Green may well deserve the title "the new blue" in standard where most decks are what I consider midrange affairs, the format is slower and less powerful and only really Anticipate exists in blue as a card quality spell. Standard is highly driven by creatures and these green cards are at their best when creatures are the main source of action you are looking for. The cube is a different story, all the older blue card quality cards are still in the format. Green may have jumped from having basically just Sylvan Library to having a decent spread of effects of this kind but it is still a third of what blue has at best. Further to that the blue stuff in cube is not fussy about card types. Blue card quality can provide quality regardless of your deck makeup while green card quality is a little more restricted in where you can play it. A classic example is the blue green infinite turn style deck where most of your action is instant or sorcery type. In such decks Sylvan Scrying is probably going to be better than any of these cards as all you will be getting is lands, and by that logic some kind of Rampant Growth likely better still. While these green card quality effects may not be great in certain combo and control cube decks it by no means makes them too narrow or too weak. The cards are very well suited to most green decks as the makeup of green is so creature heavy. There are some creature based combo decks which these will be pretty interesting additions to. Another reason these cards hold their own in cube despite being narrower than the blue alternatives they typically pack a little more punch for the mana. On a one or two mana card a little more punch goes a really long way!
Traverse was next up and it is really quite special. Lay of the Land was playable and Traverse scales quite significantly better! Most of the time just Lay of the Land early game is fine enough, you often only cast Demonic Tutor early game when you need to get a land as the tempo cost of spending two mana to do nothing is steep (obviously combo decks love to fire off a turn two Tutor but other decks not so much). In this role Traverse is far better than Demonic as it is half the cost! Late game you should be able to have delirium, otherwise you probably shouldn't play the Traverse. This is easy enough to do but is made a lot easier with sensible deck design. When you have delirium Traverse is one of the best tutors in the game. The cost is so minor and the range is very broad. Traverse has the best scaling of all the green card quality effects and that is typically the area in which they out perform the blue ones. Synergy and scaling.
Vessel of Nascency also arrived on the scene at the same time as Traverse. I overlooked the card somewhat based on the lack of success of Seek the Wilds. Given the results of PT Eldritch Moon however I think I need to give this card another go. Vessel does a lot more things than Seek the Wilds and indeed some more than Impulse. My early dismissal came from the feeling that three mana is too much to pay for card quality. This is an assumption brought over from blue card quality and may well not be the case. Three is a lot but green can likely stomach it best. Further to this the card is split into a one mana sorcery speed play and a two mana instant ability. Some times this will make it easier to use than Seek the Wilds. The range on Vessel is also huge, hitting every card type excepts instants and sorceries (and tribal kind of). Vessel is an enchantment itself which can contribute to delirium or devotion or do something extra synergic that was not the main function of the card. Lastly it puts things in the bin which is generally pretty helpful for a lot of green synergies including many other cards talked about today. While certainly the clunkiest the Vessel is the most powerful baseline and has the most it can potentially offer synergy wise.
Grapple with the Past is the most recent addition and probably the most powerful. It actually has a lot of similarities to Evolution Charm that I hadn't quite realised. Grapple is more direct and more powerful but Evolution Charm isn't a bad card by any means and may merit a little testing revisit. Grapple is the green Anticipate combined with a bit of Regrowth and a bit of Strategic Planning. It scales better late game and scales better with any graveyard synergies. It is pretty much Anticipate as your first play for finding you action or land drops and it is pretty much regrowth late game recurring you a juicy threat. Solid all round and even stronger when used with other cards on this list like Gather the Pack and Traverse the Ulvenwald.
Blue has more rounded card quality, it still has the premium effects and it still has the most. Green however has become the colour with the best card quality if lands and creatures are all you care about. Further to this the green card quality offers some of the best graveyard synergies too. Green has been the strongest colour in the midrange cubes for a little while and these cards all coming along together have only pushed green further ahead in cube and hands down the best colour in standard. Blue is still the most "powerful" cube colour but green decks do more winning and should continue in that trend. The real question is whether this surge in green power will allow it to topple red as the knig of cube!
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