Green is doing just fine in my cube without 1 cmc ramp.
Yeah but your cube is also very unique compared to most other lists. Your power level is a little bit lower than most rare cubes so your green decks don't necessarily need 1cmc ramp to be competitive. You also seem to have a fairly aggressive green suite, which naturally means that a larger percentage of your green decks won't want as much 1 and 2 mana ramp.
By no means does this invalidate your argument, although I think there's also a little bit more too it than "it works fine."
Agree with Onder here.
Your argument is basically that the most powerful green decks include 1cmc ramp. Which is true. And you'll need it if that's the power your format is at, but you also make it so that your green decks are disadvantaged if they didn't happen to draft the... what, like 7-8? 1cmc dorks and then also draw them because you were expecting the green decks to be at that power level. It also crushes the aggro decks to see a T2 4/4 and/or T3 5/5 too hard for my liking. And then the T2 true ramp like Rampant Growrth can't be interacted with unless you have some cutthroat LD around and then the T4 5/5 is ready to go.
Not my preference at all, but the beauty of cube is that we all get to make those decisions for ourselves.
I'm not sure where this "7=8" 1cmc mana dorks meme has come from in the cube community. Green decks don't need that much ramp to be successful if you build your green section right. If you look at high-preforming green decks from across the history of magic, you'd see that most of them only contain 4 1cmc ramp spells in a 60 card deck. Obviously the midrange decks in current standard are an example of this, as they only run their 4 copies of
Llanowar Elves. For a 40 card deck, the same ratio of 1cmc ramp spells is approximately 2.66 cards per deck. In modern, most 60 card decks don't run a full 8 dorks between BoP and
Noble Hierarch.
So if most constructed decks don't even run 7-8 1 cmc dorks, why do our cube decks? Because the traditional cube knowledge says "ramp into Emrakul" and everyone seems to think that that is the primary way to build a green ramp package. Then, when people try to re-define what green does, they try to make an entirely new take on the color instead of just not doing the semi-toxic uber-ramp thing that powermaxers do.
I know that rant has little to do with your arguments about stonewalling aggro and
rampant growth effects, but it seems wrong to me that people always say you need almost 1/4 of a ramp deck to consist of 1 cmc mana dorks to "be good." Green ramp is more than just playing 12 mana idiots. Yea
