Ethersworn Sphinx

The engine here is a mismatch between what you pay and what cascade reads. Affinity for artifacts shaves the printed nine-mana cost by one for each artifact you control, so in a dense shell this resolves for a fraction of that price. Cascade is a triggered ability, not a discount: when you cast the spell, it fires off the printed mana value of nine and lets you cast the first cheaper nonland hit for free. Nothing about the affinity discount touches the number cascade sees. That gap is the payoff. You spend two or three mana to deploy this, and cascade cashes in a mana value of nine, high enough to flip almost anything short of another nine-drop into play at no cost. It sidesteps the usual cascade tension (keep your curve low to cast the payoff early, but then whiff into chaff) by decoupling the cast cost from the value cascade counts. The 4/4 flying body is the tax you accept for the trick: with a thin artifact count, this is a nine-mana 4/4, exactly the dead card that price suggests, so the whole design leans on the deck actually delivering the discount. Affinity and cascade had each headlined their own era (affinity infamous enough to draw a ban wave, cascade a spell-chaining staple ever since); stacking them turns the discount into a fixed cascade of nine.