Locations
I will be using Jesse Hatfield's list for this primer. For reference:
[cardlist]
[Spells]
1 Blue Sun's Zenith
1 Intuition
3 Cunning Wish
3 Meditate
3 Turnabout
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 High Tide
2 Preordain
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Ponder
4 Time Spiral
1 Mind Over Matter
4 Candelabra of Tawnos
[/Spells]
[Lands]
12 Island
2 Flooded Strand
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Polluted Delta
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
1 Brain Freeze
1 Echoing Truth
1 Meditate
1 Rebuild
1 Snap
1 Turnabout
1 Wipe Away
3 Pact of Negation
3 Repeal
[/Sideboard]
[/cardlist]
The first step toward learning any combo deck is to understand the goldfish. Every combo deck wants to goldfish, so we have to understand what that deck is trying to do. Looking at High Tide, we can see the basic situation is to resolve High Tide with three lands in play, followed by Turnabout, then Time Spiral. This is the earliest the deck can really do its thing. However, this is also risky, and High Tide generally goes off with four lands in play. Let's take a look at a typical High Tide draw (a goldfish):
Opening hand: High Tide, Brainstorm, Preordain, Force of Will, Mind Over Matter, two Islands
T1: Island, Preordain into Intuition and Merchant Scroll. Put Merchant Scroll on bottom and draw Intuition.
T2: Draw Ponder. Play Island and Ponder, see High Tide, Cunning Wish, Meditate. Shuffle and draw Polluted Delta (bingo!). Play Brainstorm at the end of opponent's turn, draw Merchant Scroll, Meditate, and Cunning Wish, put back Mind Over Matter and Meditate.
T3: Draw Meditate. Here the High Tide player is in an interesting position. Not having found a Time Spiral or a fourth land, there is no guarantee that he can go off from the Meditate. Intuition will guarantee that he finds the Time Spiral he needs, however, and Merchant Scroll will allow him to cast it off Turnabout. Even so, the lack of land is going to be a problem. High Tide passes and chooses to cast Intuition for Time Spiral (after cracking Delta) at the end of its opponent's turn.
T4: Draw Island. Time Spiral gets lucky and peels the Island. If it didn't, it would just cast Meditate EOT and prepare to go off on turn five. As it is, we can make an attempt on turn four. Here is the combo sequence:
Play High Tide. Tap Island to play Merchant Scroll for Turnabout. Play Turnabout and Time Spiral, with 
floating. Draw two Brainstorms, Cunning Wish, Candelabra, two Meditates, Polluted Delta. Use to cast Brainstorm, draw Candelabra, two Islands, put back two lands. Use floating to play Candelabra, tap Islands to activate Candelabra, untapping and floating 4. Play a second Candelabra and repeat, 
floating.
There are two possible lines of play here off Cunning Wish. Cunning Wish ? Intuition → Time Spiral ends up with 3 floating and a new hand. Cunning Wish → Turnabout allows us to untap our Candelabras and end up with 8 floating, enabling us to cast both Meditates and draw eight cards, potentially finding us a Time Spiral with even more mana floating. We know the top two cards are lands, but that still lets us see six more cards. Brainstorm allows us to see three cards deeper than that, so we see nine new cards. If there is a Time Spiral in those, we are in an equivalent position to simply Wishing for Intuition and getting Time Spiral. From this, we should conclude that Cunning Wish → Turnabout is likely superior to simply getting Intuition.
However, what about casting Meditate now? Right now, we have 15 mana available to us, and Cunning Wish → Turnabout requires at most 11 to get started (7 for the spells, 4 more to activate the first Candelabra). This means we have 4 extra mana, which is conveniently enough to cast Meditate and High Tide. Is there a reason to? We know two of the draws will be lands. What about the other two? Well, if there is a Time Spiral or Turnabout, it is likely irrelevant whether we Meditate now or later, but what if there is a High Tide, or both cards are blank? Let's look at all four possibilities.
Meditate first, 2 blanks: 12 mana available after Meditate. If we go for Cunning Wish → Turnabout lets us untap with 13 mana. It's interesting to note that if our opponent has Spell Pierce, we have to untap lands to get to 11, as artifacts only get us to 10.
Wish first, 2 blanks: 15 mana available, goes to 16 when we Turnabout. If we spend the mana on Meditate, we have 13 left, so we have the same amount of mana as Meditating first, which makes sense.
Meditate first, draw High Tide: We'll have floating after the Meditate, then cast High Tide with one of those . We will then tap our lands for 12 (15 floating), and play Cunning Wish into Turnabout to reuse our Candelabras. This will result in 24 mana.
Wish first, draw High Tide: If we cast Meditate before Turnabout this will result in 28 mana (7 floating now, − 3 for Wish, − 3 for Meditate, − 1 for High Tide drawn; tap for 12, cast Turnabout on artifacts, untap with 8 floating, use 4 of it to activate Candelabra, tapping for 12 more to go to 16 floating, untap for 4 to go to 12, tap for 12 more to go to 24 floating).
So, it makes no difference. Thus, I believe in fetching Turnabout (since we know we are doing this anyway), then Meditating for information. The Meditate sees the two lands we put back, along with a pair of Turnabouts. We spend 4 mana on one Turnabout to untap our Candelabras, then use one of the Candelabras to untap our lands, leaving floating. Use the floating and tap one land to cast Meditate, which draws two Time Spirals, Meditate, and Island.
From here, the rest of the turn is academic. Candelabra generates 2 more mana and we use our pair of Turnabouts to get up to 18. Time Spiral is cast with 12 floating. The new 7 is two Forces, Ponder, Preordain, Time Spiral, High Tide, Brainstorm. Cast High Tide and Ponder, which sees two lands and Candelabra. Draw the Candelabra. Use Preordain to ship the two lands to the bottom, drawing Turnabout, then cast Brainstorm, drawing Island, Delta, High Tide. Put back the two lands and cast the High Tide. Cast Candelabra, then tap lands for 16 and activate Candelabra and retap lands, ending up with 34 mana floating. Use Turnabout on artifact and get up to 66 mana. Cast Time Spiral with 60 floating. The new hand is Meditate, High Tide, Ponder, Time Spiral, two lands, and Blue Sun's Zenith, so the game is over.
This draw demonstrates the basic principle of the High Tide combo: a self-feeding spiral between mana and cards, eventually ending in a giant Blue Sun's Zenith. Note how the relationship between mana and card draw went both ways. Mana was used to feed the draw engine, and the draw engine was used to feed the mana engine. You'll also note that at no time after the initial Time Spiral was this draw ever vulnerable to Spell Pierce. This is not atypical. Spell Pierce, while decent against High Tide, very quickly becomes dead. While you may have some opportunity to use it after the first Time Spiral, you will almost certainly only get one chance. In this case, if the opportunity showed up, it would have been on the first Turnabout that was fetched by Cunning Wish.
Now, I said that High Tide has trouble going off on three lands, and I will demonstrate why. First, you require an additional spell. You need a Turnabout in addition to High Tide and Time Spiral. Even if you pull that off, you will enter your new Time Spiral with 0 mana floating, which is bad in and of itself, since if you draw a High Tide, you must tap an Island to cast it. Here's a sample of what happens if you are successful at going off with three lands, assuming High Tide and Time Spiral have been cast.
Seven cards: Force, Turnabout, Mind Over Matter, Ponder, Merchant Scroll, High Tide, Candelabra
This is an unusually strong seven-card hand, as it contains no land and the singleton Mind Over Matter.
The line: Cast High Tide and Candelabra, use Candelabra to untap lands (3 floating). Tap an Island to cast Mind Over Matter. Cast Merchant Scroll for Intuition (4 floating), and pitch Ponder to untap Candelabra and reuse it (10 floating). Cast Intuition for Time Spiral and play it with 1 mana floating. Note that while we had an unusually strong seven post three-land Time Spiral, this draw is still stopped by a Force and a Spell Pierce. If the Time Spiral resolves, High Tide will "get there" in this situation because the Mind Over Matter means the deck effectively has no mana restrictions.
Here is an example of what normally happens:
Seven cards: Merchant Scroll, Intuition, Turnabout, Cunning Wish, three Islands
This is a much more typical hand. The line of play here is to Merchant Scroll for High Tide and cast it and Turnabout, untapping your lands. This leaves you with 9 mana, so the play is to Intuition for Time Spiral and cast it. Note that a solitary Spell Pierce, or even Daze, stops the combo at this point. Assuming Time Spiral resolves, High Tide draws two Turnabouts, Force, Brainstorm, Merchant Scroll, Intuition, Island. Awkwardly, since High Tide has already cast two Time Spirals, Intuition for Time Spiral is no longer an option. Merchant Scroll probably has to go find Meditate at this point. Let's see what happens.
High Tide obviously casts Brainstorm first, trying to dig. Luckily, it draws High Tide, Cunning Wish, and Island, putting back both lands. It then casts High Tide with one of the 2 mana floating, and then casts both Turnabouts, getting to 25 mana floating. Merchant Scroll for Meditate draws High Tide into Cunning Wish, two Brainstorms, and Island. At this point, Intuition for Force of Will and Cunning Wish for Brain Freeze gets there with a bunch of counter backup.
What is important to note is the much greater vulnerability for the High Tide deck after the first Time Spiral resolves. High Tide had exactly enough mana and cards to go off, so even a simple Daze or Vendilion Clique would have ended the combo.
If you've been paying attention and reading these draws carefully, you'll have picked up on one of High Tide's major vulnerabilities—Turnabout. I'll go into more detail about this in a bit.
Disrupting High Tide
Before we get into actually disrupting High Tide, there is something you have to know. When playing against High Tide, you have to present a reasonable clock. Because High Tide requires so little to go off (just two cards, one of which your opponent can hide on top of his library with Ponder/Preordain/Brainstorm), it is absolutely imperative that you kill High Tide quickly. Dawdle too much, and you will just get combed out, as High Tide will often simply outlast your disruption.
This is one of the major strengths of the deck—the speed at which it can recover from disruption. Because the combo involves a draw-seven, High Tide is very capable of getting its hand torn apart and still comboing off on the next turn. This is the main difference between High Tide and various flavors of Tendrils combo. High Tide doesn't require a high volume of cards to get started, and thus you can never assume that you have a couple turns to do your thing. Actively trying to kill the High Tide player is em>always of the utmost importance. Remember, if your High Tide opponent is holding a Time Spiral or a High Tide, or even a lowly Brainstorm, you are potentially just one top-deck away from ¬losing the game.
Now, let's move on to talking about disrupting the deck. From our draws, you can see that High Tide is typically not stoppable after the second Time Spiral resolves, so we'll focus on cards that can interact before then. High Tide itself essentially has four types of cards—mana, card draw, protection, and redundant, less important stuff. Let's take a look these categories, with cards listed in order of importance within that category.
Mana – High Tide, Turnabout, Candelabra of Tawnos, Time Spiral
Card Draw – Time Spiral, Meditate
Protection – Force of Will, Brainstorm (only against discard)
Redundant, Less Important Stuff – everything else (insofar as they have to work with all their other cards to find the combo pieces)
This is your "hit list" for High Tide. A note on Mind Over Matter—usually, attacking this card is not profitable, as if High Tide is in the situation to cast this card, they are probably already there. The reason it is in the deck is because it really does generate a ton of mana. Two of the enemies are obvious—Time Spiral and High Tide. The rest may not be so obvious if you have never played the deck before. Now, we'll return back to the principle action of High Tide—to generate a self-inflating loop between mana and cards.
So, how do we stop this from happening? The answer is simple—bottleneck High Tide at one of these resources. By looking at the list, you might think that the best place to do this is the "cards" resource, as there are a maximum of eight copies of Meditate/Time Spiral in their deck, however, this isn't always the case. The reason High Tide runs so many mana sources is because early in the combo, the constraining resource is always mana. Using your best judgment is important, as always, but attacking mana sources like Turnabout can be very effective.
Tier 1 Disruption:
Tier 1.5 Disruption:
Tier 2 Disruption:
Other potentially relevant cards:
Leyline of the Void/Tormod's Crypt/Relic of Progenitus/Nihil Spellbomb
Note: I would only bother bringing these cards in for cards that do absolutely nothing (like creature removal). The graveyard hate is potentially relevant because High Tide revolves so much around recurring cards with Time Spiral, thus, catching a few pieces in their graveyard (especially if you've managed some other disruption as well) can potentially make life more difficult for them. It's not even close to a reliable plan, but if you have a bunch of do-nothings to board out, those are some extra options for cards that at least have a very minor impact.
Let's talk about these various pieces of disruption. We'll work our way up from the worst to the best pieces. Inquisition of Kozilek and Hymn to Tourach are worse than their other discardy brethren because they will often miss critical pieces. Note that of the three most critical cards in the deck—Time Spiral, High Tide, Turnabout—Inquisition misses two of them. Spell Pierce is very weird. It is effectively a Tier 1 disruption spell if your opponent has not cast Time Spiral, but is very much worse after that. The reason I have it at Tier 2 is because the discard spells are a tad stronger pre–Time Spiral than Spell Pierce, since they allow you to disrupt High Tide proactively while providing you with valuable information.
As for the hate bears and enchantments, they all largely do the same thing, which is force the High Tide player to bounce them before going off. This will almost certainly happen off Merchant Scroll or Cunning Wish, so look for those two cards as a signal your permanent is about to get bounced.
Moving on to the slightly better disruption, we have the weakest of the bunch—Meddling Mage. The reason Meddling Mage is better than most other hate bears is because successive copies of Meddling Mage are actually good. The first one names High Tide, and then you begin to name various bounce spells or ways of finding bounce spells. Echoing Truth is going to be the biggest bounce spell enemy, since any other situation requires them to have two bounce spells to go off. This makes Pikula more troublesome than other hate bears.
Choke should be obvious (High Tide is mono-Islands after all), and it is important to remember that High Tide needs at minimum three untapped lands to go off. With only eighteen lands in the deck, Choke can be a serious problem indeed.
The Blue spells are there because they are effective, but expensive. They do, however, have the added benefit of being Blue, which means High Tide will help you cast them. VClique is basically another discard spell, only with the added bonus of being a clock, and Counterspell is Counterspell; I'm sure you can figure out how to use them.
The major thing I want to talk about here is the 1-mana discard package. This is where you have to have a strategy. When playing these cards against High Tide, you have to look at what the High Tide player has right now/is capable of finding. There are a few important considerations beyond what is in his hand:
- What's on top of the High Tide player's deck—Frequently, High Tide will have access to this information.
- Where is the resource bottleneck in his hand—When evaluating this, it is important to remember that Cunning Wish and Merchant Scroll are much better sources of mana than cards. They can both find Time Spiral, but have to do so via way of Intuition. I wouldn't go after these cards with my first wave of disruption, but they are good targets for the second wave.
- How much time do I have before the High Tide player is able to recover?
After you determine where the bottleneck is (cards or mana), it is important to focus all your attention on restricting the High Tide player there. If you have extra resources, it is okay to use them to attack the other relevant resource, but tearing apart your opponent's hand is not a plan against High Tide. You'll often simply get top-decked out. Unlike most combo decks, High Tide is very good at drawing its way out of jams due to the sheer redundancy of the deck combined with the limited resources necessary to combo. You can hope you're able to kill him before he can find what's missing.
This fact makes planning your discard spells very important. You invariably want to lead with Thoughtseize or Duress, allowing you to take a relevant card and see your opponent's hand. At that point, you simply have to determine how long you can wait before using your next discard spell. The more cantrips your opponent has, the less time you have, although I am of the opinion that taking cantrips with Duress or Thoughtseize is a bad idea. If you do end up in that situation, I believe I would target Brainstorm first. Having said that, getting multiple cantrips off of Cabal Therapy isn't a terrible plan, regardless of what you are hitting.
Now we get to the Tier 1 disruption spells. These are the cards you want to have in your deck against High Tide. So, let's look at these spells.
Chalice of the Void – Always set to 1. This is good because it shuts off so much of the deck. When cast early, it puts a damper on his ability to find cards via cutting off Brainstorm, Ponder, and Preordain. It also has to be dealt with before your opponent combos, since at 1 it stops High Tide as well. Stopping Mental Misstep only further strengthens Chalice.
Mental Misstep – The funny thing is that the only thing really worth Misstepping is High Tide itself (getting a Candelabra Misstepped isn't great, but it's not horrible either). Of course, High Tide is probably the most important card. Like Spell Pierce, this card loses a lot of utility once your opponent has successfully cast Time Spiral. It is important to note that High Tide also gains a lot from Mental Misstep, and will probably be running three to four main-deck. You should note that Mental Misstep is extremely good at slowing the opponent down, stopping things like AEther Vial, Wild Nacatl, Noble Hierarch, and Goblin Lackey. Combine this with the fact that it is live against much of the good disruption, and you have a spell that definitely benefits High Tide quite a bit.
Force of Will – I think this one is self-evident. Given that I've talked about critical pieces to attack and the attack strategy you should use, I believe you can use that information to figure out what spells you should be Forcing.
Surgical Extraction/Extirpate – Now we get to the real boys. Extirpate is one of the strongest disruption spell you can play against High Tide, plain and simple. If you want to board a card specifically for this matchup, I would not leave home with Extirpate (or Surgical if you can't cast Extirpate). There is one very good target in High Tide for these two cards—Turnabout.
If you go back and look at the way my draws for High Tide panned out, you'll see the effectiveness of Turnabout in the deck, and its necessity as a tool. Turnabout is probably the third most important card in High Tide, and High Tide will always give you an opportunity to Extirpate it. If this happens, your opponent definitely isn't happy. Blue Sun's Zenith is not a viable plan in most situations without Turnabout, and thus he has to go with the Brain Freeze plan.
It's important to note that he can still get there a reasonable amount of the time, so if you are on the Turnabout plan, you have to back it up with other disruption (extra Extirpates or Blue spells). Even so, it helps, and with a little bit of luck will get you there. Once he is on the Brain Freeze plan, Cunning Wish becomes Enemy 1, which makes Merchant Scroll Enemy 1A. If he can't find a Wish, he is almost certainly going to fizzle, and that is what your backup disruption should be focused on. Note that removing Turnabout removes a very good mana engine, making Spell Pierce better, since you know exactly what he needs to do, and he has less mana to do it with.
But the "goodness" of these cards doesn't end there. On top of that, Surgical Extraction/Extirpate combine with counterspells and discard to give you the opportunity to cripple High Tide. If you can successfully get a High Tide or Time Spiral in the graveyard, then Extirpate it, High Tide is in a huge amount of trouble. Once again, it is still technically possible to win via Brain Freeze after this, but that is far closer to a pipe dream than a reality. Not having access to High Tide turns off almost all High Tide's mana sources, and not having access to Time Spiral means it is very difficult for High Tide to generate sufficient Storm count due to lack of cards.
Thus, these two cards are some of strongest available against High Tide. Plan A (High Tide/Time Spiral) is crippling, and Plan B (Turnabout) is pretty solid as well. If there is a card from New Phyrexia that really hurts High Tide, it won't be Mental Misstep, it will be Surgical Extraction.
Anyway, that's all I have for High Tide. I hope this has been useful.
Chingsung Chang
Conelead most everywhere and on MTGO
Khan32k5 at gmail dot com
