Various Sideboarding Strategies for Modern Jund
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| Image Credit: Chris Rahn & WoTC. |
Sideboarding is a science and an art. The science part is playing the right cards. Useful, effective, and easy to utilize cards are at a premium in sideboard slots. The art part is predicting what the meta will be at your particular tournament...or at least the decks that you will face. This part is obviously harder.
There is some sideboarding advice that is eternal, and well established. If you can't take my word for it, you can read the pros talk about it too. These laws of sideboarding (building and boarding) are:
- ALWAYS sideboard, or at least fake it.
- Remember to hide the number of cards you switch out.
- Board against their sideboarded deck, not their main deck.^
- Board based on the opponent's play, not just their deck.^
- Consider whether you are on the play or the draw.^
- Don't over sideboard. Your deck still needs to work.^
- Consider whether sideboarding a land or two out is worth it.^
- Favor value over synergy post-board: your opponent will bring in interaction.
- Build your sideboard to maximize win percentage (obvious on the surface, but harder to do in practice because it often means being willing to just eat your bad matchups.)^
- Don't run more sideboard cards than you can bring in (matchup-wise).^
- Don't overboard narrow answers (we're looking at you Surgical Extraction...)
Most of the rules are about how to actually bring cards in and out. What needs more discussion is how to build your board in the first place.
I find it helpful to picture a 2x2 of strategies for sideboarding. On the one hand, you have the matchups you are choosing to board against. These can either be matchups based on your archetype, or matchups based on your meta. On the other hand, you have the kinds of cards you are choosing to include. These are either powerful/narrow cards or fair/broad cards.
So the 2x2 of srtategies comes out to be Powerful+Archetype, Powerful+Meta, Fair+Archetype, and Fair+Meta. We'll abbreviate these PA, PM, FA, and FM.
PA: you bring a sideboard of the most powerful cards you can for the matchups your deck is weak against. You can't take too much consideration of how popular these decks are when using this strategy.
FA: you bring a sideboard of broadly useable cards that are focused mainly around the matchups your deck is weak against. So, you never have no relevant sideboard cards for a given matchup, but these cards are not necessarily the best cards you could play for your bad matchups. Think having Damnation instead of Shatterstor against affinity.
PM: you bring a sideboard of the most powerful cards you can for the matchups popular in your meta, regardless of your deck archetype's odds against them. This strategy will often have you doubling down on haymaker cards, sometimes for matchups in which you are already favored.
FM: you bring a sideboard of broadly useable cards that are focused mainly around the matchups popular in your meta, regardless of your archetype's odds against them. This method can result in a bunch of half-impactful cards for every matchup, rather than any definite sideboard cards for specific matchups. Essentially, you are in danger of getting the least amount of increase in win percentage if you try to add a few percentage points to every matchup instead of a large amount of win percentage to a few.
That being said, each strategy is at least somewhat valid, and all of them yield better results than no strategy at all. Let’s go through them one at a time and see an example (using jund) of the kind of cards each would guide you to bring in the last 15 of your 75.
PA: jund has a rough time against big mana decks, grindier midrange (see: abzan) and draw-go control decks. So following this strategy, you would want any haymakers you could get against those decks. A sideboard built like this might look like:
2 crumble to dust, 4 fulminator mage
2 kitchen finks, 2 thragtusk
2 thrun, the last troll, 3 duress
Obviously, this sideboard is narrow. There is no direct artifact or enchantment hate, no sweepers for go-wide strategies, and so on. There are some cards that do double duty: finks and thragtusk can be brought in against burn, duress does work against combo, etc. But ultimately, this sideboard has major blindspots.
But far worse than leaving you open to certain matchups post-board is the fact that you are trying to shore-up your worst matchups. The win percentage gain you have against Tron using this board is not an increase from 30% win to 80% win. It's more like 30% win to 45% win at best. There are other matchups you can board for that will grant you a far higher increase in your win percentage (meta notwithstanding).
FA: We have the same bad matchups in mind for this sideboard plan, but we chose cards that you can utilize against other archetypes more easily:
2 damping sphere, 3 fulminator mage, 1 unravel the aether
2 kitchen finks, 1 hazoret the fervent, 2 liliana the last hope
2 collective brutality, 2 duress
We have a bit more versatility in this strategy's sideboard. The damping spheres give us a backstop against storm and ironworks, lili the last hope is a great card for grindy games and small creature aggro decks, and unravel the aether does triple work against affinity, bogles, and the very pesky wurmcoil engine.
If there is a downside to this strategy, it is the amount of work these sideboard options require of you in their specific matchups. Hazoret is better than thragtusk in removal-heavy matchups, but if you want a card to reestablish parity or jump ahead in the grind-mirror, the ol' double cow is a stronger (but narrower) option. There is no way to deal with a metalcrafted etched champion in this sideboard, and that is the fastest way to lose the affinity matchup that you should otherwise win. The lack of crumble to dust means you don't get a guaranteed shut off of your tron and valakut opponents turn 4.
PM: Let’s use the current meta as an example for the meta strategies. The top ten decks are humans, hollow one, affinity, jund, jeskai, burn, storm, bogles, mardu, and tron. That would mean we need as many cards that are haymakers against these decks as possible. A sideboard using this strategy might look like:
2 damnation, 1 kozilek’s return
2 obstinate baloth, 2 ancient grudge, 1 shatterstorm
2 grafdigger's cage, 2 damping sphere
2 crumble to dust, 1 collective brutality
The first thing I notice while trying to put this together is that I can't include haymakers against each deck. If you go any lower on the number of copies of cards in the sideboard, you can't reasonably expect to draw them soon enough in the matchups you really need them for (think the baloths and hollow one).
Obviously, if you get a few of these cards off early enough in their intended matchups, you should be well positioned to win the game. If those matchups make up the majority of your matches, you are gonna do very well. The catch is that modern is a great format... and that means it is near impossible to count on a small handful of decks being the only ones you will face. If you come up against something you haven’t prepared for, your mainboard is all you have.
Adding up the percentage of the meta for all of these decks right now (May 19th, 2018), I get 36.55%. The cards are not narrow enough to be totally unusable outside these ten decks, but you have to consider the possibility of coming up against other strategies where having crumble to dust instead of fulminator mage, or shatterstorm instead of liliana the last hope, leaves you with annoyingly few options.
FM: Same meta as above, but we want to play cards that are more broadly useable. That means fewer copies of each card, and more reliance on the mainboard to hold the line against the most linear strategies. This sort of sideboard is probably the most popular, and would look something like this:
1 damnation, 1 anger of the gods, 1 liliana the last hope
1 grafdigger’s cage, 2 nihil spellbomb
2 ancient grudge, 1 unravel the aether, 2 collective brutality
2 fulminator mage, 1 grim lavamancer
1 engineered explosives
It has a lot of breadth. You'd always have something to put in the main in games 2 and 3. Most pros play with sideboards like this. However, as you would expect, this kind of sideboard has the steepest learning curve. There are a lot of one-of's, so you need to mulligan strategically to find the cards you brought in.
Jund mulligans pretty well, but I think that counting on a bunch of one-of's is not the best way to give your win percentage a boost. I feel as though the the one-of strategy is mostly a reaction to those moments where a player has no sideboard options in a matchup, and they want to avoid that. I say you can safely embrace the "I have nothing to sideboard" reality (so long as you remember to pretend to sideboard when you are actually playing).
My preferred sideboard is in the same vein as the one above, but a bit more focused:
(note: I play two collective brutality in the mainboard)
3 fulminator mage, 2 liliana the last hope
2 obstinate baloth, 2 grafdigger's cage
2 ancient grudge, 1 unravel the aether
1 kozilek's return, 1 kalitas traitor of ghet
1 nihil spellbomb
I think kozilek's return, the lilianas, and kalitas are enough to bring in against humans and other creature aggro decks that I don't need damnation or anger of the gods. Not to mention that jund is already favored against decks that try to win with cheap creatures.
I like unravel the aether as a nod to bogles without committing much, while also helping against wurmcoil and artifact decks.
Obstinate baloth is for hollow one, which I wouldn't include specifically for one deck, but that it also works well in the mirror (now way more common) and in the abzan psuedo-mirror. Good stuff.
The rest is pretty cut and dry. I feel this selection gives me a solid 2-5 cards for almost any matchup. I prefer a small and easy number of switches for games 2-3, and I find that sideboarding less is often rewarded due to the impact of the opponent's sideboard choices and the higher consistency it gives my deck in the post-board games.
Wow, long post. But I think it was a good exercise.
Until next time.
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