magic guide to a good sideboard

[billy92]

where can I find a guide on how to build a good sideboard

[seba1983]

Sideboarding is not as complicated as it seems. Its all about kowing your deck and knowing what you will most likely play against.

Then you have to figure out what decks you have problems with. dont put cards in your sideboard to imporve matchups that are good already. thats a waste of space.

then try figuring out why you have problems with those decks and what cards would solve those problems. try to find cards that help in more than one matchup.

if a matchup is realy horrible but the deck does not show up a lot you can decide to ignor it. 43-lands from legacy for instance can almost not win vs. storm-combo. however in a usual tournament you will face such a deck once at most. so even when you loos (and you will) you can still make top 8 and win. so you just ignore strom combo to ensure you win your other matches.

i can try to give you some examples of what to put into sideboards if you tell me what deck you play in what format.

[billy92]

Dragon Stompy in Legacy

[seba1983]

ok the first question is what is the meta like. in legacy this can be somewhat hard to determin because of the great number of possible decks. if you play in a regular tournament then may be other players can tell you whats popular localy.

otherwise here are some decks you can almost always face:

thresh
landstill
loam
goblins
survival
ichorid
storm
weeny agro

note each of these covers several specific decks

now you need to figure out what your good and bad matchups are.

with chalice and trinispheer main your already packing almost as much storm hate as you can. a quick tip set chalice for 1, not for 0 vs storm.

spheer works wonders vs ichorid too. will still be tough thoug, so if there is a solution that helps vs other matchups too we'll be happy to pack it.

loam can be realy troubelsome. we need quite some mana and lome likes blowing it up. loam also has reacureable removal, another thing we realy dont like. our magus of the moon main is good but not excelent here. they run basic lands and can cast szeismic assault / devastating dreams to get rid of him. what we realy want to do is kill thier grave especialy to rid them of thier loam. so we now know we want grave hate.

thresh ... it has force and daze ... it has goyf. it realy hates most of our disruption. thresh with red has bolt and fire ice. both handle the magus. thresh with white has counterbalance wich does nothing because of our high curve (yeah!). we have bigger beaters then they do and more. so what we need to handle are them force and daze to get our stuff to stick. some counter hate would be nice. sword of fire and ice is our bolt etc. protection and we have that main ...

landstill can be tricky. they hat spheer a lot but they have reacuring chump blockers lots of hardcounters and removal that shoots from all angles. here we need some anti control tech. this comes in the form of counter hate, grave hate and perhaps some artifact hate (for stuff like crucible). hmm i see a pattern emerging ^^

survival can use its grave but is very versitile. modern versions can win very well without ever seeing a survival. we need to control key creatures, sever his survival tutorin ability and control his grave whilst still being agressiv ... hmm we dnt have access to enchantment hate but we have something better that will work wonders vs landstill too pithing needle (hmm so i do name a card befor im finished mehh). on top again grave hate + this time some creature hate will help depending on the specific build.

goblins ... ok we have bigger beaters, chalice and spheer. if thats not enough pack some creature hate. hmm more patterns ^^

weeny agro - goyf sligh, zoo, fish you name it ... all will suffer from creature hate. if vial is a very central pice of thier strategy artifact hate can be good too. spheer and chalice rock here too as can the magus. vs. goyf grave hate does some good but that applies to thresh too.

random stuff - you can never realy prepare for that. if you get paired with stifle naught artifact hate and blue hate (read counter hate) will do the trick though so dont worry. a good SB is flexable. you dont need the best silver bullets but the ones that will help the most often.

so now to some cards so you knoe what im talking about:

gravehate - relic of progenitus ... why? because cantrip is nice, constant removal is nice and instant speed goyf protection is very nice too.

counter hate - pyroblast ... why? deals with counters but other blue meanies too. stifle, faeries etc.

artifact hate - take your pic shattering spree is very nice especialy if affinty sees play where you are but there are lots of other options. take shattering spree as a starter and compair the others. then ask yourself why would this be better then spree.

pithing needle - stops soo many things: survival, deed, hexmage, explosives, planeswalker, manlands and and and ...

creature hate - pyrokiesis ... why? free to play and will do enourmous damage to the decks we might need it for: goblins, zoo, slight, fish, elves etc.

so there you have it 5 cards and 15 slots ... if you go:

3
3
3
3
3

or some other distribution depends on your meta. it can even lead to other must have inclusions and cutting of stuff that is very good in general theory but not in your particular case.

enjoy and good luck.

[billy92]

cool tnx