Parallax Tide

Premodern-legal editions of Parallax Tide — old-border printings plus any period-appropriate foil promos (Arena/Judge, through Scourge). Hover to preview an edition on the card; click to select it.

Nemesis

2000·nemrare

Selected

Old-border editions + pre-Scourge promo foils (Arena/Judge). Modern-frame reprints (8th Edition onward) exist but are not period-appropriate printings.

Why It's Banned

A four-mana blue enchantment that uses its fading counters to remove an opponent's lands from the game, only returning them if it ever leaves play. In a vacuum it is a soft tempo tool, but Premodern's deep mana-denial and enchantment-recursion shells weaponize it: paired with Replenish it can be looped back into play, permanently stripping an opponent of their lands and locking them out of the game entirely. That kind of non-interactive, repeatable resource starvation is exactly the play pattern the format's interaction-first philosophy refuses to tolerate.

Printed in Nemesis (2000) during the Masques block, with its enabler Replenish coming from Urza's Destiny (1999) — both squarely inside the 4th Edition–Scourge legal window. Replenish itself was a defining engine of that era's Standard, but the deck that terrorized the format was built on Parallax Wave, Opalescence, and Saproling Burst; Parallax Tide was at most a fringe land-denial option, not the headline of the classic Replenish combo deck. Its Premodern ban landed 2026-01-18.

Trivia & Lore

• Parallax Tide was illustrated by British comics artist Carl Critchlow, best known outside Magic for his 2000 AD work (Judge Dredd, and early on the strip 'Nemesis the Warlock / Deadlock') and for creating 'Thrud the Barbarian' for the gaming magazine White Dwarf in 1983.
• Parallax Tide is a {2}{U}{U} enchantment with Fading 5, and despite its competitive pedigree it is NOT on the Reserved List, leaving it eligible for a future reprint.
• Parallax Tide has had only two printings: its original black-bordered Nemesis printing (Feb 14, 2000) and a gold-bordered copy in World Championship Decks 2000. Unlike its sibling Parallax Wave (reprinted in 2014's Vintage Masters), Tide has never received a standard-set reprint.
• The gold-bordered World Championship Decks 2000 Parallax Tide (collector number tvdl37) comes from Tom van de Logt's 'Replenish' deck, which ran a full 3 copies of Parallax Tide alongside 4 Parallax Wave and 4 Opalescence.
• Tom van de Logt, the Dutch player whose Replenish list was immortalized in the WC00 product, reached the Top 8 at 2000 Worlds in Brussels but lost his quarterfinal to Benedikt Klauser; he then won the 2001 World Championship in Toronto the following year with a completely different deck (the black-red 'Machine Head').
• Despite reading like permanent land removal, Parallax Tide does not destroy lands: its leaves-the-battlefield trigger makes EACH player return all cards they own that were exiled with it, so if the Tide is destroyed or its fade counters run out, the opponent gets all their lands back at once.
• The Parallax enchantments carry a deliberate non-printed Oracle wording from Magic's power-level-errata era: under Wizards' 2006 'Power-Level Errata B-Gone' update they were intentionally left so they will NOT return themselves to play when removed by their own effect, specifically because of the broken loop with Opalescence.
• Parallax Tide debuted in Nemesis alongside the other Fading enchantments that defined Replenish-style decks: Parallax Wave (Fading 5) and Saproling Burst (Fading 7) were also first printed in Nemesis on Feb 14, 2000.
• Andrea Mengucci had a strong run with Premodern Replenish (built around Parallax Tide), finishing 3rd at Italian Nationals in 2024 and 1st in 2025 - shortly before Parallax Tide was banned in Premodern in January 2026 (effective immediately in paper, and from January 20 on Magic Online).