Welcome back to Very Limited. Over the last few weeks, we've had discussions that were mostly related to pick orders and card power level. In an effort to sharpen our big-picture Limited understanding, we'll be taking a look at one of the most overlooked concepts required to becoming a Limited master. Sideboarding well in Limited is a lost art. Most of us read columns that tell us how to sideboard in specific matchups with our Constructed decks. When playing Limited, we know to put cards such as Glare of Heresy or Dark Betrayal in our deck, but we fail to be the sculptor that's able to shift a bad matchup into a good one. Today, we'll be discussing how to optimally sideboard when drafting and when playing Sealed Deck.

We can go a step further and write down the power and toughness of our opponent's creatures, keeping a tally to recognize the most common power-and-toughness combinations in our opponent's deck. This is the most important information when we make our sideboarding decisions.

How will we use this information to our advantage? Magic is a complex game in which less-than-stellar cards can be very strong against more-than-stellar cards. For example, Cyclops of One-Eyed Pass won't be making our main deck a lot of the time, but if we're facing an opponent with multiple 5/5s or a few Scholar of Athreos, a 5/2 body matches up very nicely against our opponent's plan.

One of the most common things we run into when drafting is the bear deck. We lose games to players who simply play 2/2s and 2/1s for 2 mana while keeping us on the back foot by having a couple pump spells for when we play a creature that trumps his or her endless stream of 2-power dudes. We shouldn't be losing to these people more than a small portion of the time, though. We have two games in which we can force those players to have nearly perfect hands by filling our deck with countless trump cards that force one or two tricks. The vanilla 2/3 for 3 mana may not be as strong as a 2/2 flyer for 3 mana in a vacuum, but it's much stronger in this particular matchup. We can fill our deck with 2/3s for 3, 2/4s for 4, and other fat-assed bodies that stonewall the opponent's plan. It may seem that these aggressive strategies are running us over, but we'll be quite happy to see our opponent enter the second game with reckless abandon when we've shifted our deck accordingly.

What do we take out of our deck? The fact that a card usually makes our main deck doesn't mean it's always good against our opponent. For example, Lash of the Whip is a fine middle-of-the-road pick that almost always makes the main-deck cut in our black decks, but the card becomes very weak when our opponent is playing a lot of inexpensive creatures that cost less than the 5-mana removal spell. Sometimes, Lash of the Whip is outright bad; our opponent may be playing an aggressive deck with a top end that's mostly made up of creatures with 5 or more toughness. We only have so much time to sideboard, so it's important that we remember which cards underperformed for us in previous games. Following the same logic, we should constantly be thinking about which cards we don't want to draw. We've already trained ourselves to play to our outs, but it's also important that we know what the absolute worst nonland draw step is—this will be valuable information when we're shaping our deck for the next game.

We should try to make sure that every card in our deck is capable of at least trading for one of our opponent's cards. We can sift through our deck after each game and ask ourselves how each card will trade with something. Obvious exceptions exist, such as Sea God's Revenge, but those cards are often huge game-breakers that we wouldn't sideboard out unless in a very extreme scenario in which the opponent is hyper-aggressive and we're extremely top-heavy.

We should discuss some of the more common sideboard tricks we can use in Theros Limited: X/1 flyers become outright bad when we know that our opponent has multiple copies of Coastline Chimera. Inexpensive creatures and creatures with enters-the-battlefield abilities are the best bestow targets against blue decks with Voyage's End or Griptide. Instant-speed enchantment removal is game-breakingly powerful in conjunction with toughness against heroic strategies, almost always resulting in a card advantage and tempo swing in our advantage. Benthic Giant is very good against aggressive decks with removal instead of pump spells, but very bad against pump spells. Silent Artisan and Pheres-Band Centaurs are great against G/x decks now that Born of the Gods has been released.

There’s room to gain big advantages in Limited if we sideboard correctly. Today’s discussion taught us that sideboarding in Limited removes a huge element of variance from the game by allowing us to sculpt our deck to beat a specific opponent when the cards available to us make it possible to do so. Going forward, we can use this information to dominate opponents who continue to play Limited with no more than twenty-three of their cards.