Hello all! This is a public service announcement about the rules for what you’re allowed (or not allowed) to keep with your sideboard. You CANNOT keep cards that are legal in the format and “conceivably playable” in your deck (i.e., your deck could even theoretically cast that card with the colors of mana your deck can produce)… UNLESS those cards are:

• Promotional cards that have been handed out as part of the tournament.

We don’t want to punish people who just don’t have a better place to put that card.

• Double-faced cards represented by checklist cards in the deck.

Duh… where else would you keep those?

• Double-faced cards being used to represent the ‘night’ side of cards in the deck.

This is the special one! If you are using opaque sleeves, you can play your DFCs in your deck, and keep some number of extra copies of those DFCs to use as the transformed version. For example, you have 4 Delver of Secrets in your deck, and 4 more with your sideboard (in different sleeves) so you don’t have to pull out and transform the ones in your deck. Or you have 4 Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy in your deck, and probably just one extra in the sideboard to use when you need a Jace, Telepath Unbound.

Note that in all cases, “These cards must not be sleeved in the same way as cards in the main deck and/or sideboard.” That way nobody worries that you might slip in extra copies of something into your deck (even accidentally).

One extra fun bit of info that occasionally comes up: The rules about mixing actual DFCs and Checklists in your deck have been slightly relaxed. Now you’re able to use checklists for your valuable Jaces, but use real DFCs for your less expensive Delvers (previously it had to be all checklists, or no checklists). You still have to use all of the same type of card for any specific card name. You can’t play 2 checklist Delvers and two real Delvers (and I have no idea why you’d want to do that anyway).

Go forth with this new knowledge, and worry not about unreasonable game losses!

Today’s Tournament Tip written by Josh Stansfield (as suggested by Alex Mullins, thanks!)