The Art Of Sideboarding

Most people probably think the most basic level zero sideboarding, and perhaps the essence of what sideboarding is for, is cutting dead/weak/poorly
positioned cards for hate cards. That actually is where everyone starts, I suppose. It’s simple and easy, and uses the basic idea of what sideboards are
for.

I’m interested in something a little more nuanced, but still broad and abstract enough that it can be widely applied to almost all sideboarding. Astute
readers may know where I’m going with this, as it’s something I’ve discussed fairly recently. Sideboarding is more than changing a few cards. When you and
your opponent change a few cards, the fundamental texture of the games change as well, and understanding a preparing for that is a big part of successful
sideboarding. It’s easy to sideboard against your opponent’s game 1 deck, only to find that what matters has changed and the cards you’ve brought in might
not even be good anymore.

It’s important to understand the general principle at work here. In a vast majority of cases, decks will be built to follow a proactive strategy in game 1.
They’ll have interactive elements, but those cards will be able to interact on as wide an axis as possible. Most decks will be built to tell the same
narrative regardless of what they’re playing against, and game 1 will be about letting your deck resolve its narrative rather than letting your opponent do
the same.

For the second game, both players get to attempt to rewrite their narrative in the context of the narrative of the matchup, and you want to tell a
narrative about how your deck will beat their deck, but you need to be sure you’re beating their new narrative, not their old narrative.

You’ll notice that I’m framing this in a way you might not be familiar with, but I think it’s a useful way to be able to think about games of Magic. Each
deck tells a story–Zoo might be, “Play a large threat, remove opposing blockers, burn an opponent out to end the game quickly.” U/B Control might be,
“Trade cards with my opponent to buy time to take over the game with card draw spells to get to a point where I can counter all of their threats, then
deploy a resilient victory condition and coast to a win.” Sneak and Show would obviously be, “Use library manipulation to build a hand that can put a giant
monster into play. Kill my opponent with my giant monster.”

When sideboarding, you need to identify whether your baseline narrative can compete with your opponent’s narrative. If it can’t, you’ll obviously need to
work harder to change the story you’re telling. Sometimes your new story will be very simple and very different from your old story–against Manaless
Dredge in Legacy, most decks hope for the narrative to become: Play Grafdigger’s Cage or some other hate card to end my opponent’s narrative. Win with
whatever.

The most important thing to understand when sideboarding for Constructed, and when building your sideboard for Constructed, is that games 2 and 3 will be
slower and more interactive than game 1. Every deck has to be built more or less to accomplish its primary objective as efficiently as possible. When you
don’t know what you’re up against, a proactive strategy gives you the best chance of dictating the narrative of the game. Once you know what you’re
opponent is playing, you’ll be able to bring in hyper efficient interactive cards, allowing you to shift your focus toward disruption. Across almost all
matchups and formats, sideboard games will end later on average, meaning that card draw, more expensive spells, and better lategame cards will be at their
best in games 2 and 3.

This is why I sideboard additional Chandra, Pyromasters into my Standard deck against literally every single opponent. The nature of Chandra, Pyromaster is
such that it’s better in games 2 and 3–it’s a slow, lategame card that draws cards. This works perfectly with every sideboard strategy I have, because it
fundamentally plays the game that people play after sideboarding.

While this is the most important, most fundamental shift you can expect to witness in sideboarding, it’s far from the whole story.

Let me shift focus a bit and talk about sideboarding in Limited. I may be best known as a deckbuilder at the moment, but the single element of Magic that I
think I’m best at is actually sideboarding in Limited. Interestingly, this is something you never really see–I imagine very few people know much about how
others sideboard in Limited. It’s difficult to write about sideboarding with a general card pool, so there are few articles about it and no sideboard
guides. People watch far more Constructed matches on Twitch than Limited matches, and when they do watch Limited matches, they don’t usually (if ever) get
to see how players sideboard. As a result, it’s really hard to learn about sideboarding in Limited without just playing a lot of Limited. I’m going to try
to address that to the best of my ability.

In Draft, just like in Constructed, most decks are trying to tell a specific narrative. For less focused decks, it might just be that they’re hoping to hit
their lands on time, curve out reasonable threats, and maybe answer their opponent’s best creature, but some decks tell a much more streamlined story.

When drafting, there’s a good chance you won’t have the card pool to radically change what your deck is doing. I love formats where there are enough good
cards that you can draft entire sideboard strategies, like Vintage Masters and Modern Masters, but for the most part, that’s the exception. In Sealed Deck,
however, this is absolutely essential.

Imagine I’m playing Khans of Tarkir Sealed, and I have a good Mardu deck with a consistent plan. I’m trying to “go wide” with tokens and win with Rush of
Battle, Trumpet Blast, or Raiders’ Spoils. If my opponent’s plan is to lock up the ground with walls and then play a big threat like Woolly Loxodon, their
narrative will be horribly positioned against mine. Walls don’t stop tokens well, as they can only block a single one, and they still let me raid.
Investing a lot of mana into a huge creature that can only block a single attacker or that I can easily chump block is much less effective than investing a
medium amount of mana into a medium sized creature that will still trump my small creatures, but do so much faster.

My opponent might lose, and they might realize that their deck is poorly positioned. They might cut Archers’ Parapet for Jeskai Student to give themselves
a more appropriate early blocker, and maybe they get a little creative and bring in a fringe hate card like Heart-Piercer Bow. Now they might have access
to tools that can beat me, but they haven’t changed their fundamental narrative, and mine is still much better, so I’m likely to win anyway. Instead, maybe
they realize, “wow, that was a terrible matchup,” maybe they had another build of their pool in mind, so they switch to their B deck. If their B deck has
the plan, “play a lot of removal spells, draw cards with Bitter Revelation, win with bombs,” they’ll find that while they’ve changed the matchup, they
haven’t actually improved it. Spot removal is still bad against tokens, and the card draw is too slow.

My opponent needs to understand what kinds of narratives are best suited to trumping the narrative my deck is telling. In their spot, I’d look to be
aggressive with relatively cheap creatures that have high power and more than one toughness. They want to try to either end the game before I can build up,
or, more likely, apply enough pressure that I have to trade creatures; but because my creatures are small when they’re not attacking, I’m likely going to
have to make unfavorable trades. This is likely a worse deck than the deck they originally built, since they’d be playing this from the beginning, but a
weak deck that’s doing the right things is likely better positioned in the matchup than a strong deck that’s doing the wrong things.

Sometimes, you can’t change as much as you’d like. In the World Championships, in Khans of Tarkir Draft, my deck was all removal spells and card draw with
a few big threats. My plan looked very much like the plan of the B deck described above. When I played against a U/W aggro deck with a very low curve and
multiple Treasure Cruises, I knew my plan was horribly positioned. It was Khans of Tarkir Draft, meaning that, when I wasn’t taking spells for my deck, I
was taking mana fixing, and I didn’t have room to change what my deck did. The narratives were so lopsided that I felt like I needed a way to “make
something happen,” so I brought Rush of Battle into my deck where that card made no sense, because I could imagine stealing a game with it. My opponent was
trying to race with evasive creatures and would be largely ignoring my creatures, so I could easily get a few of them in play, and trying to play a long
game was wrong. I needed to try to steal an early game, so I brought in an out of place Rush of Battle and won the match because of it (with a little help
from my opponent). These kinds of desperation plays come up rarely, but it’s still important to know what to look for and when you have to get creative.

In Vintage Masters at the World Champions, I drafted a U/G Madness deck that had a sweet white splash for Breath of Life to reanimate a few giant
creatures. The splash was well supported, and it gave the deck an exciting, unusual angle of attack. In my matches, I played against Storm, B/W evasive
aggro, and Mono-Red Goblins. Every round, I sided out my entire reanimation package. It made me feel a little stupid for bothering to draft all this stuff,
but in each match, it was clear that it just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I needed cheap creatures against Storm, especially since my opponent had
multiple bounce spells; it just wasn’t worth all the set up compared to just playing an attacker earlier to establish a clock. Against B/W, my opponent had
reanimate, so if I discarded a big creature, he could take it. He also had ways to exile my threats, or he could just chump block while killing me with
evasive threats–it was a similar issue to what I was discussing above, the mismatch of big creatures against tokens. Small evasive creatures function
similarly to tokens, and I just didn’t need a body that big. Again, against goblins, I didn’t need a body that big, because my opponent was trying to go
wide.

All three matches forced me to abandon one of the fundamental narratives of my deck, and it was important that I was willing to do that. I didn’t get hung
up on letting my deck do a cool thing because it could, I tried to reshape my deck to do the things that would work against what my opponents were doing.

Getting back to Constructed, before the top 8 of the Season Four Invitational, Dan Jessup mentioned that his deck was relatively good against me compared
to other Abzan Midrange decks because the threat of Jeskai Tokens had forced him to include more Bile Blights and Drown in Sorrows in his sideboard. I just
smiled, because I wasn’t really convinced Drown in Sorrow was a good card against me after sideboarding. In game 1, it would be great–one of my advantages
was that I knew he had no sweepers, and he had few blockers, so my tokens could be a huge problem for him. After sideboarding, I expected him to overload
on sweepers, and I needed to make room for answers, so I was taking out all of my token makers. Now, Drown in Sorrow was a clunky removal spell that only
answered certain threats, and which would encourage him to try to hold it for a spot that would never come, making it even worse than it would be if he
knew to just cash it in to kill a Seeker of the Way if the opportunity presented itself.

Unfortunately for me, Dan had figured out when we played before that his deck was in danger of not being threat dense enough against me because I had so
much removal after board, and brought in more planeswalkers instead of Drown in Sorrows. This is a spot where he was rewarded for recognizing the way that
I was changing my narrative, and avoiding bringing in a card that’s only good in game 1.

This actually happens to be a common problem with Drown in Sorrow. It’s a “sideboard card” in that it answers a narrow enough set of things that you often
can’t afford to put it in a maindeck, but it actually gets a lot worse in games 2 and 3 in most of the matchups where you want it. It’s still a high impact
enough card that it’s usually worth bringing in there, but it’s not the powerhouse it would have been in game 1.

The primary points I hope everyone takes away from this:

1. Sideboard games are different from maindeck games in a consistent and predictable way. Be prepared for that, and understand that it’s okay to have cards
that you board in or out against absolutely everyone because some cards really are only good in game 1s or only good in sideboard games.

2. Think of games as a story of competing narrative lines where you’re trying to tell your story over your opponent’s story. Figure out if it makes sense
that your story would come out on top, and recognize when you need to find a new story and how to do that and how to match stories well.

3. Predict your opponents’ new narrative and answer that rather than their original narrative.

Sideboarding isn’t easy, and how you want to sideboard against two different Abzan decks might be totally different based on a few card choices, or even
based on how your opponent plays, but I hope I’ve helped you work out some structures that will make coming to conclusions about what you should be doing
substantially easier.