Yay Cascading Is The Best

By River

Cover image board – http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=1j9Gti0 

Introduction

Why Cascade?

• Cascading increases your expected combos from skyfall. Every time orbs fall down, they have a chance to match with both each other and with the orbs still left on your board. So if you’re cascading, you increase the number of permutations of those orbs that occur, which increases the chances that there will be a 3-match among them. (Rest of this explanation is left as an exercise to the reader)
• Cascading lets you make shorter move paths. If you’re able to cascade orbs in a variety of ways, you can let orbs stay closer to their starting position, thus taking a lot less time to move.
• Cascading is sometimes required when matching FUAs if you want to maximize combo count.
• Cascading allows you to activate lead skill when your leaders are bound, or a sub’s damage when that sub is bound, when row clearing. If you cascade combos after a row clear, those cascaded matches will count towards your lead skill. Anything matched beforehand won’t (though total combo count includes all matches, both before and after, for combo-based leads).
• Cascading lets you match through tape without resist. Tape can make boards difficult to match, but usually not impossible – provided you cascade.
• Cascading looks cool! Yeah this is the only reason that matters.
• Also it’s fun! Ok I guess this too.

What to expect from this guide

I will give you a series of guided exercises to practice. And by practice, I mean seriously, you will spend hours/weeks/months building up skill. And you will never think you are good enough, but it’s ok it’s about the journey or something. Do NOT expect to read this and be like wow, yay, I can cascade now! Instead expect to read this and be like holy shit what have I gotten myself into and then spend a couple weeks with daily practice and then you should be able to do some of the patterns at least 10% of the time lol. GLHF!

Tl;dr this guide is how to learn to cascade, and not just how to cascade.

Also, if you do actually go through the entire process outlined here & get really good at cascading, let me know! I’d love to hear what you did exactly and what suggestions you have for improvements – or same thing if you spend a ton of time practicing via these methods but get stuck.

What is an exercise?

Generally I try to associate one exercise to a concept. So there will be some concept to learn (how to find an L-cascade) and you will then go into EC (Endless) easiest difficulty and every single floor of your run you will apply this concept, regardless of how unnatural it seems in the board. The reason for this is that at the start it will literally NEVER seem reasonable. So you might fail a lot, but you will also be forced to see patterns that actually were always there but you didn’t realize. You should repeat the exercise until you have at least about 85% success with it. I wouldn’t expect 100% success from anything because then you will never get past any hurdle, but you should feel like you totally understand the concept and can “almost always” apply it.

There are a couple options that you can do for each exercise.

• Move time

• Unlimited time to move (obviously it’s not literally unlimited move, but run Nyx x Nyx and it basically is)
• Regular time to move (whatever your team is)
• Limited time to move (base 5s, or even a 4s lead, or maybe just -2-3 te from what you’re used to) – see if you can push your limits
• Thinking time
  • Infinite time to think – move once you’ve planned everything
  • Limited time to think – try to move really quickly but it doesn’t have to be literally instant
  • No time to think – you have to be holding an orb already when the next screen pops up, and start moving immediately
• Requirements of application of concept
  • Absolutely 100% required to apply – doesn’t matter how bad the board seems
  • Apply when possible – it’s just normal matching, but incorporate this when you can
  • Toggle: left-only, right-only, or either side of the board to pick your halfboard is okay. If you play on a phone with your finger, I recommend starting left-side only, but if you play on a tablet at all, or phone with a stylus, you should be able to start on either side and go in either direction. Reason for this is that it’s important to see what you have already matched, and going right-to-left with your finger on a phone is pretty hard to do.

So this said, here are some options. I recommend 5 EC runs per concept (yes, that’s 250 times you are applying it).

• All 5 runs unlimited everything, 100% requirement
• 2x unlimited both, then 1 unlimited thinking, regular move, then 1 no thinking infinite move, then 1 limited thinking, regular move – all 100% requirement, you will probably fail the last run a bunch
• All 5 runs regular move, and reduce thinking time as you go, you can drop the 100% requirement

Or you can feel free to set up your own requirements, thinking about the above.

Notation

I use maximumjank’s notation since it’s pretty good & also I learned to cascade from playing with him. This is an image he made for his Anubis guide which you can find here. (It’s a good overview of what you want to do and why, and if you like to self-teach that’s all you need, but if you want more guidance you might get lost cos it doesn’t really go over the ‘how’ part).

In this diagram, only pay attention to the Red and Dark orbs, also I won’t really talk about the prime versions of the cascades (bottom row) so ignore those if you want. But I will extensively use the notation in the first row, so make sure you understand it.

Halfboards: What & Why

A “halfboard” is a 3×5 slice of the board (we’re assuming 6×5 not 7×6), 3 across and 5 tall. So you can fit 5 combos into this area. This is the only type of cascade I’m going to cover in this guide, not random horizontal cascades. So actually technically the cover image of this guide doesn’t count.

Why only halfboards?

• It’s a much cleaner way to cascade than random horizontal cascades
• They tend to be more skyfall-safe because there aren’t as many random board-clear steps, and when they are, (usually) they’re relatively well protected, unlike horizontal cascades
• With horizontal cascades you will almost always miss a combo or 2, with halfboards you can bf (brute force) the other half of the board np and miss nothing
• While you can learn halfboards by going through a series of exercises, horizontal cascades are more about just having an intuition, there’s a lot less of fixed patterns to memorize and always apply the same thing – so halfboards can give you a general intuition of cascading in general that you can apply to horizontal cascades more than the other way around
• I don’t do horizontal cascades (usually) so I can’t really help with them anyway

Exercise Set 1: Single Clear Step

1A: L Cascade

The first thing we will do is make a single L-cascade.

Make this pattern every single board. Here are options for filling out the halfboard (the rest will be two verticals):

Which option you pick to finish doesn’t matter, do anything you like.

How do you pick the orbs?

Yes this is the important question. Sometimes it will be super obvious what orbs to pick. Sometimes, less so. Often you will want to pick up the bottom-left corner orb so you can move it up or right to place another orb directly into the corner to be part of the 3-match. Usually you want to identify pink as a color that has one orb near the top of the halfboard and two near the bottom, even if those two near the bottom aren’t exactly in position already.

Make sure you don’t accidentally blob, also remember that if the first vertical after the cascade is dark, it will blob with dark. If red and pick are the same color, then the first 2 options are fine, the 3rd is not.

1B: I or J Cascade

Now we’ll make a single I-cascade or J-cascade, your choice. In practice, you will probably almost never do this. But it will help you get used to the process of remembering what orbs you have to put where.

As above, how you fill in the rest of this half board is up to you.

When you’re matching this, you will want to look in the bottom row for a pattern like XYX or XXY, and pick those to start your cascade if feasible. If not, pick orbs similar to the case of the L cascade and figure something out.

1C: Double Cascades

These are still single-clear-step cascades, even though there’s more than one cascade – all cascaded orbs will match at the same time.

This exercise is a bit more fluid than the first two, since now you have a good idea of what a cascade looks like, and so it’s time to start looking for more practical patterns. Make a left half-board (or right, if you want) that has two of the cascades shown above. The third option in 1(A) already fits this pattern. Here are some example boards:

When you’re matching these, count the orbs on or near this side of the board. Make sure you are planning cascades with colors that you have enough orbs in.

Exercise Set 2: TL & Variations

2A: TL Cascade

So in this exercise, literally every board needs to be matched with this exact setup. It’s ok if red and heart are the same color, but obviously light can’t match either of those colors. Here are some patterns you may want to look for when setting these up, but you can also find your own patterns.

Not all of these are the ideal way to set up the boards, but that’s not the point of the exercise. I just pressed random in Dawnglare a bunch until I got boards I could easily draw on.

Pick up heart, then green will be your horizontal, with red over light. Finish red & light before finishing green	Pick up dark, and then pull blue as the vertical, heart as the horizontal, and place the light from the top row in the corner, not the one from the left column. This would actually be a good 3-step with the left heart in the top row.	WEW I swear this was a random DG board. If this cascade isn’t laughably obvious to you, you need to practice a lot still. Just remember to not blob light at the end 🙂 In practice I might match dark earlier, something like this http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=KBhC4N1
Pick up green, average the hearts into 2nd row, then pull green vertically and push dark on top of the greens as you’re doing that	Pick up light, move up, and pull green into the 2nd row then dark over blue. Very standard setup.	Pick up blue, put heart in the bottom row then green horizontal and red over green.

Diagonals vs Unraveling & Redoing

Consider this board. How should we put Dark into the corner? There’s 2 options. The first is to diagonal. The second is to do this: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=Uuuy0K1. Which one should you do? Honestly it’s your choice. Do the first only if you feel super confident diagonaling. I usually unravel.

That said, generally it’s better to avoid this situation in the first place by placing the top orb adjacent to the rest of the “combo.” Watch: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=Mj5yWv1 See how I go out of my way to position heart next to red before pulling red into position? This saves the need to diagonal or undo.

2B: JTL & ITL

In this exercise we’ll be making cascades like one of the following:

Woah, isn’t this complicated? Well…not really anymore tbh. We’ve figured out how to do TL boards, and now all we’re doing is kicking some of the 2nd-row orbs up into the top row, above a vertical.

TL cascades are 100% skyfall safe for total number of combos. JTL & ITL are NOT. They are MOSTLY safe, but not completely!!

It is definitely possible that skyfall will ruin your combo if you do this, for example in the above boards if 2 hearts fall consecutively on top of the lights as the lights are matching, the red orbs WILL NOT MATCH. So you should only do this if it’s a case where:

• You are required to do this cascade to get any match at all (ribbon etc)
• You aren’t at a huge risk if you lose a combo, but you want extra matches from skyfall
• You are required to get extra skyfall matches to clear the stage (e.g. Oichi in A4)
• You don’t care about this problem and want to show off (usually this)

Also note that if light and red are the same color in this setup, it becomes REALLY UNSAFE. So don’t do that.

So, that said, how do you find these???

Let’s look at this board. http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=b0foEo0 

This is a perfect candidate for a JTL or ITL cascade. Can you find the starting point? The obvious answer might seem to be the dark in the first column, but actually the dark in the second column is a much better option. Watch: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=KFsURf1 

Can you see how obvious the cascade is from this board?

Here is the completion of the cascade: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=R9Lfm91 

Which brings us to here:

So, why was this cascade obvious?

Well, a couple things. First, look at the left-right distribution of orbs. In the left halfboard, there are 3 light, 3 blue, 3 heart. And there’s 2 dark and 1 red exactly 1 square away from the halfboard, as well as green 2 squares away. So that means there’s a good left-right distribution, making it a good candidate for some kind of halfboard. Why this specific one? Well first, I don’t like the idea of putting dark in the 2nd row because of the bottom-row placement of the 3rd dark orb (though it could certainly work – http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=VD12O41 – just remember to unblob pink!). Also, at a first glance red seems kinda far to bring into the corner (though actually this is a pretty nice setup too – http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=rSlfO81). Light is pretty obviously a good candidate for the vertical, so let’s try red in 2nd row and since we certainly don’t want to drag the top one down just let it fall and add a 3rd step.

This is generally the TLDR of how to recognize times that it’s appropriate to have 3-step cascades – there’s a nice 2-step, except one orb that should be in the 2nd row is actually near the top of the board, so just put it over a vertical and add another cascade step, ez.

Exercise Set 3: Whatever You Want!

Yay time to practice whatever you feel like. Here is the ^halfboards command from Miru Bot: https://imgur.com/a/T6pfJ 

I recommend learning ITL, which looks like this:

Often you will find this very easy to set up in the bottom 2 rows, and patterns like this are often hard to unravel into another cascade setup.

In addition to ITL, I’d pick 3-4 other halfboards and practice them individually. From that point, you should be pretty good at recognizing halfboards in their general cases and applying them in your gameplay!