New Article Series and Update

One of the hardest things to do in Magic is sideboarding. It's also something you do at least once in every single game. Yet players don't have nearly enough content on this subject so today I am starting a series of articles focused on helping you improve at every aspect of sideboarding. Over the course of this series we will cover
Building a sideboard. Covering the various different philosophies and approaches to building a sideboard.
How to actual sideboard.
Sideboarding on the play and the draw
Knowing when to get weird with your sideboard.

Today we are going to start simple and lay out why sideboarding is so important, and why you should care about it.

To start you will play more post board games then you will ever play pre board games. You will always play at least one pre and post board game and anytime you play game three you skew things towards post board games forever. This means that knowing what you're planning to switch between the two spots is of the utmost importance. When you think about it in a numbers way. Your deck often has about 35 spells on average. If you have 15 cards in your sideboard you're increasing the number of spells you have access to by about 45%. This is a huge increase in possible things you can do. When you stop thinking about it as a separate entity and instead a thing you need to spend as much time on as your deck selection results will come.

Now that we have established just how much of a huge part it plays in total games played along with access to cards you can play, you can start to understand how this is an aspect you need to be thinking about, and thinking about what your opponent is doing. A huge level up moment everyone has eventually is “oh my opponent also has plans for right now.” It's very obvious in hindsight but its something that all players experience at some point. Once you understand that you are able to start sideboarding for their post board deck and not their game one deck. It once again sounds very easy but elude players at first. I remember the first time hearing this early on in my Magic career and it was game changing.  

We will dive into this more broadly in the next article but, keep in mind that players will have differing sideboards then just the stock list and watching how they are playing can be a big hint in sideboard games to how they have sideboarded. An example is let's say you are playing a standard match. Wrath of god is a somewhat common card this creature's heavy midrange deck will play in certain metagames. If your opponent has been playing creatures and instead has been doing more card selection spells or various ways to generate advantage that is not a creature. It might be worth thinking about not playing into the wrath if you can avoid it and undo some of the potency that sideboard cards have. Things like this are small edges that you will need as you move up the competitive ladder.

It becomes quickly apparent why this is all so important and also why I hope many of you can understand why I want to take the time to fully write an article on each of these topics, however with the holidays and time crunch it just wasnt possible to get the first one out this week with out the content suffering. I am hoping to have part 1 Actually Building a sideboard done by next Thursday. So that we can end this year on some high quality informative content!

Hopefully everyone is having a good holidays I know magic slows down for a bunch of people in these last few weeks of the year and I hope you all are enjoying the Magic slow season

Happy Holidays and see you all next week for a return to more in depth content!