It’s 11:00 p.m. on a Friday night; you and four of your best friends are hanging out in a hotel room somewhere just outside of Chicago after a four-hour road trip, and are adding the finishing touches to the decks you all plan to play in the Vintage event the following morning. If I had to speculate as to the exact topic of conversation taking place among the individuals in this particular room, I’d wager that right about now somebody’s asking: “What should I play in my sideboard…?”
In this week’s installment of Vintage Avant-Garde, I’ll disclose the techniques I use to construct optimal sideboards for Vintage tournament decks, as well as the criteria that I use to evaluate the usefulness of potential sideboard cards and strategies.
I. “75”
A Constructed quality Vintage deck contains 75 cards: sixty cards in the maindeck and fifteen cards in the sideboard. The combination of 75 cards a player chooses to register at 9:00 a.m. of an event are the only cards that he or she has the option to use for the entire tournament—in short, whether or not you’re playing in a side-draft at 2:30 because you went 2-2 drop, or are winning in the finals at 9:00 p.m. is a direct function of how good the seventy-five you fashioned the night before is.
In my article from three weeks ago,
“Your Ideas Aren’t as Bad as People Say They Are,”
I discussed the difference between
obvious
and
subtle
types of tactical innovation. The deployment of synergies that are obvious, cards that are known to be
broken
(i.e. “auto-includes” in an archetype), and other well documented “powerful”
strategies won’t give a player a significant advantage over any given field of players—rather, it merely allows a player to maintain the
Status Quo
, and positions that player’s 75 card selection somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Aside from the decision to select a specific archetype (Workshop, Mana Drain, or Dark Ritual, etc.) the selection of the specific fifteen cards that will constitute the sideboard is probably the most relevant pre-tournament decision that will impact tournament success or failure; the fifteen cards that constitute the sideboard of a given deck are usually the fifteen most important choices in deck construction.
With that being said, it’s important to distinguish between most
important
and most
powerful.
Clearly, in a Mana Drain deck, Ancestral Recall or Black Lotus are more powerful cards than what you’re going to be sideboarding in; since after all, these cards make the maindeck every single time and almost never get boarded out. The key to understanding the difference is that every single Mana Drain deck plays Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus, and every single other deck expects you to have Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus—therefore, playing with these obviously great cards, while necessary and undoubtedly correct, isn’t a decision that gives a player an advantage over the field.
The biggest misconception I believe people have about the relationship between maindeck and sideboard is that: “The maindeck is the
deck,
and the sideboard is a collection of helper cards.” In actuality, the full 75 cards, main and side, are the deck, and they’re all intrinsically important parts of the overall strategy a player will use to win matches in a tournament. Assuming a match goes to a second or third game, (almost all matches are decided in
at least
two games), a player will have the opportunity to use their sideboard in as many games as they don’t use it—if it takes three games to decide a match, a player will play more games with access to the sideboard than not.
When a player sideboards for game 2 and presents their deck to the opponent, the new 60 cards (which includes some number of maindeck cards being cut and replaced with cards from the sideboard)
is
the new deck; therefore, it’s much more useful to view the full 75 as a pool of cards from which a player can build and reconfigure new and better matchup specific decks. After all, aside from specific circumstances where an opponent gets a game loss, or the clock runs out in game 2, a player must win at least as many games with a version of their deck utilizing the sideboard as without.
II. “Sideboard with Purpose”
A good sideboard should do two things: plug holes and improve percentages. In modern Constructed Magic formats, particularly Eternal formats, good decks tend to be synergistic, linear, and aggressive/powerful. What I mean by this is that most popular decks are proactive, rather than reactive, and that most decks try to abuse a linear strategy to win the game. While some decks, particularly blue decks, play with permission (Force of Will, Spell Pierce, or
sometimes
Mana Drain), it’s important to make the distinction that these decks aren’t pure control decks but rather use efficient permission to disrupt an opponent until they can execute a combo finish, usually Time Vault/Key.
The reason that the Vintage metagame looks the way that it does is that the various types of powerful linear strategies people commonly play cannot be easily or efficiently controlled by one type of counter-strategy. Unlike the Vintage of eight years ago, blue decks, by virtue of having Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and Yawgmoth’s Will, aren’t intrinsically more powerful than every other strategy—Wizards of the Coast has done a good job of printing cards that empower other powerful, linear archetypes and enable them to compete with what had previously been a format dominated by Mana Drain control decks.
What ends up happening in a format full of decks that have varied linear modes of attack that cannot all be controlled by a single deck? The answer is that the metagame becomes matchup driven, where some strategies will be inherently good against some decks while at the same time being vulnerable to other strategies.
In a metagame such as this, where percentages are largely matchup driven, sideboard construction becomes the distinguishing factor that will ultimately determine tournament success or failure. Since we’ve already established that a deck cannot be good against everything game 1, because the strategies are too varied and linear to control, good deckbuilders rely on the sideboard to shore up matchups where their own linear strategies are fundamentally vulnerable by directly attacking the linear strategy of the opposing deck.
The most distinct example of this phenomenon is the relationship between Dredge decks and non-Dredge decks in the Vintage metagame. The linear strategy employed by the Dredge deck is so non-traditional that most decks have a very difficult time beating it, since very few cards that are good against a wide array of the field tend to also be good against Dredge. Aside from combo decks that can consistently goldfish on the first or second turn, and anti-graveyard decks (which don’t really exist pre-sideboard), Dredge’s linear, graveyard-based, non-interactive strategy has a tendency to beat most other popular Vintage decks with a staggeringly high percentage in the first game of a match. My estimation is that Dredge probably runs between being favored 80-90% in game 1 against most popular variations of blue Time Vault and Mishra’s Workshop decks, which usually account for over 50% of the field.
Dredge decks usually fluctuate between 8-15% of any given field, which means that it isn’t a popular enough deck to make it worth having a great matchup against in game 1, but it isn’t so irrelevant that you can afford to simply throw that matchup away. It’s likely to assume that a player will need to play against Dredge at least one time, possibly twice in the Swiss rounds, and it isn’t completely out of the question to assume that it might be a matchup a player faces in the single elimination Top 8 rounds. Most decks, assuming this about the Dredge matchup, overcompensate by becoming much better than 50% against Dredge in the post-sideboard games by devoting between six and nine sideboard slots specifically to punishing a graveyard-based deck. While a deck might be a linear disruptive Time Vault-based deck in game 1, it presumes to become an “anti-graveyard” control deck in the second and third games. A Time Vault control deck, by virtue of bringing in four Leylines of the Void, two Nihil Spellbombs, two Yixlid Jailers, and one Tormod’s Crypt goes from being a 20-80 underdog in game 1 to being an 80-20 favorite in the sideboarded games.
In a fundamentally bad matchup, such as almost everything vs. Dredge, the sideboard either becomes the player’s best friend or undoing, depending upon whether it was correctly or incorrectly built.
My philosophy for deck design is that after sideboard, I want all my matchups to feel winnable, especially in the case of matchups that appear very bad in the pre-sideboard game. While it’s certainly true that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to be competitive against everything even after sideboard—it’s reasonable to be “passable” against most decks in the second and third games, which is to say, your strategy will at least give you a chance to steal some games.
Most importantly, players need to be aware of the percentages that their deck is likely to have against the expected metagame. I’d argue that if MUD decks were expected to constitute 25-35% of a given field, it’s unacceptable to play a deck that has a poor game 1 percentage against them while not drastically improving the matchup after sideboard. It’s just common sense that having to play an unwinnable matchup every third round is tournament suicide, but if a player builds their deck correctly and takes the percentages into account, it’s a problem that’s easily avoidable.
III. “Building Decks With the Sideboard in Mind”
All good decks, built by good deckbuilders, are designed with the sideboard in mind. The sideboard cards are just as important as the maindeck cards to the total functionality of the deck, since a player has to consider how their deck will perform against an entire field over the course of an entire event.
Vintage archetypes tend to be both established and stable, and over the course of a large-scale, eight-round event, one should expect to see the following types of decks: Mishra’s Workshop, Blue Time Vault/Oath of Druids, Storm Combo, Dredge, and Fish. These decks are the pillars of Vintage and vary with regard to what percentage of the metagame they comprise—but, they always tend to exist and make an appearance at a big event. Knowing this, any deck a player chooses should, between the main and side deck, address these particular matchups in one way or another. Presumably, if one can predict which of these archetypes are likely to constitute the largest percentage of the field, those are the matchups where one would prefer to have the highest winning percentage.
One useful approach that my teammates and I often use when constructing possible tournament decks is to build with a sideboard-centric perspective. Instead of trying to start out with a sixty-card maindeck that’s good against everything, we will build between two and four versions of the same archetype, and each version will be pre-boarded to beat another specific strategy.
For example, if we use this technique on a blue Time Vault deck, the goal of the exercise might be to build versions of the deck specifically tuned to beat Workshops, Fish, and the mirror match. While the core of the deck, the aspect that’s linear and therefore pro-active, is likely to remain intact from matchup to matchup, the role player cards always fluctuate in value depending upon the opponent’s deck.
The cards that will never, or only under extreme circumstances, be swapped out for sideboard cards are the core of the deck. In a potential Time Vault deck these cards are likely to be:
Ancestral Recall
Time Walk
Brainstorm
Mystical Tutor
Gifts Ungiven
Ponder
Tinker
Thirst for Knowledge
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4 Force of Will
4 Dark Confidant
Demonic Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Yawgmoth’s Will
Time Vault
Voltaic Key
Inkwell Leviathan
(24 spells) + (assume 26 mana sources) = 50 core cards
The total on these cards comes to 50 cards, which means that in a prospective Time Vault deck, there are approximately eleven open slots with which a deckbuilder can toy around with. Keep in mind that the 24 maindeck spell slots listed here don’t include any permission or disruption, so those types of spells will need to be addressed with the ten open spaces as well. We’re going to take a conservative approach to building this deck, and will say that the disruption suite for this deck is going to have two Spell Pierces and two Mana Drains.
The potential deck now has six open slots from which we can begin to design pre-boarded variants that are tuned to be matchup specific.
In a Vintage tournament in “Magical Christmas Land,” what would we want those six cards to be in a game 1 situation against a Mishra’s Workshop deck? Obviously, the best-case scenario would be cards that are linear and attack an artifact-based strategy.
3 Nature’s Claim
2 Trygon Predator
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
I’d love to play against Mishra’s Workshop decks all day long with a version of Time Vault that had three Nature’s Claims, two Trygon Predators, and a Hurkyl’s in the maindeck. With access to this kind of hate in the main, such a deck would be heavily favored to beat most of the popular Workshop builds. When I actually played this list against the MUD deck I have in my gauntlet, my hypothesis was confirmed as the Blue deck won the ten-game set by a large margin, 8-2.
In the next matchup, Fish, you want cards that efficiently deal with their cheap, yet powerful, creatures—as well as some ways to deal with their disruptive artifacts, such as Null Rod or Chalice of the Void. Keeping in mind that Fish has traditionally been a tough matchup for Tezzeret Blue decks, it isn’t completely unlikely that in spite of devoting six cards to the matchup that it’ll still be close percentage wise.
2 Doom Blade
2 Nature’s Claim
2 Sower of Temptation
What’s interesting about this configuration of the deck was that when I tested it against my stock Bant-Fish deck, the pre-boarded Blue deck actually appeared to still be behind in the matchup 4-6. A 40% win percentage with a deck that’s pre-boarded against one that isn’t is terrible.
So, I went back to the drawing board. In playing the matchup, I discovered a few things: firstly, Sower of Temptation was often too expensive to actually cast and often bit the bullet to their Swords to Plowshares. Secondly, I learned that Doom Blade, while decent, didn’t really get me far enough ahead; although it was very good, destroying one of their monsters wasn’t always enough to get me out of a bind. My second try at the Bant-Fish matchup looked like this:
2 Nature’s Claim
2 Perish
2 Doom Blade
Perish was much better than Sower of Temptation, and resolving it often won games outright; in fact, my game plan often revolved around tutoring for Perish, resolving it, and easily winning from that point. With two copies of Perish in the deck, my percentage improved to 60%.
Lastly, I wanted to address the mirror match.
1 Nature’s Claim
3 Thoughtseize
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
I played this list against another Jace deck that, in place of the six sideboard cards I had pre-boarded, included: two Nature’s Claims, two Trygon Predators, one Hurkyl’s Recall, one Spell Pierce. Jace is amazing in the mirror, as is Thoughtseize. The pre-boarded deck won 7-3.
Now, that we’ve gathered some data about how the deck is going to perform against other decks, we can begin assess where we stand from matchup to matchup. The most obvious thing to note is that we’re not going to be able to play with a maindeck that beats Fish in the first game, as it’s unrealistic to be playing with multiple Perishes and Doom Blades in game 1.
Secondly, we notice that Nature’s Claim was a card that I wanted to play in all three matchups—which makes it pretty much an auto-include in this deck—not to mention it’s also going to be very good against Oath of Druids, a deck we didn’t test against yet.
Lastly, we know that Fish is much less likely to make up a large percentage of the metagame, so trying to beat them in the second and third games with the help of our ace-in-the-hole, Perish, seems reasonable.
After crunching some numbers, and assuming that the most likely matchups are going to be other blue decks, followed by MUD, and distantly followed by Fish and Dredge, I’d suggest a Jace deck that looks like this.
Creatures (5)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (16)
Spells (37)
- 1 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Brainstorm
- 2 Mana Drain
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Mystical Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Mana Vault
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 1 Hurkyl's Recall
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 1 Time Vault
- 1 Gifts Ungiven
- 1 Thirst for Knowledge
- 1 Tinker
- 1 Voltaic Key
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Lotus Petal
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
- 1 Ponder
- 2 Thoughtseize
- 2 Spell Pierce
- 2 Nature's Claim
Sideboard
The thing that I like about a deck like this is that between the main and sideboard, it has a very well-balanced approach to attacking the field, which means that while the deck isn’t going to have very many matchups where it “blows people out,” it’s also resilient and does not in turn get “blown out” of a three-game set by any specific linear strategy. By using a sideboard-centric approach to deckbuilding and arriving at a well-positioned 75 card deck, we have covered our bases and have a legitimate plan for 90% of the decks we’re likely to face—and, as we move from our most likely opponents to our less likely matchups, our implied win percentages are consistently bolstered against the decks we’re the most likely to face.
Now, I’m not saying that this particular list is “cutting edge,” or the best possible choice for a tournament—however, I’d certainly feel comfortable playing this list in a number of different metagames, and I’d expect to have a good chance to win an event with it, were I to sleeve it up.
One last, but nonetheless important, factoid I’d like to address in this section comes at the suggestion of fellow Meandecker, Paul Mastriano. He responded to the initial draft of my article with the following point:
“When designing the sideboard I think a common mistake is to forget how many cards you’re willing to side out for a particular matchup. I think people often say, ‘I hate workshop, I’m going to side nine cards for it’ but then when they actually go to sideboard they don’t have nine cards they can reasonably side out, so they either wasted those slots, or (even worse) cut better cards for worse ones post-board.”
One of the biggest mistakes that people make with regard to the design of a 75-card package is that they don’t stop to think about what their sideboard packages are going to be from one matchup to the next, as Paul accurately describes in his statement. If you’re boarding out cards that are already good against a deck for cards that are marginally better, it’s very likely that you’ve mismanaged your sideboard space. The last thing that a player needs to be doing is gaining only slight advantage from sideboard slots in a matchup that is already decent at the expense of being ill equipped for a matchup where they’re likely to need percentage in order to compete.
When we examine the sideboard packages that exist in the “Possible Blue Deck” that was constructed via a sideboard-centric approach to deckbuilding, it should be clear that for every card that’s likely to be boarded in that there’s a corresponding card that is significantly weaker in that matchup.
Workshop
-2 Thoughtseize, +2 Trygon Predator
-2 Spell Pierce, +2 Doom Blade
Fish
-1 Gifts Ungiven, +2 Perish
-2 Spell Pierce, +2 Doom Blade
Dredge
-2 Thoughtseize
-1 Gifts Ungiven, +4 Leyline of the Void
-1 Thirst For Knowledge, +2 Nihil Spellbomb
-1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor, +1 Yixlid Jailer
Storm
-2 Nature’s Claim, +2 Mindbreak Trap
After sideboard, all of our weak cards in a specific matchup come out and are replaced with cards that are specifically good against the linear line of attack that we’re going to be facing.
IV. “Vintage Sideboard Guide”
I’m going to end this article by providing a resource for Vintage deckbuilders to utilize for constructing efficient sideboards. The way the sideboard guide is designed to work is that for each major archetype, I’ll list the top ten cards, in order of efficiency, that are most useful in gaining percentage against the aforementioned deck. Now, some cards are color specific—so, if you’re building a deck that can’t play a particular card, it isn’t going to work in your strategy, but assuming that a player could have any card without mana constraint these are the cards that my experience has led me to believe are likely to most drastically swing a matchup.
Against Mishra’s Workshop decks
:
4. Energy Flux
Against Blue-Based Time Vault decks
:
5. Thoughtseize
1. Null Rod
Against Storm Combo Decks
:
3. Trinisphere/Sphere of Resistance
Against Dredge Decks
:
1. Leyline of the Void (by a wide, wide margin)
Against Fish Decks
:
5. Pyroclasm
4. Doom Blade
2. Balance
1. Perish
Against Oath of Druids Decks
:
4. Spawning Pit
Against Gush decks
:
4. Ankh of Mishra/Tunnel Ignus
3. Trinisphere/Sphere of Resistance
2. Thoughtseize
It should be obvious that this list is an assessment of cards that I believe are abstractly good against a particular linear strategy, and aren’t necessarily going to be contextually exploitable by every single archetype. For instance, I wouldn’t recommend sideboarding in Null Rod in the Time Vault mirror, or Energy Flux in the Stax mirror… but who knows, maybe that is the insane technology of tomorrow.
Another important thing to take note of is that some cards tend to be good against multiple archetypes. For instance, Thoughtseize is great against a multiplicity of decks, and Doom Blade is also useful against multiple decks. Cards like these are great, because they work overtime in your sideboard and can help shore up percentages against multiple archetypes at the cost of half the space in a sideboard. Personally, I love Doom Blade and am hard pressed to build a U/B deck that’s too good to include 1-2 copies of the card somewhere amid my 75.
“
Summary of Sideboard Strategies
”
1. All good decks are a product of how good the maindeck and sideboard together address all opposing matchups in an expected field.
2. When a player sideboards they’re building a new deck.
3. After sideboard, a player’s deck should be passable in every matchup they expect to play against.
4. All well-built decks should be built with sideboard strategies in mind—particularly, to help against popular linear strategies to which a deck is intrinsically vulnerable.
5. Consider which cards are to come out for the cards that are to be brought in—don’t waste precious sideboard space on matchups where it isn’t needed.
6. Consider building decks to address the metagame you expect to play against. Juggle the ratio of cards that address linear strategies you’re likely to play most often so they’re in the main deck, while leaving solutions to matchups you’re likely to play less often in the sideboard.
7. Utilize cards that are useful against multiple archetypes to conserve sideboard space.
Good decks have good sideboards. When the sideboard isn’t any good, it’s pretty safe to assume the pilot isn’t going to do very well.
Hope you enjoyed the article.
Cheers,
Brian DeMars