Table of Contents

• Intro
• Lineup Theory & Sizing
• Speed Modulation
• Deckbuilding as you go
• Case Study: EOE Arena Open draft
• Conclusion

Intro

Welcome back to the Limited Fundamentals series!

My plan was to leave things at the original three pieces (deckbuilding/drafting/gameplay), but I've since thought of at least two other important Limited skills I have a lot to say about: Sideboarding and Learning Formats/Interpreting Data. I plan to write up the second one in the next month, and who knows, maybe I'll continue thinking of fundamentals topics down the road!

This is probably going to be the shortest piece in the series, not because sideboarding is easy (quite the opposite), but because the big, generalizable things that can be said about it are pretty simple. Here's the first one:

You should be sideboarding more in Limited!!!

Sideboarding is somewhat of a lost art. These days most limited is played best-of-one on Arena ladder, packs have 14 cards which means smaller sideboards, and draft navigation incentivizes speculation and switching to powerful rares opened later in the draft. All these changes do directly reduce the impact of sideboarding, but at the same time, I think lots of folks' sideboarding skills have atrophied because of this (or never developed in the first place if they started on Arena).

That being said, this isn't a new thing. People have always underestimated sideboarding in limited, I think because of a few factors:

• It's a very difficult skill to learn
• It goes against heuristics of "better" and "worse" cards
• It's simply quite difficult to get yourself to do!