Game one is the deck you built. Games two and three are the deck you actually think with. Premodern rewards good sideboarding about as much as any format out there, but the plans themselves are weirdly hard to find. They mostly live in people’s heads, in old Discord threads, and in the odd tournament report.
We wanted a better way to work them out and to share them, so we built two things. Both are live now and free to use:
- A Sideboard Planner for building, saving, and sharing your own in and out plans for any matchup.
- A library of community Sideboard Guides, with boarding plans from other players sorted by archetype.
No ads, nothing to pay for, and you don’t need an account just to read.
Why bother building this
If you’ve played Premodern for a while you already know the gap between a fine list and a winning one is mostly post-board: which dead cards come out against Stiflenought, how Burn shifts on the draw, what you bring in for the mirror. That knowledge is hard-won, and it almost never gets written down anywhere you can actually use.
A wall of text like “-3 Lightning Bolt, +2 Pyroblast” is easy to fat-finger and a pain to read. We wanted something you can see: real card images, a quick way to flip between the play and the draw, and plans that are easy to pass along once you’ve got them dialed.
The Sideboard Planner
The Sideboard Planner is an interactive board. Paste your list once, then for each matchup just click cards to move them out or in. It shows the real art, lays everything out by mana cost, and keeps a running count so you don’t end up at 59 or 61 by accident.
A few things it does:
- Cards you can see, not a text dump. Click to add or remove copies.
- Separate plans for the play and the draw, since boarding isn’t always the same either way.
- Paste a list or drop in a
.dekor text file. Cards pull their first-printing art from Scryfall. - Sign in and your decks and plans save to your account, so they’re waiting on any device.
- Copy a clean text version anytime, or publish the plan as a guide for everyone else.
Community Sideboard Guides
Plans are a lot more useful once they’re shared. The Sideboard Guides library pulls together boarding guides from players around the format, each one tied to an archetype with the full matchup list right there.
Filter by archetype, sort by newest or most upvoted, and open any guide to see the exact in and out for every matchup, in the same clean layout the Planner makes. If one helped you, give it an upvote so it floats up for the next person.
Want to publish your own?
If you’ve got a deck figured out, pass on what you know:
- Build your deck and matchup plans in the Planner.
- Hit Share, add a title and archetype.
- It goes through a quick review, then shows up in the library under your name, with a profile page that collects everything you’ve posted.
You’ll need a free account with a verified email to publish (just a light spam check, nothing more). You can edit or take down your guides whenever you want.
Free and fan-run
Play Premodern is a non-profit fan project, made under the Wizards of the Coast Fan Content Policy. No ads, no paywall. Card images and data come from Scryfall, and the format itself is run by the committee over at premodernmagic.com.
Give it a try:
Now go win games two and three.