Can't deploy a combination of new and existing Apex classes

Scenario: Add a field to an existing Apex class "A". Create new Apex class "B" that refers to the new field in A. When deploying these two Apex classes to an org that has the previous version of A (without the new field), the deployment will fail if Tooling API is used.

In this case, it would be nice if IC detected this situation and used the Metadata API.