Amen.
The Roshambo paradigm has a true root. It is generally true that you will have an advantage in a game of magic if your deck is much faster or a little bit slower. The problem is when people expand that from generally true to true in a specifically tuned environment and attempt to definitively state that those speeds can only be accomplished in a singular fashion.
Maybe the only solution to the roshambo is running every shit one drop that has two power, but then again maybe you don't have to if you aren't running 15+ sources of artifact mana.
Rant incoming...
There's a 7000 page thread on MTGS where I futilely argued against the grain on the Roshambo thing. I agree that it isn't a fiction of anyone's imagination. It does exist. There are matchup advantages in this game and they do naturally manifest in the classic aggro > control > midrange > aggro. It's a function of the resource mechanics of this game. But at it's core, it is exactly what you said - an advantage if your deck is much faster or a little bit slower. Really, if you get down to the root of this, it's a pendulum that exists in every single game of magic that is played. One player is always the aggressor and the other player takes the role of the controller (even if they aren't playing a "control" deck). And the match ends up a balance between the aggressor trying to win the game by playing more cards quickly or by putting bigger threats out early versus the control player trying to stall long enough to win the game with unanswerable threats and/or pure CA. It isn't any more complicated than that. Half of every match is figuring out if you should be the aggressor or not. Sometimes it's obvious and other times it isn't. And the best games tend to have you shifting gears as opportunities present themselves.
I generally can talk for hours on this subject, but frankly that marathon thread on MTGS where I was banging my head against a wall for literally days has worn me out a bit. So I'll keep it relatively short (by my standards anyway).
I believe in constructed, you are never going to get away from Roshambo. Because decks are much more consistent and much more focused (because you can run 4 of each card). You can make super fast efficient decks and you can make really slow, ultra powerful control decks with insurmountable CA. And because of that, you will always end up with aggro > control > midrange > aggro. But in cube, you do not have to end up at this level of polarization for two very important reasons:
1. Cube is not constructed and unless you're going out of your way to create tons of redundancy and a draft environment that will produce constructed level consistency, it is impossible to make decks that function on that level. I don't even know why anyone would even want to do this honestly. IMO, constructed magic blows.
2. You can completely control the card pool in such a way that you can make it virtually impossible to draft the extreme types of decks that make Roshambo prevalent. My cube for example is missing a lot of oppressive control finishers. And that has a major impact on how well midrange does. It also allows slower aggro decks to flourish because they can still beat control while being able to run a 5 drop or two to help with the midrange matchup.
My perfect meta is one where the matchup is completely irrelevant, and the winner of every game would be the player that built the best deck (not best as in I'll play control since everyone is midrange - but more I made a really tight synergistic deck and I wrecked face with it) and who made the fewest play mistakes (which necessitates games actually having decisions to be made - a problem I find with un-interactive games where the only real decision that gets made is when the loser scoops). As there is luck involved in this game, that cannot ever truly be true. But I do think you can get close to a meta where each type of deck has a relatively even chance against any other type of deck. Obviously, some decks will have your number just because they play something you are vulnerable too (sweepers being kryptonite to token type strategies, etc.). Maybe this makes for a more homogenized meta (where control is less controlling and aggro is slower on average), but that's a compromise I'm good with personally.
My cube hasn't realized my perfect meta yet, and likely never will. But it's the heart of my design philosophy and what drives my decisions on what cards to run.
