Last week I gave a brief overview of the deck I believe gives you the best chance to win any PPTQ you might be playing this season. I thought this week I’d let you know how the changes I made to the list performed for me. By the end of the article I should have covered all of the cards I have tried out for the sideboard so you can make your own decisions going forward.

The reason I believe UW Control is good is because it’s so versatile. Blue and mainly White have some of the best sideboard options available in modern. I made a few changes to the list I posted last week in preparation of Infect being a more popular deck down south than in most places.

Here’s the deck I played to 1st place at Saturdays PPTQ.

The only change to the main deck was taking out 1 Supreme Verdict and adding in 1Wrath of God. The reason being Elves seems to be at every event I play in and Ezuri, Renegade Leader was a bit of a problem before. There’s a second in the sideboard for this reason. It’s good against Thrun, the Last Troll as well which comes up quite a bit.

The Wrath of Gods performed quite well as sweeper number 3 and 4 and the ‘can’t be countered’ clause wasn’t missed. I actually played against Elves and Thrun again so Wrath was a much welcomed change.  Like I said last week, the deck plays quite smoothly so not much actually needed changing. The matchups I was given lined up very well for the deck and my loss in the semi’s was more down to getting a tad unlucky than anything else (except having no Wrath of God and therefore no way to get rid of an Ezuri lead army without a Path to Exile).

The sideboard however, needed addressing. Knowing what I know about the surrounding areas in the South West I knew there wouldn’t many graveyard dependent decks so the 2 Rest in Peace were the first things to go. As a brief aside I think the new iteration of Dredge is pretty decent but suffers from the same issues every graveyard deck has; it’s a little too easy to hate. It’s one of those where it has hands that make you feel you can never lose but the flip side to that is it has a lot of hands that are unkeepable. You can get quite unlucky playing this deck as well. If you’re a player that prefers to burn out rather than fade away, then this deck might be for you. When you win it’s normally in devastating fashion. When you lose its normally in devastating fashion… I think you get the gist.

I heard there might be a lot of Infect, Naya Burn and Boggles at the event so I added 2 Spellskite as a way to combat those focused, targeted spell based decks. At very worse Spellskite acts as a 0/4 wall that can get in the way of attackers. I originally thought Chalice of the Void would fill that spot but it made a few of my best cards in those matchups dead and my side-boarding started becoming awkward. Bringing in Chalice and leaving in Path to Exile seemed a little strange. Infect has a few problems dealing with a Chalice for 1 at the moment as not many people seem to be playing a 2 mana artifact destroying spell. Most have 3 Nature’s Claim. Mulliganing aggressively to try and find Chalice against Infect is probably not a bad plan as the matchup is quite poor.

Sometimes a Chalice isn’t actually enough as the Infect player can still cast their spells, they will just get countered and put into the graveyard for Become Immense to eat. Ultimately that’s the reason it got cut. The best card I could think of for a specific match sometimes didn’t get the job done. So Spellskite went in as it is very good vs Boggle and Burn as well as Infect, which I expected to see.

The last change was cutting 1 Negate and 1 Condemn from the side board for 2 Sunlance. Sunlance was a card I’ve wanted to try out for a while and it performed pretty well. Its main use was killing mana producers on turn 1. Sometimes that’s enough to give you enough time to play your game. At the very least it stops them making one of many very good 3 drops in the modern metagame (Seriously, killing one on turn 1 in the semi’s stopped me getting turn 2 Stone Rained or Bloodmoon’ed, of which he had both in his hand!).

Sunlance was mainly in there as a way to kill turn 1 Glistener Elf or Goblin Guide but it turns out it was good at most points in the game. There were turns it killed things like Goblin Electromancer against Storm (really wished I had Rest in Peace in my sideboard at that point!) which disrupted them enough to not kill me in the next couple of turns.

I think the sideboard has 11 cards that need to be in there in some capacity but 4 that can be messed around with. Those are the cards I’ve highlighted above. It really depends on what you feel about the metagame you’re going to go and play in. There’s no shame in sacrificing one matchup like I did with Infect last week if it strengthens up another couple of matches.

A few cards I seriously thought about but didn’t include;

Blessed Alliance – Good against Infect and Boggles. Fine against Burn as well. In the end I was starting to butcher my sideboard trying to salvage a matchup I might not even play against so they didn’t make the cut.

Aven Mindcensor – I really love this card but I came to the conclusion it doesn’t make enough of an impact to really include.

Fracturing Gust – If this gets cast vs Affinity the game is over. The issue is I might be dead before this is relevant. It is good vs other decks as well. Lantern control and Boggle take some of the crossfire from trying to hate on Affinity. In the end I thought I would probably play the 3rd Stony Silence before the 1st Gust.

If I’m honest expecting to have game against most decks in Modern is unrealistic. The format has too many popular decks to bank on playing certain ones in most events. The only ones I think you can be sure of seeing is Jund (or any GBx Goyf deck), Jeskai, Burn, Infect and possibly Dredge now after it’s SCG Open exposure last weekend. There might be one I’m forgetting but for the most part these are the non ‘pet’ decks.

So my advice is to plan vs those 5 decks if you’re playing in anything bigger than a PPTQ but try to have a resilient sideboard for PPTQs. Nothing too narrow except Timely Reinforcements as it’s just too good not to have in there.

I’ll have to apologise as last week I said I would have a sideboard plan for you. That’ll have to wait but if you’re as impatient as me please feel free to ask in the comments. It’s what they’re there for. If you’ve had success with a deck like this let me know as well. I’d love to see what worked for you.

Thanks for reading.