When preparing for a big tournament, it’s often very important to look at the metagame as a whole. In formats that are quite diverse, like Pioneer currently, chances are you won’t be playing a deck with good matchups across the field. Instead, you’ll need to carefully prioritize your card choices to best suit the matchups you expect to play against the most.
When facing strategies where your main gameplan doesn’t line up well, sometimes the best course of action is to take drastic measures and play dedicated hate pieces in your sideboard. Even if a specific matchup is poor game one, you may be able to salvage some matches by winning games two and three on the back of some powerful sideboard cards.
With this in mind, today, we’re going to highlight a handful of sideboard options that are incredibly underrated. As the Standard and Pioneer metagames continue to evolve, these cards can be a lifesaver in the right spot.
Fighting Your Worst Fears
- Mana Value: 1WW
- Rarity: Rare
- MTG Sets: Core Set 2021
- Card Text: Hexproof. If a source would deal damage to you, prevent that damage and put an incarnation counter on Nine Lives. When there are nine or more incarnation counters on Nine Lives, exile it. When Nine Lives leaves the battlefield, you lose the game.
When deciding what cards to put in your sideboard, sometimes you’ll want to prioritize cards that target one or two key matchups rather than ones that are more versatile, but ultimately less impactful. For example, given how popular Rakdos aggro is in Pioneer, it’s common to see cards like Chandra’s Defeat in sideboards. Chandra’s Defeat is much less flexible than some other removal spells, but its efficiency makes it a top-tier choice.
Well, some players have recently been having success taking this idea to the extreme to help “fix” otherwise horrible matchups. Take Lotus Field combo, for example. According to recent data on the win rates of different archetypes at last weekend’s Regional Championship, one of the most lopsided matchups possible was Lotus Field combo versus Rakdos aggro. Lotus Field combo only won 18% of its matches against Rakdos aggro.
Despite Rakdos aggro being quite popular, Lotus Field combo performed well overall during the weekend. Its matchups proved mostly favorable otherwise. As such, some players have made it a point to stock up on a full playset of Nine Lives in the sideboard to try to “steal” games two and three. Nine Lives completely invalidates the pump spell and Callous Sell-Sword kill route from Rakdos aggro.
Another example of a card that can completely take over games on its own is Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines. Decks like Mardu Greasefang have started utilizing Elesh Norn in the sideboard, as it completely shuts down decks like Selesnya Company that revolve around enters-the-battlefield triggers. Selesnya Company’s typical forms of removal, such as Werefox Bodyguard, look quite mediocre in the face of Elesh Norn.
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Splashing For Success
- Mana Value: 1G
- Rarity: Uncommon
- MTG Sets: Magic 2011, Magic 2015
- Card Text: Destroy all enchantments.
Going further down this route, some players are going as far as to splash hate cards for extremely difficult matchups. Just yesterday, one player got second place in a Magic Online Pioneer Challenge with mono-black midrange splashing for Back to Nature in the sideboard.
This is clearly a nod to the five-color Enigmatic Incarnation matchup, which can be quite tough. Back to Nature is the type of card that can completely demolish the opponent, blowing up the namesake enchantment while freeing all your haymakers that were stuck under copies of Leyline Binding.
While not quite as deep of a splash, it’s now commonplace to see Imodane’s Recruiter as a splash-worthy sideboard card for mono-white token control decks in Standard. The Adventure half of the card works well with Caretaker’s Talent, which is nice. However, later in the game, if you can set up a big attack by casting Imodane’s Recruiter and giving your squad Haste, you can win games versus Domain or the mirror that you otherwise wouldn’t have won.
Using your sideboard to your advantage is a very underrated part of Magic. Making use of Back to Nature in mono-black midrange, for instance, is not an obvious idea by any stretch. It’s cool to see players thinking outside the box and getting rewarded for it.
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