Greetings everyone ,
the Archon Council decided to put several changes to the vote. You can vote on the following change:
Unbanning Grim Monolith
You can had over to our Discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 15-Nob-2022 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasoning for the proposed change:
Although Grim Monolith looks like a mana rock, it functions more like a ritual in most cases – often even with a one turn delay. If used this way, you get to jump to 6 mana by turn 3, which can provide a sudden burst of mana for a powerful effect. Unless you want to cast your commander with that mana, this is not a very reliable thing to do, since you need to draw both Grim Monolith and a payoff in a 98/99+ card deck. Additionally, while being colorless makes it available in all decks, the colorless mana it generates makes it harder to use unless you are running many colorless or high-mana-value cards.
Decks that we think will use this card are not very competitive at the moment in our opinion and could use a boost, like: Teferi, Temporal Archmage, Daretti, Scrap Savant and other not-quite-meta decks. If a deck wants to either use Grim Monolith multiple or infinite times, rather than untapping it by paying 4 mana, it has to put some work in for that to happen. Often, this can only be done by further playing cards that don’t interact with the board, making yourself even more vulnerable than you already are when playing Grim Monolith and not using it instantly, effectively taking a 2-mana tempo loss.
Grim Monolith doesn’t enable any new infinite mana combos that wouldn’t also work with Basalt Monolith, and it actually doesn’t work in some of these because the untapping cost is 1 mana more, which makes it not work with cards like Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy or Rings of Brighthearth.
Over the course of the years, answer cards have also become cheaper, more flexible and often can be a threat as well like creatures that double as a clock and removal, making it easier for other decks to interact with you. This means that artifacts are easily removed or disabled in modern magic. The rise of decks like Shorikai, Genesis Engine and Breya, Etherium Shaper in the meta also leads to many decks that already run these kinds of answers.
For these reasons, we think that Grim Monolith should be unbanned in Archon.