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.