There are many classes of combo decks, but the broadest classification is based on speed. Fast combo decks are frequently somewhat volatile, easily capable of winning as early as turn one or two, but prone to the occasional misfire where the deck does nothing. These decks are typically very vulnerable to some sort of disruption like graveyard hate, discard, or countermagic. Slow combo decks, on the other hand, sacrifice speed in favor of resiliency. This style of combo deck is capable of utilizing disruption to defend against early threats or interaction while assembling the cards it needs. The idea is this: the longer the game goes on, the more likely you are to be able to play through all the various interactive elements your opponent could have. Nothing epitomizes this style of combo deck more than Legacy High Tide:

High Tide ? Legacy | Truckis, 5-0 Legacy League

• Spells (42)
• 1 Intuition
• 3 Candelabra of Tawnos
• 3 Cunning Wish
• 3 Turnabout
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Flusterstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 High Tide
• 4 Merchant Scroll
• 4 Ponder
• 4 Preordain
• 4 Time Spiral

• Lands (18)
• 12 Island
• 3 Flooded Strand
• 3 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Brain Freeze
• 1 Grafdigger's Cage
• 1 Hurkyl's Recall
• 1 Meditate
• 1 Pact of Negation
• 1 Snap
• 1 Surgical Extraction
• 1 Swan Song
• 1 Turnabout
• 1 Wipe Away
• 4 Thing in the Ice

Buy This Deck

This is the definition of a slow combo deck. You’ll spend the first few turns sculpting your hand with cantrips, Merchant Scroll, and even Cunning Wish. Due to the mana-intensive nature of the combo, you have no chance of winning on turn one or two, and relatively slim odds of being able to win on turn three. Turn four and five are where things start to get interesting.

The idea is to tutor for or cantrip into one or more copies of High Tide. Once you’ve found a High Tide, you start generating mana every time you can untap your lands. This combined with Candelabra of Tawnos, Turnabout, and, most importantly, Time Spiral, allows you to chain cantrips and generate mana while drawing through your deck. It’s also interesting to note that using Turnabout to untap multiple Candelabra of Tawnos allows you to generate exponentially more mana than untapping your lands directly.

The strength of this deck is that it’s primarily composed of redundant cantrips and card selection. The entirety of the maindeck is comprised of mana, card drawing, and disruption. This means that it’s actually very difficult to break apart the combo because of how redundant your main deck is. Most of your cards help you find high tide and other pseudo Dark Ritual effects or help you chain your way into a Cunning Wish for Blue Sun's Zenith or a Time Spiral.

Of course, the downside of this is that your combo is much slower than something like Tendrils of Agony or Show and Tell. The advantage is that you get to be more interactive; people have even gone so far as to include Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top in the High Tide deck to help buy even more time to sculpt the perfect hand.

Unfortunately, the availability of Candelabra of Tawnos is a huge limitation in paper Legacy. However, the card is relatively inexpensive on Magic Online. If you’re interested in doing something degenerate, but want to play a slower, more interactive game, consider giving this a try in your next Legacy event.