Suspend is a very powerful card mechanic in the magic the gathering game but one of its major flaws is that your opponent knows exactly what is going to happen and when. With this advantage he can prepare. This becomes even more problematic when it is a creature and your opponent can hold removal in order to specifically use against it, but this becomes less problematic when your opponent can't be entirely certain when it will come into play.

Nihilith is a rare horror from the Future sight expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs two black and four colorless mana if you want to play it in the traditional way, but the more likely way is to pay the one black and one colorless to suspend this card. It comes into play with 7 suspend counters on it meaning that if you do nothing it will be the 9th turn before this comes into play, also known as four turns after the game has ended and you have reshuffled Nihilith back into the deck.

Luckily wizards of the coast recognised this and gave it an ability to speed this up. This ability reads "Whenever a card is put into an opponent's graveyard from anywhere, if Nihilith is suspended, you may remove a time counter from Nihilith."

This works perfectly with black and black loves putting cards into the opponents graveyard and there are a number of very good ways to do this. The first is through creature removal. Every time you use a terror you speed up the creature a little, and if you play damnation you can speed it up by several turns.

The next way to put this out faster is through discard. Causing your opponent to discard two cards puts them into the graveyard and so this is a good addition to that type of deck.

The final and quickest though least likely to be used way is through decking cards. There are a number of blue and black cards that let you put as much as half of your opponent's deck into the graveyard at one time.

For this what you get is a 4/4 creature with fear. This is not an earth shattering creature but if your opponent can't kill it it or block it it will kill him making it a reasonable creature if not one that is great, but if you can put it into play on turn four or five it is really quite good.

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