Your sideboard is just as important as your main deck—sometimes even more so.
Consider this: in a best-of-3 Round Robin tournament, you are guaranteed to play at least as many game 2s and game 3s as you will play game 1s.
Also consider this: your deck could win every single game 1 you play, but your record is not likely to reflect that game 1 dominance if it’s not performing well in games 2 and 3.
The mantra of “taking out the bad cards and putting in the good cards” certainly serves as a starting point for what to consider when cutting and adding cards for each matchup, but it doesn’t get us across the finish line when building a sideboard from scratch. It’s a multi-step process that I recently embarked upon for my pet deck in Modern: Grixis Death’s Shadow.
Here, we’ll look at the steps I took to building my very own sideboard, tailor made for my meta. I will reference my own spreadsheet that I built for this project; my spreadsheet can be found here.
1. Know Your Meta
This is the first and most important piece of building a sideboard. Without this information, it’s difficult to proceed. Sideboards are built with specific decks in mind, so it is extremely helpful if you already know what you will be up against week in and week out. For a larger, unknown meta—one you might find at a MagicFest, for example—this ends up being an educated guessing game that involves discerning the most popular decks overall right now.
For this discussion, we’ll look exclusively at building a sideboard for a known meta—one you might find weekly at your local gaming store.
Make a list of every deck in your meta. Consider the decks you know you see every week, the decks you see multiples of, and perhaps even the decks you saw one time and haven’t seen in a while. Once you have your list of decks, it’s time to begin that careful study.
2. Research Your Meta
It’s helpful to know the kinds of decks you’ll be up against each week as well as the cards within those decks. Some research on MTGtop8.com and other similar websites can be helpful for getting an idea of the common versions of the decks you’re up against in your own meta.
Even more helpful is to know what these decks seek to accomplish by using those cards as well as the ways in which those decks will seek to attack your deck. For example, UW Stoneblade is a control deck that is chock-o’-block full of answers (in the form of removal and counterspells) that seeks to outgrind and outlast Grixis Death’s Shadow, a notoriously threat-light deck. To combat this as a Death’s Shadow player, I want to take an approach that allows me to quickly establish a threat and then protect it from Stoneblade’s multitude of answers. Thus, my sideboard choices for the deck should reflect that.
Performing this task for each deck you expect to face in your meta will not be a short process, but it will give you a better understanding of your deck, its various matchups against other decks, and its role in those matchups.
3. Consider Your Best and Worst Matchups
There are some matchups where you are heavily favored and will not need to sideboard. Grixis Death’s Shadow decks tend to feast on combo decks because of Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek, which strip combo pieces from the opponent’s hand. These are not decks that a Grixis Death’s Shadow player should prepare to defend with the sideboard; the main deck already does a good enough job of that.
We don’t need to run up the score on anyone. With the sideboard, we want to gain an edge against our weakest matchups.
4. List the Bad Cards by Matchup in Your Meta
Imagine your best- and worst-case scenarios for each card. Imagine having one or multiple copies of each card in your opening hand against each deck. Imagine what it will be like to draw that card off the top of your library in the middle of a game when you need a card that is going to bring you closer to victory.
Now imagine the worst cards in each of those situations. These are the cards you want to take out of your deck in a certain matchup.
For this step of the process, it is helpful if you already have some experience playing your deck against some of the other decks you expect to face in your meta. It is possible to complete this step without that experience, but you will have to think about each individual card in your deck against each of the decks in your meta.
One of the worst matchups for Grixis Death’s Shadow is Humans, a creature-based strategy. A look at the MTGtop8 deck lists for Humans reveals around 37 creatures and 4 noncreature spells. Because there are so few noncreature spells in the Humans deck, Stubborn Denial is a dead card for Grixis Death’s Shadow.
Ultimately, you want to create a list of the worst cards in your deck against each of the other decks you will face in the meta. Write down how many total cards you want to take out in each of those matchups. Eventually, your sideboard should have cards that fill each of these vacancies for each of these decks. If at all possible, you do not want to go into games 2 and 3 with dead cards in your deck.
5. List Cards that Answer Weaknesses
Every deck has its weaknesses. Sometimes, these weaknesses can be mitigated with good sideboarding. Do not make the common mistake of overextending into your sideboard, though; you never want to switch out too much of your deck and accidentally dilute your real game plan. Consider it like a boxer getting tips from their trainer in between rounds. If you are up against an opponent that is hitting you with a hundred left jabs, it helps to be able to dodge to your left. But that doesn’t mean anything if you can’t then follow up with a left hook of your own.
For example, Grixis Death’s Shadow is weak to go-wide strategies that employ a lot of creatures on the battlefield. The main deck has a fair amount of hand disruption to take creatures from an opponent’s hand as well as removal for creatures on the battlefield, but creature-based strategies can sometimes present more threats than Grixis Death’s Shadow has answers. For that reason, Plague Engineer has become a staple in Grixis Death’s Shadow sideboards to handle tribal strategies (e.g., Humans, Spirits, Merfolk, etc.).
5b. Consider Hate Pieces
Sideboard cards tend to fall into one of two categories: answering weaknesses and hate pieces. Graveyard hate (like Rest in Peace and Surgical Extraction) is the most common kind of hate piece found in most sideboards because graveyard decks are always on the fringe of prevalence if not prevalent at the time. Hate pieces are often the only way to interact with or “turn off” these decks. The aforementioned Plague Engineer could be considered a “hate piece” against tribal decks, but it also answers a real weakness in Grixis Death’s Shadow.
Hate pieces can be some of the strongest cards in your sideboard because they will often turn off your opponent’s deck to such a degree that you can outright win the game on the spot—or at least use the advantage you gain to propel you closer to victory.
Although many are not as strong as an “I win” button (like Rest in Peace against a graveyard deck), there are hate pieces for every card type and every archetype, though not every color has access to hate pieces for every card type (for example, red struggles in dealing with enchantments). Choose your hate pieces and the number of hate pieces wisely. Consider which decks your deck performs the most poorly against, and look for hate pieces that answer multiple decks.
I had a difficult task of finding a graveyard hate piece for Grixis Death’s Shadow, a deck which often relies on its own graveyard. Many graveyard hate pieces, like Grafdigger’s Cage, are symmetrical in that they prevent both players from accessing their graveyard. However, Ashiok, Dream Render is a strong “one-sided” hate piece that can exile everything from an opponent’s graveyard. Ashiok has the added benefit of denying your opponent the ability to search their library—a denial that can sting in a fetchland format like Modern. Furthermore, in Grixis Death’s Shadow, Ashiok has the added benefit of putting more cards in my graveyard, helping me to delve for a Gurmag Angler or adding flashback targets for Snapcaster Mage. Ashiok has the added benefit of both hating out my opponents and furthering my own game plan.
6. Find Commonalities
At this point, you should have a list of all the decks in your meta, the cards that are helpful against those decks, and the number of open spots you’ll have against each of those decks.
With your list of cards on the y axis, put the decks in your meta on the x axis. Next to each card, put a mark underneath each deck to indicate that the card is worth considering as a sideboard piece against that deck, and do not put a mark next to the card if it is not a fit against that deck. On my spreadsheet (and as illustrated in the example above), I chose to fill these cells in black to make them stand out and to create a visual aid to indicate the most common cards.
What you’ll end up with is a scatterplot chart that will very clearly indicate which cards are most heavily featured. The cards that are the most widely represented across matchups should factor into your sideboard. This will allow you to answer multiple decks with one card, thus saving you valuable space for even more answers.
7. Write Up How Many Copies of Each Card You Want to Bring In for Each Matchup
You already have your “outs” for each deck. Now write up your “ins”. Try to keep the numbers balanced so that you have enough cards to bring in for each matchup and that you won’t have any bad cards left over in your deck for games 2 and 3.
Keep in mind that you only have 15 sideboard spots to work with, so it’s important to maximize those spots by including as many cards as possible that answer a wide range of the decks you’ll face. These might also be the cards you consider carrying multiple copies of, whereas the narrower cards might only be represented with one copy in your sideboard.
This might take some balancing. You might find that you have too many cards, which might mean you need to readdress step 4 to consider some cards that address a wider range of decks in your meta. In my case, I ended up with 13 cards, which allowed me to bring in two more copies of cards I might want in a pinch.
8. Write Up Your Sideboard Guide
If you did it correctly, your sideboard should be 15 cards, many of which are helpful against a broad range of decks in your meta and some of which are helpful against some of the decks in your meta.
The final step in the process is to write up your own personal sideboard guide. You can reference this between matches—however, do not reference the sideboard guide during a match, as this constitutes “outside notes” and could get you a game loss.
You might find eventually that you can sideboard without referencing your guide, but in the meantime, I hope you will find it helpful to have a template for what to do in between matches.
As a bonus tip for adding your sideboard cards to your deck in between games 1 and 2, instead of going through your deck and pulling out the individual cards you want to remove and then adding the cards from your sideboard into your deck, one way to keep your opponent guessing is to shuffle your sideboard into your deck, then pull out the sideboard cards and main deck cards (15 total) you won’t use. That way, your opponent has no way of knowing how many cards you’ve added from your sideboard. This will take some practice, but it deprives your opponent of some information they could otherwise use to their benefit.
Happy sideboarding!
MTG Frenzy 