Today I’m going to talk about something quite a bit different from Mono-Green monsters or Esper Spirits. I’m going to talk about Innistrad Limited. I’ve done a significant number of 8-4’s on Magic Online, and I’ve had a better winning percentage in Innistrad Draft than any other format I’ve ever played. I feel like I have a very good grasp of the format, and one thing I’ve discovered is that there’s a lot of room to gain edges in most matches by the use of sideboard cards. In recent sets, Wizards R&D has done a great job of reducing the number of unplayable cards. There are a few gruesome exceptions to this rule, but for the most part almost every pick is going to conceivably serve a purpose in some matchup.
Sideboarding in Limited is something that often is overlooked and undervalued. Players focus on sending signals, reading signals, deck building, and playing the matches in Limited environments, but there isn’t a lot of focus on how to sideboard in between games to give you an edge in games 2 and 3. Having a proper sideboard and plan in Constructed is one of the most important factors behind success. Why should Limited be any different? Just like Constructed, there are archetypes in Limited formats, and you want to make sure that your cards match up well against your opponent’s gameplan.
Before I talk about Innistrad, let me put on my storyteller’s cap and monocle and regale you with the tale of how I first learned just how important sideboarding could be.
The year was 2009. The format was Zendikar Sealed. I had just started playing Magic again after a year and a half hiatus. I was sitting down to play in my third PTQ of the season. The first two had gone very poorly for me: 2-2 drop in both. This PTQ would be different—I hoped. When I opened my packs, I looked at a collection of strong playable cards. "This will work out quite well," I thought to myself. "Yes, this will work out quite well for the person who gets this pool." I registered it and passed it on.
Minutes later, when I looked at the pool I was actually going to play, "work out quite well" was not one of the few choice phrases I selected to describe it. The words I did use may or may not be fit to print on this site. I was looking at what appeared to be the most classically powerful Limited strategy: Green/White with no removal and (almost) no evasion. By "classically powerful" I mean that this exact archetype is what you see when you look in the dictionary for "going 1-2 drop."
I was about to go into battle armed with one Emeria Angel and 39 other cards. I had a Blazing Torch, a minor ally theme, a Kor Skyfisher, and a whole lot of random ground creatures. My plan was to draw Emeria Angel every game and hope my opponents didn’t play bombs or removal because I couldn’t deal with them. Up until the second-to-last round, this strategy had miraculously worked. I had one loss to a Kalitas that was able to successfully "Ghet" me, but I was in a position where if I won the last two rounds I’d make Top 8.
That’s when I got paired against a B/W monstrosity that had two Marsh Casualties, Emeria Angel, and Vampire Nighthawk along with some other strong cards. In the first game, my creatures foolishly decided to check out the noise they heard in the nearby Marsh and did not successfully return. I yelled out, "No, don’t go in there!" but they didn’t listen. Twice my board was destroyed by Marsh Casualties, and I lost badly. Going into the second game, I realized that something needed to change or I was just going to fall victim to the same thing again.
Ondu Cleric wasn’t going to get the job done. If I wanted some real work done, I had to turn to a beast of burden. Out goes some random one toughness creatures. In comes a bunch of Pillarfield Oxen. The only thing that I can remember about the next two games is that my opponent was hit by a bunch of 2 by 4’s until he died. After I swung for lethal in game 3 with two Pillarfield Oxen and a Joraga Bard, he showed me the two Marsh Casualties that were dead in his hand.
Rumor has it that he bought the next one-way ticket to Ox-ford.
I ended up winning the last round and made my first Top 8 of the season. However, the thing that stood out most to me was that round. I was able to beat two copies of one of the best spells in the format with a bunch of very mediocre creatures. It was at that point that I truly learned the value of sideboarding in Limited.
Up to that point, I generally sideboarded like many people do. If my opponent is playing Mono-Black, I side out Doom Blade. If they have fliers, I bring in Plummet. If they’re playing artifacts or enchantments, I bring in Naturalize. In other words, I sideboarded in and out the obvious choices. Other than that, I didn’t touch my board too much.
That philosophy is only the beginning of how you should sideboard in Limited. While taking out the worst card in your deck for a card that kills fliers is a good sideboarding strategy against a U/W skies deck, chances are there are a lot more cards that can be swapped out to improve your matchup as well. Expensive creatures like Kindercatch or Grizzled Outcasts are weak cards against a deck that probably has some number of Feeling of Dread, Silent Departure, and Griptide. You’re going to spend five or six mana only to have your work undone by one or two mana on their turn. Those cards would be much better as One-Eyed Scarecrow or even that third Silverchase Fox in your sideboard.
I find that most of the time, I can make two-to-three sideboard changes to improve my matchup against whatever I’m playing. While that may not seem like a whole lot, it’s certainly better than nothing, and it can often be just enough to win a match. You would be surprised at how often I draw a sideboard card and think: "I’m so happy this isn’t the card that used to be in that slot."
Underrated Sideboard Cards
I’d like to first talk about some of the more underrated sideboard choices, and then I’d like to cover some of the common draft archetypes and general sideboard strategies against them.
Skeletal Grimace
Ah yes, everyone’s favorite thirteenth pick: Skeletal Grimace. The number of times I’d maindeck this card is very low. Either I’m hurting badly for playables or I have somewhere between 30 and 40 Ralph Neo-Naders in my deck and need a way to make sure my opponent’s Squire doesn’t trade with my guys. This card suffers from the common problem that a lot of creature enhancements do: it opens you up for easy two-for-ones by bounce or removal spells.
However, there are some matchups where Skeletal Grimace is fantastic. I’m talking about when you’re playing against generally red-based decks that are relying on removal like Wrack with Madness (check yourself before you Wrack yourself), Brimstone Volley, and Fires of Undeath, or against decks that just don’t have much or any removal at all. Stick this on a guy and either they can’t profitably block it or they can’t profitably attack through it. I have won a fair share of games with Skeletal Grimace, and I’m sure my opponents were left scratching their heads and wondering what just happened.
Spare from Evil
How many of you have lost games where you spend turns 1-5 curving out your board while your opponent plays Armored Skaabs and Dream Twists targeting themselves? You’ve got them down to seven life and have fifteen power in play. Then they cast Gnaw to the Bone, gain sixteen life, and the following turn they cast Spider Spawning and put eight 1/2s into play.
That Chapel Geist equipped with a Silver-Inlaid Dagger is now trading with one-fourth of their spell. Oh, and they get to flash it back next turn as well.
After losing game 1 and muttering to yourself, "If I just had one more turn," you casually browse through your sideboard, don’t see anything, and shuffle up for game 2. Right? Wrong.
You bring in Spare from Evil. You build up your board while they hide behind the most evil creature type in Innistrad: Spiders. Then, while they’re tapped out after flashing back a Spider Spawning, you cast Spare from Evil and crash home for a ton of damage.
My favorite story with Spare from Evil involved my opponent attacking me with over twenty Spiders. I had exactly enough blockers to survive at one life. I also had a Lumberknot in play that got quite fat off of a steady diet of Spider. My opponent flashed back Spider Spawning and passed the turn, casually sitting at 56 life behind a wall of Spiders. On my turn, I cast and sacrificed a Selfless Cathar, cast Spare from Evil, and hit him for over 60. It brought a tear to my eye.
Lost in the Mist / Bone to Ash
You don’t want these cards against quick and aggressive strategies because sitting back and doing nothing with four and five mana against a deck that’s probably ahead on board isn’t helping you much. A savvy opponent is not going to play into either of these cards and continue beating you with what’s in play until you tap out to play something. Then they’ll unload their hand while you’re tapped out.
However, these cards are very good against decks that are slower than yours. If you’re playing a U/W tempo list against a controlling deck and you need a card to counter that last trump they have, you should highly consider these cards. If that extra Abbey Griffin in your deck is going to become irrelevant when your opponent slams his Reaper from the Abyss into play, perhaps you should side it out and bring in Lost in the Mist or Bone to Ash. These cards are also much better on the play than on the draw, which is a relevant consideration. Bone to Ash is a relevant sideboard card against Bloodline Keeper on the play but not on the draw, for instance.
Spectral Flight, Furor of the Bitten, Talons of Falkenrath
I often find that the number of these cards I play is directly proportional to the number of Invisible Stalkers I have in my deck. Spectral Flight also makes it into a few other decks I draft. Furor and Talons very rarely do.
I tend to side in these cards in a few situations. The first is what I call pure desperation. That’s when your deck is a steaming pile of…cardboard…and your opponent’s deck is a well-crafted masterpiece of modern Limited theory. Curving Riot Devils into pass on four mana into Bitterheart Witch matches up fairly poorly against your opponent’s Bloodline Keeper into Bloodgift Demon. However, if that Riot Devils is wearing a Furor of the Bitten and a Spectral Flight and your opponent didn’t draw the right piece of removal, well, one can dream, right? If your deck can’t conceivably win against your opponent’s without some luck, then perhaps you need to sideboard in cards to try to get as lucky as you can.
The second situation is when you know your opponent’s deck doesn’t pack a lot of removal capable of two-for-one-ing you when you slap one of these on a creature. If you’re playing against G/W and your opponent didn’t show you any Bonds of Faith in the first game, playing Furor of the Bitten on your Somberwald Dryad might leave him or her drawing dead.
Curse of the Pierced Heart, Nightbird’s Clutches, Cobbled Wings
These cards all serve basically the same purpose in your sideboard. You want to bring these in against decks that are going to play durdly creatures that gum up the ground, preventing your creatures from crashing through to kill them. Your third copy of "random 3/2 ground-pounder" is going to do a lot less against an army of Fortress Crabs and Armored Skaabs than any of these choices.
You don’t want any of these cards against decks that are more aggressive than yours. It doesn’t matter if their creatures can’t block if they’re all turned sideways bashing your face in anyway.
Lumberknot
This special guy gets his own category because he’s kind of a pet card of mine. If game 1 involved you calculating how his seven creatures are going to profitably block your nine attackers, then may I suggest Lumberknot? He doesn’t do much the first few turns he’s in play, but the threat of him growing completely out of control will often force your opponent to make some suboptimal plays.
Bring him in against decks where a lot of creature stalls and trades are going to happen. It doesn’t take long until he’s the biggest creature in play. Soon your opponent is scrambling to find more fodder to throw under the ever-growing bus. Eventually, when your opponent concedes to your 13/13 Lumberknot because he ran out of chump blockers, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Did I mention that he has hexproof?
Ranger’s Guile / Faith’s Shield
These cards are generally close but not quite good enough to run in your initial 40 due to their situational nature, but if they don’t end up main they should come in quite often. Ranger’s Guile is an easy swap in for something like Spidery Grasp against decks that play a lot of targeted removal and don’t have many fliers that you need to eat. Likewise, I’d rather have Faith’s Shield than something like Break of Day or Skillful Lunge against a deck that’s planning on killing my creature in response to my pump spell anyway.
Faith’s Shield has a lot more versatility than just serving as a white Ranger’s Guile, though. It removes enchantments like Bonds of Faith, Claustrophobia, and Burden of Guilt by granting the creature protection from those colors. It can sometimes make a creature unblockable by granting protection from the color of your opponent’s creatures, and if you’re at five or less life it can be a one-sided fog or counterspell for burn spells. There are a lot of situations where this card can be a big blowout spell, and if you have these in your sideboard I’d keep a close eye on situations where they could be relevant while you play game 1.
Bonus Card: Chalice of Life
I’ve done a lot of triple Dark Ascension drafts on Magic Online the last week. I’ve ended up playing this card in three separate drafts. One of my opponents made sure to drill home the point that he couldn’t believe he was losing to a deck that was playing this card when I had one in play. I missed the opportunity to inform him that I was running three copies of it, for maximum rub-in value.
The first time I played it, I was very skeptical. One of the basic tenets you learn about Limited is that random life gain cards that don’t affect the board (see: Angel’s Feather) are pretty terrible. It doesn’t matter if you gain seven life if you can’t stop your opponent’s 4/4 creature. It’ll eventually kill you anyway.
That’s what I also thought, for the longest time, and that theory isn’t necessarily wrong. However, there is this card called Pristine Talisman. That card has seen a decent bit of play in Standard lately, and believe me, it’s not because it’s a three-mana artifact that taps for a colorless mana. If the life gain was not relevant, people would be playing Manalith instead. The one draw control decks had towards playing Pristine Talisman was that it was able to negate something like a Moorland Haunt with the life gain long enough for the control deck’s endgame to come online and win.
Based on that principle, I decided to run this card in a few drafts, and I was not disappointed. Actually, I so very impressed overall that I started picking them up as early as sixth and seventh pick when I was drafting removal-heavy strategies. I also made note of any that I saw in the first three packs with the expectation that I could see them when the pack wheeled around.
I don’t think this is the kind of card you want to play all the time. I definitely don’t want this in an aggressive deck, but in a deck that has a lot of removal I think this is an excellent card. One of the drawbacks to Limited decks that have a lot of removal is that they’re inherently weak to cards like Midnight Haunting that create more than one threat. They either have to spend a removal spell on both tokens, or they might end up taking ten or more damage over the course of the game from a couple of 1/1 fliers. Either of those options puts the deck behind in one resource or another: cards or life.
Chalice of Life lets you ignore your opponent’s random 1/1 guys and focus your removal on their big threats until your endgame can come online, at which point their random 1/1s are meaningless anyway. I don’t think you should expect to flip this card often, and if you’re able to flip it you’re probably in the kind of position where you could win with pretty much any other card. However, gaining eight-to-ten life over the course of the game is not trivial if your goal is just to survive long enough to get big fatty boom-booms online.
Sideboarding Against Specific Archetypes:
I’m going to spend a very brief bit talking about a few common archetypes in Innistrad draft and a few overarching themes to show you what to sideboard against them.
Black/Red
In: Creatures that pack much back. 2/3’s are perfect against Black/Red decks since they usually have a lot of vanilla 2/2 creatures and are hoping to use their removal to clear out your bigger guys as they trade with your smaller ones. Dust off those Riot Devils.
Out: Creatures that cost three or more mana that will trade with a 2/2.
U/W Evasion/Tempo
In: One-Eyed Scarecrow and aggressive creatures that can feasibly win a race. A creature like Festerhide Boar is much better than Lumberknot.
Out: Creatures that cost five or more that aren’t bombs and can’t interact with flying creatures and creature enchantments that let you get two-for-oned by Bonds of Faith, Griptide, or Silent Departure.
B/G/x Spider Spawning
In: Creatures with evasion, Spare from Evil, Rolling Temblor, Divine Reckoning, and creatures that can interact favorably in combat with 1/4’s. Occasionally Curse of Oblivion or Purify the Grave should come in.
Out: Creatures that can’t attack into a 1/4 and creatures that are too slow to deal any damage before they get their endgame online.
W/G or W/R Beatdown
In: Creatures with high power to trade up in combat. Good examples are Nearheath Stalker or Headless Skaab. Also, I generally like combat tricks to give you an edge in creature combat.
Out: Creatures that have one toughness if they have Forge[/author] Devil”][author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] Devils and Geistflames, and creatures that quickly become outclassed. See: Torch Fiend.
I hope this article has given you new tools for sideboarding in Innistrad block. May you win all your drafts with janky sideboard tech!
Thanks for reading,
BBD on Magic Online
@BraunDuinIt on Twitter
P.S. Anyone who has played any Block Constructed on Magic Online recently has probably run into the wrong side of a Hellrider. That card is definitely one of the most underrated cards in Standard right now. I expect that we will see a lot more people ridin’ dirty with this in the weeks to come.