Hi everyone,
The Archon Council decided to put a change up for vote. You can vote on the following change:
Unban Gaea’s Cradle in Archon.
You can head over to our discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 15-04-2025 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasoning for the proposed change:
Gaea’s Cradle has been on the Archon banlist since its inception as a carry-over from Duel Commander. There, it was banned in 2016 for enabling too fast setup from proactive green-based decks. In the Archon format, enabling fast/excess mana should come at a reasonable cost and while Cradle is a potential repeatable source of huge mana, it does come with the drawback of being tied to creatures on the board. Being dependent on your board state means you will have to work to get more than one mana out of Cradle in our very fast and highly interactive format. The scenarios where Cradle generates too much mana are fringe (like playing Ornithopter in your deck) or avoidable (like destroying your opponents creatures). In testing we found Cradle to be on par with other high-impact cards of the format without enabling strategies that we don’t want to encourage in the format Cradle gameplay is telegraphed, interactable and does not influence the earliest turns of the game in a negative way. Therefore we would like to give Cradle a chance as a way to boost green-based go wide strategies