(Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder | Art by Karl Kopinski)

Please Stick to the Low-CMC Spells That You're Used To...

Welcome to Too-Specific Top 10, where if there isn’t a category to rank our pet card at the top of, we’ll just make one up! (Did you know that Throes of Chaos is the only non-creature, non-land card with only two words of rules text?)

There are only four cards which Cascade for less than four mana, three of which are out of Alara Reborn and are rather underwhelming, along with Shardless Agent, a specific print out of Planechase 2012 that was pushed a little harder outside of the Standard environment.

Outside of that, every card printed with Cascade on it costs four or more mana. Even among the new Commander Legends cards that care about Cascade, Averna, the Chaos Bloom costs less than four, but doesn't actually Cascade, and Imoti, Celebrant of Bounty is five mana, itself, while giving your spells that cost six or more Cascade.

This means that, much like the old Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder and Maelstrom Wanderer Cascade decks, the new commanders are still very open to combo lines where you can design what cards you Cascade into through deck construction. Taking a moment to peruse EDHREC's Combo page for Temur options, there are over 100 various infinite mana, damage, or life combos involving only cards that cost under three mana.

Are most of those the same cards more or less doing similar things with different various Walking Atlas effects? Absolutely. The point is, however, that you can easily construct a deck that grabs a piece of your combo every single time you Cascade, simply by filling the rest of the deck that isn't Cascade cards or combo pieces with spells that cost a lot of mana.

Just because spells have a high converted mana cost doesn't mean they'll be difficult to cast, however.

Top 10 Cascade "Misses"

There are more mechanics in Magic: The Gathering than you can count on your fingers that can ultimately result in spells costing less than their overall converted mana cost, meaning that there are hundreds of cards that technically cost a lot of mana but can be cast for a lot less. Ultimately, this means that you can rather easily put together a deck comprised of nothing but these "expensive" spells, allowing you to be a degenerate combo junkie at will!

But what are the most popular cards that technically cost more? Well, let's take a look at our criteria and find out!

Criteria: Cards with a converted mana cost greater than three that you can cast for at least three less than their converted mana cost. As is tradition, all results are ordered by EDHREC score.

This leaves out a couple corner cases like Adventure and Cycling that you may be interested in for a Cascade combo build, but ultimately will get you more or less where you need to be to avoid running into your "irrelevant" spells that do pesky things like have power and toughness, draw cards, or remove threats as opposed to outright just winning the game.