Sideboarding Strategies and Tactics, Part 1
Sideboarding is one of the most important skills you can develop to improve your chances of winning tournament-Magic matches. For one thing, sideboarded games are more numerous—and more important—than Game 1s. Really! Sure, you play a Game 1 every match... but except in relatively rare circumstances, you also play a Game 2. If you 0–2 or 2–0 every single match, sideboarded Game 2s are "merely" exactly equally important to Game 1s. But because many matches go to three games, that means that over the course of a career (or even just over the course of a single tournament) you will play many more sideboarded games than Game 1s.
Don't you think that you should put some method and mindfulness into these multitudinous, meaningful, even monumental contests?
This article will go over several strategies, tactics, and patterns of sideboards and sideboarding... as well as revisiting some of Magic's great sideboards as illustrations. No one article can cover every single sideboarding system and strategy, so we are going to leave the best for last this time; "last" being "next week" in this case; and "best" being somewhat debatable... but most-assuredly exciting.
What are we trying to accomplish?
Most sideboarding; most good sideboarding, anyway, is ultimately moving toward a single objective: speed.
Either you are figuring a way to make your deck win faster, or you are figuring a way to slow down the opponent's deck, presumably so that you can delay his or her victory until after you have pocketed the dubya. All your decisions can therefore be examined through that lens of speed. You will see common strategies like "bringing in more (fast) creature-kill for beatdown decks..." that is, at least in part, because killing the opponent's creatures slows down his or her offense. Bringing in a tonnage of creature removal—in some cases more removal than the opponent has threats—can hang a gigantic anchor around the opponent's neck; when were you planning to win, exactly? Because as long as you tax those threats, you can delay an opposing victory. This applies to the other sorts of permanents (and their commensurate sideboard cards) in the same way...
Sometimes you will want to bring in cards that dominate an opponent's strategy (dredge is going to have to jump through some hoops to beat your turn-zero
We will touch on lots of these ideas and more today. Hopefully, you will be able to come away from this primer on sideboarding invigorated, and with new ideas on how to build or otherwise utilize your sideboard resources in future.
Irrespective of what you actually put into your sideboard and how you want to utilize those cards, there are a handful of rules to sideboarding that you should keep in mind; but the most important of these, that I think bears some reflection before we proceed is this: Never make their cards good.
Never Make Their Cards Good
Often, their cards are good. They start out good. You can't really help that. Just as you strive to play good cards in your deck, the opponent will do the same. You have
But what you can do is to keep from making the opponent's cards useful.
During the Championship Season of Mirrodin/Kamigawa Block Standard, a common strategy for Red Decks was to tap four mana against Mono-Blue Control decks and blow up all the Islands. Blue Control decks of the era had numerous permission spells to fight a sometimes-clunky four-mana spell, but getting all your Islands blown up is pretty harsh... so they would sometimes sideboard just against sideboard cards by adding an over-the-top answer in
The most powerful threat a Red Deck player could present at the time, offensively, was
So if a default blue sideboarding strategy was to bring in
For one thing, you would never, ever want to put yourself in a spot where all your Mountains were being blown up. You can make an argument for playing with one
But the other issue was that
They just had so many cards that were so good against Red Decks.
Josh Ravitz's sideboard from the US National Championships Top 8 exemplifies the concept of never making the opponent's cards good.
Not only did he make cards like
A post-sideboarded Red configuration could fuel
Not only did this strategy blunt usually effective sideboard cards like
Part of what was important in Josh's sideboard—and what is a huge challenge for sideboarding in general—is not only what to bring in, but what to take out. Josh's plan against
Efficiency Swaps
A challenge with most sideboarding is to bring in cards that are useful in a matchup, but not necessarily to the detriment of your overall strategy. Put another way, there is a temptation for players to bring in a ton of cards in a matchup that they think are good against a particular opponent... but where they just end up weakening their own paths to victory. One way to avoid such a pitfall is the strategy of the efficiency swap. An intuitive way to illustrate this technique—essentially taking out a card for a better version of that card in-matchup—is to look at Frank Karsten's recent Naya Blitz deck.
When Hall of Famer Frank Karsten burst onto the Standard scene with Blitz in April of this year, he immediately became famous for making it to the elimination rounds of his World Magic Cup Qualifier...with no sideboard at all! Frank sided in fifteen mystery cards every game; sided out the same fifteen. Part of that was just Frank being Frank, but Naya Blitz is a deck with so many pocket synergies—Humans linear off of
He later realized that some matchups, like the mirror, gave rise to opportunities for sideboarding that would almost by definition improve the deck... but that he didn't have to disrupt his plans overmuch to take advantage of them.
Consider
Thoroughly unexciting in the Blitz mirror.
Thoroughly unexciting in the Blitz mirror.
If you are playing forty dudes and the opponent is playing forty dudes... what exactly are you getting out of Thalia but the opportunity to draw two—or even three—underperforming cards, one or more of which will be stuck in your hand?
In the mirror you can painlessly side out three copies of
Any time you are taking out something and substituting the better version of that something for a matchup, you are stretching your "efficiency swap" muscles.
Strategy-Specific Sideboarding
... is exactly what it sounds like. You know what the opponent's strategy is and you bring in cards appropriate to that strategy (which may or may not mean interacting with specific cards). For example,
Remember what we said about good sideboarding having an eye to speed?
What do you see, special, about this sideboard?
Osyp Lebedowicz's Slide deck, winning Venice, is history's darling, but I think Zvi got something right with
You see, here's the thing about
In a format with
Faced with a Bidding deck in an upcoming feature match a desperate Slide player famously asked Zvi how to win the matchup... to which he responded, "You don't have the cards in your sideboard."
But Zvi did.
Zvi understood speed, even then. He sideboarded
His strategy was to lay two-drops, buff them, and get in with haste creatures. An opponent who is spending mana cycling or setting up for a future sorcery is just begging to be brained for 6 on turn three. Begging for it. Zvi didn't side in particular cards against
Check out this showstopper by Hall of Famer Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa:
If you don't have a great idea of how this deck works, it's like this:
- Turn 1:
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth +Thoughtseize [opponent's answer] - Turn 2:
Dark Depths (now a Swamp) +Vampire Hexmage ; at some point sacrifice the Hexmage in the direction of theDark Depths to make a 20/20 Marit Lage. - Turn 3: Attack for 20 (remember, you already got their answer on turn one)
Now it didn't always go so smoothly. Eventual PT-winner Brian Kibler played
You had to expect that mirror opponents, if they didn't have
A very nice deck that went a long way to protect its combo from common strategies with the tools to anticipate, counter, and overcome that same arguably best strategy even when the opponent pulled it off instead!
Sideboarding Against Sideboarding
The strategies and tactics above speak largely to siding against the opponent's baseline strategy... making your deck a little more customizably efficient, protecting a combo, or winning even when the other player gets his or hers.
But what should be clear by this point is that decks in sideboarded configurations often play quite differently than they did in Game 1. There are extreme examples (transformations and repositionings) that we will go over... but there is also the simple realization that if the opponent looks different... you might want to, too.
This example is a little bit cheating because Osyp played a pair of
Ravager Affinity decks—especially in an era with full-on
So you've got a fist full of
...and won, via primary strategy (more-or-less) anyway.
Repositioning
Personally, my favorite sideboarding strategy is repositioning. You start at 12 o'clock; your opponent aims at 12 o'clock. But you are standing at 3 o'clock so your opponent misses. Game on. Game.
Repositioning relies on a macro understanding of Magic's big archetypes and how they interplay. Like, what's the difference between StOmPy, Sped Red, and Suicide Black?
These decks were all contemporaries and could all start on some sort of flawed 2/1 or 2/2 on the first turn. All of them either hurt themselves (
StOmPy had
Suicide Black could win on the second turn with a
Sped Red could get great tempo draws and would absolutely wipe the floor with Suicide Black... but had different, substantial, problems. It relied on its removal to get through, and its guys were actively bad at creature combat. When forced to interact (rather than forcing the interaction), it was often overpowered.
All these decks, although starting in similar places, interacted in wildly different ways with the other decks of the format. One was a swarm beatdown deck with no way to win outside of attacking; one was a disruptive demi-combo deck; and one was a beatdown/burn deck with a resource-denying sub-theme. Which one(s) would you want to play against if you were a combo deck? Which would you run and hide from?
Mark Gordon played a straight Red Deck to a victory through the star-studded Top 8 of GPKC '99. His deck was offensively solid with big
But after boards, Gordon could take out his
It is simple-minded to reduce this to color-specific sideboarding. He isn't just moving to trade a 'Blast with any old blue card. He is literally rebuilding his archetype. This isn't a Red Deck any more. He has transformed himself into a Suicide Black deck!... that happens to tap Mountains. He is now a tempo/disruption deck. His starting configuration was not fast enough offensively to race
Even the greatest Standard deck of all time could improve strategically via sideboarding!
Caw-Blade could remove its permission cards and replace them with board control cards like
A beatdown deck of the era might salivate at the idea of fighting a UW permission deck that had to draw the right colors in the right order... but what about a removal deck that topped up on
Twelve o'clock? Meet three o'clock.
Surprise!
Surprise! sideboards put many of these elements together. You make the opponent's cards bad. You anticipate the opponent's sideboarded configuration and present a deck that you don't think he or she can beat. Your opponent's got all the wrong answers, but baby, have you got threats.
Surprise! sideboards tend to create the splashiest swings in win percentage... at least as long as they remain surprising. On balance, they tend to require tons of sideboard space, so they can cost you flexibility, especially if you have to play a third game.
Perhaps the greatest and most famous of the Surprise! sideboards was Jon Finkel's Prison deck from 1997, Jon's first PT Top 8. He played a deck that was overwhelmingly artifacts and enchantments. He would play a progressive game of Diamonds into Icys, slowing the opponent down with
Losing to Jon's deck would take...forever. Opponents couldn't reach for their sideboards fast enough. All artifacts and enchantments. Lock combo-control deck. Check and check. Wait until you see this stack of
But Jon?
Knowing the opponent would go for artifact and enchantment removal, Jon—Surprise!—switched in his
The hapless opponent would have more-or-less one line: Hope the greatest player of all time—though not yet—was mana screwed.
When you use the Surprise! strategy, you start with a deck that can lull the opponent into making what should be an obvious change: No creatures? Overload of some other kind of permanent? The opponent almost only has one way to go.
Sucker.
The opponent has all the wrong answers but no way to compete with your actual threats.
Color-Specific Sideboarding
...will have to wait for next week.
I hope you liked this overview of various sideboarding strategies and tactics. We promise you'll like—or at least be super excited by—next week even more.