Thalia and the Gitrog Monster is in Black so there may be an Ad Nauseam build that someone will brew up, but I don't know that it would be a better Naus deck than the ones already being played in cEDH.

This commander is probably best suited in mid-to-high powered play as an answer to decks that win out of nowhere with combat damage. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker probably isn't going to kill the table on the turn it combos off unless the deck's creatures can enter the battlefield and attack that turn. I suppose a reference to Kiki-Jiki might be a bit outdated, but my point stands. Aggro combo and even a lot of combat decks will need to remove your commander before going for the win.

The Commander League I run at my LGS has a theme for May of commanders with "Attack" on them somewhere. This list will probably see at least a few games, and I expect there's a good chance I'll manage to win a game or two over the course of the month.

I have been playing in the cEDH league on Monday nights as well and finally managed to notch not just one but two wins! I had been expecting a rough time as those guys are very good at the game, and I may devote a future column to some thoughts about what to expect when moving into playing cEDH. It has been quite the struggle and has been eye opening in a lot of ways. I'm still not an expert on cEDH but I'll share what I've been learning, possibly as soon as next week.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!