Mono Blue Tide Control Primer

Intro

Tide control is a strong deck that has good matchups against a lot of popular premodern decks. I’d argue it’s the best control deck in the format right now. While mostly a blue control deck it also has elements of prison and combo. It has its fair share of free wins in many matches where the linear gameplan of Tide comboing into creature land beats just wins. However, it is also a deck with a fairly high skill ceiling. Strong format knowledge and threat assessment ability are important for when you don’t have free wins. As a bonus, it’s also one of the cheapest decks in the format (though the price of Tides is certainly rising).

The Combo

Parallax Tide interactions have become popular across several decks but I still want to outline them for those that aren’t aware. I also want to describe proper sequencing. There are two ways to combo with tide in the deck – Chain of Vapor and Stifle. Some lists will also play Nevinyrral’s Disk. To combo with a Chain of Vapor: 

• Play your Tide.
• Holding priority, activate Tide five times targeting five of their lands.
• Still holding priority, respond to the last activation by casting Chain of Vapor on your Tide.
  • At this point from bottom to top, the stack will look like: up to five Tide activations and a Chain of Vapor. When Chain of Vapor resolves, the Tide’s leaves the battlefield trigger goes on the stack. It then resolves with no lands exiled yet so no lands get returned. After that the exile land activations resolve.
• Optionally sacrifice a land to the Chain of Vapor to bounce an on board threat that they won’t be able to replay.

If your opponent has fewer than five lands you can follow these same steps but start by exiling some of your lands, passing priority between each exile before holding priority and hitting all of their lands. This effectively lets you untap some of your lands.

To combo with Stifle:

• Play your Tide
• Exile their lands one at a time, passing priority between each activation. 
• When the fading trigger causes you to sacrifice the Tide in your upkeep, allow the sacrifice to resolve and Stifle the return to battlefield trigger. 

If you’re going for the Stifle combo it’s important to exile their lands one at a time to better play around cards like Gush or Fireblast.

Disk works similarly to Chain, except instead of casting a Chain, you activate the Disk. 

None of these lines can be interrupted with removal from opponents. In the Chain / Disk case, your opponent’s first opportunity to react is when the Chain or Disk activation gets put on the stack. Once they’re on the stack your opponent’s removal spells will kill the Tide but the result will still be the same. The leaves the battlefield trigger resolves returning none of their lands and then the exile trigger resolves. In the Stifle case, you still use let the removal spell resolve and still use Stifle to counter the leaves the battlefield trigger. 

Maindeck Choices

• 3 Faerie Conclave. The deck normally wants to have untapped blue on turn 1 to threaten Stifle or Force Spike and another untapped land turn 2 to threaten counterspells. Post board we also want to have mana up turn 1 for Annul or Blasts. We really need to have mana up on 2 for counters, card draw, and Keg. This means turn three is the real sweet spot for when we’d want to drop a Conclave. We’re not swinging with Conclave until pretty late in the game since we want to keep up double blue and swinging with a conclave takes up two of our blue sources. Ultimately, conclave can lead to clunky sequencing in a deck that can fall too far behind if it stumbles, so we’re opting for 3 instead of 4 copies. 
• 4 Parallax Tides. Many lists are playing just 3. In many matchups I find myself digging for the Tide combo, so it’s better to have the maximum. Drawing two Tides isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it allows you to be more aggressive with casting Tides or can help buy time to get the other half of the combo. The deck has no ways to shuffle, and when running 3 Tides I’d find myself forced to take one with Impulse knowing it might be a while until I had another opportunity or bottoming Tide because I needed a counter for a must-answer threat and then not getting another opportunity later to cast one.
• No Standstills. To be fair, I’ve never put Standstill in a premodern deck, but I’ve found every time I’ve played against it, it was bad for my opponents regardless of what deck either of us was on. In order for Standstill to be good, we’d need a lot of things:
  • A relatively clear board (or a Powder Keg/Factory in play to deal with opposing creatures). Unlike Landstill, which has Wraths/Swords/Humility to keep the board clear, Tide revolves around letting some threats stick and eventually dealing with them. 
  • An opponent that has worse lands than us. Popular decks like Terraoath and Terrageddon have better lands than us. Even if the board is empty they’ll eventually end up with Wastelands / Ports to deal with our threats and Villages / Factories to beat down. Landstill has its own creature lands plus Decree.
  • Mana up after casting Standstill to counter a must-answer threat. It certainly depends on the matchup, but going shields down against some decks is not worth getting three cards. Giving a green opponent an opportunity to cast Survival will quickly allow them to make up the card advantage lost. At that point we’re priced into two-for-one-ing ourselves (Chain + counter), which means we may lose a chain we need to Tide combo. Against Dreadnought, we’re giving them an opportunity to get a Dreadnought in play. Against Stasis, giving them that opportunity to land Stasis or Black Vise can be game over. If we’re waiting until turn 4 to cast Standstill and hold up a counter, I’d rather just cast a FoF instead. 
  • Few enough cards in hand to not immediately hand size from the Standstill. This deck is bad at emptying its hand and especially bad at doing so at instant speed. Landstill at least has STP as a cheap spell to cast when having > 7 cards in hand. 

Meeting all these criteria is going to be rare. I’d almost always rather have FoF instead of Standstill. 

• Card draw/selection suite. I went down a FoF since Lobstercon and replaced it with a Flash of Insight. I found that FoF can be clunky as a 4-drop. And as with Standstill, FoF can be tough on a deck that’s bad at emptying its hand and can thus sometimes end up being an expensive Impulse. We don’t have a lot to do with odd mana, so Flash of Insight can help give us something to do on turn 3. While we’re not as good as Dreadnought is at utilizing the flashback side, it does help us dig for half of our combo or whatever answer we need. I’m still tinkering with this slot. Intuition is another potential option. AK is great for card advantage and Impulse is great for digging for specific answers / combo pieces. 
• Counterspell suite. This is a fairly standard mix. Some builds will play more than 2 Force Spike. I think 2 is a good number. It’s a card that’s good when it’s good and quite bad when it’s bad. It can be great early in the game to prevent us from falling too far behind. On the play it’s also our best answer to turn 1 Goblin Lackey. On the other hand, this deck is full of lands and really doesn’t want to have dead nonland cards in hand, so it can be pretty bad to draw more than one. It’s also easy to play around and some decks have natural sequences that play around it. Burn, for example, only has Incinerate at 2 mana so when we’re on the draw it can be hard to find a good use for the Force Spike.
• 3 Quicksand. Quicksand has a lot of good targets in the format. It’s a turn 1 answer to Goblin Lackey. Coupled with 2 Force Spikes (on the play), Mishra’s Factory, Chain of Vapor, and Stifle, it gives us a lot of ways to kill the Lackey or at least slow down the Goblins player. It’s also a great answer to Goblin Piledriver. It holds off opposing Mishra’s Factories and Meddling Mages and can kill Jackal Pup or Ball Lightning. We run a lot of lands and have a lot of ways to dig for lands if we need more. Setting us back a land drop is worth killing some of these must-answer threats. If your meta is full of Mono-U Dreadnought, Replenish, TerraOath, etc. then some number of Wastelands or more Islands may be a better option. 
• 3 Powder Keg, no Disks. Keg does work in pretty much every matchup. It’s often dealing with Mox Diamonds, creature lands, Dreadnoughts, or creature tokens. In creature heavy matchups it can often get 2-for-1s at the cost of some life or deal with otherwise problematic threats like Argothian Enchantress. I played a Disk at Lobstercon and while I found it to be somewhat good situationally, it was very hard to set up a good scenario for Disk. It can be an 8th combo piece for Parallax Tide and is a way to get around Meddling Mage, but tapping 4 mana at sorcery speed to not immediately impact the board is risky. It’s especially bad post-board when opponents tend to have more artifact hate.

Sideboard Choices

• 4 Chill, 2 Blasts. Most decks run 2 Chill and variable numbers of Blasts. I think that the game plan against the red decks should be focused on staying alive and then preventing them from doing anything through Chill + Tide. Having fewer answers to turn 1 Lackey loses percentage points in the Goblins matchup, but Chill + Tide makes the burn matchup feel easier. 
• 3 Annul. Considering going up to 4 here. Most of the scary cards in popular decks are artifacts or enchantments.
• 2 Dominate. Primarily used to steal creature lands, elephants, and dreadnoughts. 
• 1 Tormod’s Crypt. I was at 2 but felt that some of the graveyard based decks were already fine matchups. 
• 1 Teferi’s Response. Our lands are our only way that we win so we need to protect them against Wastelands/Ports/Dust Bowl. 
• 1 Misdirection. Good at winning counter wars. Redirecting a LD spell, burn spell, or Gerrard’s Verdict can be back breaking. 
• 0 Cursed Totem / Hibernation. I made a conscious decision to sacrifice some matchups – specifically Elves, Enchantress, and Madness. Some of these can be helpful in those matchups, but I don’t know if the percentage point increase is worth it. I’d rather have more percentage points against other decks that see more play.

Matchups – This includes some common play patterns but keep in mind that this is a reactive deck so everything is situational. I don’t have an exact sideboard mapping.

Burn

• This matchup feels close. I think the sideboard changes make it pretty good but its best draws can be hard for anyone to beat. A patient burn player should be able to beat you if you’re unable to get a Tide combo through. 
• Play notes:
  • Their 3-drops (Vortex/Ball Lightning) tend to be some of the scarier cards in game 1. I’ve rarely won a game where an opponent was able to connect with a ball lightning. Hold up answers or at least mana to bluff answers. Tapping out on turn 2 on the draw to play a keg can be game losing. If an opponent has something like a Cursed Scroll and Lavamancer in play with a not large graveyard then it may be better to eat some chip damage and wait until you can have Quicksand up for a potential Ball Lightnings.
  • Stifling their lands turn 1 is a good time walk.  Stifling lands later on can be less valuable. They have a lot of Stifle targets in the deck. You don’t want to be stuck later on with Tide in your hand no way to combo with it.
  • Cursed scroll is scary if games go long and you aren’t set up to tide soon. It’s a blank if you’re able to tide. Same thing applies to a lesser extent with Lavamancer. 
  • Play as many basics as you can first post board and feel free to burn quicksands early to play around Price of Progress assuming you have a backup Ball Lightning answer.
  • This is a rare matchup where comboing with Stifle can often be better than Chain. Since you don’t have to stack the activations like you do with Chain, your opponent is forced to Fireblast in response to a tide activation or risk not being able to ever cast the Fireblast. You’ll often have counters left on the tide after exiling all their lands meaning you can get some time walk turns.
  • They get slower post board. Play around their REBs/Pyroblast to the extent that you can. 
  • Get value out of Force Spikes where you can. This is true with most matchups but it’s pretty easy for burn to play around it. Their deck is mainly one drops and three drops. There’s not a spell they’d cast on turn two that you really need to counter, making Force Spike on the draw pretty bad.
• Sideboarding is something I messed up at Lobstercon. In testing I tried several different sideboard strategies and was winning the burn matchup regardless. I went with an approach where I boarded out Tides and tried to match their threats with my answers. Theory was that my deck would be full of Blasts, counters, Kegs, and card draw. I could let their first few burn spells through and then they’ll run out of cards before I do. Despite having more lands than the burn opponent, my lands are real cards/answers to their threats – Quicksand kills a lot of things, Factory neutralizes Pups, etc. This was flawed logic. Games would go long and my opponents would win the long game. I couldn’t kill quick enough and my opponents would get to enough lands where my Force Spikes/Mana Leaks become useless. Eventually, Chill also becomes useless as they draw enough lands. Instead, I’ve switched up the board to increase Chills and decrease Blasts. I’ve also changed my strategy to how I play the games and it has worked well. Aim to get an early Tide combo and Chill down and you’ll buy yourself infinite time / blank many of their scariest threats. Generally against this deck your expensive non-Tide spells are bad – Fact or Fiction and Flash of Insight.

Goblins

• This is a pretty good matchup that does suffer from leaning on sideboarding Chill more than Hydroblast. Without a turn one Goblin Lackey they’re a clunky deck. Your answers line up favorably to their threats. You can answer something and play a card draw spell in the same turn. You often don’t need to Tide them to win.
• Play Notes
  • Not surprisingly, lackey is the most important card in this matchup. Without Lackey, you can counter or ignore pretty much everything else that they play. Fortunately you have a lot of answers or ways to buy time against a turn 1 Lackey – Factory, Quicksand, Chain of Vapor, Stifle, Force Spike. 
  • They don’t have a lot of reach. You can often afford to go down quite low on life total.
  • You can stifle a lot of things in their deck but you don’t need to stifle everything that you can. Ringleader or Matron triggers don’t matter if you’re able to tide them shortly after. Siege Gang ETB might not matter if you have a keg in hand.  Stifling a Piledriver or an incinerator to keep your factory alive can be more valuable. Post Tide combo a single Factory can stop their entire offense.
• Sideboard Notes
  • The 6 anti-red cards are obviously good. Teferi’s Response is better if you see Ports but still okay to bring in against Wasteland builds. Keg is not bad too. Force Spike is good on the play but is really bad on the draw if they are able to get a Lackey through. We can durdle more in this matchup if they don’t have a Lackey so the expensive spells aren’t as bad as they are against burn but are often still not that great.
  • You may want to main phase Chain their turn one Lackey to play around Pyroblast. 
  • Protect your Chills. You can Chain them to save them from removal. It’s better to play draw go for a while rather than leave yourself vulnerable to Tranquil Domain.

Dreadnought

• I’ve found this matchup to be slightly favorable preboard but can vary post-board depending on how they sideboard. An early Dreadnought is their best path to victory. As the game goes longer and you hit your land drops, their free counters won’t let them win a counter war. Sideboard strategies can vary. 
• Play Notes:
  • You often end up in two counter wars – one over the Dreadnought combo on their turn and another over your chain or powder keg on your turn or potentially their next turn. It can sometimes be fine to play a Mana Leak or Force Spike even if they can pay for it to tap them out for the second counter war. 
  • Be thoughtful about whether you want to fight over the Dreadnought or the Stifle/Vision Charm. You normally want to fight over the Dreadnought since they have fewer copies of it and letting it resolve means they’ll have more answers to your answer to the Stifle/Vision charm in the form of another Stifle or Vision Charm. Earlier in the game you want to give yourself the best chance to answer their Dreadnought. Later in the game, you may want to get the 2 for 1 to set yourself up to out-resource them for the late game. 
  • Landing a Powder Keg in the mid game lets you go on the offensive.
• Sideboard Notes
  • Dominate, Annuls, Misdirections, and Keg are generally the set of things you want but some are better or worse depending on their sideboard plans. What you side out depends on how you think they’ll sideboard too. Stifle is only good if they’re going for the Brain Freeze plan or if they go for their Tide plan and you need to keep them off 4+ mana with your own Tides. Similarly, Tide is mainly good if they’re going for their own Tide sideboard plan. Pay attention if they have Chains or Factories game one. If they’re not on UW then Quicksand does nothing and some number of them can be sided out. 
  • Figuring out their game plan early is important. You want to be aggressive if they’re on the Brain Freeze plan and somewhat aggressive on their Tide plan but want to play the long game if they’re going deeper on the Dreadnought plan.
  • Against UW try to play around Armageddon if you can. 
  • Save your Annul for the end of the counter war if you can to play around Misdirection. 

Replenish

• Favorable matchup. They’re trying to play expensive cards and don’t have card advantage. You run a fairly straightforward gameplan – counter their clunky spells and tide them. Not a lot of what they do matters. You can typically play around their interaction. 
• Play Notes
  • They typically run either Tsabo’s Web or Mana Leak game one. It’s rare to see both. Sequence your basics first if you can and pay attention to their blue mana available. 
  • Their Parallax Tides are the only enchantments that really matter. You can let a lot of other ones resolve and deal with them later. 
  • Frantic Search with Ancient Tomb or City of Traitors can get them up on mana. You might not be able to Mana Leak their follow up spell as a result.
• Sideboard Notes
  • Annuls, Misdirection, and the Tormod’s Crypt are useful. Powder Keg is not the best but don’t remove all of them. Some lists could bring in Meddling Mage or Exalted Angel. It’s also your best answer to Tsabo’s Web and you cannot win if you can’t answer a Tsabo’s Web. 
  • Orim’s Chant / Abeyance can mess up your tide combos.

TerraOath

• Even to slightly favorable matchup. You play the long game better than they do and they’re typically a deck that wants to go long. Be patient. Despite having lots of lands in the deck they can have a hard time recovering from a tide. 
• Play Notes
  • Sylvan Library is their only source of card advantage. It’s generally one of the most important cards to counter. 
  • Game one they have a lot of dead cards – Oath of Druids and Pyroclasm/Swords
  • What’s threatening is very dependent on what your draws look like. Sphere of Resistance can be bad for them or good for them depending on how many lands you have and what lands they have. Land destruction is typically worse for them than Spheres but similarly sometimes it doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. 
  • Powder keg is one of the best cards in the matchup. It kills their Mox Diamonds and holds back their creature lands. Be careful about Naturalize when casting it with no hits on the battlefield or when ticking it up if you want to go after Spheres or Terravores. 
  • Their colored mana is not very good and gets worse postboard. They lean a lot on Mox Diamond. Getting rid of their Mox Diamond can prevent them from getting GG to cast their LD spells or terravore and buy you a lot of time. Keg as a one for one removal on a Diamond is not bad. Same with Chain of Vapor.
  • Sequencing your lands is not straightforward. Their biggest turns are when they can wasteland into a relevant spell so playing out basics can be good to prevent that. Playing out basics exposes your basics to LD, however, which may not be ideal. 
• Sideboard Notes
  • Keg, Teferi’s Response, Dominates and Misdirection are what you want in. FoFs you typically want out. They just end up stuck in your hand. A Tide can probably be cut too. One of the ways we lose is having multiple Tides in hand but being unable to cast them.
  • Dominate is mainly for their creature lands. Stealing a Treetop Village sets them back a threat and a green source. You can sometimes get a Terravore with it but don’t be greedy saving it because you want to get up to 6 mana to get a Terravore. 
  • Postboard their mana gets worse because they need to have GG to cast their LD/Terravores while also having R to hold up blasts. Pay attention to what colors they have available. It can sometimes be good to Tide when it’s safe to Tide and hit their colored mana even if you don’t have a stifle yet.

TerraGeddon

• Slightly unfavorable to even. They’re like TerraOath but with no dead cards in the main, more card advantage, and more threats that matter. Notably their mana is worse which is key to playing the matchup. 
• Play Notes
  • An important thing to recognize is that their mana is bad. Pay attention to what colors they have available. Even if they have a lot of lands untapped they can’t necessarily double spell or at least they can’t play a follow up spell that’s a bigger threat than the first spell. Mox Diamond is super important for them. 
  • Keg normally sits on 0 to kill Mox Diamonds and Call of the Herd tokens. It may need to go to 2 to kill Meddling Mage depending on what has been named. If they Mage naming Chain you are still able to Stifle + Tide.
  • Play basics out first. Play Quicksands before Factories typically to play around their Wastelands.
  • Weathered Wayfarer is the least important threat that they have. This may sound unintuitive. We’re a deck that’s trying to play a one sided Armageddon and Wayfarer helps them undo the Armageddon. They beat us by playing a couple threats (Meddling Mage, Terravore, Call of the Herd) with enough disruption (Waste, Port, Meddling Mage) such that we spend our turns trying to dig and find answers to the board while they attack and close the door with Armageddon when we tap too low. You’re normally winning if they go for Wayfarer into Wasteland each turn. If they’re not going for Wastelands they’re still setting themselves back a mana per turn. Either case, they’re not adding to the board and you’re still able to cast your card draw and sculpt a good hand. 
• Sideboard
  • They bring in artifact/enchantment hate and in some builds they’ll bring in blasts. Tapping out for Tide can be dangerous. Similarly going up on Keg might eat a Disenchant or Naturalize for no value.
  • We bring in Dominates, Teferi’s Response, and the fourth Keg. Some number of Annuls can be good too. Probably not all of them. They hit Mox, Library, Seal of Cleansing, and Aura of Silence sometimes, and Winter Orb sometimes. Dominate is mainly for Treetop Village or Call of the Herd tokens. It can occasionally steal a Meddling Mage or a Terravore. Teferi’s Response has the obvious Wasteland/Port hits but it also makes it safer to go for blocks with Factory. Force Spike can go out. Since their mana is bad they often have mana up to pay for the Spike.

BW Control

• Slightly favorable matchup. They have a lot of dead cards preboard and their threats are clunky.
• Play Notes
  • We’re playing the very long game in the matchup. They have a lot of answers to our creature lands – Swords, Dust Bowl, Vindicate, sometimes Disenchants maindeck. Our goal is to blank these and tide them out. I rarely go for chip damage with factories because it unlocks their Swords.
  • The fourth tide helps a lot in this matchup. You typically want to tide them twice in this matchup. They run a lot of lands and with Eternal Dragon loops they can get back in the game if you’re only getting rid of five of their lands.
  • You can Stifle their Decree of Justice or Keg the tokens / unflipped Exalted Angels.
  • Trying to Stifle + Tide can be risky. They can go Swamp + Duress and ruin your plan. You can go after their black sources first to play around this line or wait until you have counter magic up to protect the combo. 
• Sideboard
  • Teferi’s Response, Misdirection, and Powder Keg are the main things that come in. Force Spike is easy for them to play around. Mana Leak can similarly be bad. Quicksand doesn’t do much besides hit unflipped Angels. 
  • Misdirection on Vindicate can really mess up their mana. Misdirection on Gerrard’s Verdict can be a game winning blowout. 
  • They have a lot of cards to side out and not quite as many cards to bring in so they will still have lots of ways to deal with your creature lands left in the deck. Teferi’s Response is great card advantage. You can bait out a Swords if you need cards sooner or can just hold to answer Dust Bowl / Vindicate.
  • Haunting Echoes is something to watch out for post board. It’s hard to beat a resolved Echoes but you should be able to tide them before or have counter magic up.

Landstill

• Favorable matchup. They have to be the aggro and are not particularly great at doing that. Our lands are better than theirs. 
• Play Notes
  • Hit your land drops and play draw go. Powder Keg answers all of their threats so sticking one and letting it sit on 0 really slows them down. 
  • They don’t really have anything scary that they can cast when we’re tapped out. It’s fine to tap out on our turn if needed to win a counter war or resolve a key spell.
  • Their mana isn’t the best. They may have more countermagic than us but will run out of blue sources.
  • Be patient if they resolve a Standstill. You normally don’t care that much about countering the Standstill anyway. They’ll get a Decree at some point and get some pressure going but it can take them a while to do that. You can often wait until they have seven cards in hand and cast an Impulse on their end step to crack it. 
  • Dust Bowl is one of their best cards in the matchup. Protect your creature lands from it by sequencing basics first if you can.
• Sideboard
  • Powder Keg, Teferi’s Response, Dominates, and Misdirection come in. Force Spike can go out. 
  • Powder Keg answers all of their threats.
  • They still have enough ways to target your lands to make Teferi’s Response worthwhile. Hitting a Dust Bowl is huge. They likely keep some number of Swords in because they have too much else to take out. They’ll probably up their number of Disenchants / Seals of Cleansing as well. 
  • Dominate steals their creature lands. If they fight over the Dominate on their end step then you’ll probably be tapped too low to fight over your follow up Tide. 
  • Misdirection helps win counter wars. It can occasionally be used to redirect a removal spell at their own creature land. 

Enchantress

• Unfavorable to slightly unfavorable matchup. Preboard we can sometimes just counter all of their win cons but post board they have too many must counters that they’ll eventually break through.
• Play Notes
  • Preboard they may only have 4 total cards that matter. Some combination of enchantment token makers (Sacred Mesa or Mobilization), Opalescence, and Replenish. It’s possible to counter all of these and ignore everything else. Mana Leaks and Force Spikes quickly get nullified by Serra’s Sanctum. If they know what they’re doing they can potentially overwhelm you by playing many of their threats all at once. If you’re trying to win this way then you need to prioritize Counterspell highly.
  • Another approach is to deal with all of their enchantress effects and beat down/Tide combo them. If you can stop their card advantage engine then they’re playing a bunch of cards that do nothing. Holding Powder Keg on 2 answers Argothian Enchantress while saving your counterspells. If they do manage to stick an enchantress effect things can unravel quickly, however. 
  • Force Spike and Mana Leak become dead cards pretty quickly. Use them on anything relevant if you have an opportunity.  
  • Tide combo is necessary to slow them down but Serra’s Sanctum can unravel things quickly. Try to turn the corner fairly quickly after a combo. Postboard Carpet of Flowers also makes the tide combo worse.
• Sideboard
  • Postboard gets a lot harder. They can bring in some combination of Tsabo’s Web, Xantid Swarm, Carpet of Flowers, and Aura of Silence which are all pretty hard for us to beat.
  • We bring in Keg, Crypt, and Annul. It’s hard to determine what to bring out and depends a bit on their sideboard strategy. Force Spike and Mana Leak get bad very quickly but at the same time they may have a lot of must answer early plays. FoF feels slow.
  • Keg gets taxed a lot. You need it to kill Argothian Enchantress and Tsabo’s Web. They have opportunities to Seal of Cleansing or Aura of Silence before you can tick up to 2, however. It is also our easiest way to deal with Xantid Swarm.
  • If you want to have more game against this deck, put some Hibernations in your sideboard and try to Hibernation end of their turn into Tide. 

Elves

• Unfavorable matchup. They produce a lot of mana through mana dorks rather than lands, have threats at different mana values, and can generate a lot of quick pressure.
• Play Notes
  • Wirewood Symbiote, Survival of the Fittest, and Priest of Titania are the biggest threats they have. Symbiote makes many of their other cards into must counter threats and provides protection against Powder Keg. Survival generates them an insurmountable amount of card advantage. Priest of Titania generates insane amounts of mana making Tide useless. 
  • Tangle Wire makes it hard for us to hold up counter magic or get Keg setup. You can stifle the trigger if needed but it’s not that great to do so. Tangle Wire’s trigger will resolve before we’re able to add a counter to our Powder Kegs meaning that we may have to wait another turn cycle to crack the Keg since we may have to tap it to the Tangle Wire. 
  • In order to win you need to stop them from having any card advantage engine (Survival or Symbiote + Multani’s Acolyte) and keep their board clear with Keg. Watch out for Caller of the Claw. 
  • We need to stabilize and then turn the corner fairly quickly. This is a matchup where they can quickly turn the game state. A topdecked cradle can completely undo a tide combo for example.
• Sideboard
  • Keg, Dominates, and Annuls can come in. Keg is one of our best cards in the matchup and is regularly a 2-for-1 or better. Annul answers Tangle Wire and Survival. Dominate acts as a really bad removal spell. It’s not good but can be the necessary answer to keep them from overwhelming us. Anything durdly is bad in the matchup. If we can keep them from getting too far ahead or building a card advantage engine then they’re just a bunch of 1/1s.

Stasis

• Unfavorable matchup to slightly unfavorable matchup. Black Vise backed by counterspells is extremely hard for us to beat. On top of that, Stasis itself stops any offense we have. 
• Play Notes
  • The typical game plan is to hit your land drops, counter Stasis, and either counter Black Vise or have a keg ready for it. If you can’t counter the Stasis then Chain of Vapor can help get you out of a lock. You need to get pressure going while keeping up counters which is pretty mana intensive.
  • Stifle can sometimes be used to prevent them from untapping Forsaken City to pay for the Stasis. It can also be used to counter a Black Vise trigger.
• Sideboard
  • Annuls, Misdirection, and Keg come in. Having more answers to their two key cards is important. Misdirection is used to help win counter wars. Being able to Misdirection their Chain of Vapor to our Keg can sometimes win games. Expensive cards can be bad. A Tide or two can be trimmed. 
  • Watch out for potential Brain Freeze plans out of their sideboard. 

Madness

• Probably the deck’s worst matchup. You have to get very lucky to win. 
• Play Notes
  • All of their cards are must answers, they can play their threats at instant speed, and they have countermagic on top of all that. You can’t really afford to play around much and just need to pray that they don’t have things to do. 
  • Their mana is sketchy. Sticking an early tide and then dealing with their board with Kegs / Chain of Vapor is the best shot you have of winning. 
  • You can Stifle the madness triggers leaving their creatures in exile. 
• Sideboard
  • Keg, Crypt, Annul (maybe not all), and Dominate can come in. Keg can wipe out Rootwallas or Mongrels, Crypt can exile their Squees which is a huge card advantage engine for them. It can also hit their Wonder, which makes Mishra’s Factories into possible blockers and turns on Quicksand (though they don’t have good Quicksand targets). They may have Genesis post board too which is an otherwise unbeatable threat. Annul answers just Survival in the maindeck but can hit Tsabo’s Web in the sideboard. Dominate acts as a bad removal spell ideally for Wild Mongrel. FoFs can probably come out.

More Thoughts

I was drawn to the deck because I like playing decks whose primary gameplan results in a point of inevitability where your opponent can’t do anything – somewhere between prison and control. A common problem with some prison decks like MUD in premodern or mono red in older legacy formats is the lack of card draw / card selection and threats that don’t do anything against certain decks. A MUD hand in premodern with an early Metalworker into Masticore can look great against a deck like elves but does nothing against a 12/12. Similarly, a turn 1 chalice on 1 might be great in the delver matchup, but it does nothing against Turbo Muxus. Similarly, control decks can run into similar issues of mismatched answers. Landstill can lose games by drawing a hand full of swords to plowshares against an Argothian Enchantress or counterspells against creature lands. 

The deck I’ve probably put the most time into was Lantern Control. While definitely more linear than Tide Control, Lantern had a similar ability to have a prison gameplan that attacks every deck in the format at a fundamental level, be disruptive along the way, and dig for prison pieces. Typically, a player wins by drawing cards that do stuff and then casting those cards. Lantern would prevent opponents from drawing cards that do stuff. Tide prevents them from casting those cards. Lantern had discard while Tide has counterspells. Lantern had Ancient Stirrings/Whir/the lantern combo to dig for lock pieces while Tide has all the blue card draw/selection options. 

Both decks also reward a deep understanding of the matchup and an ability to reassess threats within the context of a game. Back when Ad Nauseum was a deck in modern, knowing that they had 0 ways to win if you can land a Witchbane Orb or Pithing Needle naming Lightning Storm while holding an Abrupt Decay meant a different approach from the normal linear gameplan. You didn’t need to dig for Lanterns or Shredders or Ensnaring Bridges like you’d typically do. By threat assessment within the game, I’m talking about the ability to read a board state, understand the cards in your hand, and think about how the next few turns will play out. In Lantern vs. Tron, a Karn Liberated on top would normally be scary, but it doesn’t matter if I have a Thoughtseize that can take it before my opponent can get to 7 mana or if I think I have sufficiently many looks at a pithing needle through Ancient Stirrings + Lantern/Shredder. In Tide, you need to make similar assessments. A Goblin Piledriver is generally a scary card – it gets big quick, can’t be blocked by a faerie conclave, and can’t be bounced by a chain of vapor. If the board is clear, however, it’s often fine to let the Piledriver resolve. It’ll just attack for 1 a turn and I’ll eventually draw a quicksand or factory or I’ll have enough time to get a keg up to 2. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen players with both of these decks lose to not being able to properly evaluate how threatening a card is in the context of the active game state. 

About the Author

Andy Levine top 8’d the 2024 North American Premodern Championship with Mono Blue Tide and is an all-around great guy in the NYC Premodern scene.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this content, please consider supporting with a donation or membership here. In this specific case, I compensated Andy with a bunch of cards he needs for his Vintage cube but donations help compensate writers for their content!