Even players who prepare heavily for Constructed decks can miss the importance of good sideboarding. In my own articles, which chronicle primarily 10-game sets between new decks against the existing gauntlet decks, I focus on Game Ones… but tournament victories are statistically much more dependant on sideboarded games than Game Ones. Just think about it… in any match that comes to a natural 2-x conclusion, you will have the same number of Game Ones as sideboarded games, and, in the case that the first two games split, some additional number of sideboarded games.
More than just building an adequate sideboard for the metagame and knowing about correct sideboarding techniques, the presence of additional sideboard games actually gives you greater opportunity to err. I remember missing Top 8 of a PTQ with a R/B deck where six of the Top 8 decks were U/W decks against which I was highly favored; admittedly one of the remaining decks was a B/U/R deck that beat me and the last was the G/R deck that eliminated me in the eighth round of Swiss, but I still liked my chances [had I made it]. I was a little depressed, not just because I had just missed Top 8, but because I was 6-1 going into the last round whereas my opponent, with the same record but worse tiebreakers, wouldn’t draw.
“It’s okay,” consoled my teammate John Shuler. “You didn’t deserve to win anyway.”
And to be fair, I didn’t. I sideboarded quite badly and made a key error in the last turn of my tournament. I was siding in Voids and Addles against G/R all day, trying to win a control game; but because G/R had so many haste creatures and I didn’t have any life gain, playing the control in the creature-on-creature matchup was just playing into their burn cards. Despite the fact that I had won all my G/R matchups until the last round, the Addle decision cost me greatly. Getting ready for the win, I Addled against three cards; he paused, held up his hand. After thinking for what seemed like an eternity, down came Raging Kavu.
Well that’s Green and Red, I thought. That signaled me that he had either only Green or only Red in hand… I had to guess very well. I put him on Kavu Titan and named Green.
He in fact had Kavu Titan in hand, so you would think that the play was the right one and I went on to race him with my Skizzik, right? This in fact was a Terry Soh-level bluff because he was holding both Green and Red in addition to the Raging Kavu. Had he not played the Kavu, a card I would not have taken, I would have just named Red because I would have been most likely to lose to either a big burn spell or a Skizzik… which was of course the last card in his hand. So in came two haste creatures and I lost that race.
So many things could have gone differently in this match! I could have named Red. I would have been playing against a Kavu Titan, but I was holding two Voids and was already clocking with a Skizzik of my own. As it happened, I took an unnecessary amount of haste and was forced to Void my own 5/3 (not to mention taking the Raging Kavu’s six damage). I could have led with Void… but the only creature in play was mine. More than either, I could have sideboarded correctly and not given up so much initiative; I know that I was still two wins out of the blue envelopes, but to me, even four years later, this Swiss loss still feels like a missed Pro Tour.
The above story actually illustrates several elements of sideboarding. I think that some of them are true sometimes but others are rapidly eroding. For one thing, Shuler argued from the standpoint that I had sideboaded wrongly. Maybe I had – in retrospect it seems I did – but I think it is probably more accurate to say that I merely Lost the Sideboard War. Going control had been effective for me earlier in the day because my opponents let that role work. I brought in two classes of cards, Void and Addle that were
1) significantly more powerful than my main-deck cards or
2) gave my deck a capability that it did not have in the main deck; lowering my threat count made me more vulnerable to losing an exhaustion war, but that isn’t our focus for the time being.
In general, sideboard cards should follow these two trends, at least by degree. In the abstract, we want our sideboard cards to be much more powerful than our main deck cards. I am often telling Steve Sadin, ghweiss, even Osyp that certain cards aren’t good enough for the sideboard. Magma Jet might just be a two-of in Extended RDW (we ended up playing four) but I disagreed when Joe Black wanted me to run the third and fourth in the board over my first two Electrostatic Bolts. If you think about it, this trend is easily followed by tracking mana costs. Magma Jet, a great card, just isn’t powerful enough. When you Jet, you might take out an Arcbound Ravager… but don’t expect to Scry. Electrostatic Bolt clears him off the table, quickly reduces your hand size, and answers an opposing RDW deck’s four mana sideboard cards all at one spicy mana. Consider cards of the same cost:
Way back in Alpha you had Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt is one of the most efficient damage packets in the history of the game and quite good at stopping threats… but against Blue, it’s no Red Elemental Blast. One of them erases Mahamoti Djinn, the other needs a twin (to say nothing about countering Ancestral Recall). Rend Flesh and Perish both cost R2; over the years I’ve played both cards in main deck and both cards in sideboard… It isn’t surprising, though, that you would expect Rend Flesh more typically in the main and Perish more typically in the side. Both cards take out a Call of the Herd Elephant token… But Perish takes out all of them. Similarly, today’s Ponza players have played Demolish, and are probably fine playing Sunder From Within; rather than destroying just one artifact or land, Flashfires and Granulate let them smash lots… at the same mana cost. If there is one rule that I want you to take away from this article, it is that good sideboards are packed with powerful cards. Sideboard space is scarce. You have 1/4 as much room in your sideboard as you have in your main (less if you are Jon Becker, Adrian Sullivan, Toby Wachter, or Junior PT Champion Justin Schneider), so your cards have to have more impact.
You will notice that the above sideboard cards all either increase flexibility at a low cost (Red Elemental Blast) or generate potentially devastating card advantage at the same cost of a perfectly acceptable one-for-one. In addition, they are all predominantly color hosers.
Color hosers were historically the backbone of sideboarding. In recent years, R&D has toned down the speed (Hydroblast) if not the power (Karma) of Standard color hosers… But you get the idea. The classic sideboard card offers a tremendous effect for its cost. Counter that key class of spell for one or two mana. Destroy all permanents of this description. Prevent all damage from threats of a particular color.
The other classic type of sideboard card allows your deck to do something that it couldn’t in its primary configuration… at least by degree.
Consider Adrian Sullivan first highly publicized deck:
Green Machine
– PTQ Paris 1996 Type II Format
2 Icy Manipulator
4 Nevinyrral’s Disk
2 Soldevi Digger
1 Zuran Orb
4 Fallow Earth
2 Fyndhorn Elves
4 Llanowar Elves
2 Nature’s Lore
3 Stunted Growth
2 Sylvan Library
4 Thermokarst
4 Uktabi Wildcats
4 Waiting in the Weeds
19 Forest
1 Strip Mine
3 Thawing Glaciers
Sideboard:
4 Aeolipile
2 Icy Manipulator
2 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Crumble
3 Seeds of Innocence
2 Tornado
Notice that like most Mono-Green decks, Adrian’s is incapable of dealing directly with creatures. He can tap them or clear the board with a Disk, but would have a lot of problems with a dedicated utility creature or a fast Hypnotic Specter. Pyrite Spellbomb’s granddaddy helps alleviate this shortcoming.
More importantly, Adrian’s deck has no very good way of dealing with artifacts. He has the potentially devastating Nevinyrral’s Disk for Winter Orb decks, but remember, most of the artifact decks of the 1996 era Type II were full of Disenchants and Divine Offerings. Adrian would probably fall prey to an Arcane Denial and go kold before he were able to get his sweep online. After boards, though, his deck can ramp up the artifact destruction element with lots of Crumble and Seeds of Innocence. One Crumble can make Winter Orb frown and Howling Mine weep; one Seeds of Innocence… well there’s always Game Three.
Notice how decks that have some measure of enchantment and artifact destruction — say three or four Disenchants in the main — can increase the degree of their artifact hate with a stack of Divine Offerings in the board. We see this all the time today, with players cheating on Viridian Zealots due to the absence of Affinity, but ready with Oxidizes, Naturalizes, Tel-Jilad Justices, and even Wear Aways. They go from decks that can handle maybe one key artifact (say Vedalken Shackles) maybe one time given the appropriate window to decks that can overwhelm a certain class of cards (say Vedalken Shackles) in such a way that the opponent’s deck is no longer viable… assuming of course it retains sufficient threats.
Consider this deck from the same era as Green Machine:
U/W Control – Andrew Cuneo
1 Icy Manipulator
3 Lodestone Bauble
2 Marble Diamond
2 Serrated Arrows
2 Sky Diamond
1 Zuran Orb
1 Arcane Denial
4 Brainstorm
2 Counterspell
2 Dissipate
3 Force of Will
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Recall
1 Balance
1 Blinking Spirit
3 Disenchant
1 Land Tax
3 Swords to Plowshares
3 Wrath of God
4 Adarkar Wastes
6 Islands
4 Mishra’s Factory
5 Plains
1 Strip Mine
3 Thawing Glaciers
Sideboard:
2 Serrated Arrows
1 Soldevi Digger
1 Control Magic
2 Hydroblast
1 Mahamoti Djinn
3 Political Trickery
1 Steal Artifact
1 Conversion
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Disenchant
1 Divine Offering
Unlike Adrian’s deck, this one, believe it or not, actually won a PTQ. I was actually on the receiving end of Andrew’s deck, which looks like a mess of 2’s and 3’s, but actually had – I believe – the first successful Brainstorm/Thawing Glaciers engine in recorded Magic.
The neat thing about this deck is that it supports all of the basics discussed in the last section. Andrew’s deck has no good way to beat a Kjeldoran Outpost; after boards, he has a very good way in Political Trickery [+Thawing Glaciers]. He has three Disenchants, but nicely enhances his hate potential with Disenchant, Divine Offering, and Steal Artifact later. Most importantly Andrew has that Mahamoti Djinn.
We think of the Surprise! sideboard as a completely transformative strategy; it doesn’t have to be. Sure, you can configure your deck in such a way as to completely rearrange your post-board plan, devote all your precious sideboard slots to a new end, but from a theoretical standpoint, there is no real difference between Surprise! and Andrew’s lone Mahamoti Djinn. In simple terms, the presence of Mahamoti Djinn un-invalidates the opponent’s creature sanction. In the first game, he’s only got Blinking Spirit (and arguably lands) to hit with dedicated creature elimination; once it’s gone, there is no difference between Brainstorming into a Mahamoti Djinn and just drawing one of many creatures. The Djinn evades. It hits hard. It races much better than 2/2s, four mana or zero.
The last element of standard sideboarding I want to touch on is the so-called “tweak.” Sometimes you will see a Mono-White Control listing with three Exalted Angels and one in the sideboard. The columnist will tell you that the fourth Angel comes in every time, but is not in the main deck because you always take out a different card. This is an example of poorly tuned deck the tweak. Basically the tweak takes out not a useless card for a useful card – at least not necessarily – but simply seeks to enhance the efficiency of the deck. The original example of the tweak was back in Type I, Weissman v. Kim. In the artifact-heavy Kim matchup, Weissman’s Swords to Plowshares could only hit Jade Statue and Mishra’s Factory; Weissman could side out Swords to Plowshares for Divine Offering and have an instant that could still hit these two types of cards but also hit various other threats in the Kim deck; if all the swap did was replace a card that gave the opponent life with one that gave you life, that would probably be a reasonably good example of this technique.
Most of the above is basic stuff. This article, though, is about Sideboards I Like. I built a lot of the Sideboards I Like and will explain why I like them. Recently Steve Sadin asked me how I became such an insanely good deck designer and I actually had to think about it. I mean I’ve been tooting my own horn for about ten years, but saving one deck and one PTQ season, I was never as good as friends and contemporaries like Jon, Zvi, or even Osyp. Now, after long years, I am finally very good at tuning 60 or 75 cards if not executing on them, producing the G/W deck, reinventing Mono-Blue, then the B/G Extended deck (I still think this is the best deck I ever made), and now the Kuroda-style Red.
The best way I can explain it is that I’ve crystalized all of Magic into two principles (this probably deserves its own article at some point, but they have particular salience in sideboard strategy):
1. Pre-empting the opponent’s fundamental turn, or
2. Completely invalidating the opponent’s strategy
I know that Zvi builds on a completely different paradigm, but these rules work for me and give me focus that allows me to do my best work within the limits of my skills. You will notice that these are wholly interactive concepts and don’t work particularly well in undefined metagames. These limitations also make it impossible to build the maximally efficient beatdown deck… but they work for me. They also only work if you are willing to slavishly devote hours of testing not to getting better but to completely understanding the representative decks of a particular metagame.
The first deck I want to talk about is my Masques Block deck:
Good Rebel Deck
1 Rebel Informer
4 Cho-Manno’s Blessing
1 Defender en-Vec
1 Defiant Falcon
4 Disenchant
4 Mageta the Lion
1 Nightwind Glider
4 Parallax Wave
1 Ramosian Lieutenant
4 Ramosian Rally
4 Ramosian Sergeant
1 Seal of Cleansing
4 Steadfast Guard
1 Kor Haven
2 Rath’s Edge
23 Plains
Sideboard:
1 Rebel Informer
4 Afterlife
3 Defender en-Vec
3 Seal of Cleansing
4 Story Circle
I actually tuned and re-tuned the same archetype throughout the season and there were sometimes wild differences in the listings week-to-week… this is just the first one I found on the Internet.
On the way to Top 8, I sat down across my eventual writing partner Justin Polin and beat him soundly in Game One. He said “You drew Sergeant and I didn’t, so you won.” So I said, “Okay. I’ll side out all my Rebels and beat you anyway.” Justin looked at me like I was being a gloating *sshole, which I was, but I am an honest gloating *sshole if nothing else, and sided out all my Rebels.
What I found was that this was actually the optimal sideboard strategy in most matchups. I had maindeck Informer and Justin brought in Informer… with nothing to shoot. I had no Sergeants, no Falcons, no nothing. Instead, I just overloaded on enchantments and anti-enchantments. I figured the cards that mattered were Parallax Wave and Seal of Cleansing but that there was no way that Justin would be able to match all my Story Circles and Waves and that I would eventually just win with Defender en-Vec; because I had more land and more Lions, I was right.
Eventually we tuned the main deck to better accommodate this plan, shortening the Rebel Chain to just the eight primary creatures and no three-drop Rebels at all. This let us play cards like Jeweled Spirit that were more synergistic with the no-Rebel sideboard plan, and add more and better creature removal.
Chris Pikula had a particularly troubled love/hate relationship with this strategy. After drubbing one opponent, he stared at his Sergeant-enabled beatdown force and said “You mean I just slaughtered you with these cards and now I’m going to side them out? It’s right… but it doesn’t make any sense.”
But from the perspective of invalidating the opponent’s game and pre-empting his fundamental turn, it made a lot of sense (remember, I’m incapable of tuning an actual beatdown deck). Our version of Rebels was the only one that had enough enchantment hate to handle our sideboard plan. In the very late weeks, I was running six Disenchants main and siding up to multiple Devout Witnesses as well as the standard eight. Moreover all the common strategies were specifically anti-Rebel: Informers, Massacres were obvious, but even Withdraw and Rising Waters keyed on the opponent tapping out to search for creatures. We never ceased to play a creature deck… we just invalidated the specific answers that the opponent brought in to fight us.
As for fundamental turn… What turn could an opposing White Weenie deck win? What turn could they overwhelm Story Circle? We always sat behind Parallax Wave, never using a counter, as the opponent failed to deal any damage. We would axe his Wave and get off Mageta or Blinding Angel or Wave of Reckoning; we controlled every aspect of board development. Sure, we had potential issues with decks that weren’t either inferior Rebel decks or reliant on Black removal… but with primarily one exception, those decks sucked, and the Rising Waters deck had a really hard time with a million Disenchants and Story Circle anyway.
Among modern sideboards, one of the most expertly devised is Terry Soh Tooth and Nail deck:
Troll and Nail – Terry Soh
10 Forest
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Tower
2 Duplicant
4 Eternal Witness
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
2 Sundering Titan
4 Kodama’s Reach
3 Mindslaver
3 Oblivion Stone
1 Plow Under
3 Reap and Sow
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Sylvan Scrying
3 Tooth and Nail
Sideboard
2 Iwamori of the Open Fist
2 Molder Slug
3 Plow Under
2 Razormane Masticore
4 Troll Ascetic
2 Vine Trellis
Terry has already done a fine job explaining his deck. I’d just like to add that the reason that I like this sideboard plan is that it precisely invalidates the opponent’s plan. Say you are playing a deck with access to Cranial Extraction and you are facing a Tooth and Nail deck. You probably want to cast that Cranial Extraction. Say the opponent is in fact holding the card that you name with Cranial Extraction. You should win, right? Except given Terry’s technique of siding in a bunch of randomly good Green creatures, you no longer do. This is Strategy Superiority plain and simple. The opponent’s deck operates normally, he makes his hand, you win anyway. There’s nothing more to really say about this other than I don’t know if it will still work three weeks from now.
On that subject, here is a Red Deck that has been talked up a bit recently:
Kuroda-style Red – Osyp Lebedowicz
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
20 Mountain
4 Arc-Slogger
4 Solemn Simulacrum
3 Beacon of Destruction
4 Magma Jet
4 Molten Rain
4 Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Shrapnel Blast
1 Sowing Salt
4 Wayfarer’s Bauble
Sideboard:
2 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
2 Culling Scales
2 Duplicant
4 Fireball
2 Flamebreak
1 Sowing Salt
2 Stone Rain
The main reason Osyp chose this deck was its insanely good sideboard strategy against Blue Control. In case you don’t know, the goal against Blue is to take out all of your eight creatures and replace these with Boseiju, Who Shelters All, Fireball, and land destruction. What happens is that a Blue deck operating normally will simultaneously have a highly inefficient deck (Spectral Shift, Bribery, Vedalken Shackles) and no way to win. By assembling Boseiju + the many burn cards, this deck completely invalidates Blue’s strategy of countering threats and simultaneously pre-empts its fundamental turn by easily removing all threats. How is blue going to actually win against Boseiju + Sowing Salt? It can’t use your guys any more… Will it plan to race with Meloku in the face of Boseiju + Fireball?
At this point I actually no longer like the sideboard strategy very much because a clever Blue player can just sideboard a bunch of Boseijus himself and then it becomes a fair fight… except Blue has significantly better resource manipulation than Red Decks. This will of course pull his pants down against conventional Boil/creature strategies, but when the deck whose performance you care about (primarily, anyway) on a day is the one in front of you, that will be small consolation when you get your Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] Condescended or something.
On the other hand, this deck has an insane sideboard against Blue:
Some Snappy Deck (with Entwine)
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Duplicant
2 Mindslaver
1 Sundering Titan
4 Talisman of Impulse
4 Eternal Witness
2 Kodama’s Reach
4 Reap and Sow
1 Rude Awakening
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Tooth and Nail
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
4 Magma Jet
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
4 Cloudpost
13 Forest
4 Mountain
1 Okina Temple to the Grandfathers
Sideboard:
1 Platinum Angel
1 Triskelion
1 Mephidross Vampire
2 Kodama’s Reach
4 Tel-Jilad Justice
1 Viridian Shaman
3 Boil
1 Leonin Abunas
1 Boseiju, Who Shelters All
Troll Ascetic is very good against Blue Control; I actually lost to it when I debuted the Blue deck at the Columbus LCQ. The thing I don’t like about siding in Troll Ascetic is that you actually have to get your cards before the other guy gets his cards and then resolve them, which means you really want the Troll on turn three and aren’t favored to have him. I don’t like this because the Blue mage can pre-empt your Fundamental Turn with any counter, or you can just not have the Troll and it is much weaker later in the game.
This sideboard, on the other hand, is very aware of the best Blue anti-techniques. The absolute best Blue strategy against conventional Tooth and Nail with Boseiju is to bring in Temporal Adept; your Magma Jets are faster. You have an even better Boseiju plan than the Red Deck due to Sylvan Scrying, meaning that you can eventually get off Rude Awakening if not Tooth and Nail. Blue wants to pre-empt your Tooth and Nail with Bribery… but Boil is, again, faster. Wherever Blue has a trump, you have a faster trump. You have better early game resource development and an inevitable late game. Essentially, you have trump at every stage of the game, so if you miss one, you can lean on another later in the game. All of them generate a huge advantage in at least virtual card advantage, and because you don’t have to sequence your threats a certain way, you are less draw dependent. This deck doesn’t have Strategy Superiority like Terry’s deck does – if the opponent gets off his bomb uncontested, he might just crush you – but you make it very difficult for him to stake a Fundamental Turn before you do, regardless of which one he picks to make his stand.
Of these sideboards, the only one I consider wholly transformational is the Kuroda-style Red. The Rebel deck was still a creature deck… its creatures just didn’t get wrecked by Rebel Informer. Terry’s deck becomes even more a deck that wins with creatures than before… It’s not Terry’s fault his opponents picked the wrong plan. Only the Kuroda-style Red deck actually changes its mechanics of victory into an engine keyed wholly on virtual card advantage and burn. That said, the Sideboards I Like require you to have a keen understanding of the format in order to work well. They are inherently limited against unanticipated threats. For my part, I’m only considering Green or Red Decks for Regionals this year. The reason is that with Saviors in the mix, I don’t feel like I have a perfect understanding of the format… but even if you don’t know what the other guy is playing, nuking him for 20 seems to work just fine. I’d potentially go Green because of Viridian Zealot, which I am liking more and more the more I test, and he can kill Erayo even if you are locked under Rule of Law (nice swipe, Sean).
The last Sideboard I Like is what I call Rock-transformation, which isn’t an homage to Sol Malka so much as an allusion to a large blunt object that you might throw through a window or perhaps use to brain someone from behind. Call it transformational or not, this sort of sideboard looks like this:
The G/W Deck – Brian Kibler
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Akroma’s Vengeance
3 Decree of Justice
2 Gilded Light
4 Oxidize
4 Pulse of the Fields
4 Renewed Faith
4 Wing Shards
4 Wrath of God
4 Elfhame Palace
3 Forest
12 Plains
4 Temple of the False God
4 Windswept Heath
Sideboard:
2 Darksteel Colossus
2 Duplicant
2 Mindslaver
4 Purge
2 Reap and Sow
3 Tooth and Nail
Say you have an opponent who can beat the core elements of White Control. What are the chances he can also – or even be optimized to – beat Tooth and Nail? Seth Burn came up with this sideboard as a solution to the G/W deck’s weaknesses to decks against which it didn’t have natural inevitability. The strategic change gave the deck an arguably more robust Plan A and had the opponent shooting in the wrong direction in much the same way that Terry’s Tooth-to-Troll invalidates Cranial Extraction.
The Rock-transformation is particularly good in open formats, when playing against decks with unknown quantities of answers. Like Cuneo’s subtle transformation, it doesn’t have to be as dedicated as Seth’s Tooth and Nail swap: If you look at the coverage of PT: Philadelphia, you will see that many players at least looked at their boards almost every game, tweaking their decks to make Cranial Extraction worse, get faster beats, take advantage of going first, lessen the initiative loss of going second, Win the Sideboard War. This skill-intensive dance goes against the conventional wisdom of siding one empirically best way; they played to win the match against a certain opponent, not just beat the other deck’s default board configuration. Osyp made a comment early in the tournament that Cranial Extraction was bad… His first round opponent Extracted for Extraction into a Kodama of the North Tree, finding none in Osyp’s G/W deck, when he could have just deuced the Kodama with his own North Tree. The post-sideboard threat swaps in the Block Gifts Ungiven deck seek to change a deck highly vulnerable to Cranial Extraction into threat decks of similar resilience to Peppermint Von Courderoy’s.
LOVE
MIKE
Bonus Section:
I initially submitted a 50’s-style society gossip column this week, highlighting the backbiting of a certain Mr. S_____ on the occasion of the P__ T___, but Teddy Cardgame rejected it on the grounds that Star City is an alleged “Magic Strategy” site and they don’t publish 50’s-style gossip columns… Not The Month Before Regionals, anyway. So if you, like Jamie Wakefield, actually burst into tears every Thursday night at midnight at the lack of urine-inducing joviality in my once lighthearted writing, you just wait.
You have been warned.