Kirin Combo Sideboard Guide

Up-to-date as of June 7, 2022

Introduction

---

Welcome to the Kirin Combo Sideboard Guide! In this guide I’ll give you my thoughts and advice on strategy and sideboard plans for the most common matchups you’ll see today (January 2022). Be sure to read over Kirin Combo: A Celestial Primer if you haven’t already; a lot of the stuff I’ll cover in this guide builds upon the ideas I introduced in the primer.

Matchup-specific comments (sideboard swaps & strategy) begin on Page 2. If you’re looking for a quick-and-easy sideboard guide, feel free to print out this one-page reference sheet! (Outdated)

First, let’s have a look at the list.

As with all sideboards, ours looks to cover as many of our weaknesses as possible. The threats we care about most are, in order:

1. Big creatures that come down early (Murktide Regent, Tarmogoyf, etc.)
2. Pitch evoke elementals (Fury/Solitude)
3. Planeswalkers (Wrenn and Six)
4. Creature aggro/creature combo

Make sure to keep these things in mind if you ever edit the sideboard.

Toolbox Theory

---

The first thing Magic players think of when they hear the word “toolbox” is a decklist longer than your average CVS receipt with a sideboard that’s filled to the brim with singletons. But even though Kirin Combo classifies as a toolbox deck, it doesn’t quite fit that brand. “Where are the spicy silver bullets?” you’re probably wondering. “Did you forget your Panglacial Wurms? What do you mean, you’re not playing Yorion, Sky Nomad!?”

Certainly, that kind of all-in-one toolbox deck is a lot of fun and can be strong in especially diverse metagames, but in this case, I think it’s less optimal than the current plan for three big reasons.

The first, and most obvious, is that Kirin is a combo deck. With a two-card requirement and no redundancy, it’s very hard to justify fetching anything but a Celestial Kirin with Eladamri’s Call when you don’t have one in hand. In fact, I’d say that it’s almost always correct to prioritize combo pieces over other creatures if you haven’t yet assembled the combo, even if you have a silver bullet that shuts down half of your opponent’s deck. Modern decks are not so fragile; most sideboard cards function as speed bumps in the best case, and any decently-crafted list will have outs and alternate plans that don’t get hosed by a single card.

The second reason is tangentially related to the first: fetching a silver bullet is slower than drawing it naturally. Normally, this isn’t a huge deal for a toolbox deck because they can rely on the power of their main win condition (whether it be Knight of the Reliquary, Primeval Titan, Panglacial Wurm, or whatever else) to make up for a loss of tempo, but Kirin Combo is a synergistic deck without many innately good cards, and it’s fairly reliant on a two-card combo to win the game. If you choose to tutor for a sideboard card instead of a combo piece and don’t manage to assemble the combo in a timely fashion, it’s possible to simply lose any advantage you might get from that hate card.

The third reason is that Aether Vial and its partner, Eladamri’s Call, are not good in every matchup. The black-based midrange matchup is an example of this; Vial is a much less effective card against these decks because discard spells can remove your payoffs before your Vial can play them. In addition, Vial is a dead draw later on in the game, which is a huge detriment since that’s when grindy decks begin to edge out their competitors with higher-quality topdecks. Against discard decks, the best plan for Vial decks is often to board out Vial, which causes a sort of domino effect on this particular toolbox package—Eladamri’s Call is really slow without Aether Vial, so Vial’s absence makes Call worse, and by extension, silver bullet cards become worse as well.

So, if a toolbox deck can’t rely on its toolbox, how in the world does it get by? Well, this is where the half-transform comes into play. By replacing Aether Vial and Eladamri’s Call with sideboard cards, Kirin Combo can board into a more midrange-oriented deck in matchups where that package is lacking. In order for this plan to be effective, though, the deck can’t play a lot of one-ofs, so it loses some utility in matchups where the toolbox stays in.

This idea can also be applied to the Kirin combo itself. When the combo is less effective (against Affinity or Burn, for example), pieces of it and its supplements can be cut for sideboard cards. Theoretically, one could even go for a full transformational sideboard (Heliod, Sun-Crowned / Spike Feeder / Walking Ballista, anyone?), but let’s not get too saucy here.

Overboarding

---

For the most part, each of our cards have clear purposes: Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Sanctum Prelate target noncreature spells, Oust and Brutal Cathar target creatures, etc. It’s usually pretty easy to see which ones are good or bad in a given matchup so long as your opponent has a distinct game plan.

It gets trickier when you come across other midrange decks. White sideboard cards stack up very well against a lot of the most popular midrange decks in the current Modern metagame, and without a well thought-out plan it can be hard to find cards to cut post-board. Of course, that exact issue is what this guide is supposed to help you with, but in the event that the meta shifts and the sideboard plans below become outdated, the following advice may be useful.

My preferred approach to sideboarding is to compare the nth copy of one card to the nth copy of another and weigh the positives and negatives of both choices. As an example, let’s compare the first copy of Brutal Cathar to the fourth copy of Giver of Runes in the Mono G Tron matchup. 

Giver of Runes offers us protection from removal spells like Spatial Contortion and Warping Wail, which are cards that the Tron player is likely to bring in against our deck. However, Brutal Cathar is an answer to Wurmcoil Engine, which is Tron’s best card against us. In this matchup, we also keep all four Eladamri’s Call in the deck post-board, which boosts the value of silver bullet creatures, and with two or three copies of Giver we still have good odds of drawing its effect. Therefore, the first copy of Cathar yields more benefit than the fourth copy of Giver and should be boarded in accordingly.

This method is a great way to find cuts when you’ve inadvertently congested your main deck with sideboard cards. Other important things to consider are the functions of your cards and how many effective copies of a certain type of card you need, who’s on the play, and whether you’re keeping in core cards like Eladamri’s Call; silver bullets have great utility when you have access to your tutor spells, but without, they only have a marginal effect on your win rate.

Matchups

---

Before we continue, let me expand on some of the reasoning behind the matchup chart I gave you in the primer (shown below).

Kirin Combo Matchup Chart
Winning (65-35)	Land Ramp Spell-based Combo
Favored (60-40)	Control Cascade Spell-reliant Aggro Urza’s Saga decks
Slightly Favored (55-45)	Spell/Graveyard-reliant Midrange Graveyard decks
Even (50-50)	Vial Tribal White-based Midrange
Slightly Unfavored (45-55)	Creature Aggro
Unfavored (40-60)	Creature Combo Black-based Midrange Affinity Mill
Losing (35-65)	4c Omnath Red-based Midrange

We’re favored against noncreature decks like Control, Belcher, Storm, and Cascade because they don’t establish much of a board presence and thus have no way to counterattack us through an Armageddon. We also pack a lot of noncreature hate cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Ranger-Captain of Eos, and Sanctum Prelate in the main deck and sideboard. Spell-heavy aggro matchups such as Phoenix and Prowess are favored because they rely on using their mana every turn to trigger their creatures, making them similarly soft to Armageddon; tax creatures and especially Ghostly Prison shut them down hard.

We’re favored against midrange decks that have a high density of low-cmc spells and/or rely on the graveyard (e.g. UR Murktide, Grixis Death’s Shadow) because we have access to Rest in Peace, Sanctifier en-Vec, and Sanctum Prelate. Notably, many midrange decks that play discard spells are soft to these sideboard cards, so they occasionally have to prioritize discarding them over our combo pieces. Kirin also has an advantage against decks that play cantrips and dedicated card draw spells like Expressive Iteration because those spells are very tempo-negative.

Although I listed Aether Vial as one of Kirin’s weaknesses in the primer, we actually do fairly well against most Vial decks. We have a lot of main deck removal for it in Prismatic Ending and Skyclave Apparition, and Vial aggro decks don’t typically run much removal themselves, so we can often use the Kirin combo as a creature wrath when Armageddon is too risky. Most of these matchups turn out to be roughly even with some deviation in both directions. With more copies of Ghostly Prison in the sideboard (or main), creature decks can become favored matchups.

Sideboard Guide

---

In the following sections, I’ll go over 32 of the most relevant and/or interesting matchups of the Modern format in January 2022. Each section includes a brief overview of the matchup as well as my recommendations for sideboard swaps. For your convenience (and also because I don’t expect anyone to read through all of this), I’ve made a catalogue to help you navigate the guide.

Before we start, let me tell you my rule of thumb: you should always keep 4 Celestial Kirin, 4 Ugin’s Conjurant, and at least 2 Ranger-Captain of Eos in the deck for post-board games. Four Kirin and six effective copies of Conjurant gives you reasonable odds of drawing one of each combo piece even if you board out Eladamri’s Call. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule, but it holds true in most matchups.

It may be tempting to cut copies of Ugin’s Conjurant over Ranger-Captain of Eos since he is more flexible, but that is actually a mistake. Ideally, you want to be casting removal spells and sideboard cards in the first three turns, then the combo on turn four. However, if you have to play a Ranger-Captain of Eos to assemble the combo, you’ll either be losing the chance to get your sideboard cards down early or giving your opponent another turn to use their mana. So, by reducing your chances of drawing a Conjurant naturally, you make the combo a turn slower on average and thus grant your opponent more time to answer your sideboard cards or build up their board.

With that out of the way, let’s begin!

Catalogue

---

---