During our latest local Legacy event, one of the other players was giving my Caw Cartel list from my last article a shot—props, by the way. When paired against Maverick with Punishing Fire, he correctly identified the fact that he needed to bring in a way to deal with that engine, as otherwise it becomes essentially impossible to win. Sadly what he decided to do was to give Surgical Extractions some play time.
That is a terrible plan! Extractions are practically dead cards against Maverick outside of Punishing Fire and the last thing you want to draw aside from that one turn when they don’t have a Grove open and a Fire in the yard.
This observation isn’t meant to bash the player in question. Figuring out that kind of thing is hard to do on the fly, especially when you’re not familiar with the deck in question and look at your sideboard in the middle of the match hoping to find some way to deal with a threat you hadn’t anticipated. Today I will go over some fundamental considerations concerning sideboarding so that all of you will be better prepared the next time you face something you aren’t ready for.
Sideboarding is an oft-ignored art, and one that is particularly difficult to get right in Legacy. There are just so many viable decks that it is pretty much impossible to either address all matchups during sideboard construction or to have set sideboard plans against them. Accordingly, many players make glaring mistakes during sideboarding, especially if they aren’t intimately familiar with their deck of choice. To make those decisions correctly, it is necessary to first understand how sideboard cards work in general.
Blowouts and Tweaks
There are exactly two types of cards one should find in a well-constructed sideboard (ignoring Wish-boards and transformational sideboards here—some other time maybe): powerful hate cards (blowouts) and extremely efficient utility cards that are too narrow for the maindeck (tweaks). The goal during sideboarding is to either simply trump the opponent’s strategy with cards they can’t beat if they stick or to make sure your deck is a well-oiled machine against exactly the threats your opponent brings.
Some examples of each type to illustrate where I’m going with this:
Blowouts
Circle of Protection: Red
Choke
Ethersworn Canonist
Perish
Leyline of the Void
Umezawa’s Jitte
Sulfuric Vortex
Xantid Swarm
These cards all have such a massive impact on the game when cast that just finding them will often be game winning nearly no matter what’s going on in the game other than that. The downside? Most of them have very specific applications and are lackluster outside of the matchups they’re meant for.
Tweaks
Red Elemental Blast
Path to Exile
Diabolic Edict
Spell Pierce
Flusterstorm
Duress
Vendilion Clique
Oblivion Ring
Disenchant
Engineered Explosives
These cards, on the other hand, won’t win you matches all on their own. What they do is to give you answers to threats your maindeck can’t handle, interactive capabilities in areas you usually can’t interact in, superior redundancy in a certain kind of effect that is paramount in a matchup, or solutions that are simply ultra-efficient instead of just straight up powerful.
Finally, there are the in-betweens: hybrids. Some cards can be either blowouts or tweaks depending on both your deck and your opponent’s. Note that they will still be one or the other in each matchup; they only fluctuate before we’ve opened the box and seen what exactly we’re facing.
Hybrids
Surgical Extraction
Relic of Progenitus
Blood Moon
Back to Basics
Wrath of God
Mindbreak Trap
Hurkyl’s Recall
Two Sideboards Analyzed
To illustrate, let’s take a look at two sideboards from decks I’ve written about (decklists included because these considerations only make sense in the context of the deck the cards are used in):
Lands (15)
Spells (45)
- 1 Tendrils of Agony
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Cabal Ritual
- 4 Duress
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 1 Grim Tutor
- 3 Cabal Therapy
- 4 Lotus Petal
- 4 Lion's Eye Diamond
- 4 Infernal Tutor
- 4 Ponder
- 1 Ad Nauseam
- 2 Preordain
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 1 Past in Flames
Sideboard
So how does this sideboard break down?
Blowouts
Tweaks
1 Chrome Mox
2 Chain of Vapor
2 Echoing Truth
1 Cabal Therapy
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Grim Tutor
Hybrid
Well, I guess the more interesting question is actually why does it break down like this? Chrome Mox and Grim Tutor are there to tweak your gameplan. All you are doing is trying to increase the number of business spells and accelerators to be able to go off a little bit faster than the maindeck configuration could. The Empty the Warrens has a similar role. Against decks that are vulnerable to an early Goblin swarm, it allows you in a single card to modify your strategy and go for early wins for a lower total mana cost.
The bounce spells, on the other hand, don’t adjust how your deck implements its plan; instead they serve as cheap and efficient answers to all forms of permanent based disruption, something the maindeck can’t actually deal with. Finally, the fourth Cabal Therapy provides additional redundancy against stack-based control elements.
As far as the blowouts are concerned, Infest serves to eliminate boards flooded with hate bears. An answer, yes, but one with enough impact to, on its own, completely destroy the strategy of opponents like Maverick against this deck.
Extirpate is one of those cards that is a hybrid for many decks but has a very particular target in this deck, anchoring it firmly in the blowouts section. While it could serve as utility—for example against decks that use Intuition as a Tutor—you won’t be boarding it in for those matchups. You’re better off protecting the integrity of your engine. Here, you only want it against Reanimator and Dredge. Against both decks Extirpate serves as an extremely powerful answer to their strategy that will disrupt them significantly enough to usually win you the game.
Finally, Hurkyl’s Recall is a card that has blowout potential but is included for its value as a tweak. It will work as a blowout sideboard card in certain matchups (Stax especially) but as those are rather rare, it’s mainly present as an additional out to Chalice of the Void (some Aggro Loam builds for example).
Looking at a sideboard for a very different deck, here is my latest Caw Cartel list again:
Creatures (8)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (13)
Spells (37)
Once more, the breakdown:
Blowouts
None
Tweaks
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Counterspell
2 Path to Exile
2 Spell Pierce
1 Vendilion Clique
Hybrids
1 Terminus
3 Surgical Extraction
2 Back to Basics
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
As you can see, there are no pure blowouts. Spell Pierces, Counterspell, and Vendilion Clique are cheap interactive cards meant to allow you to tailor your interactive pieces towards becoming more of a stack-based control deck, in the same vein that the Paths allow you to raise your spot removal quota. The Explosives and Oblivion Ring are meant to give you more ways to interact with hard to touch threats, be it Nimble Mongoose, enchantments, or planeswalkers.
Yet the sideboard isn’t totally devoid of powerful bombs; only they all also have value as tweaks depending on context. Surgical Extraction gives you a means to interact with a graveyard and serves as useful interaction against combo decks even if it isn’t stellar against them. At the same time you’re generally on the double-Extraction plan against Dredge (hit both Narcomoebas and Ichorids to completely disarm them), which is where it has its role as a blowout.
Back to Basics similarly just completely locks some people out of the game (*cough* 43 lands *cough*), but it also provides you with an answer to Punishing Fire/Grove (as alluded to at the beginning). Terminus, as a Wrath effect, can blowout some decks (Maverick for example) but also covers you against threats like Emrakul and Nimble Mongoose.
Jitte, finally, is a dominating card in some matchups (such as U/R Delver) but also has the utility of clocking opponents faster if the round threatens to end before you can finish the match.
When to Tweak and When to Blowout
Now that we understand how these two types of sideboard cards function, the important question becomes when to use which, something the structure of the sideboards above may already have given you an idea about.
As blowout cards tend to be more restricted in application—they usually are insane against certain decks or situations and pointless against others—you will want to use that type of card only when you need something that can swing matchup percentages massively or when the expected percentage of decks where the card is live is very high; say Choke in a format with a lot of Islands.
Given how CabalANT is already very good against a lot of the metagame and mainly weak to a very particular set of cards/strategies, it makes sense that you would use blowout cards to address those and some tweaks to cover all the bases against less common disruption.
On the flip side, if your deck has close matchups across the board and few cards/interactions you’re incredibly weak to, you will mainly want to use tweaks to allow you to fine tune your deck against particular strategies so that it can simply carry out its usual plan with heightened efficiency. That is the case with Caw Cartel, and the sideboard reflects that.
The biggest advantage you gain from doing this is that it allows your sideboard to cover more ground. Because your cards are less specific in application, your sideboard cards will allow you to make meaningful changes against a wider range of opponents. This is a valuable quality for your cards to have, especially in a format as wide open as Legacy.
That doesn’t mean your percentages will necessarily end up better overall than in a deck that needs blowout style sideboard cards; after all, you’re using blowout cards because your matchups are more lopsided, meaning that against those decks where you don’t meaningfully sideboard you should already be favored to begin with. This only becomes a problem against decks that a) you didn’t expect to show up and b) that are actually hard to beat for you anyway.
How do hybrid cards fit in here? Well, as all upside, obviously. If your hybrid cards actually function as blowouts in those matchups where you need them to, the additional utility they provide when used to tweak is just gravy. Free matchup percentage thrown in to sweeten the deal, if you want. By using cards of that nature which still fill your need for blowouts in the relevant matchups, you gain marginal percentage against a multitude of decks while also salvaging your bad matchups.
It is therefore a very good idea to always think about possible uses for your blowouts outside of that capacity. This will help you to answer unexpected threats when forced to board on the fly and allow you to build sideboards that can solve many more problems than meets the eye. The way I use Back to Basics in Caw Cartel as my catchall answer for disturbing non-basics while also grabbing some blowout potential on the way is a good example of this.
Theory and Praxis
Given these overarching theoretical foundations, the question is how does knowing all this actually help you play better and build better decks? You’re reading to learn how to win more, after all (though I hope there is some enjoyment involved too).
Well, by knowing what type of cards your deck needs, you can construct better sideboards as just illustrated. You will also make much more effective decisions when forced to board on the fly.
Let’s go back to the starting example of boarding Caw Cartel against Punishing Fire Maverick, assuming you’ve lived under a rock for the last six months and never played against the deck. You look at your sideboard and try to figure out what to bring in. Well, they’re extremely creature heavy and, judging from game 1, will try to grind you out in the long game. That sure sounds as if Terminus, Path to Exile, and the Jitte will be good here. Oblivion Ring and Engineered Explosives also seem like cards that might prove useful, assuming there are worse cards in the maindeck (note that a player that knows Maverick will definitely want to board in Oblivion Ring so as to have more answers to Choke, but we’re assuming boarding on the fly here).
Yet there’s also that annoying Fire/Grove engine against which you need additional utility, namely the ability to disable the engine long enough to ramp them out with Jace. There are only two ways for you to interact with that engine at all: Surgical Extraction and Back to Basics. Both will generally be able to keep the engine locked down under the assumption that you can find a safe spot to stick them. The questions now become a) which is easier to stick and b) which one has more utility against them outside of answering Fire/Grove.
With Surgical, there are no positive interactions against anything they do but the Punishing Fires (no, making Knight of the Reliquary a little smaller doesn’t count) and sticking them becomes nigh impossible against a decent player once they find a second Grove. Back to Basics, on the other hand, is a perfectly serviceable tool to interact with Grove of the Burnwillows, answers any number of Groves, and also serves as a blowout some of the time (whenever their draw includes a lot of non-basics).
The main disadvantage here is that they might have enchantment removal to be able to get the engine back up again, though that seems less likely than them finding two Groves what with Knight of the Reliquary and you having very few maindeck targets for enchantment or artifact removal.
So these are the cards you’ll definitely want to bring in:
2 Path to Exile
1 Terminus
2 Back to Basics
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
These are the maybes:
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Engineered Explosives
Now, checking the maindeck for cards that seem lackluster, the Spell Pierces seem atrocious and clearly want replacing. Countermagic in general seems rather weak against them and with so many rather expensive spells that all seem to end in Knight of the Reliquary, the Spell Snares can probably go too. Vendilion Clique is easily outclassed—you are not going to be able to race them with anything but Entreat the Angels—and the disruption effect is very minor against a deck that is nothing but creatures.
Everything else seems pretty good actually; yet you still need to make room for Jitte, which sure looks like it’d be a blowout here quite often. The weakest remaining maindeck cards are probably the Counterspells, so this is the swap I’d make on the fly when applying the principles I’ve outlined.
Out:
2 Spell Pierce
2 Spell Snare
1 Counterspell
1 Vendilion Clique
In:
2 Path to Exile
1 Terminus
2 Back to Basics.
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
Wait, do hear the chorus of, "But you’re supposed to board out Force of Will at the very least when you don’t expect Choke"? No, no, you’re not supposed to do that.
I know other blue decks like U/W Stoneblade will want to remove Force of Will against other fair decks. Caw Cartel absolutely doesn’t. Different from those decks, you actually have an insane card advantage engine that is easily able to fuel Force of Will even in grindy matchups, and the tempo gained by Forcing spells is much more important in a control deck that has such an overwhelming late game (for those interested, my full boarding plan removes the other Counterspell for an Oblivion Ring).
The Full Fifteen
To recapitulate, when building a sideboard or sideboarding on the fly, ask yourself where you need to use air strikes and where the ability of a special forces commando unit will be more appropriate. If you can get both the air strike and the adaptable combat team, count your blessings and profit. Just make sure you don’t send airplanes to attack a pure anti-air position. Alright, alright, I’ll stop using that weird military metaphor now.Â
In sideboarding, as in anything else Magic, the most important thing is to have a plan to guide your actions. That doesn’t mean you need to have it all figured out in advance, but you need to know how and why the cards you’re using are actually in the 75.
Once you can answer the question if you’re just tweaking or if you’re truly relying on your sideboard cards to swing the game by themselves, you’re already halfway to reaching the correct decision. After that you "only" need to understand what’s going on well enough to make the correct cuts, and your sideboarding should deliver at least reasonable results.
That’s it from me for this week; I hope you enjoyed this return to basic strategy instead of the more decklist driven articles of the past month. Let me know if this was helpful for any of you and where you totally disagree with me. Until next time, remember: in with the good, out with the bad.