Building a sideboard and knowing how to sideboard in tournament matches of Magic: The Gathering are some of the most important and often underemphasized skills in the game. The entire concept has spurred the sideboard guide — a now instrumental part of strategy articles and deck techs —as a way to get a new pilot of a deck up to speed as soon as possible.
Novice players will take a deck and then build a sideboard by imagining cards that would be good against certain decks in a given format. But proven players with a track record of success know sideboarding is more than that. I talked to a handful of past and present pro Magic players to get their dos and don’ts for how to sideboard in Magic. This article will breakdown five of their tips (in no particular order) that players need to know to improve their sideboarding.
Sideboard For Your Opponent’s Post-Board Configuration
Many decks have a Game-1 plan that revolves around one goal that shines when an opponent is unprepared or ill-equipped to interact with their strategy. But once the jig is up, they know their opponent is going to have sideboard tools to attack their deck so they make adjustments to their deck to give them resilience to hate cards or an extra avenue to victory. This means you also need to have this accounted for when sideboarding. If you bring in a bunch of cards to fight Plan A, but the opponent is doing something else it won’t matter what you brought in to attack them.
This is the first thing both Reid Duke and Brad Nelson called out when listing mistakes players make when sideboarding. Nelson put it simply, “Sideboard for how their deck will be after they sideboard, and not just for their maindeck.” Duke, a Pro Tour champion and member of the Magic Hall of Fame, continued on that, “Don’t sideboard against the deck they had in Game 1. Anticipate what will change (sideboarded games are typically slower and scrappier) and try to be one step ahead.”
So, if your plan to beat a low-to-the-ground aggressive deck is to rely solely on sweepers, know that the opponent will most likely be prepared for this and have either a way to give their board indestructible or a cheap counterspell to punish you. The same goes for trying to beat a graveyard-based deck by slamming a card like Rest in Peace or Tormod’s Crypt. As you invest in these disruptive pieces your opponent could be bringing in a win condition that doesn’t care the slightest about their graveyard.
Sometimes It’s Right To Sacrifice Matchups
It’s usually impossible to have a deck that is well positioned against every conceivable deck in a given format, especially in eternal formats where the archetypes can have a much wider range. Your deck will most likely have one or two matchups that are incredibly hard to beat or require a heavy investment from your sideboard to have a fighter’s chance. Do you give up half of your sideboard slots trying to shore up one bad matchup or use those slots to round out your plans against a handful of other decks where you aren’t a heavy dog in the matchup?
Nelson, the 2010 Player of the Year, said that trying to dodge a certain deck is more beneficial if you can get a read on the meta. “If a matchup requires a lot of standalone sideboard cards but is trending downward in meta share and playability, it’s often best to ignore it and hope you don’t play against it.”
Sure, maybe you will get paired against the bad matchup and get slaughtered, but there is also a chance you still lose with a bunch of sideboard cards. Or yet, you do happen to avoid getting paired against the deck and get to leverage extra tools in other matchups that you see throughout the tournament. Winning tournaments takes a bit of luck on top of a lot of skill, so sometimes risks need to be taken.
Avoid Over-sideboarding
One mistake new and seasoned players make is over-sideboarding. Bringing in too many cards for a certain matchup not only means your sideboard is skewed heavily for a particular matchup but also your deck has a less likely chance of functioning how it is meant to after swapping too many cards between games.
Simon Nielsen, the 2022-2023 Player of the Year, and Duke pointed to this mistake when giving sideboarding advice. Duke said, “People change so many cards that they compromise their main strategy. They lose the qualities that made their deck strong in the first place.”
Nielsen explained how over-sideboarding can lead to your deck not functioning properly by giving a couple examples, “If you board in a ton of counterspells, maybe consider boarding out the medium sorcery-speed three-drops, because if you were building your deck from scratch, you’d never put a random three-drop creature in your deck with eight counterspells.” He also said if you sideboard your deck to go long now you also to need to cut the bad topdecks in your deck, effectively leading you to have to sideboard even more cards.
This all leads nicely to the next tip.
Mapping Your Deck For Post-Board Games
This also happens to tie in with the first tip, but comes before ever playing in the tournament by knowing what your deck will look like after sideboarding for matchups. SCG Invitational and Eternal Weekend champion Brian Coval calls this sideboard mapping. “Build your sideboard as part of your deck. Not as 15 theoretically-useful cards for decks you might play against. You don’t have a deck and a sideboard, you have a 75-card pool of cards to build new decks out of throughout the event.”
Coval breaks this down in a couple of ways, with one example being players who react to losing to graveyard decks by adding even more hate pieces — say some copies of Surgical Extraction on top their playset of Leyline of the Void. Coval explains, “What three additional cards are you going to cut in those matchups to bring those in? Does your deck still work as intended when so many maindeck cards are in the sideboard in a bunch of your games? How good is a Surgical Extraction if you start with your Plan A Leyline in play?”
Coval gives another example of sideboard mapping in Magic’s oldest format. “Many Vintage decks play hyper-specialized interaction like Mental Misstep, Flusterstorm, and Pyroblast in the main deck. None of those cards do anything against popular decks like Prison Shops or Mono-White Initiative. In that case, you don’t just need good cards for those matchups to come in, you need all of those bad cards to get out! If you have a Mental Misstep, two copies of Flusterstorm, and two Pyroblasts in your main deck, you better have at least five cards for those “big non-blue permanents” decks in the sideboard or else you’ll be holding blank cardboard with nowhere to put it.”
So, to summarize, if your deck doesn’t have a plan because too many important cards were cut for matchup hate, or generally doesn’t look like a deck anyone would build on purpose, your map is no good.
Different Plans For Being On the Play/Draw
The texture of a game changes wildly depending on which player gets to go first, so it only makes sense that you should have different approaches to games when you are on the play or the draw. One of the clearest examples is when a blue deck features a two-mana counterspell. When they are on the play, they can tag a key two-drop, but are usually helpless against that spell on the draw.
This is why Nelson hammers home the idea of having different sideboard plans for going first or second. One of the biggest advantages the Standard master utilized, and one of the concepts he is best known for, is enacting these swaps. “Don’t have the same plans for the play and draw. When you are on the draw, prioritize more cheap interaction. When you are on the play have a few more proactive elements.”
That cheap interaction will be vital when working with a mana disadvantage on the draw while your early threats will be able to snowball games more often when on the play. Sticky threats, like planeswalkers or artifacts, help in this regard even more so than creatures.
What practices have you found successful in sideboarding? Which of these tips surprise you the most? Let us know on social media!
