Okay, coming from me and my new meta in Arizona, a couple guys in my new group were discussing Griselbrand and how his time on the Bench for EDH should be up due to a number points that were brought up consistently in our discussion.

Points:
1. He has a high mana of Seven cmc and if bolted, he is boned
2. Griselbrand runs out of steam later in the game unless lifegain is involved
3. His ability presents a significant drawback of paying life in exchange for card draw, which early game is helpful but peters out once the life total is low.
4. Blue Control will take every advantage to do to copy, control and or clone him, making his board presence less threatening
5. A Griselbrand deck would require Lifegain oriented cards in order to make repeated use of his ability

So should we remove Griselbrand from the Official EDH banlist?

No.

No Because:

Bolted? he is a 7/7 so lightning bolt doesn't kill him. Even if he is being murdered the damage is already done. He has a CMC of 8 (which was one of the biggest complaints about him btw) but there are too many ways to cheat him out or recur him that the cmc doesn't matter

Later in the game doesn't happen, the player draws 21 cards on the spot at least and goes on to win from there. Google the legacy deck called tin fins to see how he ends the game.

A common misconception for players is that paying life for cards is bad. 1 life for 1 card is an incredible rate and any veteran player knows that. His ability is not a drawback.

Blue control will be too slow, the grislebrand player already has everything they need to win. In addition, being a prime clone target is actually part of the reason prime time and sylvan primordial are banned. One of the ban list criteria is "warps the game strategically". If the right strategy when encountering a card is that you must clone, control or kill it, then it warps the format strategically

The main ban list criteria Grisel breeches is that he interacts badly with the format. We start at 40 life, which means you get 4 activations before you even need to think about your life total. thats 28 cards in hand immediately when he hits the board. Plus he has lifelink himself, so you don't even need to work to get a source of lifegain, because it comes stapled onto the card.

In summary, Griselbrand:
1. Warps the format strategically by making the game revolve around who can get and keep one in play (similar to prophet, prime time and primordial)
2. Interacts badly with the starting life total of 40 which makes the pay 7 life part of his ability almost irrelevant
3. Is incredibly powerful compared to it's costs.

Hell no.

With no Banned as a Commander list anymore, unbanning Griselbrand makes him legal as a Commander. We don't want to go back to those dark times.

In mono-black, especially if he's leading the 99, seven mana is not expensive. The colour has more mana doublers than any other- it would be trivial to drop him on T5 or even before.

You are aware Griselbrand has lifelink, right? Refuelling his ability is a matter of pointing your giant flying demon at someone, even if they chump it. Reading 2 and 3 it seems like you missed that.

How is having multiple Griselbrands in play "making his board presence less threatening"? Is this some bizarre form of mutually assured destruction where nobody dare use a Griselbrand because anybody gets them?

In any case, assuming your 4) is correct, that's an excellent reason to keep him banned. Centralising cards that everyone is playing and become the first clone targets tend to get that treatment- see Primeval Titan, Sundering Titan, Prophet...

RaiRai, that's not even a good attempt at trolling. Not taking part in this.

Hey at least Evil Greg (was it Greg?) could then put it into his Kaalia deck, amirite?

I may be having trouble gauging public opinion on this... Are you guys saying "Boo!" or "Boo-urns!"?

Also, when I sat down this morning and read this headline, I picked the wrong time to have a gulp of coffee.

But seriously, RaiRai, have you ever played against Griselbrand in any format? He's one of the strongest if not the strongest (in my opinion) creature ever printed. I second the recommendation to see TinFins in action. It was my deck of choice when I played legacy and the look on people's faces when those onions burst all over the place on turn two was priceless.

Griselbrand is more deserving of his ban than at least 50% of the cards on the ban list, and I say this as someone who absolutely LOVED playing Grizzlebees for the month or so he was legal.

The banlist currently has 34 cards on it, but if the RC suddenly decreed that they were no longer willing to have more than 10 cards on the list, and were unbanning 24 cards, I am about 90% sure that Griselbrand would be one of the 10 to stay on the list, and equally as certain that would be the correct call.

THAT is how utterly ban-worthy he was.

Also he costs 8, not seven. Please at least do us all the courtesy of reading the card you're discussing so we at least know you have your basic facts straight.

Have we forgotten that he first rule of living successfully on the internet is to not feed the trolls?

You heard it here first... Sheldon thinks RaiRai is a troll.

I'm going to pick this point to derail the thread utterly since all of the meaningful discussion is done on it. This is surprisingly hard, and I think it ends up leaving the format with too much fast mana in the end.

My 10 card banned list:
Griselbrand
Yawgmoth's Bargain
Recurring Nightmare
Balance
Tinker
Channel
Tolarian Academy
Fastbond
Karakas
Sylvan Primordial

I think this list is still leaving off some cards that nobody should be playing with, but it at least gets the most egregious ones that people think are just powerful and fun and a decent chunk of the fast mana.