Moonfolk Tribal started so innocently.
A history:
At one point in time the purpose of this deck was to assemble specific, elaborate combos involving amulet of vigor and hedron crab to produce enough landfall triggers to kill every opponent in one shot.
Then, as the deck became more and more tuned, more lines began to emerge. Combos became streamlined, tutors became more flexible, windrider eel got cut because it was bad. One fateful day I was staring at a copy of high tide and figured it ought to just go in the deck.
Guess the moon really does affect the tide.
This is commander high tide and it will take dozens of not a couple hundred games to perfect the lines, tutoring, and table reading necessary to pilot it properly. I’ve put in a few hundred over the years and I feel like I played it right about a third of the time.
My old deck techs would go over specific combo engines to assemble. Usually along the lines of “mana doubler” + “amulet of vigor” + “patron” + “landfall” + “land bouncer”
Now, though, there are so many combinations of synergistic effects that the deck functions well while missing a leg. It now uses flexible blue tutors to set up powerful high tide turns in an attempt to prop up one of these dangerous engines.
Piloting part 1: Our Commander
This ugly fella is amazing and unique.
Some things to understand about how we will be playing it.
-
We eat our moonfolk. With the exception of Oboro Breezecaller and maybe Uyo, silent prophet, cast your rabbit people early and cash them in for a turn 4/5 commander as consistently as you are able.
-
Moonfolk Offering allows you to cast your commander at instant speed, but only with the sacrifice.
-
It is not a moonfolk.
-
It’s a flying 5/4! It can bash and do fairly well for itself in terms of combat damage. Suiting it up with some adventuring gear can be lethal down the road so don’t miss damage if you can help it.
Lastly, there are certain cards that take advantage of the landfall triggers that Patron makes that will win the game in a loop. Your win conditions are:
Damage- Sunscorched Desert
Mill- Altar of the Brood, Hedron Crab
Combat- Adventuring Gear
The core of the deck revolves around returning lands to your hands via
Trade Routes
effects and putting them back into play with our commander. This can be used for landfall, or to generate infinite mana with the interaction between
Patron of the Moon
and
Amulet of Vigor
Piloting part 2: The Combos
This deck doesn’t quite function on an A+B basis to win. Think of it more like a sandwich. We have a lot of excellent sandwich material, and mixing and matching can work very well! Sometimes you’ll draw into peanut butter and vinegar, but there are ways out of that too. If the combo is a sandwich, Patron of the Moon is our bread. It will form the foundation of our work, and without it we just have a bunch of loose pastrami.
The easiest way to do this is to go card by card and name the synergies. That said:
Amulet of Vigor
- synergizes with your commander, enables easy infinite landfall. As long as you can generate 4 mana per two lands returned to your hand, vigor will allow you to generate infinite mana as well. A lot of the cards that synergies with this will be in the value section of this write up. Works particularly well with Crumbling Vestige. Turorable by Trinket Mage, Reshape, and Inventor’s Fair.
Oboro Breezecaller
- infinite landfall at 3M/L (mana per land) Infinite mana at 4M/L. One thing you’ll see is a requirement for each land to tap for a certain amount of mana. Casting high tide grants this effect, as do some artifacts. The fastest route with her is definitely with Nykthos (5 or 6 ML preferred) and Lotus Vale. Tutorable by Vedalken Aethermage and Muddle the Mixture.
Retreat to Coralhem- this is much closer to a straight up A+B, Retreat gives us a ton of flexibility with its abilities. For most of the game it scries until it is targeting a wizard while
Azami, Lady of Scrolls
is in play or a
Walking Atlas
. The Atlas/Retreat engine can sometimes take the place of patron of the Spirit is disposed of. This is regrettably not tutorable in this version of the deck.
Uyo, Silent Prophet
- a sleeper in the deck, Uyo’s presence is rarely felt but she can dominate a game. Once at 7 mana, Uyo +
Turnabout
+ Patron creates infinite mana. Ditto with
Reset
at 5 mana. You can do this with
Time Spiral
, but I wouldn’t recommend that if you have anywhere to be in the next hour. Sunder can also work, although this requires more pieces.
Piloting Part 3: Tutors
When I said I’m not sure if I pilot this deck correctly all the time, this is what I meant. The tutors are both cheap and flexible, though most have a few go-tos they often find for me.
Mystical Tutor
- the most flexible tutor in the deck. Any instant or sorcery at the price of a card (and if you grab time spiral, that solves itself). If you’re stretching for cards or mana, this will help. Findable with merchant scroll, if necessary. Top 3 tutors are
1.
Time Spiral
2.
High Tide
3.
Sunder
Merchant Scroll
- the next most flexible tutor, though it is nearly tied with the next entry. A few cards in the deck would love to be instants and aren’t, but this grabs enough stuff that it’s well worth our time.
1.
High Tide
2. Sunder + Turnabout
3.
Mystical Tutor
Muddle the Mixture
- this card is so sweet. It’s a difficult to counter tutor, which makes setting up future turns excellent. With the presence of UUX spells, this card is able to grab nearly anything you need. Some top grabs recently are:
1.
Oboro Breezecaller
2.
Mind Spring
3.
Vedalken AEthermage
Reshape
- now things start getting sketchy. This strictly gets supporting combo cards and doesn’t help much with set up. In a pinch, memory jar can be fetched. If you need a land, particularly nykthos or glacial chasm, do not be afraid to grab a map. Default is a mana doubler. The most sacrificed artifacts are adventuring gear, seat of the synod, and walking atlas.
1.
Extraplanar Lens
2.
Amulet of Vigor
3.
Altar of the Brood
Trinket Mage
- Trinket Mage serves 2 major roles in this deck: grabbing a combo artifact like amulet of vigor and altar of the brood or just grabbing sol ring. You’ll notice a swath of 1 mana artifacts in this deck. This utility package can be modified to your liking but this spread has seemed to work the best for me. Note that it is a wizard.
1.
Sol Ring
2.
Amulet of Vigor
3.
Altar of the Brood
Expedition Map
- don’t be afraid to crack for a basic if you want to go off with high tide soon. Unless you plan on drawing a lot of cards, reliquary tower isn’t necessary early on. It’s best to drop a map on 1 crack on 2 for either Lotus Vale or Nykthos, depending on how much devotion you plan on creating over the course of the game. This can be turned into another artifact tutor via inventor’s fair.
1. Nykthos,Shrine to Nyx
2.
Reliquary Tower
3.
Lotus Vale
Inventors' Fair
- Definitely the most difficult tutor to set up, this card should be used almost exclusively to close up a combo loop.
1.
Amulet of Vigor
2.
Altar of the Brood
3.
Boompile
Vedalken AEthermage
- Wizard cycling is the best ability in all of magic. It’s like land cycling, but for wizards! VA is another difficult-to-counter tutor but this can be done at instant speed. Aethermage is able to find combo pieces, value engines, and more tutors. This is surprisingly flexible for 3 colorless mana.
1.
Azami, Lady of Scrolls
2.
Oboro Breezecaller
3.
Trinket Mage
Spell Seeker- Last one! Spell Seeker grabs High Tide. It can do other things, and pairs well with our Muddle package, but generally speaking this is a 3 mana body that grabs one spell.
1.
High Tide
2.
Mystical Tutor
3.
Mind Spring
Part 4- Value, Interaction, and Noteworthy Cards
While the gameplan of “use tutors to set up engines” is all well and good, no deck is complete without solid roleplayers. This section will just quickly go over the various types of cards that fill out the 99.
4.1 Counter Spells- A staple of any blue deck. These should be used to protect yourself more than interfere with your opponent, unless they need to be dealt with. The descending importance of these are:
•
Counterspell
•
Swan Song
•
Misdirection
(-ish)
•
Muddle the Mixture
•
Soratami Savant
(-ish)
•
Uyo, Silent Prophet
(-ish)
4.2 Card Draw- another draw towards blue, this deck wants to create a source of multiple simultaneous cards. There are three main engines as well as a fourth for when you have high tide up and running.
•
Rhystic Study
•
Azami, Lady of Scrolls
•
Consecrated Sphinx
•
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
In addition to engines, there are one off card selection/filtering spells.
You’ll want to fire these off earlier in the game
•
Preordain
•
Fact or Fiction
•
Mind Spring
•
Retreat to Coralhelm
4.3 Board Interaction
This deck has both offensive and defensive board interaction, limited though it might be.
Offensively, this deck can bounce permanents with capsize, and all-star flooded shoreline can keep people from wanting to attack you all by itself. Back to Basics can cripple 2+ color decks, and Turnabout can be used to shut off a blue player during their upkeep in order to let yourself combo more efficiently.
Defensively, Retreat to Coralhelm can work wonders, but the best defensive card in the deck is Glacial Chasm, which can be flashed in with Patron and returned with our moonfolk to mitigate the damage.
4.4 Wheels
There are 2 key wheels in the deck, Time Spiral and Memory Jar. Both of them allow you to have a fresh hand and untapped mana, which is key to having a powerful turn. You will often draw into tutors and need to have mana to truly go off, so using these effects over something like Time Reversal is key. Former versions of this deck played Commit//Memory, which I think is a worthwhile effect for its cost and could easily make a return. When sequencing, remember to play a land before if using Time Spiral, but after if using Memory Jar. This is, of course, unless you’re looking for a specific land.
These wheels, and Time Spiral in particular, lets you be more gun-ho about your use of high tide. You don’t need to wait for the perfect setup to fire it off. Time Spiral lets you be reasonably certain that you’ll make good use of the mana you’ll get off of it.
4.5 Moonfolk
They’re kind of important, I suppose. They are the food we feed to the Patron, so it feels important to rank them by importance. In this tier list of moonfolk, think of it like this: the lower the tier, the tastier the moonfolk. Try to avoid sacrificing the higher tier ones if possible.
Tier 0- Oboro Breezecaller
Tier 1- Meloku, Uyo
Tier 2- Soratami Savant, Soratami Mindsweeper
Tier 3- Floodbringer, Soratami Rainshaper, Oboro Envoy, Moonbow Illusionist
Tier Food- Moonbow Illusionist
Part 5- Future Additions
Obviously, any deck can be improved by throwing money at it. Some cards are more worth pursuing, and here are the immediate changes I’m looking to make.
• +
Mana Drain
- to help accelerate an early Patron or Mana Doubler
• +
Show and Tell
- I’d like to try this one out. The big, and really, only hit is omniscience. However, with the number of tutors in the deck it would be relatively easy to start with omniscience and find the show and tell. Drawing S+T without omniscience might be awful, though. It’s worth testing.
• +
Dizzy Spell
- This is an alternative to Trinket Mage in a lot of cases, except it can grab High Tide. The Wizard text on Mage is really nice and currently the reason he’s being kept around.
• +
Whir of Invention
- This card is so good that it’s probably worth a shot even though it doesn’t work with our 2-cmc tutors.
• +
Ancient Tomb
- One of the biggest problems with this deck is getting patron out on time, and Ancient Tomb + a 3 mana Moonfolk gets the big ugly brute down on turn 3. The problem is that the deck has no way to recover life, so this is a potentially very risky add.
• -
Jace, Architect of Thought
- this is a good card. Very good, in fact, but it’s starting to show its age. The card draw is just not that good and he’s difficult to protect.
• -
Fact or Fiction
- this is probably incorrect. This card is probably just so good that it gets in, but man I feel kinda disappointed with this card each time I cast it. The hits are so polarizing that you often have to take the one you really want over the four that would be only ok.
Part 7- Budget Alternatives/Powering Down
Over the course of time, this deck has become more and more expensive. It’s rare for a new card to be added in, and some “necessary” pieces are starting to creep up in price. Fear not! If you wish to pilot this deck on a budget, or to reduce its power level for a more laid back table, there are alternatives
• Alternative 1: the Peregrine Drake plan.
Peregrine Drake
is good. It should likely be in my deck as it is, but I dislike these creatures. Use your high tide and drake to generate a bunch of mana and cast a big blue idiot like
Stormtide Leviathan
or
Inkwell Leviathan
or
Kederekt Leviathan
. . . . I like Leviathans.
• Alternative 2: the Valuefall Plan. Who needs infinite mana? Playing a land is good enough some of the time, and doubling down on cards like
Guardian of Tazeem
,
Roil Elemental
,
Seer's Sundial
and
Adventuring Gear
can lead to some super fun games.
• Alternative 3: Flying Moonfolk. Moonfolk all have flying. Slap a sword on one and send it at your opponent undeterred. Patron itself with a
Blackblade Reforged
is pretty good. They’re also all wizards, if you have wizard tribal support. (ok, there’s one rogue.) Try out
Hall of Triumph
,
Favorable Winds
,
Bident of Thassa
Part 6- Some Advice
After playing this deck for awhile, I have learned a few things that I would like to share with any would-be-pilot of this kind of deck.
• Practice, practice, practice! If you don’t like to goldfish decks, then I wouldn’t recommend picking this up. Picking up routes to victory faster is good not just for you but for everyone else at the table.
• This deck is not for every table. This deck can sometimes take a long turn to get a kill. It’s not the most “play by myself” deck I’ve seen, but it leans heavily toward that end.
• Cast. Time. Spiral. Make it a goal to cast this card in every game. Shuffling your graveyard back into your deck is a main feature for reusing your spells, and getting a fresh grip and 6+ mana to work with it is how you go from falling behind to pulling ahead.
• Don’t be afraid to pull the trigger on value. If you have high tide and turnabout, or high tide and X, or even just high tide into a big spell, don’t be afraid to accelerate! Dropping an early sphinx or omniscience is exactly good enough, and thanks to time spiral and Kozilek you will get the chance to use your spells again later.
• Treasure your counterspells. Ask if each spell reduces your clock drastically or interferes directly with your plan before countering it. You have precious few of these and you have to make them count.
• Cast gush whenever you’re able to come out neutral on it. Don’t get cute.
