How to Win the Sideboard War | Riftbound Fundamentals

Comments · 16

• GA

  @GamesDeconstructed · 3 months ago · pinned

  Check out my Riftbound Achievement Tracker at: <a href="https://achievebound.vercel.app/">https://achievebound.vercel.app</a><br><br>And let me know what&apos;s one aspect of Riftbound you&apos;d most like to improve at!

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• 19

  @191Oscar · 2 months ago

  Love the vids, feel like I know most of what is being said instinctually but sometimes struggle to put what I feel into words when teaching friends the games. You explain things very clearly!

• MI

  @mikyallis5848 · 3 months ago

  Great video, Inormationan and editing 🎉<br><br>Idea for series pick deck and explain which card and why against specific decks

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• ME

  @MelchiorVA · 3 months ago

  Thank you so much! Thius really helped as I had no clue what I was doing with sideboarding

• KA

  @Kakarot9002 · 3 months ago

  Great video, I learned a lot of this from following Alanzq’s decks since set one. His Kai’sa deck had 9 2 drops main and triple lecturing yordle side board. At first i didn’t like it but it grew on me to only play lecturing when going second unless I’m facing a hard control or scaling deck like aurora at the time in set 1.<br>Now he does the exact opposite with Diana and I love it. Main board 2-3 gear removals and a bunch of random silver bullet cards to side out for g2 along with merchant anytime I’m going second next game because I have a 3 cost Diana chosen. <br>A key thing I learned this set that has helped me is I no longer look at my sideboard first between games to decide what to side in for the matchup. &nbsp;Instead I look at my main deck first to decide what to side out, then what I said in will be second, as I found this makes my brain default more to quickly &nbsp;figuring out what cards are worth taking out for the matchup rather than “what do I take out for X side in card?”

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• AN

  @andrewgr144 · 3 months ago

  @GamesDeconstructed &nbsp;Thanks as always. &nbsp;I think your videos are just objectively good and have a high signal to noise ratio, but I also think that something about the way you organize and share your thoughts is super-compatible with the way my brain wants to take in information.<br><br>My Hot Take on sideboards ever since Unleashed was revealed is that I think there&apos;s now a viable strategy where you devote all or almost all of your sideboard to taking advantage of a battlefield that will almost guarantee you the win, and play your other two games with your main deck. &nbsp;(It may be that you should start with your &quot;sideboard&quot; in your main deck and use that battlefield in game one, but conceptually it&apos;s your sideboard, since you&apos;re not using it for the other two games.)<br><br>Only some Legends/Domains and only a small number of battlefields can gain enough of an advantage from a particular battlefield to make this viable, but there are still a lot of decks that could be built this way. &nbsp;The canonical example for me is The Grand Plaza, which says that if you hold with 7 or more units, you immediately win the game. &nbsp;I think any green deck domain legend could build a sideboard that would win with this condition almost all of the time, assuming that the 32 cards you&apos;d use from the main deck were relatively normal and had a few commonly used cards like Charm and Back Off. &nbsp;Flurry of Birds is one of the chief enablers; Sand Soldiers can also really help. &nbsp;If paired with Yellow, there are an abundance of other cards that can create units at a battlefield. &nbsp;Two copies of Allay to try to stack deflect, or Alpha Wildclaw instead, along with saving all your Defy cards for the turn where you&apos;re defending trying to hold... I&apos;m not sure what the exact card mix is, or whether it can really be done with Green and any other color, or whether it requires Green and Yellow (or probably even better Green and Purple, using purple to loop some unit creation and for extra counterspell ability), but I am absolutely convinced that there are existing or very close to existing decks that could have a 90%+ win rate with The Grand Plaza if the entire sideboard was dedicated to it. (Stun cards are mega-useful here, as you merely need to bounce the attackers back for a single turn.)<br><br>Obviously there&apos;s a cost involved with not having a sideboard to answer specific meta threats like Aurora. &nbsp;But don&apos;t forget that your opponent is going to have a very difficult time side-boarding against you, unless the deck lists are open, because you&apos;re changing all 8 cards for the 2nd game, and the strategy you&apos;re pursuing is obviously going to be very different from maximizing your ability to hold for a single turn with a bunch of units.<br><br>Battlefields that don&apos;t reward you with an automatic win are obviously going to be harder to gain so much benefit from that you could expect to get up to 90%+ (or whatever the actual number is for The Grand Plaza), and I think that&apos;s where it gets interesting, because IMHO almost auto-winning a game in a three game series is just obviously correct even if it costs you flexibility and the ability to answer specific meta threats, but as the benefit becomes further and further away from auto-win and into just heavily-favored and then into favored, it&apos;s not at all clear to me where the inflection point is.<br><br>But in any event, my main point is that I&apos;ve never seen anyone use their sideboard this way, and I think enough cards were released in Unleashed to make reliably winning with The Grand Plaza feasible, so IMHO we should be seeing people trying it.

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• IT

  @ItsModin-t7g · 3 months ago

  Good video, learned a lot. 👍<br>I am someone new to Riftbound, started a couple weeks ago. I play Vex Gloomist, one of my issues so far is finding a good time to play Vex apathetic. If i try and play her immediately on turn two she is very susceptible to spells due to my lack of runes. But if try and save her for another turn or two then my opponent is able to take advantage of the fact i don&apos;t have vex on field. I&apos;m not sure how to go about this.

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• AL

  @alpi7411 · 3 months ago

  A video I would be interested in: cards that &quot;replace themselve&quot; like scuttle crab or discipline are good. But how many of these cards are too much? If I build a vex deck I already can put so many of these cards in my deck but I do trade power for draw effect. You will get to a point where you can draw the whole deck but you have nothing powerfull to play.

• SC

  @Scarpisriccardo · 2 months ago

  Do u do coaching?

• JO

  @JohnPaul-nb5iu · 3 months ago

  Haha I love the content but in my mind you are the Riftbound Goldfish guy. 🐠😅

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