In my article on Mogg Alarm, a forum poster wondered why I didn’t include Pyrostatic Pillar in the sideboard to combat Solidarity, one of its weaker matchups. There’s a good reason, but for now, allow us to digress into a relevant tangent. The tangent will not be as entertaining as those from Geordie Tait or Tim Aten, but it will also not require any psychogenic drugs in order to follow it.
First, a note about “that thing on my head,” as some of you have asked me about. No, it is not an undersized football helmet. It is a yarmulke. With a silent “r”. That’s right. Also known as a beanie, a kippah, or skullclamp, er, skullcap. And no, I am not the pope. You’ve got the wrong religion. And yes, in case you haven’t noticed by now, I am Jewish. Hurray for historical obscurity.
That being said, there is a salient point about traditional Jewish knowledge from the Talmud, called “omnisignificance.” I did not coin this term, but in academic rabbinical terms, it describes the notion that every single thing found in the Bible has significance, no matter how seemingly unimportant. The epitome of this concept is ascribed to the great sage R. Akiba, who expounded thousands of religious teachings and precepts from the mere calligraphy of the letters in a Torah scroll.
Now that our grand expose’ on religion is over, I can refer back to the question posed. With a thousand degrees of separation between the two contexts, Pyrostatic Pillar is not “omnisignificant.” It exists only as a silver bullet to Solidarity. It does little else to the deck, other than being a witch-slap to your Reset-packing opponent. (FrummyChick hates it when I use foul language. Dumb-@*% rules.)
This is an important concept that most new players miss altogether, but even experienced players mess up. Often, experienced players think about a sideboard as an opportunity to pull in silver bullets for a particular matchup. This notion causes a barrier to better play: you could even potentially start getting into the Danger of Cool Things. (If you haven’t read that article yet, then you’ve already got a barrier to better play.)
Omnisignificance is not a brand new concept, nor is it a revolutionary idea. Yet it is one of the most consistently difficult concepts for newer players to implement, and many of us older players forget about it sometimes. It’s elusive because it forces us to think and to know about the underpinnings of a deck, and because more experienced players sometimes only incorporate it as part of their maindeck strategy, unwittingly ignoring it altogether when it comes time to build a sideboard.
The fundamental idea of omnisignificance is that a deck must strive to make its contents as universally efficient and effective as possible to an expected metagame or environment. This is perhaps most evident in a good drafting strategy.
Let’s assume that you are drafting a defensive U/W strategy that aims to win with fliers. You start off your draft with a bombtastic Myojin of the Cleansing Fire, and you know instantaneously that you are going to be pulling it out for the long game. You gobble up a Ghostly Prison, a Cage of Hands, a River Kaijin; nab a late Soratami Mirror-Guard and a Teller of Tales, and finish with a Kami of Old Stone. In Betrayers you first-pick a Jetting Glasskite, take a Shimmering Glasskite next, lucksack a Tallowisp, pull a late pick Shining Shoal; and you know things are beginning to look really, really sweet. You take a late-pick Terashi’s Grasp for your board and by the time you hit Saviors, all you need is a few Minamo Scrollkeepers, a couple of extra fliers, and maybe another goody or two and you should be set to bust up your opponents all the way to the top of the 8-4 queue. (Yeah, I know this is basically an impossible occurrence, but that’s not the point. Go with the flow here, okay?)
In such a situation, it would be absolutely counterproductive to take an Isamaru, Hound of Konda over Floating-Dream Zubera (assuming such a scenario was possible). Yeah, Isamaru might be a great creature, but that’s not the correct strategy. Assuming such a booster actually ever made it into your hands, the only reason you take the Big Dog is because you’re rare-drafting. And with a deck like the one I described, that’s seems really shortsighted, since you should own the other drafters with what you’ve already got.
The Zebra is clearly the right pick because it plays right into your game plan: stall, stall, stall. Your whole deck is trying to achieve a singular result – wait until your opponent is basically halted in his or her tracks, then play your game-ending bomb, and win house. Your opponent is powerless. He or she cannot stop the inevitability of you dropping your newfangled Mageta Myojin and plowing through them in a few sweeps across the table, or sending in the Air Force while Kami of the Old Stone, Harsh Deceiver, and Kaijin of the Vanishing Touch push Moss Kami, Gnarled Mass and Loam Dweller back into the forest. In order for your plan to be successful, you need to build your deck around that strategy. Anything that compromises that strategy does not belong, no matter how good it is.
Most often, omnisignificance is actualized in the maindeck, where you tend to “trim the fat” and aim to make your game one good against most decks in the field. This is often the first step that most new players go through when they learn good deckbuilding skills. As an example, allow me to recall a time when I was helping a guy named Noah build a W/G threshold deck in the Odyssey/Onslaught standard. He was new to the game and had only been playing for a few months, but he was surprisingly good and was already making a name for himself as a hardcore spike.
He had a solid mid-range creature base with Wild Mongrel, Basking Rootwalla, Call of the Herd, Ravenous Baloth, and Anurid Brushhopper. While there were better metagame choices at the time, there didn’t seem to be anything distinctly awful in his deck. Nothing caught my eye until I found a few Nomad Mythmakers in deck. It turns out that he had a really mean trick that he liked to play: he would pitch one of the deck’s three Mythic Proportions into the graveyard and reanimate it onto a creature, pounding over with an exorbitant amount of trample damage. I knew it would be pretty brutal when it worked, but to his dismay, I told him he had to cut it.
More entrenched players instinctively know the correct answer here. The muscular-aura combo doesn’t belong because a deck like that never wants to hardcast the Proportions; and without the enchantment-manipulating cleric, they would be nothing more than Mongrel fodder. The six cards that made up that combo did not possess omnisignificance; that is to say, the cards were not did not do enough to the deck’s aims and goals. They would be better off suited becoming maindeck Krosan Warchiefs to work with the beast components, or Mystic Enforcers to give the deck more threshold-based synergy with the discard. Even Roar of the Wurm would be better, since unlike Mythic Proportions, once it was in the graveyard it could do damage all by itself. Roar needed neither Mythmaker nor a creature to enchant to make it work from that point on. Or perhaps they simply became Naturalizes and Llanowar Elves, which would be more utilitarian in nature and thus more relevant all across the board.
(Now, in a deck that was aimed to break Mythic Proportions consistently – something that ran Tallowisp, Academy Rector, Argothian Enchantress and Sterling Grove – that could be another story. With those tools, a Mythmaker-Proportions combo could be exploited to a potentially competitive level, at least as an academic exercise. But that’s an entirely different strategy, and the Mythic Proportions ceases to be about a neat trick and starts becoming the focus of the deck and works in sync with its engine.)
More recently in the competitive arena was the almost universal rejection of Flametongue Kavu in Goblin decks. (Sorry, Mike.) Since it’s not a goblin, it might not be “the best fit” in a deck that revolves around tribal Mogg-mania. In the jargon I am currently employing, as great as FtK is, he isn’t omnisignificant enough to be included.
When it comes to focusing on deck objectives, sideboards are no different. You cannot expect to be the favored deck in every single matchup, because every strategy has a foil. That’s why you need to follow metagame trends, and/or have a transformative approach to sideboarding; so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Sometimes, sideboarding decisions are misleadingly “easy,” as authors sometimes tell us in their articles. (“MUC! Bring in da Boils. You win! Derf.” Or, “Tooth and Nail! Bring in extra LD and pwn. Derf.”)
Such a simplistic approach to sideboarding is not exactly how pros ride the gravy train, or how Teams Meandeck and Shortbus lock up the SCG P9 tourneys. Deck pilots need to understand matchups and their own deck very well in order to build and play a deck properly, especially in Type One. Ultimately, sideboards need to be as omnisignificant as possible.
The best way to describe this is to understand sideboarding through the following paradigm: In game one, you want to be able to tackle anybody and anything as much as possible. After game one, you want to narrow down your strategy into the most effective opponent-gutting machine possible. Whereas you would like to have the same honed, precise game plan in game one, you simply cannot due to the fact that different opponents’ decks demand different tweaks and tunings.
A perfect example of this concept was MBC in Odyssey block. Game one involved the use of a maindeck that was average against the field. This was because MBC revolved around an amalgamated approach – a bit of discard to counteract control, a bit of creature removal to counteract aggro. Postboard, however, was when MBC began to ooze darkness and despair down the opponent’s throat like a vise. Against control, in came another Haunting Echoes and the swift little butt-kickers (Nantuko Shade) and out went the gobs of Innocent Bloods and some Chainer’s Edicts; all aimed at putting a quick threat on the table and mercilessly pounding and pounding away at the opponent’s hand and life total. Against aggro, the discard could come out for even more melee-stopping, ground-pounding removal like Faceless Butcher. As a deck, MBC narrowed down its strategy against each deck so that it had virtual card advantage in every draw. Since every card in the deck was aimed at demolishing you, it was relentless and effective against the entire field, despite game one numbers that seemed less than dominating. (Of course, ‘Tog was just busted, so MBC wasn’t really noticed this way.)
An inverse example is Skirk Fire Marshall in the Onslaught/Legions Pro Tour. SFM was quite popular during the pre-Scourge Goblins matchup, when it was a critical sideboard card in the Goblins mirror match. Skirk Fire Marshall vanished once Scourge became legal, and most likely not because of Goblin Warchief. More important for our discussion, Scourge gave us Siege-Gang Commander. At five mana, the Fire Marshall now had to compete with SGC, who brought more power to the table and was a stalemate-breaker all by himself. Simply by bringing enough creatures to the table and/or serving as an outlet to shock the opponent’s creatures or life total, SGC could swing matchups. Against Rift/Slide, Rifting a Siege-Gang still left a bunch of tokens, and on the way out he could shock the opponent back. Sliding an opponent’s SGC? That was just plain stupid. All together, it was painfully obvious to Fireman Skirk that SGC would always be the better inclusion. The Commander sent the Marshall back to the base to do latrine duty, since the Fireman would never have nearly as significant an impact as the Commander would for the same cost.
Other factors contributed to the removal of SFM from sideboards as well. With the rise of MWC and the new Goblin Bidding tech, Skirk Fire Marshall was pushed even farther away from being a centerpiece of the sideboarding strategy. Other strategies like the Fireball combo became more important – too important. All of these factors caused the once-significant Fire Marshall to go back to the bench, where most expected he would have never left.
Returning to our course of discussion from these examples, we see an alternate perspective to sideboarding. Using this “focus on what matters” approach, the sideboard should not be viewed as a way to bring in answers, but rather a way to remove the chaff. The most common problem players have when sideboarding is knowing what they want to put in but not what they want to take out; myself included. When thinking of your board as an answer bank, you forget that the real point of sideboarding should be narrowing a matchup’s strategy to meet the challenge at hand.
The advantages of this perspective should be immediately obvious. The first is that since you are aimed at making your matchup more focused, you’ve already had time to figure out what cards to take out. It also means you are dedicating yourself to know more about how the matchup should play out, a focus which improves your play skills and your understanding of strategy. Sometimes, these changes are quite simple – against a nearly creatureless deck, creature removal is obviously useless and a more relevant threat must be employed. Whether you bring in Duress or Naturalize or more creatures or something else entirely is dependent on the specifics of the decks in question, but the fundamental idea is the same: “In this matchup, card X isn’t great, so I replace it with card Y that is much more appropriate.”
Notice that in that last line, I didn’t say “card Y that is monstrously game-breaking and opponent-chomping.” Rather, I said “much more appropriate.” The key idea is that you cannot possibly sideboard against every deck in the room, so you must rather have a sideboard that is not only tailored to the metagame but is equally robust enough to be useful against decks you might not expect, or against opponents with unusual strategies.
That’s why Pyrostatic Pillar is sub-par in the sideboard of Mogg Alarm. REB and BEB both hit huge parts of the metagame, especially since Red and Blue are the basically best colors in Legacy right now. Goblin King is good against Black’s Engineered Plague, against Red, and in matches where you simply want more threats or want to remove “specialty” creatures like Goblin Sharpshooter. Sideboarding the fourth Gempalm Incinerator is a perfect way of describing what I’m getting at: it’s not about brute force from the board but rather tweaks and tuning to narrow down and focus on the core strategy in the current matchup. Even the lone Goblin Welder that I used to run in my board (I now run three Pithing Needle) is more “omnisignificant,” since at the very least it’s another Goblin. As an actual goblin, Welder plays nice with Goblin Ringleader, Siege-Gang Commander, and the Goblin Kings. Pyrostatic Pillar can claim none of those benefits.
As a side note, this is why flexible disruption is so important. Pithing Needle is a chase rare that will be played in every format because it is the pinnacle of an omnisignificant sideboard card. It can disrupt almost every deck, is useful in multiples, and has a noncommittal casting cost. On a lesser note, a similar line of reasoning explains why Naturalize is generally chosen over Oxidize as a sideboard card – it hits twice as many types of targets.
Coming into this vantage point, it also becomes apparent that not every matchup is favorable. There is simply no way to turn certain matchups around. Try as hard as you can, traditional Extended Life decks will always have a hard time winning against The Rock. Even when decks have incredible silver bullets in the board, it doesn’t mean that it will win. Look at all of the hate the Ravager Affinity survived through – it was just simply a better deck than most. It could win through almost all forms of hate that players brought in. That boarding strategy didn’t work consistently because it ignored the fact that Ravager Affinity is a deck built with a practically rigid adherence to omnisignificance. Every card in that deck was ruthlessly synergetic, to the point that its own lands could be converted into Shocks.
The idea that you can’t beat everything is normal. If Mogg Alarm can’t beat Solidarity more than fifty percent of the time, but crushes almost everything else by a ten-point margin, I’m not going to get the pH34r. (Not that it does, but I’m making a point here.) Sacrificing my other matchups by devoting sideboard slots to a deck I might not even face is pointless.
Omnisignificance is nothing more than a term that encapsulates several well established fundamentals of Magic: virtual card advantage, splash damage, avoiding “The Fear”, synergy, strategic superiority and metagaming principles. It’s not really anything that you haven’t heard before. Yet for some reason, there is a big leap in play skill between those who can only apply it to maindeck construction to those who understand its implications in sideboarding.
This may be because of the presence of powerful hosers in Eighth Edition (Boil, Karma, etc.), or because Affinity forced us to practically pre-sideboard our decks with abnormally large quantities of relic-smashing spells. This perpetuating misconception seems evident, since in every version of the Type II format that it has been legal in, Tooth and Nail has been heralded as DOA more times than I can possibly count. Despite the fact that it can win through the overwhelming number of cards that can disrupt it, people constantly declared it dead. There are several reasons for this, but I would like to speculate that core reason for its success is its sheer mana acceleration. The deck achieves a singularity that is very difficult to break down by most decks – get huge quantities of mana and then spend it.
Listen to that again. Get huge quantities of mana and then spend it.
So many sideboarding strategies failed to blast Tooth because they missed the boat. Quash wouldn’t herald the end of the Tooth era. Boseiju wouldn’t end the era. Discard wouldn’t end the era. All of these strategies essentially failed, because Tooth is beyond silver bullets aimed at the card Tooth and Nail itself. It is about mono-Green decks sweeping the board with Oblivion Stone the same time White decks would normally Wrath. It’s about regurgitating Sundering Titan onto the table with or without the deck’s namesake. It’s about being so many turns ahead of your opponent in mana development that it feels like you’ve Time Walked your way into victory.
The deck defied all of the screams against it partially because it was able to evolve, but also partially because people didn’t allow their own decks the ability to strategically compete on the same level. Some decks, like QM’s Big Blue Tron and Flores’ Kuroda Red (and others of the Paskinesque ilk), were obviously able to overcome this strategic advantage, even using the tools that were suggest by those who wrongly predicted Tooth’s demise. Nonetheless, I think that the widespread notion that Tooth was “in its last throes” all of these times has more to do with the fact that those making these claims couldn’t really grasp the idea that sideboarding is really about honing your deck’s strategy, and not necessarily about breaking the opponent’s.
I’ve certainly got a lot to learn about sideboarding. Too often, I get caught in the same trap of forgetting to analyze a matchup enough to know what I need to take out. As I play more and more, though, I realize the effective nature of the “plugging holes” perspective rather than the silver bullet one. Even though I know I need to start planning my sideboard strategies ahead of time, at least when I do so on-the-fly I feel more confident about the decisions I’m making.
So that’s my latest dose of Talmudic wisdom. More next time, when I may or may not muse about the endless sardonic retorts I can provide in response to the question, “Hey man, are you, like, the pope, with that, er, thing on your head?”
Cheers!
-Nathan J
Of course, props to R. Akiba, for being so inspiring. Also, some major Mad Hatter Gratitude to all of the other SCG featured writers, who tolerate my endless stream of me poking fun. Or at least, for not coming to my house and pummeling me about it. Yet.