Ebb and Flow: Low Tide Update

[serenechaos]

Low Tide has remained my personal baby, my magnum opus as a deck artist. I've gotten decently good at piloting it, more limited by my general playing ability than by the ceiling. I have a few flex cards that rotate in and out in various combinations based on how I feel, and a mostly unmoving majority, but the deck does continue to evolve beautifully.

The Growth
4 Brainstorm
4 Growth Spiral
4 Planar Genesis
4 Grisly Salvage
1 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Mystical Teachings
1 Veil of Summer
1 Archdruid's Charm
1 Harness Infinity

The Cycle
4 Dictate of Karametra
4 Early Harvest
1 Turnabout

The Loop
3 Shigeki, Jukai Visionary
3 Colossal Skyturtle
1 Atarka's Command
1 Kolaghan's Command

The Life
4 Prismatic Vista
5 Forest
1 Snow-covered Forest
5 Island
1 Snow-covered Island
4 Swamp
1 Snow-covered Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Snow-covered Mountain

Sideboard
4 Force of Vigor
4 Endurance
3 Veil of Summer
2 Abrupt Decay
2 Assassin's Trophy


Planar Genesis is the new hotness, been fiddling with it. It's not strictly better than Joint Exploration, because putting the land in tapped has mattered a couple times, but it is definitely better. When I play it in Modern I will probably just play both to replace the Brainstorms.

Archdruid's Charm and maindeck Veil have been amazing, Charm was such an autoinclude the second it left the printing sheet. Critically, it provides a line for Mystical Teachings to reach Shigeki/Turtle on its own and is maindeck artifact/enchantment hate.


K command has continued to be an mvp, it just does everything and I'm never* sad to see it, even if I'm missing both colors (obv sometimes it's that last dead draw or the red just never gets there while you're wishing you could shock and hit an artifact).

Atarka's has been clutch. Aside from being very attached to the symmetry with Kolaghan's, the half-spiral is genuinely useful early and beating hexproof and infinite life was clutch literally two days ago at FNM (admittedly Modern), beating a resolved Thoptersword board. Hilariously, the fast combo g1 was followed by brutally annihilating his board and hand every turn with Turtle+K command while waiting for Harvest to go off.

Snow Tide has been decently successful as well; full snow lands,+4 Coatl, +1-3 Graven Lore, -X things of your choice, I recommend starting with the Brainstorms. Coatl stalling boards is extremely good in a deck that mostly suffers from being half a turn too slow for the format (and a lack of interaction, which is also solved by these). Graven Lore just feels... good to resolve. Scrying 5 and knowing you're about to draw 3, feels powerful. The card isn't good because it's 5cmc, but in a deck that doesn't care that it's 5cmc, it's bonkers. Much like Harness Infinity at 7cmc. Like yes, I was able to afford to Teachings for Harvest, cast Harvest and flashback for Harness, I think I'll be ok getting 7 spare somewhere.

One current consideration is moving Veil back to the board and adding a 7th forest; the land count has been ok, but I would prefer if it was great, and if anything new comes in it needs to be green first.

Yard hate can be brutal, depending on what kind and how well your opponent times it: Surgical effects are a death knell, losing Shigeki or Harvest is unrecoverable, you're on turtle beatz and repeated K commands.

Countermagic is only a problem during bottlenecks, otherwise you can get Veil, or combo off over top of it, or just let it happen and then get your pieces back with Shigeki. Casting restrictions are similar; Blood Moon is blank, Spheres are effective but weak, since the entire structure of the deck essentially negates the problem, and Chalice at anything but 3 is laughable (and 3 is still pretty winnable). Discard has the same problem as countermagic, it has to be well timed or strongly followed up, otherwise your combo pieces will just get back your other combo pieces. Sadly, Grief does...exactly that, strong discard and instant pressure. But hey, you lose to the most despised power card in the format, what can you do.

Play-wise, I've gotten much better at recognizing lines and sequencing, but my epilepsy makes focus and memory challenging. I make a lot of obvious mistakes, usually from missing details and forgetting things. In my camera match, I forgot I needed to respond to a Saga trigger before the draw step, critically getting my Vista needled and being exactly one mana short to go off until more hate was in place. I made a couple other mistakes, and you'll be able to see that I'm extremely shaky and confused from nerves and neurology.

I've done most of the cool achievement bits though: bouncing a turn 1 Emrakul with Turtle, Teachings for Veil fairly regularly, going off with disruption on the stack, and probably into the double digits of resolved Harness Infinity, which always wins.

Here is my camera match with the deck, I managed g1 to force him to blow up his sphere, and then it was all downhill. Even in that game I was way too nervous, I should have gone off a million turns before I finally did.

https://youtu.be/tRYVAZxExpk?si=FFMaf9pmPU7wgXQ6

I would gush about all the beautiful arts I picked out but I'm pretty sure there's a character limit on here.

[NukeMoose]

I just logged into this forum after something like 14 years to say that I like your deck and think it's really cool.

I always love brewing outside the meta and have had some success with it, and early harvest storm combo is one of my old time favorite strats. I might be giving this a whirl in the near future.

[FTW]

Deck looks fun. Planar Genesis is a good addition for the instant speed strategy.

For Legacy, I would not recommend the snow plan with Ice-Fang Coatl because the format is full of Orcish Bowmasters.

For Legacy, do you want more Veil of Summer maindeck since most of the format is blue counters (FoW) or black discard (Grief)? It makes game 1 better.

Is Reset good here for the instant speed version? They're a lot cheaper lately. Maybe 3 Reset 3 Early Harvest 0 Turnabout? Or 3-2-1 split?