Years ago, I was part of a team of pros practicing for upcoming events. We would take sixty random commons, then write a half dozen decklists on the backs. Playtesting would involve playing deck #3 on my cards against deck #4 on his, and so on. We played endlessly – but there’s a problem with this technique. See it? (Or just read the title….)
The problem was that these proxy decks were a pain to sideboard, so we didn’t. We generally didn’t get around to practicing sideboarding until we had chosen maindecks, then we worked hard at sideboards for those decks. We never really looked at sideboarded tech for the other decks. Too much of the time, we knew the standard sideboard cards for each archetype, but didn’t have a good idea of how they played.
Quick question: going into a constructed Pro Tour Qualifier or Grand Prix, do you seriously expect to win every single game you play all day?
Wow – that’s some ego you got there, dude! Seriously.
As for everyone else, I would like to point out that, unless you lose four straight games and drop, you will be playing more sideboarded games than unsideboarded games. Even that ego-flated never-loses dude will still play half his games sideboarded.
Might be a good idea to practice for those games, too.
This is the first of a two-part article. This one looks at some sideboarding examples, and tries to pound in the idea that practicing sideboarded games is necessary. Part two looks at a whole bunch of sideboard cards for Extended.
Time to pound some more, this time with an example.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that you are playing Sunny Side Up against Boros. You’ve played this matchup 200 times. You know what to expect. You’re at six life. You are safe for now, since he only has three mana open, but dead on his next turn. However, you have the storm count almost high enough and have Cunning Wish in hand. You just need another cycle, so you sacrifice all your lands and artifacts, cast Second Sunrise, and…
You get hit with Orim’s Chant in response.
Orim’s Chant?!? From a freakin Boros deck?
Well, why not?
It’s a cheap White spell. Why shouldn’t Boros sideboard it? It just beat you, didn’t it?
More importantly, how, if it you have playtested this matchup 200 times, could this possibly surprise you?
Now I can tell you have some questions. I’ll try to answer them.
You’re just making this up, right? No one is that dumb.
I watched this happen, pretty much as stated. At Worlds.
Orim’s Chant in a Boros deck?
Yes, and I have seen the card in sideboards of Affinity and Zoo decks as well.
So, are you saying Orim’s Chant is a good sideboard card against Sunny Side Up?
Do your own damn playtesting.
Won’t you give us a hint?
I’m not on a team anymore. I don’t have enough time to prepare for competitive play. My playtesting happens on MTGO, where I don’t own Chants. On the plus side, I can now write about all the tech I can find. I don’t have to hide team tech.
In the semi-serious Extended play I have done, both online and in paper – yes, Orim’s Chant seems just fine. You can put it in the sideboard of Sunny Side Up or TEPS, too.
Moving on.
Another example. You are playing Raphael Levy TEPS deck against a Zoo deck (kinda like Jeroen Remie.) You have Orim’s Chant, Burning Wish, Mind’s Desire, and three rituals in hand, and plenty of mana available. You are at thirteen life. Zoo has that hoser enchantment in play, plus two Watchwolves, a Grim Lavamancer (with plenty of graveyard) and a Savannah Lions, has no cards in hand and is in upkeep. Can you win?
Some of you are probably saying “hoser enchantment? What hoser enchantment?” If you aren’t playing TEPS, maybe we can forgive you. If you are playing TEPS, and don’t know – dude, you need to do your research.
Most of the TEPS people are already doing the math. Pyrostatic Pillar: Enchantment, 1R: Whenever a player plays a spell with converted mana cost 3 or less, Pyrostatic Pillar deals 2 damage to that player. Their math is something like:
Chant on upkeep – Pyrostatic Pillar knocks me to eleven life.
Grim Lavamancer shoots me – nine life
Worst case, he drew Char and burns on my upkeep – five life.
Burning Wish for Hull Breach – three life.
Hull Breach to kill the enchantment – one life.
Go off.
Yes, they say, we can win.
Good, except that “that hoser enchantment” isn’t the one Remie ran. It’s Rule of Law.
Rule of Law: 2W, enchantment, no storm for you!
The TEPS player had better draw another Orim’s Chant next turn, or he dies. His next turn will end with Burning Wish for Hull Breach. The turn after that he will get to cast Hull Breach, then go off. Without the Charm, he is going to get eaten by dogs.
Would anyone sideboard in Rule of Law? Well, let’s assume something like Boros is one turn too slow to beat TEPS consistently. Rule of Law always takes two turns to get rid of – one turn to Burning Wish for Hull Breach, another turn to cast it. Two copies wins the game – one Hull Breach can only kill the first copy, and TEPS only has one Hull Breach. Two turns may be enough time for Boros to win – and having two Rules of Law is a sure win, not a clogged hand. Sounds okay.
Wait! Sins of the Past lets you cast Hull Breach from your graveyard.
Er – no, it does not. Rule of Law lets you cast Sins of the Past, but prevents you from casting another spell – like Hull Breach – that turn.
Does Rule of Law work against TEPS?
Yes.
Is it better than Pyrostatic Pillar?
Remember what I said about doing your own playtesting?
When you start playtesting, you want to develop a feel for the main metagame decks. In a team, each player should specialize in a couple of the gauntlet decks – enough that they can really play those decks well. Start with round-robin tournaments, where everyone plays gauntlet decks against each other, until you have a solid feel for the matchups and metagame.
Then do it again, sideboarded.
It also helps to have two players become expert in each archetype. Say, for example, that you are your team’s Affinity specialist. You know the deck inside and out, and really want to play it at the PTQs. You play Affinity in every round robin tournament, and give everyone a chance to test their deck against a well built, well run Affinity deck. So why do you need to have a second team member master Affinity?
You do want to test the mirror match, right?
At some point, the team should turn from testing the metagame as a whole to testing their chosen deck(s) against the metagame. At that point, one player should be playing their teched-out deck against a teammate playing gauntlet decks.
Then doing it sideboarded.
Back when we did this, since the gauntlet player was usually not as skilled with the gauntlet deck as the player playing their chosen deck, and since we really wanted to test against sideboard cards, we sideboarded in blanks. We just chose the cards that a particular deck would take out and turned them backwards in their sleeves. When the gauntlet player drew the blank, he or she would then decide which sideboard card it was.
In the above example, TEPS verses Zoo, Zoo could chose any sideboard card – whatever seemed most useful in that situation. It could be Pyrostatic Pillar, especially if life totals were lower. It could be Rule of Law.
It could be Gilded Light.
Imagine that TEPS has a storm count of ten, and casts Tendrils of Agony. The storm trigger goes on the stack. Zoo casts Gilded Light in response.
Gilded Light is even better against Sunny Side Up, which tries to mill you out with Brain Freeze. While hitting yourself with Tendrils of Agony eleven times is not that bad, hitting yourself twenty-odd times with Brain Freeze is game over.
You know, I have seen a lot of people playing against TEPS, but I have never seen anyone cast Gilded Light. Maybe people have forgotten that tech. Maybe it doesn’t work as well as I think it should – and used to.
Or maybe people aren’t testing sideboard cards…
Next article – the practice part of theory and practice – I’ll talk about a kazillion sideboard cards for Extended. Stuff like Gilded Light. Maybe it will give people some ideas.
Those sideboard cards should also give you some ideas to shake things up. Try stealing sideboard tech from other archetypes, and play around with the results. Test everything – don’t just look at net decks.
Sometimes, you can even sucker someone into the wrong play, by making them think you have sideboarded in something “standard” or expected when you are actually doing something else. For example, Jamie Wakefield once talked about pretending to side in his Hailstorms, then taking them back out. Another example – This is my chance to tell a favorite story – one of my very few “I beat a pro” stories. Bear with me.
It was the Legion – the local TO – invitational tournament, open to the Top 16 players (in terms of finishes at Legion events over the year.) We had people like Bob Maher, Mike Hron, and Brian Kowal – and maybe Adrian Sullivan – playing. And me.
Yes, I was outclassed. I made the invite list because of two Extended PTQ Top 8s, and a ton of high finishes at FNM, beating kids. I was playing a new deck every FNM, all homebrews and all marginal – you can find some details in my archives. Go back and look.
I was playing Five-Color Rock, with Sliver Queen. A few weeks earlier, AndyStock had won a PTQ or something with a Rock deck that splashed five colors for Coalition Victory and Sliver Queen. That got a lot of press, and I knew people had read about it.
I was playing against Mike Hron, who was with Turboland. He had a couple of Explorations and Horn of Greed in play. I had a couple of Birds of Paradise and a pair of Yavimaya Elders in play. Mike had six lands and Morphling in hand. He also had, I believe, an Annul. He had taken some beats, and his life total was low. He tapped all but one Island for Morphling, knowing it could stop the Elder beatdown, while the Annul could stop the two cards he was worried about: Pernicious Deed and, I guess, Coalition Victory. I suspect he also had an answer to a fattie – maybe bounce, maybe Gilded Drake.
Annul could have countered Pernicious Deed. It could not counter Armageddon.
We had spectators to that event. I still treasure their reaction. I also treasure the fact that Armageddon was a complete surprise at that time, and was amazingly good against most of the field that day.
AndyStock did not sideboard Armageddon. No Rock deck I had ever seen sideboarded Armageddon. I did, because of what I knew about that metagame.
The point is that sideboard tech is sideboard tech – even when it comes out of a deck that does not usually play it. Armageddon was mainly played in decks like Three-Deuce – decks that always needed less mana than their opponents. That day, I suspected that I would face opponents playing control decks, so I would be the deck needing less mana. I had Birds and Yavimaya Elders. I could recover faster.
The reason to test sideboard cards in gauntlet decks is to learn not just what decks they are good against, but why. Knowledge of why something works can often be translated into other situations, and other decks. I thought about why Armageddon was good – and applied that knowledge.
It’s important to playtest your deck against the sideboard cards most frequently found in the gauntlet archetypes. However, it is also useful to think about what other cards might do. That was why sideboarding blank cards can be so good – sometimes you can deviate from the list. Sometimes you want to play some Mental Magic – especially if it’s during playtesting.
“Demonfire with Hellbent FTW!”
“Unsummon your Lions. Lapse Demonfire.”
At worst, you and your teammates can discuss whether that card – Unsummon in this case – would ever see play in a sideboard. That sort of discussion is also helpful: you have to think about the metagame in order to debate the cards, and the more you do it, the better you know the metagame.
Here’s one more scenario, and one more argument for playtesting sideboarded games:
In the current Tier 1 decks, I am probably most comfortable with Gifts Rock. I loved G/B Rock, and before that G/B Survival. While my online Rock versions are truly suboptimal (no Deeds, no Vindicates, – I’m even short a Gifts Ungiven) I have been playing around with some ideas. Some of those may translate to paper play.
Here’s one idea: add the Soul Warden, Saffi Eriksdotter, Crypt Champion infinite life combo to my discard-heavy Gifts Rock build. That’s really questionable, but bear with me.
Of course, it doesn’t work on MTGO. Time to repeat some comments I’ve made before about testing on MTGO.
First, I want cheer MTGO because you test sideboarded – you play whole matches in the tournament practice room, and when playing for prizes. MTGO has probably increased the amount of sideboarded practice games people play by an order of magnitude.
I have to boo, however, because a combo like Saffi / Soul Warden / Crypt Champion, or the Life decks, are basically unplayable online because you have to manually repeat each step. In the paper world, I can just say “I go to 2.6 billion life.” In MTGO, it takes about ten minutes to gain fifty life – and you are playing against the clock. In MTGO, this “tech” is the suxor.
I’m operating on theory here – but lets make some assumptions. Let’s assume that my discard-heavy Rock deck has a tough fight against TEPS game 1. Assume my odds are about 45% in that game. The games are long and swingy – I slow TEPS down with discard, then either I Living Wish into the combo or get killed. Either way, I’m pretty certain the odds are about 40-45% against me.
However, when I sideboard in my answers (Rule of Law, lots of discard, plus the Saffi combo via Living Wish) my win percentage jumps to at least 85%, maybe more.
Those numbers may or may not be accurate, but let’s assume that they are.
That raises the critical question.
How long do the sideboarded games take?
I’ve played game 1 of this matchup enough to know that it takes about ten minutes, on average, for TEPS to win or lose. As I said, I’m sideboarding in discard and Rule of Law. I have to cut some beaters to fit that in. That has to slow me down. Rounds are fifty minutes. Subtracting the three minutes at the beginning of the match, three minutes for sideboarding and ten minutes for the first match, I have about half an hour to win the second and third games. Even with an 85% win rate, I am in trouble if my post sideboarded games typically run twenty minutes. All this “tech” can get me is a draw.
Reason to playtest number whatever: you need to know if a sideboarding strategy is viable in a fifty-minute round. If not, even a 100% win rate isn’t an answer.
Playtest post sideboard. A lot.
Here endeth the sermon.
Next time: the practical side of sideboarding. I’ll look at a whole bunch of cards that people are playing in sideboards – or should be.
PRJ
pete {dot} jahn {at} Verizon {.} net