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Card Pros

Card Advantage: When you play Crashing Tide, it not only affects the board by returning a creature to its owner’s hand, but it also allows you to draw a card. This dual action ensures you don’t lose momentum and maintains your hand with sufficient options for future turns.

Resource Acceleration: Although Crashing Tide doesn’t directly produce additional mana or resources, bouncing an opponent’s creature can set them back on their game plan. This tempo play can effectively accelerate your position by hindering their resource development.

Instant Speed: Crashing Tide can be cast at instant speed if you control a Merfolk, giving you the flexibility to respond to threats or opportunities at the most opportune time. This can give you a significant advantage as you can decide the most impactful moment during the game to play it without having to commit your mana early on.

Card Cons

Discard Requirement: When playing Crashing Tide, you need to know that it’s not just about casting the spell; there’s an additional hurdle you must overcome if you’re hoping to trigger its flash ability. You need to have a Merfolk on the battlefield, which not only demands a tribal strategy but can also make it harder to keep the card as a surprise play for a more strategic moment.

Specific Mana Cost: Mana costs can make or break a spell’s usability, especially in multicolored decks. Crashing Tide’s requirement of two blue mana can be restrictive. If your mana base isn’t solidly blue or you’re running three or more colors, including Crashing Tide smoothly in your curve can be challenging.

Comparatively High Mana Cost: Costing three mana might seem reasonable, but in fast-paced games, this can feel quite expensive for an effect that is ultimately temporary. Bouncing a creature to its owner’s hand can be useful, but other cards might offer more permanent solutions or added value for a similar, if not lower, mana investment.

Reasons to Include in Your Collection

Versatility: Crashing Tide can be a flexible addition to decks, particularly those based around creatures with flash or the Merfolk tribe. Due to its ability to provide a tempo swing by returning an opponent’s creature to their hand and drawing a card when you control a Merfolk, it is a multi-use spell that supports both board control and card advantage.

Combo Potential: The card’s utility in bouncing creatures can be pivotal in decks that capitalize on enter-the-battlefield (ETB) abilities. The possibility of reusing your own creatures’ ETB effects or saving your key creatures from removal, while maintaining card flow, gives it a solid potential in various combo setups.

Meta-Relevance: In game environments where tempo plays are crucial, Crashing Tide shines by disrupting opponents’ board states and maintaining card parity. It’s particularly relevant in casual or limited formats such as draft or sealed, where its ability to affect the board and draw simultaneously is highly valuable.

How to Beat

Crashing Tide represents a nuanced spell in the ecosystem of Magic: The Gathering, sharing a thematic kinship with a host of other tempo plays designed to disrupt the battlefield’s balance. As a card that can remove creatures from combat and draw a card, especially when you have a Merfolk, it poses a mild threat by stalling your strategy momentarily. The prime approach to countering this wave of interference is through instant-speed spells that provide hexproof or indestructible abilities to your creatures, safeguarding them from being returned to your hand. Additionally, forewarned by the card’s one-shot nature, a sound tactic is to maintain a wide board state, lessening the impact of any single creature being bounced.

Understanding the ebb and flow of combat tricks like Crashing Tide can be critical. Cards like Blossoming Defense or Heroic Intervention can offer the needed protection when you sense a tide turning. Precise timing and maintaining a variety of responses help ensure that when the tide rolls in, your board presence remains unshaken, allowing you to pivot back into control of the game with minimal disruption.