Re: US:CD 8
I'll adress the points Chris makes (I'm wording this as a post) in the order he made them. I won't include the previous message because it's getting too long very quickly.
SGD: I think of SGD differently, and that's why I like it. SGD doesn't win through creature and auxilery damage; if that's all this deck did, it wouldn't be very good. It doesn't really have that many beatdown creatures. It wins through card economy, like most other decks. The tools it uses are Wilderbeast, which can give you a free effect when combined with either Wall, with Orangatang, or any Spike, with Cursed Scroll, with an opponent who can't use the Vineyard well, with land destruction sometimes, or with the spike dilema where you have a way to manipulate the spikes to deal with any block or attack. In addition, Weaver can deal with many decks on its own. As Seth says, it's a green control deck. Problem is, non-blue control decks tend to win by having extra cards followed by more cards than your opponent can deal with; the deck snowballs as you get one extra card per turn, then 2, then 3 and a scroll, etc. The U/G wood sage deck I posted a while ago is similar: it slowly gains more and more card drawing engines, until you mob him or get a Tradewind lock. In SGD's case, you get a Scroll lock or mob him. This prevents SGD from dealing with decks that don't care if you have a zillion cards, but this deck isn't dead against bloom at all with the right sideboard.
On Rath Cycle: The Living Death deck is green. Most of its mana is green, the majority of the cards are green. It uses the utility cards Tradewind Rider, Living Death, Recurring Nightmare and Lobotomy (along with weird uncastable cards, which really don't have a color for this purpose) to use your green creatures and Survival for extra effect. Against many decks, your gameplan is just finding the right green creatures. You'd have a really hard time calling this a black deck. You could call it a 5CG-type deck, with a primary off-color (black). The Awakening deck is more blue than green, yes, and it's built around one green card and 3 blue ones. But I see green as the 2nd color of Rath Cycle in terms of popularity, behind blue.
On "The Key to Magic": There are really two keys, card drawing and mana generation. It's not like blue is bad or anything. But you can win without drawing extra cards (not my style, but some people can). Without a good mana base, all is lost.
Earthcraft: You're right, it's still mainly a combo card. But it's not as weak as people think outside of combo decks. People will have fewer options and more basics now.
What to do with the mana: Again, to some extent, that's what support colors are for. Green wins you the game; the Tradwind or other card turns a Won Game into a Game you Won. And green has decent cards to cast, although most of them are just good fat creatures.
Green and the Orb/Armageddon: Winter Orb puts a damper on many plans, like Echo and Cursed Scroll. But compared to most decks, green can noramlly handle these quite well because of its creature-based mana. Even if the Orb isn't strong enough to play, dealing with it well is quite valuable.
Abundance is much better than Rowen. Sylvan/Rowen is 2 cards a turn, Abundance/Sylvan is 3 non-land (or land, if you want) cards a turn. That's a big differance. Rowen was just a little bit too weak to use; Abundance is starting to scare people in NY.
I didn't catch why the big green creatures won't be cast. Endless Wurm is big enough to compensate for the drawback, and there are the new come-back enchantments to fuel it. Argothian Wurm (for example, 2nd turn with Exploration) is huge. Citanul Centaurs are a 6/3 untargetable for 8 mana over 2 turns, and I think that's a good deal. Child of Gaia is a castable Verduan Force-level card.
The echo creatures are intersting, but probably not that amazing.
Over which color is the support color: I think that a color which takes up the majority of a deck is the main color. A MoMa deck that kills with a torch is definitely blue, even if it wins with red. That's an extreme example. Crazy torch, which is a Mirage/visions/weatherlight deck that generates 23 mana with green cards like Early Harvest and Llanowar Druid and wins with a Torch and Abeyance is green. They need a key non-green card to win, but so what? Often a tradewind deck will have 8 or so blue cards, or even less.
About Uktabi Orangatang. Forgot about it. OK, two better removal cards. Sorry.
The point about Verdigris is that it might be worse than the equivelent red and white cards, but it beats what blue and black have for artifacts. Being no. 3 isn't that bad.
What I meant by Sligh being a support for Cursed Scroll is that there's no other way for Sligh to gain card advantage anymore; it will just try to carry the Scroll and a mass of creatures to victory. The only good reason to play this deck anymore is that it can ride the Scroll to 20 damage.
Again, go green. A case can be made for blue and white as well, but green right now is better than red and at least even with black.