from mtg salvation squandered resources budget legacy article

Key Interactions-Any Cascade card + Restore Balance Any Sac Land + Restore Balance Restore Balance + Nihilith

As my readership knows, cascade ability + suspend ability = awesomeness. Because suspend cards have no cost, a cascade card will always cast it, and there is no suspend-time wait. Sure cuts out the "waiting" factor so many of us combo players aren't particularly fond of. This interaction is crucial in some powerful combo decks like Hypergenesis and Living End. This deck works similarly, with one main difference: it relies on the combo between the Invasion sac lands (e.g. Tinder Farm) and the card Restore Balance.

The deck is pretty simple to play on the core level. Use up your first few turns to play your sac lands, preparing a sufficient amount of mana for the main combo turn. After you are comfortably sure you can blow your opponent out with a Restore Balance, you sacrifice all of your lands for mana and then cast any cascade spell. Depending on the cost of your spell, you will cascade into other cascade spells. This creates a chain which eventually ends with all of their respective abilities on the stack while Restore Balance does its thing. Because you sacrificed all of your lands, and all of your creatures are cascade creatures--meaning you have none on the field yet--your opponent will be forced to sacrifice all of his lands and creatures, and possibly discard a few cards. After the bomb hits, all of your cascade spells will finish resolving, providing you with a few creatures hitting the field and a few spells hitting your opponent.

Nihilith is your go-to win-con. The main idea is to suspend him as soon as possible and force him out by casting a Restore Balance, whose sacrifice affect speeds his suspend clock. Once Restore Balance clears your foe's field, you should be able to ride him--and whomever was cascaded onto the field--to victory... before your opponent can defend himself. The synergy with this card and Restore Balance is pretty crazy. He will never cause you to miss a Restore Balance, but you can still suspend him whenever you want. He will also never affect how many creatures your opponent has to sac because he will never be on the field until after Restore Balance resolves. That is, unless you cast a second Restore Balance at some point in the game.

One of the major flaws of this deck is its lack of protection. Discard and well-timed counter-magic can really hurt, as your sac lands don't come back for you to try again. That being said, the deck runs a whopping 30 lands and you really only need one cascade spell to resolve in order to bruise your opponent well beyond recognition. In short, the deck is cheap and can really be a blowout.