This is a very tough time to write. Standard basically doesn’t matter, and M10 isn’t out yet in a competitive environment so we can’t fully comprehend its implications. We can speculate, of course, but every writer does that, and if I do it again it’s going to be very repetitive, since there are only so many things to speculate. So I decided to write about some general Magic strategy, not keyed to any specific format.
When I wrote my article about mulligans, my original intention was to also write one about sideboarding. In the end, though, two other people wrote about it, so I decided to stick to mulligans alone. Some time has passed, and my views on the subject have even changed, so I’m going to write about it now.
Sideboarding is one of the most underrated arts in Magic, probably second only after mulligans. Everyone knows that you play more games sideboarded than not, yet everyone always ignores it until the day of the event. The goal of this article is to help you have the best sideboard when you do ignore it until the day of the event, which you inevitably will.
I’ve always neglected sideboarding a little myself. Not that I don’t worry about it, but, as I’ve said before, I think that if you know the matches very well, then building a sideboard becomes a lot easier — all you need is a general knowledge of how sideboards are built. This general knowledge is what I’m going to focus on in this article.
There are three ways to split decks where sideboarding is concerned, as I see it — Aggro decks, Control decks and Combo decks.
Let’s start with Control decks. Control decks are by far the easiest to sideboard — both in building a sideboard and actually using it. The reason for that is that Control decks usually have a bunch of answers in their main build, and the function of the sideboard is to let you switch out the cards that don’t answer that particular matchup for cards that do.
Most cards in a Control deck’s sideboard are generic answers — a card that you would, for example, board against any beatdown deck. It’s not going to be a card that crushes them, and it’s not going to change the way your deck looks — it’s basically a card that does what your deck is already trying to do, but is a little bit better against a given strategy; a card that gives you a slight edge in the matchup and lets you take out your useless cards. This is, of course, a concern in all the decks — you want to take out the bad cards — but in Control decks, it’s usually blatantly obvious what those cards are, and there are usually plenty of them.
Let’s say, for example, that your sideboard is three copies of each Circle of Protection – you’ll have three cards that are awesome against each color but that you don’t board in against anything else, and then you’ll be left with Terror in your deck against Mono Black because you only have three cards to side in. If, instead of three COP: Red and three COP: Black you run three Condemn and three Greater Realm of Preservation (you didn’t even know this card existed, right?), you now have six cards against both those decks, and though neither of them is as powerful as the respective COP in this situation, when you factor in both of them they give you a better matchup than just the COPs would (this is, of course, theoretical, and it might be that you’d rather just run COP: Red, but I believe it’s good to illustrate the point I want to make).
Basically, the main point about Control sideboards is that it’s a deck that is so full of answers that you don’t need to sideboard specifically against a deck, but rather against a whole strategy. The exception is when there is only one deck of its kind — if the only aggressive deck is White Weenie, there is no downside to playing Dread of Night instead of something more generic like Deathmark.
Another concern in Control decks is that you usually want to lower your curve against the beatdown decks. Most of your cards against this kind of deck are going to be cheap answers, so that you are able to survive the first onslaught and then do what your deck is supposed to do. What you have to keep in mind, though, is not to lower your curve too much so that you run out of things to do once you do survive the first onslaught — so taking out one of your four expensive bomb spells is fine, but taking out all four is not.
For the Control mirror, it depends on whether counterspells are involved or not. What you usually want is bombastic spells (Identity Crisis, for example), and cheap counterspells (such as Negate) to help it resolve through their counters, and to deal with their bomb spells before they get you. Whereas in the Aggro matchups you usually attack their creatures, in the Control mirror your main target is usually their hand. Control decks usually have a lot of removal in their maindeck, so it’s also pretty obvious what to take out.
Another approach you can take is to board in permanents that are hard to deal with, and try to ride their advantage in a match that is mostly defined by spells. Simply put, if their card does something once and yours does something every turn, you’re probably going to win in the long run, and those matches are the definition of “long run.” Scepter of Fugue is the perfect example — not only it’s a permanent but it also attacks the most important resource in this matchup. Another example is Anurid Brushhopper for the Wake mirror back in 2003 — a creature that is just impossible to deal with, even more so because they take out the cards that deal with it.
In Control versus Combo, it depends a lot on what is the Combo played. Combo is usually a very defined archetype, so there is no reason to board against something generic — just target what you’re trying to beat. Sometimes you aren’t going to need anything against those — your main build is already equipped to deal with it, and the cards against Control will most of the time be good against Combo, since it’s the same resource you’re trying to attack. The specific cards against Combo will depend on whether it’s a bad matchup or not, and what cards are your plan for the Control mirror — if you have 4 Thoughtseizes and 3 Negates for Control, chances are this is enough to beat Combo, but if you have 4 Anathemancer and 2 Thoughtseize as your plan then you might need something else.
The standard Control sideboard I would use includes 6 generic cards against Aggro, 6 generic cards against Control, and 3 specific cards against Combo, though if Combo is not important enough then you might make just make it a 8/7 split and side all the Control cards against it. If the Combo is based on creatures, then you can also side in the Aggro cards, though most of the time you’ll have plenty of removal in the maindeck and nothing to take out for extra ones.
A good deck to exemplify everything I said is the one I ended up playing in Hawaii:
4 Arcane Sanctum
4 Exotic Orchard
1 Grixis Panorama
3 Island
3 Jungle Shrine
2 Mountain
1 Savage Lands
4 Seaside Citadel
4 Swamp
4 Bloodbraid Elf
1 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Wall of Denial
2 Ajani Vengeant
4 Bituminous Blast
3 Celestial Purge
4 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Esper Charm
3 Maelstrom Pulse
2 Terminate
3 Traumatic Visions
This is a clear Control deck. From this list, you can see that our goal was to beat Aggro pre board — that meant our sideboard was going to be mostly against Control, since this is the match that needs help the most and the one where we have the most cards to take out. Cards that can be taken out against Aggro are Traumatic Visions and Esper Charm; the rest is basically good against it.
The sideboard was this:
2 Countersquall
3 Double Negative
Those are the cheap counterspells, that you board in against all the Control decks.
2 Identity Crisis
1 Obelisk of Alara
1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
Those are your bomb spells, against the Control decks too. Karrthus is a bit more narrow, usually only good against decks with Broodmate Dragon.
2 Sprouting Thrinax
2 Captured Sunlight
The generic cards against Aggro.
2 Infest
The specific cards. There was no Combo in the format, but GW and Esper are a bit different than the other Aggro decks, and there was room for some specific cards, so we decided to take on the deck we had few things against and many things to take out.
It’s good to point out that Sprouting Thrinax was only included because of Fleshbag Marauder, since it’s the perfect card to answer it, but it is not a bad card by any means if they don’t have/draw the Fleshbag, and you can even board it in against decks without Black — so though it was included to combat a specific sideboard, its applications are much more than that.
This is, theoretically, a very good sideboard, and it follows all the guidelines that I’ve talked about for Control matches. It was, however, a mistake to take it to Hawaii. Why? Because of Cascade.
The problem with it was that it was something I was not entirely used to in my Control decks. Though I had to play with a Cascade sideboard when I played Swans, it was completely different, as everything was new. With this deck, I just took the generic Control approach, instead of the Cascade Control approach, and it didn’t work very well. Our plan for the mirror was to just take out the Cascade spells and board in Counters, but in the end that was too weak and it’d be better to take advantage of the Cascade spells we are already playing, like the Chapin group did, instead of taking them out.
This is also a flaw in my “know the matchup very well and you’ll be able to sideboard properly without having played plenty of sideboarded games” idea, because the sideboarded games were drastically different from the mainboarded games, again because of Cascade. I believe they are more dependent on what you are taking out than what you are bringing in, and we didn’t take that into account as much as we should have — that was our big mistake in this PT.
It seems ironic that I’m using, as an example of what I’m recommending, the only deck in recent memory where it didn’t work out, but it’s the Control deck I played in recent memory, and this was the thought process I used to build my Sideboard. Although at that time it didn’t work out, that was because of specifics of the format, not because the thought process is bad. It should work most of the time and I’m going to keep on doing it like that, since I’ve always felt my sideboards were really really good with every deck I played, but now I know that when Cascade is involved I can’t theorize as much and I should practice more instead. If you keep that in mind as well, you will be fine.
Next up, the Aggro decks. Aggro decks aren’t as generic as Control decks, because their strategy is more demanding. Basically, in a Control deck, you aim to control the game (well duh), and the cards you use to control the game are a little bit different from matchup to matchup, so one is a little bit better than the other in every match though they all aim to do the same thing. In a beatdown deck, your goal is just to kill them — and, no matter what they are playing, the cards that kill them are basically the same. That means you cannot remove some of the cards for cards that do the same but better, because if they did the same but better they would be in your maindeck.
As such, having a generic sideboard usually doesn’t cut for an Aggro deck. What you should generally try to do is to either change your strategy, usually in the Aggro versus Aggro match, or combat their sideboard.
In Aggro versus Aggro, you generally want to increase your curve, so that you become the midrange deck that we all hate because midrange doesn’t beat anything (okay, not ALL of us). Aggro mirrors are generally battles of attrition, and very rarely one person is able to rush the other out of the game, so you get time to play your big guys. Basically, everyone kills everything, all the creatures trade in combat, and the person with the last big man standing wins — your goal is to have the last big man standing.
There are a couple of ways you can do that — in past days, people used to just board in big guys. I remember Willy got second in our Nationals some years ago by winning every single Mono Red mirror because he had Seething Song and Arc-Slogger in his Sideboard, and it was just too big for other Red decks to deal with most of the time. It would be something akin to Faeries boarding Masticore against Aggro — though it’s not a beatdown mirror, the goal is to have a big man standing.
Nowadays, there aren’t many big guys you can play, but people find other sorts of cards to give them advantages — Kitchen Finks and Ranger of Eos in the Zoo mirror, for example. While both of those might be too slow for your maindeck, once removal spells start flying everywhere, they will be the men standing (or the Wild Nacatls that you got from Ranger will). Murderous Redcap, Siege-Gang Commander, and Demigod of Revenge serve the same purposes in the sideboard of Red decks in Standard.
Since you don’t have as many curve considerations post board in the Aggro mirror, you can have a lot of cards for those matches. You generally can’t have a lot of cards for the other matches, because Aggro decks are very limited in their slots – this is the case of Aggro versus Control.
When you build an Aggro deck, you usually build it for either speed and consistency or just plain speed. In both cases, you take the curve into maximum consideration. You decide you want to play a number of one-drops and then select the best to fill that number, same with two-drops, and then burn spells — you don’t just add the one-drops you want to play to your deck. So, if you decide you want to play eight one-drops, you better remember there is a reason you are playing eight and not four when you go sideboarding.
Take, for example, the sideboard of our Extended Boros deck for 2006 Worlds. That deck maindecked four Molten Rains, and had four Sulfuric Vortexes in the Sideboard — and, most of the time, you’d just swap those two if you added the Vortexes. Against Psychatog, it’s not that Molten Rain is bad — it wasn’t — but the deck just didn’t support eight four-drops. There was a reason we had only four in the first place, and that reason still stood.
Since you have less cards you can take out, it doesn’t make sense to fill your sideboard with slightly better cards so you can side in eight against every deck — it’s better to have more specific answers, to side in less cards but have those cards matter more.
Take, again, our Boros deck for 2006 Worlds, but this time in the Standard portion. The sideboard included 4 Cryoclasm, which is a little generic but also specific at the same time — it has to be a Blue or White Control deck with a lot of Basics – 3 Ronon Unicorn, which is basically a card that only does something if they have COP: Red, and 2 Worship, which we only sided in for the mirror. We came up with Worship because we had two slots in our sideboard and we wanted two cards for the mirror, and since the other decks were already covered with what we had, due to not having much to take out anyway, we were able to get the card that would make the most difference in the matchup in question, even if it wasn’t any useful in the others.
The Ronom Unicorns here are interesting, because they serve no purpose but to combat their Sideboard. The premise behind this is that the deck has a good matchup pre-board, but then the match completely changes when they have COP, so it’s worth having an otherwise marginal card just to prevent them from completely swinging the matchup with one card. This is seen the most in Combo matches, where you just flat out lose to a lot of cards, and very rarely in Control, since the deck naturally has an answer to everything and so has no need to clunk itself with specific anti-hate. Aggro decks are the middle here — you’d probably not see me playing Disenchant in that slot, but since there was a creature attached to it, we decided we could run it.
Usually, the situation has to be very desperate for me to sideboard a card that is very specific in Aggro — at that point, I’d rather just play another deck most of the time. The main thought process here is that it has to be a card that is not completely dead if you draw it and they don’t draw the card you are hating, and the matchup has to be okay if you both draw it or if neither draws it. A lot of people make that mistake against Faeries when they side in enchantment removal — sure, Bitterblossom is their best card and you’d like to take it out, but by boarding something like Naturalize all you are doing is increasing their chances of beating you if they don’t draw Bitterblossom, because you’ll have a lot of dead cards. If you manage to catch their Blossom with your Naturalize, it’s not like you are automatically winning the game or anything.
Sometimes it’s tough to know when you require a specific answer or can do with a more versatile card. I remember when we were trying to define our Sideboard for 2007 Nationals — we were playing Saito’s RG deck and were struggling between Cryoclasm and Magus of the Moon. My friend then argued that Magus of the Moon had the potential to win the game by itself, but it also had the potential to not do anything — it’s a really hit or miss kind of card — and the deck was so good that it didn’t need the free wins provided by Magus at the expense of the losses because you have a card that doesn’t do anything (and turns off your Treetops, Skarrgs, and Green cards). It made a lot of sense, and we played Cryoclasm, which turned out to be much better — if the deck was worse, or the matchup worse, we might have had to gamble on the Magus. This is why I believe it’s so important to know the matchup before you start considering a Sideboard; you need to know what you want to accomplish with it.
A similar thing happens with Infest in Faeries. When I was arguing with LSV whether we should include it or not in our sideboard in Seattle, he said Infest had been really hit or miss for him, and he didn’t like that, to which I agreed — the deck and match were good enough that there was no need to play a hit or miss card, and we could go for the more consistent and versatile, but less bombastic card, Sower of Temptation.
Aggro versus Combo is generally specific answers — Canonist, Rule of Law, Pillar, Pithing Needle. The cards you board against Control most of the time aren’t good enough against Combo, since they do not attack the same resources — Thoughtseize is usually weak in Aggro versus Control, for example, so you wouldn’t have it in your sideboard.
Combo sideboards are the hardest to build, and the hardest to put in practice. Think of Combo as the Aggro deck — you have roughly the same plan against all the decks, so it’s hard to take out something — only tenfold. All the cards in a Combo deck are carefully placed there, and selected over hundreds of other cards — each serves a role in the deck and you have to be very careful what to take out. Sometimes, it’s appealing to just take out a redundant card — say, if you are playing Fruit Peebles (the Shield Sphere/Enduring Renewal/Goblin Bombardment deck that wins by getting all of them in play and dealing infinite damage), you might be playing 4 Shield Sphere and two Ornithopters, and believe me you’ll always look at those Ornithopters when you are deciding what to side out, but again, there was a reason you played six on the first place.
Combo also has the problem that it’s the most affected by sideboards — people will run specific cards against you, and if those cards resolve you can’t win. That means you have to run specific cards to combat those, which is just as well because you have nothing to take out anyway.
Take, for example, the Swans deck we played at GP Barcelona:
2 Forge[/author]“]Battlefield [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
2 Cascade Bluffs
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
2 Ghitu Encampment
4 Graven Cairns
1 Mountain
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Spinerock Knoll
4 Treetop Village
4 Vivid Crag
1 Vivid Creek
4 Vivid Grove
1 Vivid Marsh
4 Vivid Meadow
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Swans of Bryn Argoll
2 Ad Nauseam
2 Bituminous Blast
2 Captured Sunlight
1 Primal Command
4 Seismic Assault
Sideboard
2 Aura of Silence
4 Countryside Crusher
2 Maelstrom Pulse
1 Primal Command
2 Vexing Shusher
2 Wickerbough Elder
2 Wrath of God
Every round I had to control myself to just not sideboard out the redundant Combo piece — the lands. Sometimes, you could afford to, but in some matches, such as Red Aggro or the Mirror, you really want to draw those lands and you will regret siding them out — again, there was a reason we played 41 and not 35 (though I have to say it was empirical data — we were always killing with 41 but not with 35 — than a number we arrived by math).
The sideboard for this deck could not be more targeted — the only card that you board in against a lot of decks is Countryside Crusher. Aura of Silence was only for the mirror and was the best card for what it did, and Wickerbough Elder was the Enchantment Removal of choice for decks with Runed Halo, because it wouldn’t be Cascaded and worked for beating down. Now, we could have clearly done without one of them, since they both do the same – destroying Enchantments – and you don’t really need more than two, but the nature of our deck and the fact that we had nothing to take out anyway meant we could do with two of each. I could be boarding in Wickerbough Elder only against both decks, but since we had the slots, we might as well play the most specific hate card we can find.
Maelstrom Pulse was also a specific card, though it’s hard to call a card whose text is “destroy target permanent” specific. It was there solely to destroy Pithing Needle — the fact that you could Cascade into it and have it being useful when they didn’t have Needle was a plus, but you never boarded it in against decks without Needle and, to a lesser extent, Halo, though sometimes I’d board only one against those.
Two cards there do not fit the very specific category — Primal Command and Wrath of God — and both those cards were mistakes we made in our Sideboard. The Primal Command should have been maindeck, since it’s just a good card for the deck overall, and the Wrath of God shouldn’t have been anywhere, since it doesn’t go with the deck’s game plan. Still, there is a reasoning for the Primal Command there — we wanted redundant copies of Swans for decks when we were taking out Ad Nauseam. This goes with the “there is a reason you play X” mentality — if those copies were not needed, we’d not be playing them, so if we are taking out, we should have ways to replace them somehow. We decided taking one out was fine, but taking two was pushing it a bit, so the Command, which also served as additional copies of Combo pieces against decks with heavy disruption, such as BW.
Another approach you can take is having the transformational sideboard. Transformational sideboards are very convenient, because they solve both problems you have — the “nothing to take out” and the “this card completely destroys me.” Suddenly, you have more cards to take out than you know what to do with, and most of what they boarded in is irrelevant to you.
An example of a transformational sideboard is the same Swans deck, but the one piloted by LSV and GerryT. This was their build:
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
4 Ghitu Encampment
4 Graven Cairns
1 Mountain
4 Reflecting Pool
3 Rugged Prairie
1 Sulfurous Springs
2 Sunken Ruins
4 Treetop Village
4 Vivid Crag
1 Vivid Creek
4 Vivid Grove
4 Vivid Marsh
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Swans of Bryn Argoll
2 Captured Sunlight
4 Deny Reality
2 Primal Command
4 Seismic Assault
Sideboard
4 Countryside Crusher
4 Fulminator Mage
2 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Rain of Tears
2 Wrath of God
This is a transformational sideboard because it changes the angle the deck is trying to win — before, it tried to get both Swans and Assault in play, and now it aims to destroy their Lands and kill them with Crusher. If they side in cards against the Combo, it’s not going to do them much good. This is only possible because the maindeck is built with that in mind, though — Deny Reality is, in my opinion, a bad card to play, but a must if you play this build. Building a transformational sideboard is not something you can do lightly and at the day before the tournament — you have to actually test thoroughly to see if it’s good or not, and to see what sacrifices it requires from your maindeck.
Another example of a Transformational Sideboard is Kai Budde Illusions/Donate deck from 1830 — the deck had the two-card Combo in the maindeck and morphed into a Control build with Morphlings afterwards. The deck had room for one maindeck bounce, and people played Capsize. I saw many people losing to double Seal of Cleansing, yet no one ran Rushing River in that slot, which is better at what you are trying to do maindeck — all because, after board, when you morphed, Capsize would play a pivotal role in your Sapphire Medallion powered Control deck.
There are plenty of things to take into account for a transformational sideboard, though. First it’s if you actually have enough room to take out all the bad cards — if your Combo takes up 25 cards from your deck and they are all terrible outside of it, you will end up with a bad deck with 10 dead cards when you transform. The other question is whether the transformation helps you beat stuff you otherwise wouldn’t beat, and whether the cards they will side in against you aren’t going to beat you anyway.
Take, for example, Dredge. I fully believe that, if Dredge could play a transformational sideboard, it would just win all the tournaments, yet it just doesn’t have one because there is just nothing that it can play. It’d be awesome to completely ignore all those very specific hate cards people bring against you, but how are you going to do that? First, the deck plays a very low number of Lands, so some of your sideboard would have to be Lands to help casting the spells you are bringing. Second, most big cheap creatures you’d bring — historically the main Transformational Sideboard, immortalized in Phyrexian Negator — will end up suffering from the hate anyway. All the time I think of Tarmogoyf and Tombstalker, and how those cards would be so insane as big beaters for two in Dredge, but then I remind myself that they will be bringing cards that happen to combat exactly those cards — your Tombstalker is not going to look very good in the face of a turn 1 Leyline of the Void. You also have so many cards dedicated to the Combo that you’ll end up playing Stinkweed Imps, Careful Studies, and Narcomoebas in your post-sideboard deck, which is just weak. As it is, you just cannot do anything other than combat those cards directly, with cards such as Chain of Vapor and Pithing Needle.
Transformational sideboards don’t have to be as absolute, though. If we take Katsushiro Mori’s 2005 Worlds winning deck, for example:
4 Brushland
5 Forest
1 Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers
1 Plains
4 Selesnya Sanctuary
4 Temple Garden
4 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
3 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
1 Birds of Paradise
3 Kodama of the North Tree
3 Llanowar Elves
4 Loxodon Hierarch
4 Selesnya Guildmage
4 Wood Elves
2 Yosei, the Morning Star
2 Congregation at Dawn
3 Glare of Subdual
3 Pithing Needle
2 Seed Spark
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
Sideboard
2 Carven Caryatid
2 Greater Good
3 Hokori, Dust Drinker
1 Kodama of the North Tree
1 Kodama’s Reach
2 Naturalize
1 Seedborn Muse
1 Wrath of God
2 Yosei, the Morning Star
This is originally an Aggro deck, but after boarding it morphs into a more Comboish build, with Greater Good to chain Yoseis. It’s not a drastic change, number of cards-wise, but it changes the way the deck plays completely. Without this sideboard, Mori wouldn’t really have any hopes of beating Karsten in the finals, but with it he was able to win the three sideboarded games.
Well, this is it, your PV Sideboard Guide for building sideboards one day before the tournament. I can’t claim everything I said is 100% correct, but this is what I do and those are my thought processes when I build my sideboard — I’ll sum it up here:
Control versus Aggro — Generic answers while lowering the curve
Control versus Control — Cheap counterspells, bombastic spells, cards that attack their hand and permanents that are hard to deal with
Control versus Combo – Either something specific for what you’re trying to beat or the package you bring versus Control, if it attacks the same resources.
Aggro versus Control — Specific cards against what you are trying to beat, and cards that combat their sideboards if they have anything very powerful, always keeping in mind that the core of your deck, and your curve, cannot change much.
Aggro versus Aggro — Big spells above your usual curve, cards that help you fight an attrition war. Curve doesn’t matter much anymore.
Aggro versus Combo — Specific hate cards.
Combo versus everything — Cards to combat their specific sideboard cards, or a transformational sideboard.
I’ll say again, though, that I believe the most important thing for building and using a Sideboard properly is to know the match you are playing — only then you are able to identify what you have to fix, what their problematic cards are, which angle you have to attack, what you are trying to accomplish — if you have a lot of knowledge on the format, you’ll generally have no trouble constructing a Sideboard one day before the tournament.
I hope this was useful to you and I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
See you next week…
PV