In the recent Ban and Restriction announcement from Magic the Gathering today, it was announced that Pauper was getting a change. In a trial un-ban earlier this year, High Tide was reintroduced to the format. Since then the Pauper Format Panel had been monitoring the landscape, keeping an eye on the community reactions.

Gavin Verhey followed the ban announcement with a detailed breakdown of why the decision was made – and it is worth a read: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/explanation-of-the-pauper-high-tide-ban-for-november-10-2025

To paraphrase the article, while High Tide did not see a spike in overall play or win-rate immediately, it certainly had an impact on the format.

It started gaining momentum in a deck that would result in extremely long turns, digging through their deck to find copies of Psychic Puppetry to be used in generating as much mana as possible before playing Stream of Thought to mill the opponent out.

I had the chance to face a version of the High Tide deck firsthand at MagicCon: Atlanta earlier this year – and speaking from personal experience, it was not enjoyable.

In game one of our best-of-three, my opponent assembled the combo and won after a long, intricate turn that felt more like watching a math problem unfold than playing Magic. In game two, I sideboarded into counterspells and managed to stop their first attempt on turn three or four – only to see them rebuild and start again the very next turn. That “turn” lasted over ten minutes before they eventually fizzled out and scooped. Game three, the combo went off early and that was that.

It wasn’t losing that made it void of fun, it was the waiting. Sitting there, counting mana, and watching your opponent effectively goldfish for minutes at a time isn’t enjoyable. Even the other players in the event were impacted – as the length of our matches delayed the next round entirely.

Going back to the explanation that we got from Wizards, they outlined a few things beyond just turn length and fun factor. During their monitoring, they saw that the format was beginning to shift into a more aggro meta. A meta more prevalent than they would like, mostly in response to the High Tide decks.

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.

While High Tide decks were not super prevalent, the impact it has had on the format clearly outweighs the benefits of leaving it in. Banning High Tide might disappoint a few combo enthusiasts, but it’s a change that ultimately keeps the format healthy — and ensures that everyone gets to actually play Magic – and one we agree with.