Introduction

One of the most overlooked areas of Magic is sideboarding in Limited. In Constructed, sideboard guides are very popular and players often discuss the effectiveness of different plans for different matchups, but sideboarding in Limited doesn’t get nearly the same amount of attention. A while ago I even saw a statistic that almost two thirds of the time players don’t sideboard at all in Arena Best-of-3 drafts. That is wild!

To be fair, it is correct to do so some of the time. Maybe you had to switch colors late in the draft and ended up with a minimal amount of playables so you don’t have any options, or maybe your main deck is already perfectly suited against your opponent’s. Or maybe you already made a mistake in the drafting portion by not picking up potential sideboard cards.

However, these situations should be very rare, especially in modern Limited formats which tend to have plenty of playables and thus plenty of tools to calibrate your deck towards different matchups.

I suspect that one of the reasons why players don’t sideboard nearly enough in Limited is that they just don’t have a clear idea of all the things they could be doing. Another reason is that the concept of matchups is more vague in Limited than it is in Constructed. With 60 card decks (or 80 card ones) you often know your opponents entire decklist, or at least you can make a very accurate estimate. But in Limited there is much more variance in deckbuilding, which makes it difficult to estimate the contents of your opponents deck.

Hopefully in this article I can broaden your understanding of how to adjust your deck during sideboarding and help you improve in an important area of Limited play.

Strategic Factors

From a strategic point of view, the most common reasons you want to change your deck during sideboarding are that you either want to make your deck faster or you want to make it more powerful.

If you identify that the games are likely to go long and that the matchup is about grinding wins through card advantage, then you should likely change the individually weakest cards in your deck for more powerful ones.

Let’s say you had a Blue-White draft deck in Wilds of Eldraine, and you were maindecking a 《Frostbridge Guard》 over a third copy of 《Into the Fae Court》. If you are playing against another slow Blue deck, you probably want to board out the two-drop in favor of the third draw spell.

Different cards convert mana into extra power at different rates. For example, 《Another Chance》 does this at a better rate than 《Dutiful Return》. The slower the matchup, the more appealing it is to board in cards like 《Dutiful Return》, even if their conversion rates aren’t the best.

However, focusing too much on card advantage might also lead you astray in some slow matchups. For example, if both decks are better at blocking than attacking, the board is likely to get stalled and then the amount of cards is not necessarily the most relevant factor. Finding ways to break those board stalls with 《Overrun》 effects, or to circumvent them entirely with unblockable creatures like 《Watertight Gondola》 (《Waterlogged Hulk》) can be the most effective path to victory.

On the other hand, if you identify that a matchup is more about speed, you would ideally like to lower your curve and focus on efficiently converting mana into board presence and life total advantage. If your own deck is on the slower side, this could mean boarding in cheap blockers, tricks or answers like 《Reasonable Doubt》 against an aggressive opponent. Alternatively, if your own deck is also fast and the games are likely to be about racing, cards like 《Ruin-Lurker Bat》 or 《Sanguine Savior》 might be worth their mana cost in gold even if they are not particularly powerful.

While in Draft you are usually constrained to sideboarding only a small handful of cards, in Sealed you might be able to do drastic changes like changing your colors entirely. Sometimes the opponents have decks with such powerful late games that you can’t really compete with them on that axis.

Instead, your best chance for victory could be changing the terms of engagement and trying to go under them by switching to a more aggressive deck, even if it means playing a deck that’s weaker on abstract power level. This strategy is often closer to choosing a lesser evil than claiming an advantage, but it can improve your win percentage nonetheless – it’s better to be a 45%-to-55% underdog than a 35%-to-65% one!

In all of these aforementioned situations it’s important not to be too focused on card quality alone. Cards that are generally labeled as bad or mediocre can often serve important roles in matchups if you’re keeping an open mind.

Concrete Factors

Aligning Your Answers

In addition to the strategic factors of how to make your deck line up better against their deck, it is also important to consider what I call “Concrete Factors”: how do your individual cards line up against the cards in their deck?

Perhaps the clearest example of this is aligning your answers to their threats. A card like 《Pick Your Poison》 might be too narrow to be worth including in your main deck, but if you lose game 1 to an 《Ezrim, Agency Chief》, you’re going to want to bring it in from the sideboard.

When bringing in these situational answers, you need to balance their rewards with the potential risks. In the case of 《Pick Your Poison》 against 《Ezrim, Agency Chief》, the rewards are massive, as the flier is often otherwise unbeatable and trading a one mana card for a five mana card is a huge tempo swing. The risks, on the other hand, are the times when they don’t have any targets for the spell and you end up losing the game with it in hand, or the times when the card it replaced would’ve won you the game instead.

For example, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where you board out a 《Fanatical Strength》 to make room for the 《Pick Your Poison》, and then end up in a spot where the pump spell would let you push through lethal damage, but the 《Pick Your Poison》 is stranded in your hand without any relevant targets.

The reverse is also important: aligning your threats to their answers. If you keep track of the removal spells that your opponent plays, you can sometimes spot weaknesses that you can exploit, or strengths you can mitigate.

For example, if the opponent plays 3 《Cut In》 in the first game, it could be smart to replace your 《Twisted Sewer-Witch》 with a 《Scream Puff》 for the crucial fifth point of toughness. Or if they have 2 《Shock》 and a 《Hard-Hitting Question》, then you probably want to replace your 《Griffnaut Tracker》 with, well, pretty much anything.

Prepare For Combat

In addition to being important against toughness-based removal like 《Shock》 and 《Soul Enervation》, the statlines of your creatures also matter a great deal for creature combat.

Look at 《Exit Specialist》, for example. Against some decks it can be an unblockable 《Man-o’-War》, which is fantastic! But if they are filtering mana with 《Gravestone Strider》 to flip their 《Faerie Snoop》, the 《Exit Specialist》 might not contribute to your game plan in a particularly meaningful manner.

Creatures with evenly matched power and toughness tend to be universally good, whereas the value of creatures with high power and low toughness, or low power and high toughness, varies a lot based on the opponents cards. It’s important to identify if there are specific pressure points or power thresholds.

Some decks might be completely unable to attack through an 《Agency Coroner》 or a 《Rotting Mastodon》. Red decks in particular have trouble punching through high-toughness blockers.

This same logic naturally extends to combat tricks as well. While I think 《Auspicious Arrival》 is a better card in a vacuum than 《Fanatical Strength》, if you need your 《Person of Interest》 to attack through 《Lumbering Laundry》 and 《Benthic Criminologists》, it’s quite clear which combat trick you should have in your deck. Concrete, practical details like this often matter more than abstract power level.

Keep Them Guessing

Speaking of combat tricks, another thing I like to do is switching ones the opponent has seen for ones they haven’t. Many draft sets have plenty of combat tricks that are close to each other in power level and they usually aren’t very contested, so for the decks that are interested in playing any copies, it’s easy to end up with more of them than you really need or want. Their practical value also depends heavily on how much the opponent is playing around them.

For example, if they are expecting an 《Auspicious Arrival》 they might get blown out by 《The Chase Is On》.

The same idea can be used on a grander scheme as well. Sometimes your Sealed pool has two (or even more) decks in it that are close to each other in power level. I already alluded to the possibility of switching colors entirely earlier, and surprise factor is definitely one of the reasons to do so. Not only does it make playing the game harder for your opponent, it might also mess up their sideboarding completely!

This is particularly effective if the alternative builds of your pool are very different in style. For example, if you have a slow, grindy deck in game one, the opponent is likely to board out some cheap cards for more powerful but expensive ones, and you can punish this by boarding into a streamlined, aggressive deck instead.

This works particularly well on the play. And again, the reverse is just as effective: if your game one deck is an aggressive one, then boarding into a slower deck with a better late game might catch your opponent off guard.

Conclusion

Until next time,

Matti Kuisma (X)