Deck Masters: Magic, with a Side of Board

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BrianH369

30 June 2012

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Hello, and welcome to my second article and the first (official) iteration of Deck Masters on TappedOut.net! Thank you all so much for the overwhelmingly positive response to my first article on deck building from last week, and I’m sorry it has taken me so long to finally finish this one up. Apparently I was being a TAD over confident when I said I could write a “couple” of these a week….

This article (if you haven’t already guessed) is about the oftentimes misunderstood Sideboard. I say sideboards are misunderstood because a lot of the time it seems that people don’t understand the function and relative importance of their deck’s sideboard. I’ve heard the phrase “back-up plan” arise frequently among circles of players discussing what they think their sideboard is supposed to do. While it is not inherently untrue that to some extent parts of your sideboard can be part of a back up plan, this type of thinking I feel perpetuates the misconception that the sideboard is less important than the “main” 60 cards or is somehow not directly connected to your plan A that I discussed in my article last week.

So let me start by dispelling these ideas with some facts and numbers. Every match you play starts the same, with you playing your main deck of 60 cards versus your opponent’s for game one. Once that concludes one way or the other, you reach for your side 15 and then play a second game, possibly a third with two opportunities to swap out cards from your SB. What this means statistically speaking is that you play 33.3% - 50% of your games without any sideboard and somewhere between 50% - 66.6% of your games with. Lets say that in a different way so that the gravity of that sinks in: you need your sideboard for more than half of the games you will ever play in a tournament. That’s really huge, and I feel it warrants a certain amount of respect for sideboard building that is in short supply among the community. Really, every single card choice in your sideboard is just as important as the choices you make for your main deck, and in general, I’d say sideboard building is actually more difficult to do and takes more thought as a result.

So how do you build a functional sideboard? First off and most basically, you must only consider cards for your sideboard that your main deck can reasonably support playing. This goes beyond the very simple concept of using cards in the colors you play into the realm of using cards that can be supported by your mana curve established by your main 60 as well as, and this might seem elementary, playing cards that don’t harm you more than your opponent. More on that later.

The key to building a winning sideboard is in a lot of ways the same to building a winning deck: know your enemy. Learn the meta, playtest against it, discover your week match ups and find ways to improve them.

Of course, things are never that simple, especially in Magic (if it was, this article would be MUCH shorter), and there a number of pitfalls you can run into along the way. The two most common mistakes I’ve seen in sideboard building consist of putting cards in that you think are good but “didn’t make” the main deck, and putting cards in because they “feel like sideboard cards” and are simply in your colors.

Lets start with putting cards that you like into your sideboard that don’t necessarily have a premeditated purpose there. This mistake is pretty easy to spot and just as easy to avoid doing and yet even at the highest levels of Magic, players seem to make it. Luis Scott Vargas himself recently admitted to doing this with Karn Liberated in most of his recent Standard decks. (although, he is right. Karn IS pretty good against decks with permanents…) If you like a card that you don’t have a specific matchup in mind for and think it’s powerful, ask yourself why it isn’t in your main deck. If the answer isn’t “I don’t know, it really should be” then you probably don’t want to put it in you sideboard either. Don’t just jam powerful cards into your sideboard blindly as space filler when you don’t know what else to put in either. It’s not that you have 15 slots to fill up, it’s that you ONLY have 15 slots to utilize. If you come up short, it’s because you are missing some number of options available to your deck, and you need to go out and find them.

The “feels like” a sideboard card mistake is generally reserved for players somewhat lower on the totem pole than LSV, but it is still something that I see extremely frequently. Flashfreeze, Celestial Purge, Timely Reinforcements, and Ancient Grudge all fit into this category of cards that “feel like” sideboard cards. The reason for this is that they have extremely narrow applications, but are potentially very powerful and cost efficient. Now, I’m not saying that those are BAD qualities for a sideboard card, quite the contrary really. However, you need to consider what the card actually does within the context of your deck and its opposing matchups before you just cram them into your deck.

An example of this is Timely Reinforcements in the sideboard of your W/X Tokens deck. Presumably, if you are playing a tokens deck, you will almost always have more creatures in play than your opponent, so effectively, Timely Reinforcements=Angel's Mercy, which is, you know, awful.

From the reverse side there are cards that exist that hose decks that do not exist in the meta. This goes back to my point about knowing your enemy. Basically, Tunnel Ignus has no business in your sideboard because it hoses something that doesn’t exist in the meta currently. So don’t use it.

So, you know your enemies, you know all of the hosers available to your deck, and suddenly you realize that you need a 30 card sideboard. You can’t really do that though, so you should probably trim some of the fat. Take a look at your matchups again. There should be some you have trouble with and some you can easily win whenever it arises. If this is not true of your deck, you’ve either broken the format (send me your list by next weekend’s PTQ, k? thnx) or you’re doing something very wrong and need to seriously overhaul your deck. Regardless, if you have a fair deck with game against the field, you should anticipate sideboarding more for your rough match-ups than for your good ones. If you crush RB Zombies all day you won’t need those Celestial Purges, but you still might want some more Nihil Spellbombs for that rough Solar Flare game, so replace them.

From here we can start to get into some more technical (less obvious at least) stuff. A while ago I said we’d come back to the idea of not playing “symmetrical” cards that hose you worse than your opponent, and well, now we’ve come back to it. What I mean by “symmetrical” cards are cards like Graffdigger’s Cage, Rule of Law, and Torpor Orb. Sure, it would be sweet to turn off all of those terrible Restoration Angel or Snapcaster Mage shenanigans that Delver pulls with a Torpor Orb, but you really can’t afford to play it in say Naya Pod where ALL of your creatures have ETB triggers.

This is not to say that you cannot ever play something like Grafdigger's Cage in a deck just because you have some flashback spells. If you have a matchup where you know that you will hinder your opponent more with the Cage, by all means, bring it in.

This is also a way to potentially catch somebody off guard. In fact, at a local 5K I attended about a month ago, I did just that.

I was playing against a Solar Flare player who was in absolute shock when on turn four I Trinket Maged for Grafdigger's Cage and played it. The first game we played he had seen a Sun Titan bringing back Phantasmal Images and 2 copies of Lingering Souls. After the match, my rather tilted opponent suggested that I take out the Grafdigger's Cage. My only response was, “Why? It beat you, right?” What he didn’t realize is that I had a sideboard plan for Solar Flare that involved taking out two Lingering Souls and two Sun Titan for Entreat the Angels, Grafdigger's Cage, Nihil Spellbomb and Trinket Mage. Even still, I did end up turning off the flashback on my Forbidden Alchemys and Think Twices, but in the end, the Cage was nowhere near as brutal to me as it was to my opponent, who lost access to almost all of the cards in his deck AND he didn’t see it coming, so he had no reason to sideboard against it.

I have one final point to make about sideboard building, and it is possibly the most important thing to remember when building, testing, or playing with your board: after game one, you aren’t playing against the same 60 cards a second time. Your opponent gets to sideboard too! This seems like an obvious statement, and that’s because it is, but the implications of this when planning your SB are somewhat harder to see.

So, what does this mean? It means that not only should you know you’re enemy, but you can gain a distinct advantage by anticipating what they will do as well. For instance, let say you play 3-4 Phantasmal Image in your main deck and your opponent is traditional UW Delver. Odds are, they will end up seeing an Image or two game one and decide that Geist of Saint Traft isn’t very good against you, so you can reasonably assume that they will board him out. With that assumption in mind, you probably won’t need to bring in any extra Images or Geth’s Verdicts in anticipation of the Geist, so you may not need to include them in your sideboard at all.

You should also anticipate what your opponent will bring in from their sideboard against you. If for instance you are playing Solar Flare (I keep ending up back at this deck today…) you can assume that some number of your opponents will be packing Grafdigger's Cage, Nihil Spellbomb, Surgical Extraction, and maybe even Tormod's Crypt in the next couple weeks. If you feel that your opponent’s deck can afford to run any of these hosers versus you, you may want to consider sidestepping these hate cards all together by playing with different win conditions. Try siding out your trusty Unburial Rites and Sun Titans for some Consecrated Sphinx and Entreat the Angels. By doing this, you turn their countermeasures against you into blank cards that they will hopefully draw into, which will allow you to pull ahead.

Well, I hope you all enjoy my second article half as much as you seemed to have liked the first. Tune in next week where I will briefly discuss a deck with a sideboard of 15 basic Islands while talking about Shells! Good luck at your PTQ’s this weekend (if this article is up before then)!