At the start of last week, several formats saw changes thanks to the banned and restricted announcement. While Modern and Legacy saw very noteworthy changes to their respective lists, one of the bigger ones that got far more attention were the updates to the Pauper format. Three cards were banned and two were unbanned on a trial basis, opening up the format in a whole variety of new ways. While the three banned cards - Basking Broodscale, Deadly Dispute, and Kuldotha Rebirth - are all worth examining in their own right, today I wanted to look at the unbanned cards.
Prophetic Prism was what I think most people would call a fine unban. There's concern it might make decks like Tron and Affinity a little too good, but hey, that's why they're trial unbans after all! But aside from those and perhaps the resurgence of Boros/Mardu Synthesizer decks, there's not a ton to talk about. After all, Prophetic Prism is such a boring card that it made for a bit of a head scratcher for some players as to why it was banned in the first place. So instead, I want to focus today on the far more exciting card in the unbans: High Tide.
High Tide is known for being a powerful enabler for fast mana in a variety of formats. These days, you might be familiar with it from its play in Legacy where it does all kinds of nonsense. I'm no stranger to these decks myself, as prior to me picking up Maverick as my main deck of choice for the format, High Tide was my preferred way to play Legacy for some time! Here's one of my older lists from 2012 I was able to dredge up from around the internet:
2012 High Tide | Legacy | Paige Smith
- Instants (25)
- 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
- 1 Intuition
- 2 Flusterstorm
- 3 Cunning Wish
- 3 Meditate
- 3 Turnabout
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 High Tide
- Sorceries (15)
- 3 Ponder
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Preordain
- 4 Time Spiral
- Artifacts (2)
- 2 Candelabra of Tawnos
- Lands (18)
- 12 Island
- 3 Misty Rainforest
- 3 Scalding Tarn
- Sideboard (15)
- 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
- 1 Brain Freeze
- 1 Echoing Truth
- 1 Flusterstorm
- 1 Rebuild
- 1 Snap
- 1 Wipe Away
- 2 Defense Grid
- 2 Pact of Negation
- 2 Surgical Extraction
- 2 Wipe Away
The deck sets itself up with cantrips for the first couple of turns, and then once you have enough Islands you can start going off. Play a High Tide and then use untap effects like Turnabout and Candelabra of Tawnos to untap your lands, generate more mana, cast Time Spiral to refresh your hand, and do it all over again. Eventually, you will likely have either enough mana to force your opponent to draw their whole deck with Blue Sun's Zenith or have enough storm count to mill them with Brain Freeze.
A big reason this deck functions as well as it does is because of the untapping effects. Pauper has known the wrath of these kinds of cards for a long time as well, which is why the idea of playing High Tide was so feared. Imagine playing the deck with cards like Cloud of Faeries or Peregrine Drake and then sifting through your deck with Frantic Search. It's a powerful interaction that can set up some truly devastating turns!
While many believe High Tide was never legal in the format, that's not entirely true. In fact, there were a handful of paper events that allowed it to be played for a period of time prior to unification when paper vs. online legality was far murkier. In the mid-to-late 2010s, Mox Boarding House (the retail stores for Card Kingdom) ran events known as Rags to Riches, were you'd play cheap Pauper decks to win expensive and powerful cards for other formats. Here, High Tide was legal alongside Cloud of Faeries to provide an example of just how this powerful deck might look:
High Tide | Pauper | Charles Wong, 2nd Place 11/21/15 Rags to Riches
- Creatures (7)
- 3 Archaeomancer
- 4 Cloud of Faeries
- Instants (17)
- 1 Capsize
- 1 Ghostly Flicker
- 1 Oona's Grace
- 2 Gigadrowse
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Snap
- 4 Words of Wisdom
- Sorceries (20)
- 4 Ideas Unbound
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Preordain
- 4 Serum Visions
- Lands (16)
- 16 Island
- Sideboard (15)
- 1 Curfew
- 1 Dispel
- 1 Gigadrowse
- 1 Snapback
- 2 Boomerang
- 2 Hydroblast
- 3 Mystic Remora
- 4 Deep Analysis
The version of the deck wins by looping cards like Archaeomancer and Cloud of Faeries with multiple High Tides active to generate infinite mana. From there you find Capsize and bounce your opponent's entire board, leaving them helpless as you beat them down over the following two turns. The awful play patterns led to High Tide being banned in future Rags to Riches events, though I'm unclear on exactly when this ban occurred. Regardless, it left things in a weird spot from there on, with no opportunities to play High Tide in major paper or digital play.
So, when the format was finally unified and both paper and digital legalities finally brought together, there was some brief excitement. However, with the announcement of the format unification, players quickly discovered that three cards were banned from this unification, with High Tide being among them. So, players have been wondering just how good the card would truly be in the format ever since.
So now that it's unbanned, how did we get here?
Well before we go further, I'd like to reiterate that I am in fact a member of the Pauper Format Panel that was behind this round of format changes. That means I have plenty to say on this matter. Believe it or not, I was one of High Tide's biggest champions in favor of it getting its fair shake. The reason for this was because I did some testing with it around the time of unification to see if a High Tide deck would really be as strong as it seemed it would be.
At the time, I used my experience with Legacy High Tide and Pauper to come up with a very, very rough draft list:
2019 High Tide | Pauper | Paige Smith
- Creatures (13)
- 1 Sage's Row Denizen
- 4 Mnemonic Wall
- 4 Mulldrifter
- 4 Sea Gate Oracle
- Instants (16)
- 2 Memory Lapse
- 4 Counterspell
- 2 Ghostly Flicker
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Snap
- Sorceries (13)
- 1 Clear the Mind
- 2 Compulsive Research
- 3 Merchant Scroll
- 3 Ponder
- 4 Preordain
- Lands (18)
- 18 Island
Now I won't beat around the bush: this list is not great. It was very much a first rough draft and wasn't workshopped with anyone. I can look at this now and question several of the inclusions like Memory Lapse, Counterspell, and Mulldrifter. Even Mnemonic Wall gets a weird look from me because it probably should just be Archaeomancer and say to hell with worrying about Lightning Bolt-style removal.
(card pics: Mnemonic Wall, Snap, Sage's Row Denizen)
The core concept was trying to find a good way to utilize Snap, which represented arguably the last major untap effect in Pauper. The logic was to generate enough mana from High Tides so that you could loop Mnemonic Wall or Archaeomancer with Snap to create infinite Sage's Row Denizen triggers and mill an opponent out. If this sounds, er, familiar, well it should because it was heavily inspired by Familiars decks of the time.
What I found was that the list just felt like a slower and worse Familiars deck. Familiars was typically an Azorius color deck - occasionally going Bant, Esper, or Jeskai - which gave it a lot more reach for what it could do. Sunscape Familiar itself provided mana cost reduction already, God-Pharaoh's Faithful gave you absurd amounts of life, and you also had access to several powerful sideboard options. All of this was possible thanks to the deck's access to White mana, which this Mono-Blue High Tide list lacked.
So, at some point during Pauper Format Panel discussions, I raised the idea of if a deck like this would even be good enough. Further explorations were done, and one member put this list together updated with a more current card pool:
2025 PFP High Tide | Pauper
- Creatures (12)
- 1 Sage's Row Denizen
- 3 Archaeomancer
- 4 Augur of Bolas
- 4 Sea Gate Oracle
- Instants (13)
- 1 Behold the Multiverse
- 2 Gigadrowse
- 3 Ghostly Flicker
- 3 Snap
- 4 High Tide
- Sorceries (16)
- 1 Stream of Thought
- 2 Deep Analysis
- 2 Ponder
- 3 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Lorien Revealed
- 4 Preordain
- Lands (19)
- 19 Island
Now that's a much tighter looking deck! It still feels more fragile due to the lack of countermagic, but if you're playing High Tide, you're playing to win. The general feeling, though, was that this kind of deck wouldn't be good enough either. Further discussion would be had on whether or not the dual lands with land types from Kaldheim and Dominaria United would have relevance as they'd also generate extra mana. Remember how I noted before that it felt like bad Familiars? Well perhaps Familiars itself could play it or else plain old High Tide lists could find a way to tap into this angle.
Additionally, we tried another list that had popped up in discussions online about the merits of whether High Tide would be good enough or not. I can't remember who exactly this list came from, but my gut says it was either grinders/content creators Bryant Cook or Raptor56, though it could have been someone else. Regardless, this was a variant based off of Modern Twiddle Storm decks from the past:
Twiddle Storm High Tide | Pauper
- Instants (24)
- 1 Snap
- 3 Psychic Puppetry
- 4 Dream's Grasp
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Muddle the Mixture
- 4 Peer Through Depths
- 4 Twiddle
- Sorceries (19)
- 1 Deep Analysis
- 2 Stream of Thought
- 4 Ideas Unbound
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Preordain
- Lands (17)
- 17 Island
- Sideboard (14)
- 1 Vision Charm
- 3 Dispel
- 3 Gigadrowse
- 3 Snap
- 4 Tolarian Terror
This deck takes advantage of Psychic Puppetry to repeatedly untap your islands. Thanks to the underutilized "Splice onto Arcane" mechanic from the original Kamigawa block, you can use a mana from a High Tide fueled Island to splice Psychic Puppetry onto another spell. Peer Through Depths and Ideas Unbound work great here, or you can always just cast a Psychic Puppetry itself to splice further copies onto that one. This generates an absurd amount of mana which you can then pour into Stream of Thought's replicate cost to mill your opponent out for the win.
Following some testing, the thought was this deck might be fine, though perhaps a bit too fragile and inconsistent. It wasn't entirely clear that these decks would be too strong in the modern day Pauper format. Still, there was hesitation that we simply weren't finding the best decks. As is common with, say, the Future Future League internally at Wizards, their decklists often look quite different from what the actual format ends up looking like. This is because it's only a handful of people vs. the thousands (or more) players around the world who would be working rapidly to find the optimal build.
Thanks to Gavin Verhey's innovation of trial unbans, we've finally decided to let High Tide off the chain... for now at least. We want to see just how well it will perform when put to the test. If it proves to be just fine, then it can stay unbanned. However, if it's proving to be too problematic come June 30th, it will likely get the axe once again.
With that said, we now have a little over a week's worth of data to look over. As such, it begs the question: is High Tide really that strong?
Well, over the course of the week, we've had a variety of lists show up between Pauper Leagues and Challenges on Magic Online. While two of the new Pauper Throwdown events fired on April 3rd and April 7th, neither featured any High Tide lists whatsoever. In total, we saw 9 total lists running High Tide with a 5-0 record in Leagues between March 31st (the B&R announcement) and April 7th (the time of writing).
Here's a small breakdown of the numbers for the League 5-0 lists:
- March 31st - 0 lists (may not have included any post-B&R lists)
- April 1 - 0 lists
- April 2 - 2 lists: 1 Mono-Blue Terror using Rush of Knowledge, 1 Mono-Blue Terror without Rush of Knowledge.
- April 3 - 3 lists: 2 Mono-Blue Terror using Rush of Knowledge, 1 Twiddle Storm
- April 4 - 0 lists
- April 5 - 2 lists: 2 Familiars using Glacial Floodplain
- April 6 - 0 lists
- April 7 - 2 lists: 2 Twiddle Storm
Now for comparison's sake, let's look at several other archetypes and see how many 5-0 lists were posted in the same timeframe. Please note that to keep this concise, I'm not showing every archetype, but am instead focusing on the most prevalent ones. Some may also be grouped together for simplicity, like the various Burn, Affinity, Ponza/Ramp, and Tolarian Terror strategies.
- 31 lists: Mono-Red Burn
- 18 lists: Elves
- 16 lists: Gruul Ponza/Ramp
- 16 lists: Various Terror builds without High Tide (9 Mono-Blue, 4 Dimir, 3 Izzet)
- 15 lists: Madness Burn
- 15 lists: Various Affinity builds (10 Grixis, 5 Rakdos)
- 9 lists: Jund Wildfire
- 8 lists: Walls Combo
- 7 lists: Flicker Tron
- 7 lists: Mono-Blue Faeries
High Tide barely measures up to the numbers of several of these archetypes, and it looks even worse when you break it down to the macro-archetypes from there:
- 3 Twiddle Storm
- 3 Mono-Blue Terror with Rush of Knowledge
- 2 Familiars
- 1 Mono-Blue Terror without Rush of Knowledge
Four of those lists go in another archetype that's arguably a top strategy for the Pauper format. The others have such small numbers comparatively they often feel not up to snuff. However, it's important to remember that this is still only week one and these numbers can still shift as the format settles further.
As far as Challenges go, there were three notable events that took place over the weekend: one on every day between April 4th and April 6th. Across those events we saw High Tide make showings in the following archetypes/placements:
- Friday: 4th Place Twiddle Storm
- Friday: 8th Place Twiddle Storm
- Friday: 9th Place Familiars
- Friday: 13th Place Mono-Blue Terror with Rush of Knowledge
- Saturday: 20th Place Flicker High Tide
- Sunday: 20th Place Twiddle Storm
- Sunday: 21st Place Familiars
As you can probably tell, High Tide had a pretty solid showing on Friday, with four lists using it in the top 16 and two even making it to the Top 8. This didn't continue into the weekend, however, and no High Tide decks could even crack the top 16. The first event raised some amount of concern from players, but this is why it's best to not put too much stock into a single event. Multiple events and league results - with everyone and their mother playing the deck at that - have shown it to be fine, but not exceptional, though again this may shift.
With some of the numbers breakdown out of the way, let's have a look at some of these lists and see how they turned out. First and foremost, let's have a look at the Top 8 lists from Friday's Challenge.
Twiddle Storm High Tide | Pauper | seasonofmists, 4th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge
- Instants (22)
- 1 Gigadrowse
- 1 Unwind
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Peer Through Depths
- 4 Psychic Puppetry
- 4 Reach Through Mists
- Sorceries (22)
- 1 Deep Analysis
- 1 Petals of Insight
- 1 Stream of Thought
- 3 Flood of Recollection
- 4 Ideas Unbound
- 4 Lorien Revealed
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Preordain
- Lands (16)
- 16 Island
- Sideboard (15)
- 2 Gigadrowse
- 2 Snap
- 3 Dispel
- 4 Envelop
- 4 Murmuring Mystic
Twiddle Storm High Tide | Pauper | PNascimento, 7th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge
- Instants (21)
- 1 Gigadrowse
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Peer Through Depths
- 4 Psychic Puppetry
- 4 Reach Through Mists
- Sorceries (21)
- 1 Flood of Recollection
- 1 Petals of Insight
- 1 Stream of Thought
- 3 Preordain
- 3 Pieces of the Puzzle
- 4 Ideas Unbound
- 4 Lorien Revealed
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- Lands (18)
- 18 Island
- Sideboard (15)
- 1 Echoing Truth
- 1 Pieces of the Puzzle
- 2 Annul
- 2 Deep Analysis
- 2 Gigadrowse
- 3 Blue Elemental Blast
- 4 Envelop
Both of these decks are newer takes on the Twiddle Storm version of High Tide. Players are trying all kinds of things with this deck, and it's easy to see some different approaches that are being taken. Notice how in the list I shared earlier there were only four Peer Through Depths and four Ideas Unbound as the non-Psychic Puppetry Arcane spells. Here, five more are added in the form of four copies of Reach Through Mists and one Petals of Insight, giving you far more opportunities to untap your lands with.
Additionally, if you look through the lists you'll notice the addition of some cards like Pieces of the Puzzle and Flood of Recollection. Pieces of the Puzzle allows you to dig deep to find cards you might want to help assemble your combo, while Flood of Recollection lets you bring back a key spell to continue going off. Additionally, lists are adapting the combination of Brainstorm with Lorien Revealed to cantrip more effectively and set up draws.
Now let's have a look at that Familiars list that followed them up in the same Challenge:
High Tide Familiars | Pauper | saidin.raiken, 9th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge
- Creatures (12)
- 4 Archaeomancer
- 4 Mulldrifter
- 4 Sunscape Familiar
- Instants (14)
- 1 Counterspell
- 2 Ghostly Flicker
- 3 Negate
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Snap
- Sorceries (16)
- 2 Compulsive Research
- 2 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Lorien Revealed
- 4 Ponder
- 4 Preordain
- Lands (18)
- 1 Snow-Covered Plains
- 11 Snow-Covered Island
- 1 Glacial Floodplain
- 1 Mortuary Mire
- 4 Contaminated Landscape
- Sideboard (15)
- 2 Counterspell
- 2 Dispel
- 3 Dust to Dust
- 4 God-Pharaoh's Faithful
- 4 Hydroblast
If you know anything about Familiars, this list shouldn't be too surprising to you. In addition to High Tide allowing the deck's lands to tap for additional mana, Sunscape Familiar also lowers the cost of many critical spells in the deck. This makes it trivial to chain spells and eventually generate loops utilizing Ghostly Flicker, allowing you to mill your opponent with Compulsive Research and win the game. Alternatively, you can always take the control approach using the likes of Snap and your countermagic to be the beatdown with Mulldrifters and Archaeomancers.
What I find interesting about this list is how when you compare it to the flicker build I shared toward the top of this article, I noted how the White gave Familiars more flexibility. Aside from the Sunscape Familiars themselves, though, the main deck is entirely Mono-Blue! There are a handful of White cards in the sideboard, but it's interesting to see so few of them in the main deck as well.
Finally, let's have a look at one of those Tolarian Terror lists:
High Tide Tolarian Terror | Pauper | DobleP, 13th Place MTGO Pauper Challenge
- Creatures (11)
- 3 Murmuring Mystic
- 4 Spire Golem
- 4 Tolarian Terror
- Instants (21)
- 2 Boomerang
- 2 Dispel
- 2 Spell Pierce
- 3 Snap
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Counterspell
- 4 High Tide
- Sorceries (11)
- 3 Rush of Knowledge
- 4 Lorien Revealed
- 4 Ponder
- Lands (17)
- 17 Island
- Sideboard (14)
- 1 Blue Elemental Blast
- 1 Boomerang
- 1 Curfew
- 1 Echoing Truth
- 2 Steel Sabotage
- 4 Annul
- 4 Hydroblast
This take on the Tolarian Terror decks is an interesting one. Here, you're not using High Tide as a means by which to combo, but rather using it as a ritual spell to make heaps of mana. With all that mana, you can turbo out copies of Tolarian Terror and Murmuring Mystic and then use Rush of Knowledge to find even more spells to further fuel your game plan. If you go deep enough, you can even create tons of bird illusion tokens from Murmuring Mystic to swarm the board and make it hard for your opponent to deal with.
At this point, it feels like the non-High Tide builds are functioning a bit better though. Yes, one of these Terror lists made a top 16 finish and it also made some 5-0s, but non-High Tide builds put up even better numbers in both Challenges and Leagues. Heck, the Sunday Challenge even had four non-High Tide Mono-Blue Terror lists in the Top 8 of the event! As such, I'm not sure that High Tide is where the deck wants to be in the long term, but for now it's a neat innovation.
These are only a small handful of the decks that came up over the course of the last week. So, how are things looking?
As I noted earlier in the article, it's only week one which makes it far too early to tell. There are numerous factors to consider here. Players fell back quickly on archetypes they already knew while the High Tide players are having to figure out how to innovate with an entirely new strategy. This may mean the deck simply has yet to be solved and there will eventually be a truly broken deck. Additionally, players lack the reps to pilot these decks optimally, meaning with time, we may see a rise in performance.
The first week itself seems to have been a bit ho-hum overall for High Tide. Many players have already expressed frustration over the long turns and gameplay, but there are already similar experiences that exist in lower tiers. These include decks like Cycle Storm, the so-called "Ruby Storm," X-Land Spy (usually one land, but lately has been using more), and even Familiars in the past. The slow gameplay style could also be attributed to decks like Flicker Tron and Turbo Fog as well, though in a fairly different manner. Why should High Tide not be allowed for that consideration?
I liken this situation to what happened when Lead the Stampede was downshifted in Iconic Masters. The card was an incredibly obvious fit for Elves, so everyone jumped at it. If you played in leagues, you likely ran into several Elves decks or else decks that were trying to beat up on Elves. Given that - at the time - Elves was known for extremely long turns and that it was everywhere, players thought it wasn't a good fit for the format. However, with a few weeks' time, players were able to figure out ways to combat it and the deck took a more reasonable placement in the metagame.
It's going to be very interesting to see where High Tide lands in the coming weeks. I've put some lists together that I'm excited to try based on these early results, and I can't wait to get into the trenches myself as though I was playing Legacy once again. I'll be watching how the decks continue to evolve. It's sure to be exciting!
Get out there and get those tides high!
Paige Smith
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