ITT: MTG rules nit-pickingFollow

High Tide. http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=159177

Seems like a pretty good card. I've got 3 of them planned for my new Blue deck. The only problem I'm having is this.

Say it comes to my turn again, and I have 6 untapped Islands. I pay one to play High Tide. I now have up to 10 mana from the others, but what about the mana that I paid to use High Tide? Does that one now create an additional mana and bring me up to 11 available mana?

I'll probably end up posting a few more questions, maybe not. Most of them can be answered through Google searches.

Since you tapped the island for mana before the instant was played, it would not produce a second mana and you would have 10 at your disposal.

Good luck getting all of those in your hand at the same time =P.

Emphasis mine. That's the important bit. High Tide creates a trigger that only works when an island is actually tapped for mana.


QFT. :)


Not that hard, scarily enough. Since High Tides is so old (as far as I can tell, it hasn't been reprinted since Fallen Empires), I assume that CestinShaman is either playing this deck in a Legacy format of some sort, or isn't playing it in any official events. Either way, he'll have access to the blue old-school card drawing and library manipulation (Fact or Fiction, Brainstorm, Ancestral Recall, etc.).

Blue decks specialize in finding stuff in their libraries. I've seen old-school combo and control decks that ran single copies of their win conditions, because the decks were just so efficient at finding it that running more than one copy was a waste of deck slots.


Ditto. I haven't played in years. My sister's roommates started playing a few months ago, but they're all too busy to play too often, and my schedule these days doesn't allow me to play in any tournaments at the local game store (and I can't really spare the money either). :)

Don't forget you can carry mana from your upkeep into your draw step! Sometimes helpful for combo.

I once had a blue control deck (with a few black cards centered around megrim and warped devotion) that centered around Capsize. I don't remember all of the exact cards or counts, but it had:

Capsize
Memory Crystal
Warped Devotion (black)
Megrim (black)
Counterspell
Mana Leak
Boomerang
Temporal Adept
Rewind
Unsummon

Then there are a few more creatures, mostly more ones that can bounce (a couple black ones that I can't recall), a couple possibilities of global bounce cards, and when Isochron Scepter came out it was perfect to use with counterspell or boomerang.

Not the most efficient deck, but it sure was fun.

That's pushing a bit into mana-***** territory.

23-25 is probably ideal.

Playing High Tide without Cloud of Faeries and Snap is a sin.

http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Cloud%20of%20Faeries

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=12374

I think most people that played during that time would agree. I'm of a different camp, I think the Urza's block was one of the worst designed. I seemed like every 10th card of every set in the block let you combo on turn two.

Personally, for a deck like that I'd go with a nice big blue flyer like Mahamoti Djinn or the like, just as a backup. If you wanna get a bit mean, you could hunt down a Morphling or two, or find some other creature that provides utility in addition to killing your opponent. It never hurts to have a backup plan. Your deck would kind of fizzle if someone found an answer to Rites of Replication, such as Counterspell or Whiplash Trap (when a token creature leaves play, it ceases to exist).


It depends on the deck. You want to drop one land a turn reliably until you have enough mana to play the cards you need to win. An aggressive weenie beatdown deck (lots of small, inexpensive creatures) won't need more than 4-5 lands in play at once, so they keep their land count tight to make room for all those cheap little creatures. A control deck like yours wants lots of mana so they can respond to whatever threat shows up on the board They need to drop 7+ lands consistently. However, with such a high land count you run the risk of getting mana-flooded (when you have too many lands and not enough actual spells). The best thing is to experiment; some decks just need more land than others. If the deck still wins reliably with 30 lands, why fix what isn't broken?

Also, if you put in more card drawing effects you can run a bit lower land count. A spell that lets you draw more cards increases the chance of finding that crucial 7th land for a game-winning Rites of Replication...

On the Standard rule set:

Probably both.

I didn't care about Standard rules when I played with friends/people at the shop, unless there was a tournament.

And usually, they'd be sealed tournaments anyway. I liked those, because players wouldn't have super combos or rare-filled decks.

IMO Invasion block was the best set, though i've just started playing against after a 5 year break and the current block is quite good fun.

My favourite deck ever was based around white/black/green control with Rout/Desolation angel

I play a sick Red/green Control deck in legacy which is awful to play against, usually restrict people to 2 mana availible at the most.

1x mox Emerald
1x mox diamond

8x forest
8x mountain
2x rishadan port
4x tiaga

4x stone rain
4x pillage
4x winters grasp
4x creeping mold
4x avalanche riders
4x lava runners
4x lightning bolts
4x wall of blossoms
4x stampeding wildebeast

Pure evil.