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"Cascade" combo deck discussion

www.mtggoldfish.com /archetype/standard-cascade-mid

A couple of times in the new Standard I've faced this deck that MTGGoldfish seems to be calling "Cascade". It can be hard to distinguish from the old Atraxa ramp decks at first, but [[Cemetery Desecrator]] seems to be one of the key indicators. An ideal game for this deck seems to go something like:

  1. Ramp and kill early threats.
  2. Cast [[Invasion of Alara]], which is guaranteed to find [[Bramble Familiar]].
  3. Cast the Fetch Quest side of Bramble Familiar, hoping to mill a Cemetery Desecrator and one of your several 7-mana cards.
  4. Have Desecrator exile said 7-drop and choose its first mode, immediately defeating the Invasion.
  5. Do all the bonkers stuff on the back side of the Invasion.

This doesn't win on the spot but it likely puts you in an insurmountable board position.

So is anybody playing this? How's it going for you? How resilient do you find the deck -- if step 3 above doesn't work out, what's Plan B?

On the other side of the table, how do you beat this? What are some good sideboard cards?

And just out of curiosity, where did this deck come from? Did some streamer popularize it?

The first game I played against this deck, it went off and got me good. I had to take a minute to read all the cards to understand what had happened. (A shame Arena doesn't have a text log like MTGO does.) I'm pleased, and only a little smug, to report that I sideboarded well and won games 2 and 3.

[[Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines]] seems to be good sideboard tech, since most of what this deck does relies on ETB effects. Most graveyard hate won't work against Fetch Quest, but underappreciated hate card [[Soulless Jailer]] might be the right golem for the job -- if you can keep it alive.

All things considered I think I'd rather face this than its predecessor Atraxa/Etali decks. Those are basically just "play a broken 7-drop and win", at least this one has interesting interactions between its cards.

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  • (I apologize on behalf of cardbot, we have an update still needing to deploy that should cause it to not crash on multiple cards)

    I saw AliEldrazi playing this on twitch not long ago and it looks really strong. Fun to play and watch, maybe a little boring after a while, but very strong and hard to deal with. I think Ali Aintrazi popularized it but it could have come elsewhere.

    All things considered I think I’d rather face this than its predecessor Atraxa/Etali decks.

    I agree, I think the Atraxa decks are really bad for the format too.

    I think there's not enough aggro in Standard to punish this deck, so it will run rampant for a little while. Other than mono red and maybe mono white, I don't see a ton of aggro at all. Not nearly as much as black/sheoldred, midrange, or control.

    • Thanks for the background info!

      I agree, I think the Atraxa decks are really bad for the format too.

      IMO there are three things that would historically be keeping the Atraxa decks honest that are not present in the current Standard.

      1. Aggro decks that can win faster. Aggro has mostly been hated out of the format by [[Sheoldred, The Apocalypse]], which if you ask me should have been included in the recent bans. I say this as somebody who is stubbornly trying to make three or four different aggro decks work. Sheoldred is the card that most consistently foils my plans. You need dedicated hate cards to fight her and you need to have them right away.
      2. Land destruction. Wizards basically doesn't print this anymore and I understand why, but they should at least print enough of it to keep someone off Atraxa mana.
      3. Color-fixing should be difficult. Right now in Standard we have triomes plus two or three high-quality rare duals for every color pair, which I think is an unusual amount of non-spell fixing.

      All of this combines to make a format where casting a seven-mana, four-color spell on turn 5 is totally routine and something you can expect to do regularly, which I don't think is healthy.