Hello again. Welcome to another Super Secret Sunday. The time where we talk about underused cards and under-thought thoughts, but never really under the radar strategies.
Today we will talk about sideboard cards, or more generally just hate cards. Why do we care about this in the commander format? Well the skill of sideboarding comes from knowing your deck and what card/strategies are good against it. You want to exchange inferior cards for more powerful cards that are targeted at specific features of your opponent's deck.
If your EDH playgroup doesn't utilize sideboarding, you should give it a try. It adds a fun, extra dimension to compete against your opponent and it draws many skills that make a magic player great: metagaming, sequencing, memory, predicting your opponent, etc.
If you end up in an environment where sideboarding isn't accepted, then you have to pre-board. Start building your decks with specific matchups and opponents in mind. Think about what strategies you are liking to run into. Is your deck viable against those strategies? Do you need to pack specific hate cards?
Let's look at some pointed hate cards for the most popular strategies in the format.
Token swarms are a popular and powerful win condition. There are tons of enablers for these decks, in a variety of colors. The good hate cards are equally spread out. It is a lot harder to make an army than to kill one in the game of Magic...and isn't that lucky for us. Keg can sit on zero, or tick up to smash pesky permanents like equipment or investichantments
Stompy decks. Chances are you know a guy who likes to play a lot of (stupid) creatures. Well if you are like me, then you are harboring some prejudice against these people. It is insanely hard to cast, but it does shut the the whole thing down until they deal with it.
Maybe you have the opposite problem. Maybe your opponent just wants to sit back and counter all your junk. Maybe he likes to cast a ton of cantrips and disruption in the midgame. Look em in the eye...and say NOPE.
Graveyard decks are absolutely rampant in Commander and there are plenty of ways to attack them, but most graveyard hate is permanent based. Suffer the Past enables surprise attacks on reanimation and regrowth effects. Later in the game you can go whole hog and drain life your opponent for 10+. Kind of a spicy card. Versatile and powerful enough to play in any deck.
There are certainly less subtle ways to interfere with your opponents game plan. Back in the days of the old school straight color hosers were unbelievably powerful. These cards come in every shape, size, and color. Here are a couple of my favorites.
You know what stinks? Getting blown out by this card. I have an 8.5 Tails deck. This card, along with Flashfires just makes my skin crawl. In the first 6 turns this card is usually just GG if you can snag 3-4 of their lands. Later in the game when more nonbasics are out it will be less impactful, but it is still likely to dome them for 1-10 depending on the board.
Red needs some serious help in Commander. The problem is that the core strategies of most Red decks just don't interact well with the rules of the format (or the game of magic for that matter. Interestingly enough, I feel that Red benefits the most of any color from having access to a side board. There are plenty of solid Red hate cards, but you can't afford to main deck them because they don't advance your game plan whatsoever. Against the right deck though, cards like this just cannot be beaten.
Well, that's all for today. Have fun making your friends have no fun!
Pass it up.
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