The Art of the Sideboard

If you don’t play games post-board you will never know what matters in those games and will constantly make poor sideboard decisions and those will rarely lead you to victory.

I recently played an Extended PTQ where I went 5-2 with [card]Wargate[/card]. In the last round playing for top 8 I was paired against Jund and I lost game 3 to triple [card]Blightning[/card]. Many people would just count this to bad luck or the Jund player being a lucksack, but I realized I had made a huge mistake. No it wasn’t a play mistake I had made (though I had made some game losing mistakes in the tournament), it was an even bigger mistake; I didn’t test my sideboard. I just copied a sideboard I saw online because all the cards seemed good in theory but at the PTQ I had effectively played 5 useless cards in my sideboard and if I had just played any sideboarded games I had a very good shot at making the top 8.

I know I am not the only one to make this mistake (not testing post-sideboard games) as it is one of the biggest mistakes I constantly see players making. They want to find the perfect 60 cards so they spend countless hours testing their maindeck and just roughly throw together 15 cards they think will be good against most decks. One of my good friends always does this for PTQs then the morning of the PTQ will ask me to write him a sideboard guide, then complains when he scrubs out. In any given tournament at least 50% of games will be played post-board so why do people always limit themselves and test the majority of games pre-board. You should only play maindeck games until you finalize your deck choice for the tournament you are preparing for and then you concentrate the majority of your testing on sideboarded games so you know what cards you want to sideboard out in each matchup as that is one thing you need to know before you start thinking about playing anything in your sideboard.

Today I’m going to talk about things that you should be aware of when considering all your sideboard options. I am not going to talk about specific numbers or how many cards to devote to each matchup or things like that because that depends on what deck you are playing, what format, etc., but more about the different thoughts that should go into every decision you make about the 15 cards you want to register at the bottom of your decklist. Just remember that there is not sideboard strategy set in stone and that you need to be able to adapt on the fly depending on what you see from your opponent’s deck and everything is also dependent on whether you are on the play or the draw.

When building a sideboard be flexible and diverse in your card choices and don’t over compensate hate cards for bad matchups . If your deck is having trouble against a deck like Mono Red Aggro, don’t immediately jam 4 [card]Kor Firewalker[/card] and/or 4 [card]Circle of Protection: Red[/card] in your sideboard. Skewing your sideboard just for one matchup will make you look foolish if you just happen to not play that matchup, whereas by using cards that are good against a variety of decks you give yourself a better chance versus the field.

Mike Flores once asked “Who’s the beatdown?”, and it’s important to remember that sideboards can be used to reassert your role. If you need to be the aggressive deck in a certain matchup you need to lower your curve and put pressure on them and not have cards that are just going to sit on the battlefield or clog your hand. If you need to take the control side of the matchup you can afford to cut your aggressive early drops in favour of slower more powerful effects as you need your cards to have more value once you bring the game to the later stages.

One of the more subtle things a lot of players don’t think about when building a sideboard is that you need to know how the other decks in the format plan to sideboard versus you, what cards they are bringing in just as well as what cards they are taking out. If you are playing a deck with a target on its back it is critical that you know what hate cards each deck is likely to bring in and formulate your sideboard plans around those cards. There is no problem with weird sideboard strategies to be able to sidestep and play around other people’s sideboard cards. Last year in T2 I was playing Jund and would board out my [card]Blightning[/card]s, a card many people never would even think of sideboarding out, against other Jund decks just so I would never get in a situation where they would get maximum value from [card]Obstinate Baloth[/card]. You can even see these kind of sideboard plans used in Extended Faeries. People will sideboard in [card]Volcanic Fallout[/card]s and [card]Great Sable Stag[/card]s, but those cards don’t do much when Faeries sideboards out [card]Spellstutter Sprite[/card]s and Cliques for cards like [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card] and [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card].

Combo decks can often take this to the next level. With all their card drawing and tutoring, they can sideboard out most or all of their combo pieces to radically alter their decks configuration. Most transformational sideboards, as they are called, board into a creature gameplan because people tend to cut useless creature removal for more streamlined hate so you just circumvent their sideboard entirely by crashing through the red zone. One of the more famous instances of this type of sideboard, and probably my favourite deck of all time, is Hearbeat Combo from Champions-Ravninca T2. Here is what a stock Heartbeat deck looked like at the time.

[deck title=Heartbeat Combo]
[Lands]
10 Island
10 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Swamp
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Sakura Tribe Elder
4 Drift of Phantasms
1 Maga Traitor to Mortals
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Heartbeat of Spring
4 Early Harvest
4 Kodamas Reach
1 Invoke the Firemind
4 Remand
4 Muddle the Mixture
4 Senseis Divining Top
1 Weird Harvest
1 Boomerang
1 Pyroclasm
1 Recollect
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
3 Bottled Cloister
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
2 Savage Twister
4 Hinder
4 Vinelasher Kudzu
1 Research/Development
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

For those unfamiliar with the way the deck worked, it would use [card]Sakura Tribe Elder[/card] and [card]Kodamas Reach[/card] to get the necessary lands in play, then in one turn would play [card]Heartbeat of Spring[/card], use [card]Weird Harvest[/card] to find [card]Drift of Phantasms[/card] to turn into [card]Early Harvest[/card]s which would allow them to finally reach the mana needed to win with [card]Maga, Traitor to Mortals[/card] or [card]Invoke the Firemind[/card]. With the tutoring ability of [card]Muddle the Mixture[/card] and [card]Drift of Phantasms[/card] and the ability to abuse [card]Senseis Divining Top[/card] with all the shuffle effects to always find your combo with counterspell protection, the deck was a contender. But one of the big reasons this deck was so good was the sideboard. It had the ability to become an Aggro-Midrange deck with the Creature + [card]Savage Twister[/card] package, a Fish deck with [card]Vinelasher Kudzu[/card] + Counterspells, [card]Bottled Cloister[/card] to dodge discard or even just stay a combo deck and use the sideboard as a diversion. It was just so hard to predict how the deck was going to look after sideboard that it was nearly impossible to hate out effectively and was the reason it was the best deck in the format.

A more recent example can be found in the [card]Dark Depths[/card] decks in Extended last year. The deck was resilient because not only did it have 2 different combos, it also had a semi transformational sideboard where it would sideboard down to 1 or 2 of each combo piece and would bring in [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card] and removal spells to become a pseudo UB Control deck. This form of sideboarding is very effective when done correctly and is typically seen when the combo deck is so good that the format is warped around it. At that point, a transformational sideboard may work to throw off other players.

Remember you are allowed to have a 15 card sideboard for a reason. Use it poorly and you will be punished. Use it wisely, and you will reap the rewards.