Hello, everybody—this is Gavin Verhey on behalf of the Pauper Format Panel. Today, we are making a change in Pauper. We want to walk you through the background of the change and why we’re making it.
We’ll start with the top line: High Tide is banned in Pauper. This ban takes effect immediately and will be live shortly on Magic Online.
Back in March, we unbanned High Tide as part of something new called trial unbans. The idea was that we could unban a card on a probationary basis, see how it performed, and then decide if we wanted to keep it off or return it to the banned list. This is a great way to investigate cards and potentially bring cards back into the format that people enjoy. At that time, we unbanned Prophetic Prism, which has been a success. It’s seen some play and helped decks like Urzatron, but ultimately it has been just fine. The format is very different than when Prophetic Prism was initially banned.
High Tide is a much more nuanced discussion.
At the time, we said this:
“Our hope is that the deck ends up, at best, an option in the metagame beneath the very best decks. If it ends up not being played after some experimentation, that’s a fine outcome. If it ends up fringe or playable but not in the best decks, that’s the ideal outcome. These scenarios will leave it unbanned.
“If it breaks through and enables one of the three most successful decks in the metagame, however, we will likely ban High Tide again at the end of the trial—having a kill-from-hand combo deck as one of the best three decks can be frustrating. Not every color can interact with that stretch super well.”
Event Results
First, let’s dive into data and results.
High Tide’s results started off slow as people began working to coalesce on the best versions. Eventually, players have refined the deck into a strong Psychic Puppetry and splice engine that casts High Tide and splices Psychic Puppetry onto Arcane spells to stay even or net mana, generating an immense amount of mana in a single long turn to eventually kill by looping Stream of Thought. This usually kills, when unimpeded, on turn four or five, but very occasionally on turn three.
There are a couple flexible card slots, but the majority of decklists tend to have near-identical main decks. Here’s a recent version that won a Magic Online challenge:
4 Brainstorm
1 Deep Analysis
1 Gigadrowse
3 Hidden Strings
4 High Tide
4 Ideas Unbound
13 Island
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Lórien Revealed
1 Muddle the Mixture
4 Peer Through Depths
3 Pieces of the Puzzle
4 Preordain
4 Psychic Puppetry
2 Reach Through Mists
2 Snow-Covered Island
2 Stream of Thought
1 Deep Analysis
2 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Dispel
1 Envelop
3 Fallaji Archaeologist
2 Gigadrowse
1 Muddle the Mixture
3 Snap
In terms of win rate, the deck started at just above 50% when it comes to its Magic Online win rate and didn’t have a large real-world showing at events like Paupergeddon—that’s more than fine. However, I’m really glad we took the extra time, because we have watched High Tide‘s success rate tick increasingly upward. It has crept some weeks on Magic Online to above 55%, sitting at or near the top of the metagame.
Unlike many other decks, it tends to vary a lot from week to week—despite its success, it has a smaller portion of the metagame and can be very matchup dependent (more on that later). It’s a deck that takes a large amount of play skill and experience to pilot optimally, and it’s very possible that it has taken time to slowly rise for that reason. While, as far as we can tell, the play rates online and in real life tend to be lower, historically complicated and slow combo decks tend to not show up as much in droves.
The success of High Tide alone debatably meets our threshold for banning. It is the other elements in concert with its success, however, that push it over the edge.
Problematic Gameplay and Tournament Logistics
High Tide is a card which certainly has a pedigree of slow turns—any longtime Legacy player can tell you about that. Some of that is not a surprise. However, Pauper’s version is likely even potentially more egregious than versions we’ve seen in the past.
It’s not uncommon for a High Tide combo turn to take ten or even fifteen minutes to execute, even in the hands of a skilled pilot. Unlike other formats which often have some big hammer card that helps make it clear to the opponent it’s time to pack things in, like a large Mind’s Desire, the incredibly incremental nature of the combo in Pauper means that things don’t really come to that major turning point. There is a version with a single Petals of Insight, so you can start generating infinite mana with it and enough copies of Psychic Puppetry, but many would say that’s suboptimal to play—drawing an ineffectual card with this deck can be the difference between winning and losing.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I have played a lot of High Tide now. I even played eleven rounds worth of it at in-person side events during this past Paupergeddon. I would be executing my combo for ten minutes and still not be sure if I was going to win the game. I had multiple opponents concede to me during moments where I thought I was more likely to fizzle. And while I don’t want to ascribe too much to an individual game or situation, the fact that the right play is always to fully force the opponent to play it out further compounds the time it takes.
The High Tide player will always try to combo off if they look like they’re about to lose the next turn, which means that you can expect some amount of a combo turn in every game of a match. This all boils down to a miserable gameplay experience, where the High Tide player takes up the majority of gameplay time while the other player sits there.
While it’s far from the only deck that can take a lot of time to execute—a deck like Familiars can also make games go long and monopolize the clock—at least in those cases you get to take another turn and play Magic. With High Tide, you will often watch for minutes on end with the result often being you don’t get another turn. Additionally, a deck like Familiars still leans on creatures for its combo, which the Pauper card pool is better suited to handle than something entirely from hand.
This additionally compounds in matters of tournament logistics. Because a single turn can take so long, even when plays are made at a reasonable pace, if the High Tide player begins their combo as the round is running out of time, it can cause the event to run over on time. This provides a poor event experience for everybody. While this happening is mostly situational, having it happen even just a couple times in an event can cause large delays.
While neither of these on their own are reasons for a ban—for example, we’re not taking action against Cycle Storm for its long turns—these factors in conjunction with it being a strong deck to play make it a serious problem and compound the issues.
Format Impact
While High Tide has not been the most played deck, that doesn’t mean its effects haven’t rippled across the entire format.
High Tide is a deck with extremely polar matchups. Many matchups, Game 1 is just a near-automatic loss, as the opponent has no interaction with the stack or hand, so unless they can kill by turn four, they’re relying on sideboarded games—unless your deck has a good Game 1 matchup against Tide, in which case Tide is probably in very rough shape.
To give some examples, against Mono-Blue Faeries, Tide’s worst matchup, some weeks its win rate has dipped below 20%. That is massively polar! While other matchups that don’t have Game 1 interaction have done the opposite. You sit down for Game 1 and you already often know who is going to win the first game (unless there’s a horrendous draw involved).
The result of this has been twofold.
The first is that decks that are advantaged or have a chance against High Tide in Game 1—Faeries, Tolarian Terror, Mono-Red—gain a large boost in the metagame. That’s not inherently bad. Decks becoming better because they beat up on other decks happens all the time. But it has contributed to the popularity of already popular decks and cemented Terror as a top deck.
The second piece, though, which is problematic, is that it has made it a lot more about decks racing past one another to see who can win first. Something a lot of players enjoy about Pauper is the incremental nature of the format. But if you’re trying to beat High Tide, you can either disrupt it or just try and run past it since it won’t interact with you. More decks doing the latter means the whole format gets more compressed and less interactive as people are zooming to die before High Tide’s fundamental turn.
Put another way: High Tide preys on midrange, meaning decks that can go under it but are weak to midrange become good counters. But we’ve been doing so much work over the past couple years to help slow down the format and make it more interactive: the more Pauper is about people just throwing cards at one another and seeing who wins as opposed to interactive games, generally the worse off it is. That doesn’t mean fast decks shouldn’t exist, but incentivizing the format to try to win quickly and interact very little is a negative.
Of course, after sideboarding, players gain access to options against and disruption for High Tide. Often it turns into how many sideboard cards you draw—though the deck is more resilient than many would give it credit. But this gameplay isn’t the best either when you have these very polar matchups where you lose Game 1 and then sideboard in a ton of cards to try and flip them. We’ve previously banned cards out of Mono-Red (like Monastery Swiftspear) for causing a level of polarity within the format that is lower than what High Tide is bringing to the table.
Despite the play rates being moderate, the impact on the format is outsized.
The High Tide Ban and Beyond
Ultimately, we had to ask ourselves the question, “Is High Tide making the format better or more enjoyable?” In the aggregate, and in looking at all the above reasons, the answer is no.
It’s a deck that has had outlier win rates, is hard to interact with, has caused large ripple effects, and creates a poor play and tournament experience.
Taking these elements into account together, we collectively made the decision to ban High Tide.
I want to stress that we are still happy with the experiment here. Trying something out, letting the community experiment with a card, creating discussion, and learning an outcome about a card that has essentially never been legal in the wider Pauper format is a positive result, even if the outcome was banning the card again. We have no plans for future trial unbans at this time, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see us try it again in the future.
I will say that while we did need extra time to see how the format evolved with a deck this complicated and that took time to fully see the impact of, we do want to apologize for the moving window here. While each individual reason made sense—asking for more time over the summer to see how the deck played out and aligning with the regular announcement cadence once the window moved up two weeks—it still created a shifting date as players were trying to make plans and understand if they should invest time into learning this deck and acquiring the cards. This isn’t generally what you should expect from us, and we’ll try to not let this happen in any future trial unbans.
So, what about the other cards in the format?
Well, we looked across the whole format for any other changes to be made at this time. The deck which most caught our eye as potentially in the range of a ban is the Tolarian Terror decks. These decks have been consistently strong for most of this year and over the past six months have risen to the top in both play and win rate.
However, as mentioned earlier, we believe High Tide had an outsized impact on the format and what decks people chose. Many of the decks advantaged against Terror were ones that couldn’t compete with the speed of a deck like High Tide, and many sideboard slots that could have been used for Terror were taken up by hate for Tide. We want to monitor this now that we’ve removed High Tide as an arm of the format and see how it evolves from here.
The other deck we have had our eye on are the new Spy Combo decks that have been showing up. Here’s an example from a recent Magic Online Challenge, noting there is still experimentation with the exact mix of cards.
3 Avenging Hunter
4 Balustrade Spy
2 Dread Return
2 Elves of Deep Shadow
3 Forest
2 Gatecreeper Vine
4 Generous Ent
4 Land Grant
4 Lead the Stampede
2 Lotleth Giant
3 Masked Vandal
1 Mesmeric Fiend
4 Overgrown Battlement
3 Quirion Ranger
3 Saruli Caretaker
1 Snow-Covered Forest
4 Sagu Wildling
1 Swamp
3 Tinder Wall
3 Wall of Roots
4 Winding Way
2 Faerie Macabre
2 Fang Dragon
1 Flaring Pain
3 Healer of the Glade
3 Mesmeric Fiend
2 Nylea’s Disciple
2 Scattershot Archer
This fairly new hybrid combo deck can kill fast with Balustrade Spy setting up a lethal (or at least highly damaging) Dread Return on Lotleth Giant after milling most of its library; it also has the secondary plan of Walls accelerating into its big threats. It has definitely caught our eye as something to watch. Balustrade Spy and Dread Return both have a pedigree as extremely strong cards that can fuel problematic decks. However, there are still plenty of moments to interact with the combo and some clear sideboard options. We’ll want to continue watching to see how this develops, but it certainly looks a lot more appropriate in terms of overall impact than High Tide so far.
Overall, the format has looked healthy—which is partially why we were reserved about making this change. The impacts of a deck like High Tide are a lot less surface level than other problematic decks. Our hope is that this will nudge the format back a bit more toward interaction and drop a few percentage points off the decks that were preying on Tide being around. But, as with all things, we’ll have to wait and see.
Pauper Championships kick off this week on Magic Online, and I know we’ll eagerly be watching to see what happens both there and at Paupergeddon later this month out in Italy. As always, we’ll be out there reading everything you all have to write about this as well.
Thanks for reading, playing the format, and being up for trying something as experimental as a trial unban. It was a worthwhile experiment, and maybe we’ll try it again in the future.
This has been Gavin Verhey, now signing off on behalf of the Pauper Format Panel.
Alex Ullman
Alexandre Weber
Emma Partlow
Gavin Verhey
Mirco Ciavatta
Paige Smith
Ryuji Saito
