The Gitrog Monster

The upkeep clause reads like a drawback and functions like an engine. Sacrificing a land every turn to keep a 6/6 deathtoucher on the board sounds punishing until you read it against the rest of the text: any batch of land cards hitting your graveyard draws a card, and the extra land drop each turn refills what you fed it. The "cost" is the fuel. Invert that downside and the frog stops being a beater and starts being a combo piece: loop a self-mill or land-recursion package and the card no longer cares about board state, only about how many separate times you can shuttle lands into the graveyard, drawing on each pass. Note the shape of the trigger: it fires once per event, not once per land, so the payoff is measured in passes, not raw land count, and the deck is built to maximize discrete graveyard trips. The most notorious version pairs it with Dakmor Salvage and a discard outlet to chain a functionally endless draw, with the upkeep sacrifice as the only governor. That line is what elevated the card from Golgari midrange curve-topper to dedicated commander. Deathtouch on a six-power body is almost incidental: it makes the creature a credible blocker while the rest of the text assembles the kill. The land-into-graveyard trigger is the hinge the whole design turns on, rewarding a deck built to lose lands rather than protect them.