Today we are analizyng what the entire format actually brought to its sideboards in June 2026, ranked by total copies across every Premodern decklist recorded on TC Decks, plus how each card moved since May.
The 20 most-played sideboard cards
Hover a card for its first printing · vs May = rank move (green ▲ / red ▼) and the change in that card's share of all sideboard slots.
The two cards nobody cuts
Tormod’s Crypt laps the field. It’s the cheapest insurance policy in Magic: it costs nothing to run, nothing to hold up, and it single-handedly turns off Replenish, Survival of the Fittest recursion, reanimator strategies, and every flashback and threshold card in the format. When a hate card is free and hits half the metagame, it stops being a sideboard choice and becomes a sideboard tax.
Annul — counter target artifact or enchantment spell for a single blue mana, is the format’s quiet MVP because of what it answers: Premodern’s most-played deck, Stiflenought, the entire enchantment wing (Enchantress, Replenish, Survival, Oath of Druids, Sylvan Library, etc.). One card, most of the format’s defining strategies, one mana.
What moved since May
The interesting story isn’t the leaderboard — it’s the direction. Cross-referenced with our June MTGO metagame breakdown, the sideboard trends track the metagame almost perfectly:
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The anti-red blasts are surging. Blue Elemental Blast (▲4 into the top 5), Pyroblast (▲2) and Hydroblast (▲1) all climbed. Both “blast” pairs answer a color on a single mana — the blue ones point at red, the red ones (Pyroblast, Red Elemental Blast) point at blue. Blue-hate is flat while red-hate is up, and that lines up exactly with June’s story: Burn woke back up and started winning events, so the field re-pointed its cheapest answers at it.
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Engineered Plague fell off a cliff — from #3 in May to #10 in June (▼7), the single biggest drop in the top 20. Probably due to a drop in Mono Black decks. And as the tribal aggro decks lost their grip on the top tables (Goblins, Elves), the format’s answer to them quietly got benched.
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Combo protection is trending up. Defense Grid (▲12, the biggest riser in the top 40) Brain Freeze (▲4) a key sideboard strategy in Dreadnought decks, and Chain of Vapor (▲12) climbed alongside it. That’s the fingerprint of a rising combo presence, and sure enough, Dream Halls became a real slice of the June field.
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The white-hate is cooling. Gloom (▼12) and Dystopia (▼9) — the dedicated anti-white and anti-GW enchantments — both slid down the list as Mono Black decks are droping and the decks they punish shifted.
What this tells you about your own 15
Three quick, data-backed takeaways for your next sideboard:
- You cannot ignore graveyards. With Tormod’s Crypt this dominant, if your deck leans on the graveyard, you need a plan for turn-zero exile — and if it doesn’t, a Crypt or two is nearly free insurance.
- Pick your blast direction on purpose. With all four elemental blasts in the top seven, “a blast” isn’t a plan. Are you beating red or beating blue? Run the pair that matches the decks actually winning.
- Answer the enchantments and the Dreadnought with the same slot. Cheap artifact/enchantment interaction (Annul, Naturalize, Aura of Silence) is efficient precisely because so much of the field is artifacts and enchantments.
Want to put this into practice? Build and save your in/out plans for every matchup in the free Sideboard Planner, read what other players are boarding in the community Sideboard Guides, or see which decks are driving the metagame in the Meta Explorer.
Methodology
Card counts are the total copies of each card across every Premodern decklist recorded on TC Decks in the given month, filtered to the sideboard zone via their Most Played Cards tool. May 2026 had more recorded events than June, so its raw copy totals run higher across the board — which is why the “Since May” column compares each card’s rank position, not its raw count. Card text was verified against Scryfall Oracle wording.