Permanent Waves started out as an attempt to improve Spring Tide. For those who have played Spring Tide, you have probably realized that its biggest problem was that its untap effects were insufficient to play out all of its draw spells. You simply couldn’t support your draw engine based on such weak untap effects. Cloud of Faeries and Snap only untap 2 lands. This becomes a big problem when you need to generate 15+ storm to win the game. Not only did they not untap enough lands, but Snap also opened up the deck to creature removal as disruption. This was a huge drawback against any deck packing creature removal including Goblins. Hitting a Cloud of Faeries in response to a Snap could spell doom for a Spring Tide player.
In an attempt to make Spring Tide better, I started to investigate better untap effects. The best one I found some time last year was Candelabra of Tawnos. A 1 mana artifact that lets you pay X mana to untap X lands. It avoided the Snap problem of opening yourself up to creature removal and had the advantage of untapping all of your lands if you had enough mana. It was easily the second best untap effect behind Turnabout and immediatedly replaced Snap in my builds.
The second change required some time and a policy change. Wizards of the Coast unbanned Mind over Matter in Legacy on June 1, 2007. I had wanted to try this card in Spring Tide for some time, but since the B&R had not changed in almost 3 years there was no reason to hope for this. I often heard people say that Mind over Matter was too expensive or that it would be completely worthless. I suspected that a card that let you untap your lands over and over again might be worth something even at 6 mana! After the unbanning, I immediatedly began testing Mind over Matter and the results were simply great. You never fizzled once MoM hit play and you could create a larger amount of mana than you would need to win the game.
Its worth noting that I put both Candelabra and MoM in the deck without realizing the synergy between the two. MoM lets you untap artifacts as well. So given enough cards in hand you can pitch a card to untap your Candelabra and then untap all your lands with any extra mana. This situation creates so much mana that it allows you to win without any worry about fizzling. It also allows the deck to move away from Spring Tide’s primary win condition, Brain Freeze. If you can create as much mana as this deck it makes more sense to play the better win condition, Stroke of Genius. Stroke of Genius wins the game when you cast it. It is simply the better win condition in this deck and it has the benefit of not being dead before you win.
The other main change to Spring Tide was to realize that playing 16 lands was simply not enough to support expensive spells like MoM and Cunning Wish. Permanent Waves should not play less than 18 lands. This not only prevents missing lands drops, but is more acceptable in this deck because extra lands can be pitched to MoM as you go off.
Permanent Waves
//Search and Tutors
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Merchant Scroll
2 Impulse
//Mana Acceleration and Untap Effects
4 High Tide
4 Candelabra of Tawnos
3 Turnabout
3 Mind over Matter
//Power Draw
3 Meditate
3 Ideas Unbound
//Protection and the Win
4 Force of Will
3 Cunning Wish
1 Stroke of Genius
//Lands
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
12 Island
//Sideboard
1 Meditate
1 Stroke of Genius
1 Turnabout
1 Brain Freeze
3 Wipe Away
4 Echoing Truth
4 Tormod’s Crypt
Sample hand and goldfish –
This is a hand I’ve goldfished just now as an example of how the deck works. Many people have asked me how does the deck actually work so I thought I would take this opportunity to show you step by step. It would take very long to do this for many hands but it makes sense for one hand to give a good example.
Opening Hand
Island
High Tide
Flooded Strand
Island
Flooded Strand
Merchant Scroll
Ideas Unbound
I would keep this hand in a tournament.
Turn 1)
Flooded Strand search for Island
Pass.
Turn 2)
Draw Island
Play Island
Play Merchant Scroll for Brainstorm
Pass
Turn 3)
Draw Meditate
Play Flooded Strand
Tap Island for Brainstorm
Draw Island, Island, Candelabra
Put 2 Islands back
Play Candelabra
Activate Flooded Strand put Island into play
Pass
Turn 4)
Draw Merchant Scroll
Put Island into play
Your remaining hand is – Merchant Scroll, Meditate, High Tide, Island, Ideas Unbound
Tap Island -> Play High Tide
Tap Island for 2 mana -> Ideas Unbound into (Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, Mind Over Matter)
Activate Candelabra tapping 2 remaining Islands to untap all 4 lands floating 0 mana
Tap 3 Islands for 6 mana to play Mind over Matter
Pitch Flooded Strand to untap an Island
Tap 2 untapped Islands to play Meditate -> (Force of Will, Meditate, Ideas Unbound, Turnabout) floating 1 mana
Pitch Polluted Delta to untap an Island
Tap Island plus 1 floating to play Meditate -> (High Tide, Ponder, Ponder, Candelabra)
Pitch Island to untap an Island
Tap Island to play High Tide floating 1
Pitch Force of Will to untap an Island
Tap Island play Ideas Unbound -> (Turnabout, Island, Turnabout) floating 2 mana
Pitch Island to untap Candelabra
Tap Island to float 5 mana and untap all lands using Candelabra floating 1 mana
Play Ponder with 1 floating seeing Force of Will, Island, Island shuffle randomly drawing Impulse
Tap Island play Impulse -> (Island, Ideas Unbound, Force of Will, Polluted Delta) take Ideas Unbound floating 1
Tap Island to play Ideas Unbound -> (High Tide, Cunning Wish, Candelabra) floating 2
Play High Tide with 1 floating
Play Candelabra with 0 floating
Tap 2 Islands for 8 mana untapping 4 lands with Candelabra #2 floating 4 mana
Tap 4 Islands for 16 mana floating a total of 20 mana activate Candelabra #3 floating 16 mana untapping 4 Islands
Taps 4 Islands for 16 mana floating a total of 32 mana
Cast Turnabout targetting your artifacts 28 floating and 3 untapped Candelabras
Use 4 Mana to activate Candelabra #1 to untap 4 Islands and float 24
Tap 4 Islands for 16 mana and a total of 40 mana floating activate Candelabra #1 to float 36 mana untapping 4 Islands
Tap 4 Islands for 16 mana and a total of 52 man floating activate Candelabra #2 to float 48 mana untapping 4 Islands
Tap 4 Islands for 16 mana and a total of 64 mana floating activate Candelabra #3 to float 60 mana
Continue if you wish by playing more Turnabouts
Cast Merchant Scroll for Stroke of Genius and cast it on your opponent for X where X is greater than 60
This is a turn 4 win, but the deck can win on turn 3 as well. This hand should show you the power of MoM, Candelabra and of the deck in general.
Other Resources for understanding the deck –
Spring Tide thread
I would like to thank everyone who helped me work on this deck. It includes so many people that I’ll probably leave someone out if I try to list them all.
This deck became different enough from the original builds of Spring Tide to deserve its own name. This deck is named for the 1980 Rush album of the same name. The reasoning behind the name is that this deck unlike its predecessor used permanents (Candelabra and MoM) to untap its lands and sometimes its artifacts!
Last edited by AnwarA101; 11-10-2007 at 10:34 AM.
I'm so glad you finally decided to make a thread for this deck. I really like the concept and the decklist you presented seems really strong. I have some questions:
How are your matchups vs. the top tier decks? Is this deck capable of beating aggro-control decks like Thresh and Hanni Fish?
What exactly are the Toromod's Crypts in your sideboard used for?
What exactly are the 4 Echoing Truth in your sideboard used for?
Why don't you play any Defense Grids in your sideboard? That card seems like it would improve lots of matchups.
"Part of me belives that Barrin taught me meditation simply to shut me up."
-Ertai, wizard adept
http://solidarityprimer.proboards85.com/index.cgi
Has anyone else fiddled around with a green splash and Explorations? With untap effects that scale properly, this resulted in a considerably faster goldifsh than regular Spring Tide and added the chance of a turn-2 win.
Also, I always liked a maindecked Echoing Truth because in addition to getting rid of whatever bothers you it can also be used as the biggest mana generator there is (albeit only towards the end of the combo).
With the ability to get large (but possibly not lethal) amounts of mana more easily, have you considered 2 Strokes of Genius - 'one for myself, one for them' or is this overkill?
I'm curious about this too. Looking at the example of play that you gave, it seems that one counter spell on Turn 4 would be a whole lot of trouble for the deck.Originally Posted by Bahamuth
And I'm just going to toss this out there as one of the those "interesting but probably not good" ideas: What about Bozium Strip? Ages ago, I was tinkering around with it in Solidarity, but it proved to be sorta overkill. It did get pretty disgusting when you could cast your Instants twice.
It's overkill, the deck runs 3 wishes to get the one for them after you use one up on you.
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Team Brown & Team Unicorn. Does that make me a Brown Unicorn?
Nice job dude.
The good thing about Permanent Waves is that it can recover from a Counterspell much faster due to the flexibility of Merchant Scroll. Additionaly you will also draw into Business faster than Solidarity, simply because there 6 rather 3 'real' draw spells and the power of MoM as a permanent engine.
The thing is that at the current state its not faster than Solidarity, runs less Protection and gets hit by Pithing Needle quit badly, but has the mentioned advantages. The question is if we either should keep strengtheing the engine and try to make the turn 3 kill more likely or adding 1-3 more protection spells.
Like beeing said i would run one Echoing Truth maindeck, maybe even one Wipe Away if your meta is Counterbalance, MM or Teeg infested. It also hits zombie and goblin tokens. I would cut one Wish for it, i found Wish often sitting dead in my hand.
If you're talking about Gro, that's a bad matchup for Waves. Waves doesn't do well with Counterbalance in play. If you're talking about Landstill, Waves has the luxury of time, Landstill isn't going to go busted before Turn 4. The Landstill matchup Pre-board is somewhere around 50/50. This comes from testing over 30 games with Anwar, Krieger, and Happy Gilmore. Post-board, it's still about even. Waves brings in twiddle effects like Gigadrowse to tap Landstill's islands and Landstill brings in Meddling Mage.
The Threshold matchup is very tough and nearly impossible when played against maindeck Counterbalance. I have no testing experience against Hanni Fish, but if they are playing maindeck Counterbalance its probably pretty bad, but otherwise you should have more time than you do against Threshold and that can give you just enough time to go off.
My sideboard is definitely not written in stone. I started playing this deck when MoM became legal at the end of June. Back then both CRET Belcher and graveyard decks (Ichorid and Breakfast) were big in my meta so I adopted those cards to help me with close matchups. Echoing Truth was suppose to help against Goblins as well against Chalice at 1 and it was a good way to have a non-dead card as you can bounce your Candelabras with an Echoing Truth to generate both mana and storm.
I don't think Defense Grid is a very good card as it seems to shut itself down as you play more and more High Tides, which this deck wants to do. I've tried it before in Spring Tide and I was underwhelmed with it.
The biggest question going forward is there some reliable way to deal with Counterbalance? Also I've explored splashing some colors, but nothing has really panned out as of yet.
Have you tested Diminishing Returns? The loss of 10 cards, and allowing the opponent to draw is potentially painful, but in terms of drawing horsepower, there's not much that can compete with it in the format.
Like many others, I look at this, and am stuck thinking that there's room for a color splash. Personally, it seems like black has something to offer with Bubbling Muck which has solid synergy with all of the untap effects, Duress/Thoughtseize for disruption, Infernal Tutor (and maybe Street Wraith) as hand management, Ill-Gotten Gains, Cruel Bargain or Promise of Power for alternative card drawing, and Tendrils as a backup victory condition.
It's a bit of an odd idea, but you're alread running Ideas Unbound which is arcane, so you might consider running Toils of Night and Day rather than Turnabout, and, maybe sneaking in a Psychic Puppetry and Peer Through Depths or two. (Toils will more efficient that Turnabout if you have a candelabra or two in play.)
Hi Anwar,
Thanks for finally releasing your deck list! It looks very solid, but I have some very important questions regarding this mana engine.
From my experience, Spring Tide was able to go off almost always on turn 3, mainly because it's untap effects worked just as well with few lands in play. To me it seems much less likely to hit the turn 3 win with Permanent Waves (from my very limited testing), because untapping lands with Candelabra, Turnabout, and MoM is much more mana-expensive than with Cloud of Faeries and Snap. The longer the game goes on, Candelabra and MoM become much much better (similar to Solidarity's Reset), but it makes the deck considerably slower. One of the main advantages that Spring Tide had that Solidarity lacked was the 3rd turn win. The way I see it, this deck has a much more stable mana engine but is also slower than the old Spring Tide. This is much more like Solidarity, which also has a stable mana engine but lacks speed - the main reason it dropped out of the metagame (eventhough it plays more disruption than PW). Now my main question: is this deck really able to perform well in a metagame that contains Fast Combo and Aggro-Control? It seems that those decks are a hard matchup for both Solidarity and Permanent Waves.
I would really like to see a comparison between the three High Tide decks in the format and how their matchups differ. I'm looking forward to playing this deck, after all I already got my playset of Candelabras. :)
Sometimes you have to read between the minds.
++ T8ing all over Europe since 2005 ++
++ Team aYb - all your base (are belong to us) ++
Wipe away? That seems like the best option, with acess to wish.
Why aren't you main-baoarding like 2 brain freezes? I feel like that might help against thresh (just mini-freeze for twelve or fifteen two or three times).
Solid deck, though I still feel like the name should have a Hanukkah theme.
The E.P.I.C. Syndicate: I mean, if they play a lullaby for babies they should at least play the Monster Mash when somebody dies.
It could, but you'd really have to replace one of the cantrips with a Sensei's Divining Top (a.k.a. Dreidl) for the theme ;)
I have this amazing new idea.
Add red to the deck and name it URMOM. It will be unstoppable.
SummenSaugen: well, I use Chaos Orb, Animate Artifact, and Dance of Many to make the table we're playing on my chaos orb token
SummenSaugen: then I flip it over and crush my opponent
I lol'd. xD
But know there's a point I don't understand. SpringTide was a budget version of Solidarity, because some people couldn't afford Resets.
But now this type of SpringTide is also very expansive because of the 4 Candelabra of Tawnos. So what advantage does this deck have compared to Solidarity?
Team SPOD
<Der_imaginäre_Freund> props:
Adan for being the NQG God (drawer)
Spring Tide was also a turn faster on average that Solidarity, as I recall.
I was actually wondering the same thing myself. You (Anwar) listed good reasons why to play this over SPRING tide but not Solidarity. Solidarity has more protection and the same clock...+ pithing needle hurts this deck a lot and is a very common mainboard card in threshold and also very commonly in the SB of many other decks. You did mention that this deck runs a better win condition (Stroke) but Solidarity is able to use that as well many times and also able to remand a brainfreeze and use it again. I guess Merchant Scroll is pretty good and the deck lets you get a TON of mana, but I'm just trying to see why you would play this over solidarity (honestly...I'm not trying to bash this deck, im REALLY wondering...)...
Other th
Permanent Waves is a combo deck that plays fair.
I've had the luxury to play this deck on multiple occasions durring our testing sessions and it is by far the most intersting deck to play. I never get tired of finding the little quirks that make it even more fun. CB/Top is the bane of this deck, but by no means does this make the deck unplayable. Besides haveing a fairly consistent turn 3-4 win Waves can incorporate many of the anti-combo straties that the top blue decks utilize. I would certainly give the deck a try if you have the Candles. I have won games where my opponent hand 4 hard counters in hand, all of which he could use and still was able to go off with the remaning two cards in my hand (Stroke and Candle). Merchant Scroll is so unbelievably good in this deck I can't emphisize it enough. The untap affects are very efficient and Candle + MoM is indeed a combo. I only wish that third MoM was a second stroke, Legacy is so blue infested its worth running I think.
Team Unicorn is too hetero for me.While this is close it's still wrong. Every one knows it's an orgy of unicorns.******s?
TeaM NOVA for life.
I tried and failed to morph Solidarity into a combo-control deck, but the problem that ruined that attempt (too many counters -> not enough untap effects or draw spells) can be dodged here since a single Mind over Matter turns every superfluous counterspell into a Dark Ritual, and Merchant Scroll is a cheap (in terms of card slots) way to consistently get both High Tide and draw spells in hand.
Maybe this deck could be reworked to run ~8 counters plus the CounterTop engine, while still going off on turn 5-6. This would make it somewhat attractive, since as it stands, despite being really cool, it's as slow as Solidarity and almost as disruptable as Spring Tide.
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
I think it's possible to push the clock with a deck like this to try for going off on the second land drop:
Underground Sea
Watery Grave
Bloodstained Mire
Polluted Delta
Chain of Vapor
Bubbling Muck
High Tide
Candelabra of Tawnos
Cloud of Faeries
Toils of Night and Day
Brainstorm
Ideas Unbound
Meditate
Diminishing Returns
Braingeyser
I'm not sure that the draw engine here is ideal (Ill-Gotten Gains and Infernal Contract have potential in something like this as and, Diminishing Returns is a bit risky) but something like that should have a non-trivial chance to go off on turn 2.
A sideboard, or construction with , Duress, Thoughtseize, Force of Will as replacements for the untap effects, can provide a bit of a sliding scale on the combo/control axis, but the deck needs to have some sort of answer to chalice at 1.
This deck doesn't sacrifice the turn 3 win for stability. The problem with the turn 3 win for Spring Tide was that attempt could fail. The inclusion of Candelabra and MoM make this turn 3 more reliable. When you go off and you hit something like multiple Candelabras or even better a MoM this prevents you from fizzling because you have cards that untap all your lands instead of just 2 lands. Mind over Matter actually lets you not worry about drawing anything except for a card advantage spell. I've often done the following on turn 3 -
High Tide, Candelabara/Turnabout (floating 0), tap all 3 islands for MoM
pitch 1 card, play Ideas Unbound
pitch 2 cards, play Meditate
and you keep going as long as you can generate card advantage.
I encourage anyone who is really interested to try fishing the decklist that I have posted. I've done the turn 3 win in tournament play more than I did with Spring Tide.
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