Sideboarding 201

Written By - Thomas NeilsonApril 30th, 2024

Making The Most Of Your 15

Your sideboard consists of 15 cards, allowing you to tune your strategy to adapt to the multitude of decks in the metagame. But how do you choose the 15 cards that make up your sideboard? What cards are important? What strategies should you focus on targeting? How should you attack those strategies?

Building a strong sideboard is crucial for competitive play, as they let you adjust to your opponents decks which is especially critical against decks with strong linear game plans like Adramelech Black Magic, or Sharn Boars. These decks focus on specific types of effects, such as Eradication or Tokens, and can be susceptible to various hate cards that target those effects. Without proper sideboard pieces to fight against these decks they can easily combo away and trample over your gameplan.

Designing your Sideboard Plan

With 15 sideboard cards and 17 different warlords in the metagame, your sideboard won't be able to dedicate a single slot to every deck. Rather, sideboard design is a dance of compromise, and meta gaming. You'll need to think about the decks you're likely to play against, how your deck interacts and competes against these different archetypes, and how you can overlap your cards to get the most effective overall 15.

In this way, it's crucial to think of a sideboard as more than just a back pocket of tech pieces, but rather as 18 decks, all constructed from the same 65-75 cards. Your sideboard cards aren't just a thing brought in through a vacuum to change the game, they fundamentally change what tools your deck has access to and how your deck plays. In this way, one of the best ways to create a strong well rounded sideboard is to create a sideboard plan.

School of Sideboard Design

To break down building a sideboard, here's the sideboard from my current build of Castiel that I've brought to a recent Battle For Glory and Campaign nights. Do note that this isn't necessarily the best and only sideboard for the list, but I've been happy with the board so far and it illustrates the main points I'll be covering. The full deck list can be found on my recent deck primer here.

One thing to note is that my sideboard does contain a large number of 1-of cards. This isn't necessarily the best/only way to build a sideboard, but is one of my personal preferences for side boarding.

There are a few key aspects that I was focusing on when building my sideboard.

Bad Matchups - Good Sideboarding

The main focus of the sideboard for this list was on the most difficult to fight matchups for the deck, those being Onoskelis, Adramelech, and Ethelhime. When designing my sideboard, these lists were my main focuses, as all three are top tier decks that I'll need to be ready to fight.

Seraphim Shatter Star is my only 3-of card in my sideboard, and for good reason: It's one of my best tools for fighting against both Onoskelis and Ethelhime.

Against Onoskelis, the on-discard ability makes it a fantastic way to recoup card advantage against End Of Days or Fallen Brimstone Sky, huge for a matchup where you need to be prepared to fight through a density of cards and control tools.

For Ethelhime, the ability to superglue a Seraphim warrior onto the board can buy you the board presence needed to survive against their storm kill turns, or just keep a Counter covered Qaphsiel in play for using Bow Of The Archangel or Kabshiel's Favors Of The Seraphim.

The in-discard ability is also fantastic as both of these matches will involve a lot of players trading removal and interaction into each other, and it can be easy to run out of resources. This is especially dangerous against two decks that can easily pull ahead from this position with the right cards. The draw 5 gives you the value push you need to pull ahead, stay ahead, and setup your burn kill before your opponent can recover cards through Treasury Of The Fallen Priestess or Alehouse Drink - Skoal.

Past this, my flexible suite of 1-ofs provides a variety of options for either deck. Against Ethelhime, Welcome To Alburdunn is an easy addition to survive turn 2/3, and Final Resting Place is huge if you can eradicate a Ladonza or other value warrior. The two sideboard Guardians also come in depending on play/draw, with the main deck copy of Oath coming out alongside Sigrid, being replaced by the sideboard copy of Empyrean Empire Of The Lost Messiah. Since Alehouse is packed with ways to shuffle cards away, Empyrean Empire is a less valuable card, since it's far more prone to being removed no matter how many counters you put on it. As such, swapping Guardians allows me to be less reliant on it.

For Onoskelis, Dismantle and Bow Of The Archangel provide more ways to break through a fortified back line, and Majik Void Typhoon can help to recover resources in a late game situation.

For Adramelech, Final Resting Place can stop Ermadexa, Black Magic Sorcerer, and force the opponent to jump through hoops to get it back. Majik Void Typhoon is an incredible card in the matchup for shuffling both decks back in, and potentially blanking a lethal Scour off of Ermadexa.

Divine Denial Of The Seraphim offers another Fortified negate when going first, letting the deck have another point of interaction to protect Mists, and Typhoon, and to interrupt their powerful combo turns. Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement also helps to buy a crucial turn to find lethal before they do.

Plan B

One addition to my versatile sideboard plan is Alexandria, Protector Of The Pure. Helios & Luna, Chaos Divine Lovers, is one of your best controlling tools against a variety of decks, and in certain matchups it can be effective to swap Sigrid out for Alexandria to have consistent access to Helios & Luna. With Sigrid coming out post board, Oath To The Lost Messiah does as well, as it's singularly used to fetch Empyrean Empire at the start of the game. Your second copy of Empyrean Empire comes in here to let you still get Empire online with some consistency, but in these matchups keeping Helios & Luna around is much more crucial than Empire.

The important matchups here are Sh'Lara, Merrisod, Prometheus, and Sharn.

Sh'Lara, Merrisod, and Prometheus are all battle damage focused decks that can struggle to remove a Helios & Luna protected with plenty of holy counters. This allows you plenty of protection to survive and generate resources heading into your veil flip in a way more useful than Empire alone.

Sharn is similar, but with a notable caveat. Sharn lists recently have switched to the Duxvox veil, which allows them to steal two warriors on veil-flip. Whilst Helios & Luna are still incredibly powerful in this matchup, it requires a little bit more effort.

Expel The Darkness is a fortified which can't be responded to which returns all stolen warriors back to their owners control. This is a scot-free way to reclaim your Helios & Luna without them being able to stop you.

Bow Of The Archangel is your other main way to get back Helios & Luna, and your third sideboard copy can come in to help facilitate this, being able to blow up the Duxvox Scorpion attached to Helios & Luna.

Welcome To Alburdunn is another solid option to bring in if worse comes to worse, buying you a turn as long as you have an empty board.

Tuning And Pruning

The rest of the singleton options here provide ways to adjust the deck to fare better against a variety of archetypes and synergies.

Welcome To Alburdunn and Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement are easier additions against other lists threatening kills before you, buying you crucial time.

Dismantle and Divine Denial Of The Seraphim let you tune your negate packages against different decks and their synergies. Against controlling lists like Onoskelis or Gaia, Dismantle helps with fighting against backlines, whilst Divine Denial combats faster archetypes.

Oath To The Lost Messiah is a flexible piece against many eradication focused decks. The on-play ability lets you deal damage to an opponent based on the number of cards in their eradication, which can let you kill a turn sooner than expected against lists like Prometheus, Gaia, and Merrisod.

Final Resting Place is a flexible negate that's in competition for a main deck slot, but is ultimately only needed in matchups with incredibly crucial warriors. Primarily Ethelhime, Adramelech, Mortis, Mal'ady, and Gaia.

CAstiel Sideboard OVerview

As you can see, there are a few main focuses in my sideboard plan.

3x Seraphim Shatter Star

Seraphim Shatter Star is a powerful and flexible piece against two of my most intimidating matchups, and even though it's only really brought in against these two decks, it's absolutely worth the price to turn two different bad matchups in my favor.

1x Alexandria, Protector Of The Pure, 1x Empyrean Empire Of The Lost Messiah

Alexandria provides a great option for dealing with a wide variety of lists. Even though some of these are already good matchups, the two card package of Alex and Empire covers a ton of ground for hating out various decks, turning good matchups into great matchups, and turning bad matchups into better ones for a low overall cost.

1x Galterius, The Wayfaring Knight, 1x Expel The Darkness.

These two cards only come into play in a single matchup each. Galterius provides an option against Ethelhime, and Expel The Darkness is key against Sharn. Although both of these cards are only included for a single matchup, they're powerful and popular deck, and the sideboard options provide important silver bullets in these matchups.

The other 8 cards in my sideboard are all incredibly flexible cards providing powerful options and covering any matchup I could encounter

1x Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement, 1x Welcome To Alburdunn

Welcome and Announcement can help to buy a turn against aggressive battle or effect damage focused decks.

1x Bow Of The Archangel, 1x Majik Void Typhoon

These two cards are already included in the main-deck for setting up your veil flip kill, and the playset of each is completed in the sideboard for matchups that can place certain roadblocks in the way of your turn three.

1x Dismantle, 1x Divine Denial Of The Seraphim

Extra negates are never a bad inclusion in your sideboard, helping to protect key Unified and Fortified cards on a per-matchup basis.

1x Oath To The Lost Messiah, 1x Final Resting Place

Oath is a useful alternative win condition against Eradication focused decks, whilst Final Resting Place hits some of the strongest warriors in the game, especially against decks trying to recur and reuse those warriors.

Building your plan - Answering The Important Questions

Importantly, the actual cards I've shown here don't really matter. The main goal to take forward here is the importance of having a plan with your sideboard.

With the diversity of decks available, it's completely possible to play a tournament without playing against a certain deck, so hyper focusing your sideboard can leave you with 15 useless cards in your deck box.

With only 15 cards available, Sideboarding is a game of rationing: figuring out how to best spread your thin selection of cards to give you the biggest edge possible. This can be an intimidating prospect, but I've got a few questions you can ask yourself to help kickstart your sideboarding process.

What are your worst matchups / The matchups you need the most preparation for

This is a great starting point with sideboarding: figuring out where you need to place the most attention (or potentially the least attention!)

This question covers two main points.

For one, what specific matchups are difficult for your deck? In playtesting you'll often be able to intuit this with the decks you can't seem to beat, or the ones that make you work hard to get any progress. If you're having trouble figuring this out, try talking to other players in the community who've played your deck. They'll often be happy to talk about what matchups can be difficult, and ways to shore up these matchups.

The second point is simply knowing what decks you're likely to play into in any given tournament. This is a more difficult task given the previously mentioned metagame diversity, but for starters: Sharn, Onoskelis, and Adramelech, are some lists that can be more popular and successful in tournament play.

When building your sideboard, these lists should be at the front of your mind. This doesn't necessarily mean you need to dedicate 15 of 15 slots for 6 decks, but rather that you should be actively considering these lists first and foremost.

When planning for these decks you should be considering how feasible and necessary it is to dedicate sideboard slots. If your matchup against Sharn aggro is pretty even, or potentially tilted in your favor, you don't necessarily need to laser focus on sideboard slots, and may even want to leave the list on the backburner to see what other sideboard cards you end up including that help to overlap and benefit the matchup.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there may be one deck that completely crushes yours. Whilst there are sideboard options available, it might require a significant chunk of your 15 to even slightly improve the matchup. At the same time however, the list may also be relatively unpopular. In this case, it might be worth the risk to spread your sideboard cards into other matchups, and accept the risk of the nightmare matchup.

The more common case however is that these lists will overall demand a solid chunk of your sideboard. Regardless of how many cards you bring in for these matchups, the important part is that you have an active plan for how you plan to play into these matchups. Whether this involves bringing in an entire other package to drastically shift a matchup in your favor, accepting a certain matchup as an even 50/50 and not using unnecessary sideboard slots to bump your chances up by a percentage or two, or just plain hoping to dodge your worst matchup.

2. Do I have/need a plan B?

When considering sideboard cards it can be useful to consider the other options in your Guardian and Synergy slot. These cards have the advantage of starting the game on your left side, and can be more consistently influential in the right matchups. Galterius, The Wayfaring Knight is one slot in example for this, as it can let you accrue a significant amount of card advantage as the second turn player. Some decks have even opted to maindeck Galterius for the amount of card advantage he provides right off the bat. In certain matchups, the loss of the turn one advantage may be too great a risk and you may be better suited with Serenasada, or a Guardian from your Legion.

Viviana, The Festival Royalty, is another bounty Guardian option, and one which lets you access key protective cards like Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement and Welcome To Alburdunn at the start of the game. If your deck struggles against aggressive or combo decks, then Viviana can be an effective option to bring in for consistent access to defensive tools.

Transformative sideboards and guardian swaps can provide unique ways to combat strategies, but they aren't always available or necessary. When they do come up they can be powerful tools, but don't worry if your sideboard doesn't have one, as many wont.

3. What tech cards do I need, and how can I make the most out of those cards?

As previously mentioned, with only 15 sideboard slots, it's crucial to have a sideboard with flexible card options. Many decks in the game can be hit by a variety of sideboard cards, so to optimize these slots you can find a combination that can overlap a variety of decks. For example, Black Magic Combo.

Black Magic is a high tier Combo deck that can consistently win games around turn 2/3. To combat this, there are a variety of hate cards that you can bring in. Eradication hate pieces like Concrete Catacombs and Close The Gateway can help stop the Black Magic players from milling decks. Shackle The Summoner can stop the Black Magic player from manifesting Black Magic Soul tokens, and Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement can save you from taking damage for a turn. Any of these hate pieces can be effective ways to shut the deck out for a turn or longer, so the key is finding the most versatile choices.

If you have good matchups/other sideboard plans for playing against token heavy decks like Sharn Boars or Mythic Beasts, then Shackle The Summoner might not be necessary.

In the same line, if you struggle against other eradication focused decks like Gaia, or Merrisod, this is where Concrete Catacombs and similar eradication hate cards can come into play. If self-mill decks like Mortis are also difficult to fight against, then Close The Gateway may be a high-priority sideboard card, letting you have a relevant piece against multiple problematic decks.

Making Cuts

The final crucial point of focus when designing your sideboard comes not in the sideboard itself, but in the maindeck. When you're bringing in cards, you need to bring OUT the same number of cards. But what do you take out?

I've found it useful to look at the Unified/Fortified dynamics when cutting cards and adjusting your sideboard. Unified negates are great ways to fight against a lot of the Fortified hate cards that may be brought in against you, and likewise Fortified negates can be a great way to protect your other key Fortified cards that may be more important in certain matchups.

For example, when playing against Onoskelis Fallen Control, play/draw can be an important factor in deciding what cards to take out. When on the play, your Fortified negate cards might be more important to keep so you can more consistently set up, and try to shut down Onoskelis's powerful draw engines on turn 1, like Advance Of The Fallen Armies or Bolster The Fallen Forces. When on the draw however, your Unified negate cards may be the more important ones, letting you break through your opponent's backline setup.

More situational cards like Welcome To Alburdunn or Final Resting Place can be good places to start with cuts. Whilst they can be great maindeck cards against a variety of decks, they aren't useful or needed in others.

One other important factor to consider is avoiding over-boarding. Whilst disrupting your opponent's gameplan is powerful, it can fall short if you cut too many pieces needed for your own gameplan. Cutting down on your main pieces is common and useful to adapt to a slower match and the strengths of your opponent, but cutting too much can leave you lacking the power you need to do your own strategy. It doesn't matter if you have 15 hate cards to stop a certain deck, if the other 35 cards can't consistently put into play your own gameplan.

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