Oversideboarding

Learning how to sideboard correctly is a long trial-and-error process and it takes time to achieve mastery. Of course, if you feel uncertain you may Google or ask around how to sideboard against other decks in order to create a sideboard plan for every matchup. Sticking to it guarantees you can't sideboard wrong in games 2 and 3. Don’t be embarrassed to refer to it while sideboarding. Even pro players are doing it this way. But the thing is, Magic is a fast-paced game and metagames or decklists change rapidly. What if a player encounter a deck he is not familiar with? Then, the most common mistake is oversideboarding. If you ignore lands, your deck consists of about 40 cards that do anything. If you take out 8 cards it is 20% of 40. It is a lot. You will have totally different deck now. It's just so easy to get overexcited about all the great tools in your sideboard that will hinder the game to your opponent and will grant you a free, easy win. However, it turns out that if your focus is exclusively on making your opponent stumble, you are very likely to stumble as well. Not losing the game is great, but always our focus must be on winning the game ourselves. Deciding what to take out is an underrated skill that can require quite a bit of creativity. What you take out is almost as important as what you put in.