Cultivate

The reason green ramp settled on this template and not the older one: card advantage built into the ramp. The earlier model, Rampant Growth, traded a card to accelerate, a one-for-one that left you a card lighter while you got ahead on mana. This adds a second basic to hand, so the spell pays for itself in raw count: you spend a card, you get a land in play and a land in hand, net even on cards and ahead on mana. That changes what kind of deck wants it. A ramp deck running this is not just accelerating, it is thinning its draws of future lands while smoothing color, since the two basics can be different types. The limits are doing real work in return: basics only, one enters tapped, and a sorcery-speed lock that means it cannot ambush a turn or fix mana in response to a counterspell. Those constraints are what keep a card-neutral ramp spell from being oppressive. It became the load-bearing midrange ramp piece for exactly that reason, the spell that lets a green deck hit its expensive payoff a turn early without falling behind on resources to do it. Kodama's Reach does the same job with a slightly different shuffle clause, and the two have been functional siblings ever since; which one a deck runs has more to do with availability than effect.