As you can see, green ramp is an immensely deep and diverse deck in how you can build it in cube. Having Ishkanah and Emrakul in your list, especially with a tutor for either, greatly reduces the pressure on your Craterhoof Behemoth as the win condition which in turn reduces the pressure on you to maintain a high creature count. Ishkanah is immensely powerful even with no access to black mana and these kinds of deck have sufficient mana production to go all the way up to Emrakul, the Promised End. Traverse the Ulvenwald is a lovely card in this list finding all the things you want it too once you have delrium. Perhaps you can run both the 4 mana 2/2s!? If not I would at least like to find some room for Explore.Īnother mini theme you can run that I did not in this list is a delirium one. Getting a load of land clogging up your hand that you can't put to use is annoying and with a decent amount of draw and not all that much pulling lands out of the deck I can see that happening from time to time. I like most of the things about it but it does make me want Explore effects more.
It is basically a direct replacement for Oracle of Mul Daya that you can do in this build. I ran an Eidolon of Blossoms as a source of card advantage. This deck doesn't need the Cradle as much as other ramp versions as it has more things that generate multiple mana and is more focused on safety and consistency. Low land hands with Cradle can often need throwing back where you could have kept if it were a forest. While it is great it comes with two vulnerabilities, doing nothing until you have dorks and doing nothing again when your dorks get killed. I didn't even bother running Cradle in this list. While it is space efficient it is a little rougher when you come up against lots of removal and mill effects.
It can get away with less threats overall using only the premium ones it needs in combination with the dig and tutors. It is threat light compared to my more classic versions of ramp green but this list makes up for that with more tutor, dig and recursion effects than I normally run. The list I have given below is not super refined or tested, it is an example list showing the various cards and ratios you want to be looking at when doing this sort of thing in cube. You also lose some general utility in protecting and threatening planeswalkers. It is not all upside, by using the enchantment ramp over creatures you lose some consistency on your Overrun kills via Garruk and Craterhoof which are your main routes to victory. The extra burst it provides does not offset the power per card cost in cube. The main difference is that I am not running Burning Tree Emissary in this list, you don't have the consistency in cube to merit wasting a card on a 2/2.
The modern build has a bit more reliance on tutors and a few less old broken cards it can use. The modern shell of this deck is very similar to most incarnations of green ramp decks in the cube. That is basically the premise of the deck, enchantment ramp as the core combining with Nykthos to empower delirium and with untap effects to double up on ramp earlier in the game. Those are the main two certainly but you can make use of nice synergies such as Enchantress effects or delirium more easily with so many extra enchantments in your list. It has also greatly increased the power of Arbor Elf and Garruk Wildspeaker! There are a lot more advantages to using enchantment ramp beyond safety and abuse with untap effects. I added enchantment ramp to the cube a while back and it has helped maintain a bursty ramp style of deck in green that isn't vulnerable to burn and mass removal in the same way as those leaning on Gaea's Cradle and creature ramp. Apparently this sort of deck is getting a lot of traction in modern at the moment which I find quite interesting as it has been an increasingly popular direction to go in cube.