You’re probably familiar with the Living End deck in Modern which uses various three-mana cascade cards and a decided lack of cheap spells to guarantee they can cascade into the powerful sorcery. The same trick has been exploited with Hypergenesis to great effect, which is why the card is banned in Modern. Ancestral Vision has followed suit in Legacy since the printing of Shardless Agent, albeit in a significantly less dedicated shell.
But there are two more cards in the cycle. We won’t talk about the disappointment of the family, Wheel of Fate, but the overlooked middle child, Restore Balance.
Like Living End, Restore Balance serves as a sweeper for your opponent’s creatures, but this can also disrupt their hand and most importantly their mana, since the deck sports plenty of Borderposts, a cycle of artifacts from Alara Reborn that function mostly as dual lands that enter the battlefield tapped but conveniently are artifacts in the type line and have a converted mana cost of three so as to not interfere with cascade.
Greater Gargadon completes the Restore Balance package, since once suspended it allows you to sacrifice what few lands you do have on the battlefield with Restore Balance on the stack, typically leaving your opponent with no resources and staring down an imminent 9/7 haste creature.
Despite being a much more powerful effect than Living End, Restore Balance hasn’t achieved nearly the same level of success, mostly due to inconsistency. Living End is chock-full of cycling creatures, giving it much-needed velocity to find a cascade spell early and often, but Restore Balance does not and can’t play cards like Serum Visions to fix the issue. As such, you’re more reliant on Restore Balance catching you up from lopsided positions, at which point the fact that it does not answer non-creature, non-land permanents is an issue.
Enter, Nahiri, the Harbinger. Nahiri conveniently answers these troublesome permanents while also giving the deck another angle of attack so it’s not completely dependent on Restore Balance and it can quickly close out the game by Balancing with a Nahiri already on the battlefield. Anguished Unmaking and Maelstrom Pulse join Nahiri as answers to troublesome permanents, while Goblin Dark-Dwellers gives you a way to re-buy Restore Balance in longer games.
Blood Moon and Ajani Vengeant aid in the land destruction angle this deck relies on, with Blood Moon being particularly good since it does not affect your Borderposts. Mardu Charm gives the deck some much-needed hand disruption without disrupting your cascades, with some added versatility to help against early creatures.
The result is an archetype that finally has enough tools at its disposal to form a complete maindeck with no weak links. Unfortunately, where this deck and others like it have typically struggled is the sideboard. The inability to play one- or two-mana spells precludes a huge portion of the format, and we see here various clunky hate cards like Leylines and Ricochet Trap. I’m surprised not to see any Phyrexian Unlifes for aggressive decks, but none of these cards are out of place, so perhaps they solve more pressing issues. Working on the sideboard is certainly the top priority for anyone looking to evolve this list into a true contender.
Creatures (11)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (16)
Spells (27)
