You’re at an event…maybe an FNM. Your friend slumps down in the chair next to you.
You: "Win?" You know the answer before they even say it.
Friend: "Nope! Lost game 3. Pretty lame."
You: "What are you playing?"
Friend: "R/G Aggro. He was playing Esper. I have no idea how to board against that match. It’s hopeless."
They’re obviously dejected, and you go back to fiddling around with your trade binder. This is a cycle you repeat week in and week out. There is almost no end in sight.
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Last weekend a curious phenomenon occurred while I was at a local tournament.
Despite a somewhat lackluster finish at this event, almost every single person I played against asked me for advice on how to sideboard their deck against the expected metagame. I can attribute this to a number of possibilities:
A) The fact that my playmat says "2012 State Champion: Mark Nestico Jr." makes people think I know what I’m doing.
B) Writing for StarCityGames.com has caused me to become a Magic celebrity/darling. As much as I’d love to believe this one is true, I fear it may not be.
C) I try to give constructive advice when the match has ended about the cards I saw them playing.
D) I give off the vibe of a wise, sage-like soul who betters himself through the betterment of others.
Please feel free to reply in the comment section what your answer is. If you put "B," then you’ll get a hug at the next event I see you. [Editor’s Note: Rumor has it that Mark gives great hugs.]
This got me thinking about something very important that is often neglected in the Magic community: how to sideboard properly. Reinforcing this revelation was my pal Hysler, who sent me a Facebook message asking me to write a piece similar to what I was intending to go over this week. Divine providence? You be the judge.
Sideboarding is one of the most overlooked parts of Magic—that is almost an undeniable fact. Players of all skill levels have to approach it from a very unique angle, but the single strand that links all of them is that how you sideboard will most often decide if you win the game you are playing. Sounds easy, right?
Wrong.
Your friend that we talked about earlier who lost to Esper while playing G/R Aggro used the word "hopeless" when describing the matchup, regulating the matchup to "unwinnable status." What is he doing wrong? He must have cards to bring in against them. Domri Rade? Thundermaw Hellkite? Strangleroot Geist? All of these things can make the matchup much better for the Gruul deck, but it would seem that your friend doesn’t agree. Where is he screwing up?
Tip #1: What Are You Metagaming For?
One of the most common and easy-to-fix errors people make in sideboarding is that they copy and paste the latest winning decklist and play it card for card. If it won a huge SCG Open, it should be easy to crush this Game Day, huh?
Well, that’s actually not the case in most local shops.
At an SCG Open, an Invitational, a Grand Prix, or a Pro Tour, the metagame will be defined to a point that you can plan for. For a few weeks, it was commonplace to expect a field comprised of roughly 50% Jund and Reanimator, 25% decks like Naya Blitz and Gruul Aggro, and the other 25% decks like Esper, Bant Flash, U/W/R, and other miscellaneous wares. When composing a board, you know what to expect and understand where to best allocate your slots in order to maximize your potential to beat the decks you’re anticipating playing against the most.
If your local metagame is like mine, however, these kinds of representations are not how things work out.
Picking your battles as far as your sideboard goes is what’s going to decide how well you do at all levels, and it’s very easy to lose sight of this. Let’s say you go to your local gaming store to battle and 30 people arrive; two of them are playing Reanimator, and well over half of the sideboard you picked off of the hottest decklist is set up to beat it. That’s fine, but how dead are you to the fifteen people slamming Naya Blitz and Gruul Aggro when you’re set up to deal with GP Wherever’s expected metagame?
It’s a common pitfall we all get trapped by eventually. When you watch the SCGLive coverage and see a deck perform so well, it becomes easy to just copy it directly and expect to do well with it. Hell, I’m guilty of the crime myself. Understand that the neighborhood card store and Pro Tour Honolulu are going to be very, very different. Plan accordingly.
From now on stop, drop the cards you know won’t be helpful to you at a local level and roll onwards to victory.
Tip #2: Learn What the Heck to Take Out and Leave In
Duh…? Not as much as you’d think, actually.
You’d think that this step would be the most intuitive, but it’s something that takes a ton of practice to get comfortable with. Sometimes our natural inclinations can override our judgment and take away from our chances to win. Example?
While playing Jund, which I’ve been doing a lot lately, certain sideboard configurations have become mainstays if you base your list off of Owen Turtenwald #SCGNJ decklist, which is about as close to an industry standard as they come.
You’re playing against Gruul Aggro, which is packed to the brim with cheap threats like Flinthoof Boar and Burning-Tree Emissary, Domri Rade, and a deadly top end consisting of Thundermaw Hellkite and Wolfir Silverheart—not your usual fare of Stromkirk Nobles and Ash Zealots. After playing game 1, you reach for the board and start pulling out Vampire Nighthawks, an extra Mizzium Mortars, and Pillar of Flames, thinking that boarding out your Sire of Insanitys and Rakdos’s Returns is right, but then you start to get stumped on what else to remove.
Liliana of the Veil seems strong you think? She can make them sacrifice a creature. Better leave her in!
Tragic Slip in conjunction with another removal spell or a good block can kill one of their creatures. Better not take that out.
Garruk, Primal Hunter can churn out a 3/3 every turn, and they’ll have to attack him or he’ll just win me the game. Seems too strong to take out.
All of a sudden you start scrambling because you have at least seven cards you want to bring in and only three or four that you can really see yourself taking out. You start pulling out random cards and shaving off numbers to try to make enough room for everything you think is good. Now your numbers look strange, and you don’t go into game 2 feeling confident. Ever had this problem?
Against a R/G deck like that, I would look at the following:
A) What does a card like Tragic Slip really do? I have to have another removal spell to make it really good. He’s on the play, and unless I have one of my eight shocklands in my opener, I can’t Tragic Slip an Experiment One.
B) Why Garruk, Primal Hunter over, say, Vraska the Unseen? The turns where they Searing Spear the Beast token and attack Garruk directly are blowouts against me. What if I just play a Vraska instead and kill their best creature? If I have a way of protecting her, the +1 will ensure she either lives or eats a second creature! Untapping with her again at three loyalty lets me eat a second creature. This seems great!
C) Liliana of the Veil doesn’t seem very strong against a deck that plays Burning-Tree Emissary. If they have it, her -2 ability seems very underwhelming, and I’m almost assuredly not going to want to +1 her if my hand is strong.
This train of thought will usually lead me to the plan of attack that I think is best against whatever deck I’m playing against. People often question why I bring in Liliana of the Veil in the Jund mirror match, to which I reply that hand disruption is an excellent way to beat them and if you have the follow-up Huntmaster of the Fells to protect her, you can drain the resources of your opponent pretty quickly while threatening an impending ultimate ability that will all but end the match.
This kind of process can lead to you outthink your opponent without getting too cute. Once you feel like you’re mastering each matchup, boarding becomes easier and more fluid. Using these multiple layers of thought can yield better results than just looking at the surface of a card and assuming it’s going to be great/terrible in a matchup.
In the Jund mirror, would you leave Bonfire of the Damned in? Respond in the comments.
Tip #3: Don’t Be Afraid to Test Out Tons of Options
During your testing sessions, how many of you out there play a few game 1s, get discouraged, and then give up on the match? I’m sure you’ve seen it happen just as much as I have when you all gather around the kitchen table, and it’s an easy habit to fall in to.
One simple way you can avoid this is to treat each showdown like it’s a match. Take turns going first in these sets, but after game 1 ends begin boarding for game 2 and possibly 3. Pretending you’re in a tournament will foster the right kinds of rituals before each game moves to sideboarding, giving you the mindset of how to adequately prepare your deck.
Talk to your teammates, too. If you’re losing several matches in a row, show them exactly what you are taking in and taking out—their insight may lead you to try out something different and open your eyes to other possibilities. Try their theories, discuss them with everyone, and give them a chance with an open mind.
This is also the perfect time to try out all the tech you’ve either been reading about or dreaming of because while testing should be taken with a modicum of seriousness, it’s also the time to see if ideas have merit. One common practice is to treat a certain boarded card like it’s a split card. Here’s an example:
While testing Bant Flash, we couldn’t figure out if our board should contain Renounce the Guilds or Ray of Revelation for the Bant Hexproof matchup. We figured that Ray of Revelation would be awesome at taking out their Unflinching Courages while also hitting things like Spectral Flight, letting us surprise block their creature and potentially kill it, but it was much worse against a card like Voice of Resurgence. Renounce the Guilds suffered from the same problem of Voice, but if it wasn’t in play it was a fantastic answer to Geist of Saint Traft and could be targeted by Snapcaster Mage to lead to some truly outrageous and punishing plays on our part.
In order to gain the best data, if the card was drawn in either our opening hand or at a relevant portion of the game, we’d always use it for what it was best for. They have a Geist of Saint Traft? It’s a Renounce the Guilds. They don’t have a Voice of Resurgence out and they swing with an Invisible Stalker with double Ethereal Armor on it? Ray of Revelation! We recorded the results and figured out which was better most of the time and in more scenarios. In the end, we found that Renounce the Guilds performed better in a multitude of situations and that, simply put, we wanted it more. It’s amazing how much easier things become when there is hard data in front of you.
Tip 4: Experiment aka Shake Things Up aka Don’t Be an Old Fuddy-Duddy
Autopilot is the enemy.
When playing at a huge event, it’s very easy to get tired, stressed, and just kind of try to put your brain on cruise control. This can beget some very unfortunate results because sometimes our strength lies in our creativity.
When I’m streaming matches on Magic Online, one thing you’ll hear me say a lot in between matches is "I want to try this and see how it works out." It can be dangerous sometimes because essentially you’re going in blind as to the applications a card has and basically basing the choice off of hearsay, gut feelings, and intuition. Sometimes this yields amazing results, like when I figured against G/B/W Reanimator I wanted to board in my second Rakdos’s Return along with my third Ground Seal because if I could land/stick a Ground Seal I could complement it by emptying their hand, depowering Unburial Rites and giving me a wild advantage. Since I picked up Jund, I have been employing this strategy, and I don’t think I’ve lost a round of Magic to G/B/W Reanimator in weeks.
However, sometimes this can backfire on you and deliver a whole world of pain. Recently, I got the brilliant idea of trying to board Domri Rade in the Gruul Aggro mirror match. I figured either they kill it or I can bury them in a steady stream of creatures with sprinklings of the fight ability thrown in there. Hilariously enough, the fact that they play Strangleroot Geist and I don’t invalidated this plan because the fight was much weaker against them and they could attack into Domri, kill a creature some of the time, and then still have a threat on board. Don’t even get me started on when Domri missed. I was trying to be cleverer than I had to be, and it cost me matches.
Never being afraid to try something new is the essence of a sideboard because while a lot of maindecks will stay the same, your sideboard is your best weapon against a rapidly evolving metagame.
Years ago, I was able to take down Florida Regionals because my friend Chris Fennell told me to play a card you’ve probably never heard of called Batwing Brume in my B/W Tokens deck. Go on. Look it up. I thought he was insane, but he justified it by explaining that since there was an abundance of token decks and other aggressive strategies, you could Fog their entire attack and cause them to lose huge chunks of life, killing them on the swing back. I thought "what the hell" and tried it out.
After destroying G/W Tokens and B/W Tokens mirrors with it all day, word had spread around the room about my tech. Vendors sold out of the uncommon in hours, and the PTQ the next day was riddled with hundreds of copies of it crammed into every B/W Tokens sideboard. Turns out that once you know it’s coming, however, it’s very easy to play around. The card soon fell out of favor and was never heard from again.
Experimentation gave me my first invite to Nationals, and it was all from my sideboard that let me overtake every single opponent that day. See what I mean? Don’t be afraid to try something new and different because it can either turn out to be far better than you ever expected or just as bad as you thought.
Success can come in all flavors.
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Has this guide helped you? I really hope it has. I try to view sideboarding on a much deeper level than I used to and feel like in doing so it has given me a ton more wins.
So often people explain to me, "I’m terrible at sideboarding," and to them I say, "Stop it." All of the tools that you need to be good at it are literally right there in front of you. It’s a puzzle, and you have to figure out which pieces get put where and which ones get put back in the box. If you’re right, you’ve created a masterpiece.
If you’re wrong, well, the pieces won’t fit, and your picture of a bowl of fruit will look like someone’s nightmare.
It’s every bit as easy and difficult as you’ve always thought it was, but all you need is practice and an open mind.
Rationalize every slot you fill before you finish the process, don’t work too hard to convince yourself (which will leave you open to changing), and, most of all, try to see things from your opponent’s angle. Which cards would absolutely give them fits?
Be that guy. Give them all the fits they can handle.
Catch ya on the flip–
Mark