Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo

Lesson 4: every main course requires a side(board) dish

Here we are, the last part of this journey. First of all, I want to say thank you for staying with me this far. I hope this series of articles had been interesting, fun and, maybe, it inspired you to take full control of your deck building: at the end of the day, cooking new decks is the most fun part of this incredible game!

In this last part, we will discuss how to properly think about a sideboard for a combo deck and how to metagame.

STEP 6: sideboard

Here I explore some very important concepts about sideboarding: having a plan, mapping and transformational sideboards.

Having a plan

Let me be absolutely clear: I think most people don’t think about sideboards as they should if their aim is to win. Most of the time, people ask me about good cards for a certain matchup, or they want to know the changes. That’s a poor way to approach the subject, because cards don’t usually win games of Magic: plans do.

Think about the combo nature in itself: you are choosing to put in your deck cards that do close to nothing on their own. Why would you do that? Because you know the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.

In other words, you have a plan: you want to sidestep things that matters in most games of Magic and just try to assemble a combination of cards that will win you the game. Then, why most people stop thinking in terms of plans when they reach for their sideboard?

As an example, in my Life Combo deck I play green, and I have 4 slots of my sideboard devoted to the task of beating Mono Red Madness, but I run 0 copies of Weather the Storm. Isn’t Weather the Storm a great card vs Mono Red Madness? Most people would say “yes”, and their answer wouldn’t be wrong nor right: it’s just that the question s not well put in the first place. It is a great card to achieve what? Winning? Well, it depends on what’s your plan to win the game. When I developed an Elves deck tuned to beat Madness with some Golden Pigs members, we didn’t even considered Weather the Storm, for we know the game is fought on the card advantage axis: you interact with their permanent source of damage by removing them, then you start casting big creatures that gain some life points to retroactively counter their burn spells and to swing with in the meantime.

Let’s stick to proper combo, though: in the case of my beloved Life Combo, I don’t play Weather the Storm vs Mono Red Madness because I don’t want to control the game and make is go longer. My plan is to combo faster than they can kill me, and that’s one of the few decks that can actually achieve this reliably. In order to do that, I can’t cut combo pieces, or I will inevitably slow down on average. It means I can’t board in many cards anyway: I need my 4 slots to be effective on their own. The times I don’t succeed in going faster than them is because I don’t find my combo in time, because they kill me real fast or because they have too many interaction pieces.

The best way to solve all these problems is by using a card that can protect my combo or give me some extra time if they go super-fast, depending on the situation. Weather the Storm can just protect me and, to be honest, it doesn’t really do that either, because it takes a full turn's worth of mana to gain some life points that I’m gonna be deprived of in just one more turn, most likely.

The perfect solution is Orim’s Cure: it protects my creatures, allowing me to assemble the En-Kor+Daru Spiritualist combination, and basically gain me 4 life points if I want to. It doesn’t cost time, being a free spell, so it’s the best card to play a tempo game: I just tap out every turn and, if I need to, I can use the card.

Mapping

Another important concept is the “mapping”. Poorly built sideboards sometimes have many cards to, in theory, bring in for a matchup, but not enough to cut. Sometimes a useful way to approach this is deciding what kind of plan do you want to implement, then decide which cards in the maindeck don’t contribute well enough to that plan and, finally, note how many cards you need to put in the sideboard for that specific matchup.

A clear example of this is the Pili-Pala Cascade deck that I brewed some time ago. That’s a masterpiece in creativity, sadly not a very good deck. In that deck I played 4 copies of Pili-Pala, 4 copies of Careful Cultivation and 4 copies of Violent Outburst. The idea is that, with the cascade card, you can cascade at the end of your opponent’s turn and get the Pili-Pala 100%, so that you untap and kill them out of nowhere.

The Pili-Pala combo is close to impossible to achieve vs a Lava Dart deck, so my plan vs Madness was to board out the combo and always cascade into Weather the Storm while I played a midrange game with my creatures. The same I wanted to do vs Mono Blue Terror, for they play Gut Shot and Annul. In order to do that, I had 9 cuts (4 Pili-Pala, 4 Careful Cultivation and 1 Bloodrite Invoker), but I couldn’t fit enough good cards for both matchups, so I ended up cutting a Pili-Pala form the maindeck: I still had virtually 7 copies between the cascaders and the actual Pili-Pala, but I needed one less card to bring in vs Madness and Terror, which meant 2 less cards in my sideboard. I want that deck to be good so bad…

Transformational sideboard

Sometimes, winning with the combo is really hard. Some decks make you wish you were not playing combo in the first place. Well, sometimes it’s possible to do that with some creativity, tuning and a little bit of compromises.

You see, a combo deck usually has a lot of drawing power and some interaction cards, sometimes in the form of Duress or counters. If you cut the combo cards and just play some removal spells and some creatures, all of a sudden you can have a decent midrange or tempo deck.

That’s not always possible: it certainly depends on how the maindeck is built, for example. If your combo consists in 20 useless cards, like Life Combo, then it’s really hard to turn that into a functional fair deck. It also depends on what cards constitute the combo: something like Hawkeye’s Bow can be acceptable in a midrange deck, for example.

It helps if your protection spells are not super specific. I’m talking about cards like Dispel, that can be good in a fair deck vs fair deck battle, but also Duress, Circular Logic, Hydroblast or some broad answers like that.

Back in the days, Faeries used to be the n.1 nightmare matchups for any combo deck, and the main reason to look for a transformational sideboard. For example, I reached my first Paupergeddon final on the back of a Tireless Tribe Combo deck featuring 4 copies of Seeker of the Way in the sideboard. That was a very good card, for it was harder to get with Spellstutter Sprite than the 1 mana value eponymous creature, it was almost impossible to race with all those 1/1s and it was very hard to kill, since the premier Faeries deck used to rely on burn spells to keep threats out of the board. With a mix of Dispel from the maindeck and a bunch of Blue Elemental Blast in the sideboard, I was able to trim some Circular Logic (not great with no Tribe in play) and still have more than 8 protection spells for my creatures. Times goes by, and nowadays Faeries is relegated to the tier 2 status at most.

Now, the n.1 reason to build a transformational sideboard is called Mono Red Madness (a deck you hear me talk about a lot in this last article). The combination of Bolts, free burn spells like Fireblast and reusable ones like Lava Dart makes it so that using a creature to combo is really hard.

A strategy I have been having success with is to mimic a Mono Blue Terror deck, which is not that hard if your combo deck is blue green in the first place. You see, blue gives you the Blasts, and you probably already have some number of Dispel in the maindeck, and green gives you a very good Tolarian Terror-like creature that cannot be Red Blasted in Fungal Colossus. All you have to do is be a little fancy when it comes to your manabase, for example by splitting regular basic lands with snow-covered ones and artifact lands from Mirrodin. I found out that, if you control the early turns with a mix of counters and removal spells, maybe backed up by some Faerie Macabre, a midgame 5/5 immune to the blasts is pretty good at closing the game. The creature is close to impossible to kill, because if they 2for1 themselves to deal 5 and you have a protection spell, then it’s over for them.

This is the plan that I use in Pizza Combo, for example: I cut Tamiyo’s Safekeeping, for it’s just good at protecting the combo but it’s useless when you want to play the fair game, and I leave Dispel in to win the Red Blasts vs Blue Blasts wars. Of course I cut most combo cards, but since they are too many to board out, I leave Pizza in, for it can gain life and do a soft combo with Helix on Colossus: for every green mana, you deal 2 more damage. How do you decide if a transformative sideboard could work? Well, if you have a good sense of the game’s fundamentals, you will know that a certain deck should struggle vs a certain strategy.

For example, in the early days of testing the 5 Lands Spy with Golden Pigs’s member Marco Trivella, we struggled a lot vs UB faeries, which seemed to be on the rise as a countermeasure for Sadistic Glee Combo. We quickly identified that, as many tempo decks do, UB Faeries is soft to “The Rock” strategies, i.e. green black midrange decks with beefy creatures and some removal spells. We decided to play a 6th land in the sideboard in order to be able to hardcast our land cyclers (this was before Sagu Wildling, so we had just Generous Ent and Troll of Khazad-dûm) and, with 4 Balustrade Spy and 4 Dimir House Guard, we won many games just by stalling and attacking. I know that’s now common knowledge for the Spy players, but you should remember this was prior to the lists with walls.

One last thing about sideboarding

Remember that not every sideboard slot is created equal, though: some sideboard cards let you win more than others, maybe because they are simply stronger or, maybe, because you play them in slower matchups, so the chances to actually see those cards are higher than the chances to see the cards you bring in in games that last 4 turns.

A good example of this is the Emrakul, the Aeons Torn that some Modern decks play in the sideboard: since that is a tech vs the mill deck, the weight of a single copy is really high, for you will almost 100% see the card in every post-board game. Since their plan is to mill your whole deck, they will inevitably mill the Emrakul also, unless you happen to draw the card and you don’t have a way to discard it or to shuffle it back into the deck. Mill might be a small percentage of the metagame, but the single copy of Emrakul is so good in the matchup and it’s so easy for it to actually be relevant that it’s hard to think another card would make you win more games. You will not always draw that card even if you side it in, and not many cards are good in their matchups as much as Emrakul is good vs Mill. Emrakul you basically always see and it’s super strong. With this in mind, when you evaluate how to use your sideboard slots, try to evaluate the weight of a certain card in a given matchup, not just how much the matchup is present in your metagame.

STEP 7: metagaming

Metagaming is not something that’s usually associated with combo decks, for your deck has to be built around consistency, so many slots are already taken. Barring some super niche metagames, in which you don’t play protection spells and just go faster, metagaming for the combo deck mostly means deciding which and how many protection spells to play. But sometimes there still room for some amount of metagaming. For example, deciding if you want to have a plan B in your deck can be influenced by the metagame.

Sometimes, the speed of the format informs how to chose your draw spells. If you look at my past articles, I explained how I split disputes and cantrips in my Pizza combo deck: that’s because I tend to face half fast linear decks, and half slow grindy decks, so I need a little bit of both. If my metagame is more grindy, than I could trim some ponders for some more draw-2 cards, while if the metagame is faster, then I could maybe cut a Ichor Wellspring for the 4th copy of Ponder. Also, a card like Wirewood Herald gains a lot of value if your opponent is trying to attack you with a few big, ground creatures, because now your Demonic Tutor also gain a lot of life points by blocking: if I were to face many Terror decks, then I would fit 1 or 2 Wirewood Herald in.

Mostly, metagaming in a combo deck is relevant when you build the sideboard. Deciding if a transformational sideboard is worth it highly depends on the metagame, for it takes up a lot of slots and it can be not justifiable if the deck you intend to use the transformation against is represented enough.

Also, the mapping is not always 100% accurate: there most likely be decks you cannot map well against. Deciding which one to leave out of your priorities is, obviously, a question of metagaming.

Recap

Balancing the main course and the side dish is a delicate balance between numbers, predictions and personal skills. While making a sideboard, always remember to side into a plan and not just bring in “cards”; take sheet and paper and write down your mapping: you really want to make sure you don’t cook for too many people one day and run out of food the next one; evaluate the idea of a transformative sideboard if there’s an important matchup you really cannot find a good plan for.

Remember than how many times do you side a card in should not be the only metric to use when building a sideboard: you should also try to evaluate how much a card is good when you put it in. Metagaming is usually connected to control and reactive decks, but even for combo there is a bit of it to be had: maybe in the flex slots, maybe in deciding how many card draw to devote to speed and how many to devote to the grinding, maybe in deciding which and how many protection spells to sleeve. Mostly, it comes into play when you build your sideboard.

And so we are, this is the end of the journey and the final instruction for the recipe. Feel free to reach out on YT or Discord and let me know if you liked this experiment and if I got something wrong. Perhaps I will write more in the future, but for now you go out there and you make some perfect meal for everyone to enjoy (but mostly for yourself)!