Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #882: Color Pie Changes 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

I recently posted an update to my Mechanical Color Pie article. This is part one of a two-part series where I talk about the changes.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive-to-work coronavirus edition. Okay, so recently I did an article. So back in 2017, I did an article called Mechanical Color Pie. And at the time I did that, I also recorded a podcast about it. But anyway, I decided it was four years later. I decided it was time to update it. But anyway, I decided, it was four years later, I decided it was time to update it. Basically, the mechanical color pie is me trying to list all the different colors and the different effects and like what colors do what effects. It is a daunting task. It was daunting when I did in 2017. It ended up being pretty daunting when I redid it in 2021. But what I want to do for today's podcast is talk a little bit

about the change and then just go through the changes and kind of walk through what the changes were and explain them probably in a little bit more depth than I did in the column. Anyway, so what happened was I'd always planned to update it. Mechanical Color Pie was meant to be a resource for the audience. And, you know, the color pie doesn't shift all that. I mean, it slowly shifts over time. So I knew at some point enough would change that it would make sense to come back. What I did this time that was different than last time was I involved the Council of Colors, which I did not do last time.

I think I loosely involved them last time. This time I had each one of them review their color and say, hey, is there something that shouldn't be here? Is there something that is missing? Is there something that's changed? You know, and they all gave me notes. And so that was super helpful. And we also had a meeting where we talked through some of the notes of what people thought. And there are some debates, and some of these debates actually show up in my notes on the article. But anyway, I made a brand new Mechanical Color Pie 2021, and then there's an article that's linked from it that I'm going to talk through today where I was talking about the different changes.

Some of these are minor changes. Some of them are major changes. But anyway, today, in my podcast, I'm going to talk through the changes to the Color Pie as of the Mechanical Color Pie. By the way, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you in my podcast, I'm going to talk through the changes to the color pie as of the mechanical color pie. By the way, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can go online, go to the Magic website, or go to Google and type in, you know, Rosewater Mechanical Color Pie, and you will find it. You'll find both the 2017 version, which is the original version, and the 2021 version. The two things I want to say before I go through. A, there is a link to the article I'm talking about right now that lists all the changes. Every single change is listed and

annotated. There's like a link in the first paragraph that says, you know, go see what the changes are. The second thing is there's two sections to it. The first just lists for each color what the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors are. And the second section lists alphabetically all the abilities. The one thing a lot of people don't realize when they just look at it is that the alphabetical section is where all the description and explanation is. So if you just look at the primary, secondary, and tertiary, it lists the subcategories, but it doesn't explain why. You want to go to the alphabetic section if you want to understand why.

Okay, that said, let's get on with the changes. if you want to understand why. Okay, that said, let's get on with the changes. Okay, first change up is, I used a bunch of slang in the first time, and I decided to clean up some of the slang. So, for example, I had a section called Abyss. Abyss was named after the card The Abyss, which means every turn somebody sacrifices,

it's repeatable for sacrifice. I just changed the name from Abyss to Creature Sacrifice, forced, uh, it's repeatable for sacrifice. Um, I just changed the name from Abyss to Creature Sacrifice, forced, repeatable. Okay, next, animated artifacts. So, I had a section for animating, um, lands in the first one. Um,

but, uh, I decided, uh, somebody made a note, I think maybe Corey made a note that I, I should be listing all the different animations. So now there's a section for animating artifacts, a section for animating enchantments, and there's a continued section for animating lands. We don't really animate planeswalkers. I guess some planeswalkers turn themselves into creatures,

but we don't really animate planeswalkers, and creatures are, I guess, already animated. I have gotten some notes on the Animated Artifacts one. Primary blue, I list secondary green. Green has done it historically a little bit. I put it on just because it's the number two creature, the color that's done it in the past, but it's mostly a blue thing

and not particularly a green thing, and so, I mean, maybe I'm supposed to list green as tertiary, I'm not sure. Animated Enchantment, primary white, secondary blue. The idea essentially is we're trying to make white a little more dominant in enchantment interactions. And so we decided that the animating enchantment should be more dominant in white.

Blue is king of animating things. So blue is there. But anyway, so... Oh, the other thing, by by the way is that blue sometimes has um enchantments that will animate themselves that's a common thing we do in blue we're like every time you cast a spell it gets animated um so anyway i added those two sections animating lands i just wanted to note that uh there was a big talk of whether or not I had listed green as being primary in Animating Lands. And then I think I listed red as secondary and the other colors as tertiary.

And there's some talk in the console colors, like whether we should even list the others as tertiary. And the reason I did is we've just done a bunch of cycles over the years. Like the Genju cycle from Traitors of Kamikawa, the Waken mechanic from Battle of Zendikar. And so it's the kind of thing that, like, we don't tend to have the other colors animate lands normally, but we do do cycles every once in a while. So I decided to list them as tertiary. Next, Artifact Destruction. I think white has gotten a little bit better. Uh, there was a larger gap between sort of Naturalize and Disenchant for a while,

where we really weren't doing Disenchants at common, it was mostly an uncommon thing. Recently, we have said, you know what, it's just a useful tool, we're going to let both white and green have access to destroying both artifacts and enchantments. But that we... Green is supposed to be slightly better at naturalized and white is at disenchant. But it's pretty close, and it's... Situationally, either one can be better in certain situations. Next, Banisher Priest.

The funny thing was, in the 2017 article, I listed green as secondary in Banisher Priest. Banisher Priest meaning, when I enter the battlefield, I exile a creature, and then when this permanent leaves, it comes back. White does this all the time, so it was always listed primary in white. I had listed it as secondary in green, because I had this dream that something green should do. I had made a big bad wolf for Eldraine

that like ate something, but when you killed it, it popped back out. Kind of like how the story of the Wicked Wolf, like the little writing that happens. Anyway, that didn't fly. I kind of had jumped the gun a little bit. I kind of put something that I was hoping to be true, but the rest of RD really didn't go along with it.

So it ended up not being true. So I removed that from it. Basic land counting. really didn't go along with it, so it ended up not being true, so I removed that from it. Basic land counting. Mostly all I really did is move blue from secondary down to tertiary. We don't do a lot of counting. Like, we do red is primary in basic land counting.

Black and green do it a little. White and blue do it occasionally, mostly when we do it in cycles. But I moved blue from secondary down to tertiary. Blocking extra creatures. I removed... We just don't really do blocking extra creatures anymore, so I just removed that section from

the thing. Next, bounce. I think what happened was green has this thing where every once in a while it has creatures that as an upkeep you have to bounce something. So I listed it as secondary in green. Really, that's something we don't do very much anymore.

So I put it as secondary in... I moved it from secondary in green to tertiary in green. And instead of using the word bounce, which is kind of slang, I changed it to return to hand. Next up, returning to library, two things. One is I changed it from bounce to library to return to library. But the more important thing is white used to be secondary in sending things to the library. We decided we didn't want to do that anymore, that putting things to the library felt more like a super run summon, which made sense in blue. And so white no longer bounces

things, you know, no longer puts things on top of library. There are a few cases where white will destroy something, and instead of going to the graveyard, it goes to the bottom of the library. That still happens from time to time. Next, can't block. It used to be that black was

primary and can't block, red was secondary, and red was primary and must attack, that black was primary in Camp Black, red was secondary, and red was primary in Must Attack, and black was secondary. What we found is Camp Black is so much better than Must Attack, the gameplay is a lot better. So we just said that black and red get to be primary in Camp Black. It's something we use instead of... We used to divvy them up just to make them feel more different,

but Camp Black just plays so much better than Must Attack. So I just represented that by showing that black and red are primary in it. just to make them feel more different. But Can't Block just plays so much better than Must Attack. So I just represented that by showing that black and red are primary in it. Card draw. Okay, so card draw. The biggest thing that really changed in card drawing, I mean, blue and black have stayed the same. Green, we pulled back a little bit on card drawing.

We really, for a while, we would do card drawing based on land, but that was a lot like just drawing cards because green always has land. So, um, we've really tried to focus a little bit on where it's drawing cards, tying it to creatures, and making it not quite as uh, ubiquitous as it's been. Um, we did up red a little bit in that impulsive draw. It has a higher as found than it used to. But the most important thing is we started defining card drawing white. For a long time, white didn't have card drawing. I mean, it had cantrips. Everybody had cantrips. But we've really said, okay, white's still fifth in card drawing.

It's the worst at it. But rather than being horrible and doesn't do it, it does it, but it has some restrictions. So the biggest restriction we added to white is it can only draw one card per turn. So whenever it does something, it limits it to one card per turn. Although in multiplayer play, we do let you draw one card per opponent during draw cycle, essentially.

So either on each person's turn, you could draw a card, or on your turn, you could draw a card for each opponent. There's some multiplayer stuff we've let happen. But anyway, we're also making White king of small creature cantrips. So we're doing a bunch of different things. I mean, White also, we're allowing White to, as a taxing thing, draw cards.

If you put a dust in them, they don't let you draw a card. So we're finding a lot of little ways to make white card drawing a thing, mostly for Commander. Commander's the one that needs it. A lot of the basic nature of how Commander works really undermined some of white's strengths, and so we've been juggling around a little bit, figuring out how to help white in Commander,

and one of which is giving it more card drawing, but more defined card drawing. Next is card filtering, meaning looking at top of library and then choosing some cards to put in your hand. We used to be primary blue, secondary green. I said, you know what, we're doing it enough in green. We just made it primary blue and green.

I do want to mention, and this gets a little slicing things thinly, there also is tutoring. And one of the things we've done recently with tutoring is sometimes instead of tutoring, we tutor from top of library. What that means is, hey, look at the top end card of your library, and from those cards

you can sort of tutor, go get a card and put it in your hand. When we do that, when we do sort of limited tutoring, that follows the rules of tutoring, not of card filtering. So, a lot of people were worried that white couldn't card filter anymore. White can. White can sort of tutor

from top of library. Maybe in the future I combine these into one category because tutoring and card filtering are slowly merging as we simplify like, we're trying to get rid of a lot of shuffling in tutoring. And, by tutoring only to a certain amount of cards, it're trying to get rid of a lot of shuffling in tutoring. And by tutoring only to a certain amount of cards,

it forces you to more... Like, when you tutor your whole deck, you're kind of encouraged to only have one of the things you want. When you're tutoring from the top, you know, eight cards in your library, you're encouraged to have a lot of the things in your deck. So we are moving toward that. Next.

Counteringing target activated or trigger ability. Last time it was primary blue, secondary green. We've kind of moved it down in green, so I call it the tertiary green. It's something we do, but we just don't do it much anymore. Okay, creature destruction.

Black has always been primary. We've moved white up to secondary. We've just made white a little bit better in creature destruction. It's not as good as black. It's still secondary to black's primary. But it is something we've gotten a little bit better at, and we wanted to be clear on that. Also, for a long time, we let white destroy big things,

and the big things we're defined as power four or greater. We're occasionally letting it do power three or greater, so I wanted to represent that. And another important thing is destroying with what we call compensation, meaning I destroy your creature, and then I give you, the person whose creature I destroyed, a creature, something. It could be life, it could be a creature token,

it could be card draw. But I'm giving you something for having destroyed your creature. For a while, we were letting white and blue do that. Blue was more doing it as a means of changing something. Like, I exile your creature

and give you a token, and it's supposed to represent the creature turns into the token. But the flavor was never great with that, and it was causing confusion with White's compensation destruction. So what we said is, okay, only White can destroy a creature or exile a creature, and you get

a token, you give a token to the creature. The way we're going to do transformation from now on is either it's temporary, it's an aura, or it's something in which you can undo it, or it is temporary. It's an effect that's going to last until end of turn.

So blue no longer has the stuff that like sort of destroys or exiles a creature and then gives them a token in response, for example. Okay, next up, mass creature destruction. I just wanted to mention that just like white can destroy a creature with power three or greater or four or greater, that also it can destroy all creatures with power three or greater or four or greater, that also it can destroy all creatures power three or greater or four or greater.

That it can go as low as three or greater. Creature pumping... Mostly what I did in creature pumping is A, the sort of giant growth effects that are primary white and green, secondary and black. We added secondary and red. We now say that red

can do those kind of sort of giant, growthy effects. Usually, we make power greater than toughness. It'll be plus three, plus two, or plus two, plus one, just to give it a little bit of a feel. Let's see. And a lot of this was we eradicated some. There's some categories we didn't

use, like minus N, plus N, and stuff like that. We just didn't use, like minus N plus N and stuff like that. We just didn't use very much. So I consolidated some of that. I got rid of plus 0 plus N to your team, plus 0 plus N to their team, plus 0 plus N to your team, plus 0 minus N to their

team. So a lot of sort of toughness without pumping power. We just don't do that anymore, so I removed it. Next, change the name of what we used to call creature ball, which was an X spell that makes an XX creature. Green is primary, still is primary,

but we now said that black and red are sort of tertiary. Once in a while, we let black and red do that. For defender, before, it was primary white, secondary blue, black, red, and green. I moved blue up from secondary to primary. So now Defender is primary white and blue and secondary black, red, and green.

Any color can get it, but white and blue are the more defensive colors. Okay, next. Direct damage. The one we added here was we decided for a while we had red could do damage equal to the number of creatures you have, but it just wasn't something red particularly needed, and white has this whole theme of trying to build up your army.

So we decided that we're going to let white have direct damage equal to the number of your creatures. It's something we'll do on occasion. Oh, the other thing in this section I cleaned up is, we used to have redirection for planeswalkers, and now we can just hit planeswalkers with direct damage. So I adjusted that to reference that in the damage section. Okay, next.

There's direct damage, multiple targets. I just massaged some stuff saying that white can hit things if it's an attacker or a blocker. Or, once again, there's a new section where if you count the number of creatures. Okay, added a new section. Discard as cost. Primary black, secondary red, tertiary white, blue, and green. So any color can discard as a cost.

Black does it most. Red does the secondary most. And then in order to do that, I had to change the label of discard to discard as an effect. So that discard as a cost, discard as an effect were separate things. And enchantment destruction, oh, this is one of the bigger things. We've made, it used

to be, or still is, white and green are primary. We've since made black secondary, which means that black can destroy enchantments. We limit a little bit how much it does, and it's not nearly as good as white or green. And we don't make it very easy for black to destroy its own enchantments, because we have the deal-with-the-devil type enchantments. It is something we're going to have some ability to do,

but not as easily as white or green. But this is a pretty big change. The reason we made this change was Eric Lauer came to me and said, look, it's kind of weird that black is the one color that has two different car types that it can't deal with. And that it's also odd

that enchantments, only two colors can destroy enchantments, while three colors can destroy artifacts, for example. Or three colors can destroy land. So we decided that it made sense for black to destroy enchantments, but not let it destroy artifacts, and keep red not being able to destroy artifacts, but not destroy enchantments.

And so it made it balance out a little bit better. Once again, it's going to be third tier. It's going to be worse than wearing green at it, but it is something that we're pushing around with. Next, the enchantress ability the ability to draw cards when you play an enchantment

for a while it was primary green and then in the 2017 article I called it primary white, secondary green I'm now calling it primary white and green I think what that means is we can do it in white we do it in white and it'll have the one card per turn restriction on it.

Green can get it from time to time, and probably the strongest version of the, you'll see in the future, will be green and white, is my guess. Okay, next. Talking about fight. I'll just change the name of fight. It's the only time I change it from

to a nickname. We just refer to it as bite. So fight is when two creatures each do damage to each other. Bite is when just your creature does damage to them, but not creature back. And that is something that is primary green, secondary in red. Okay, next, flash. So the old system was blue as primary, green was secondary, and white, black, and red were tertiary.

In the last couple of years, both white and black have moved up to secondary. We're just trying to give white a little more utility. We're trying to give black and blue some overlap. There's a bunch of different reasons we did it. Flash is a little bit different from most mechanics. Most mechanics, we restrict at trying to have no more than three colors do it, just to have some differentiation between colors. Flash, in my mind, is really not a keyword.

Like, if I had to do it all over again, it would be a super type. Instant would be the super type, by the way. And then, like, Instants would just be Instant Sorcerers. But anyway, I mostly wanted to reflect the idea that white and black had moved up and we made it more efficient. So this is another decent change in that we've been more aggressive about just doing flashing more, especially in white and black.

Next, Flicker, aka removing, exiling something and bringing it back either right away or to end a turn. It used to be white and blue. I said tertiary black in it because we would make stuff like Rescue from the Underworld, where you would kill a creature and then bring it back from

reanimated end of turn, which functioned kind of like flickering, but it decided that, eh, while it functions similarly, it's a separate thing, so I removed it. So flickering is now just primary white and blue. It is more in white than in blue, by the way.

White is slightly better than blue, but blue doesn't enough. We kept it at primary. Next, fourth block. This is one of the ones where I realized, it was pointed out to me in the console colors meeting that I just had them backwards. I had a primary red, secondary green.

And it turns out, if you look at the numbers, we actually do a primary green, secondary red. So that section just got swapped. Next, freeze land. So that is tap a land it doesn't untap. We experimented with this being a way for red to do sort of land destruction. It didn't play out too great, so... I mean, I'll never say never.

We might use it again in an appropriate place. But it's just not something we're doing as an evergreen thing. So I removed the section from the... Oh! Something that I should bring up. I do think that it might come a time where in one of these rewrites in the Mechanical Color Pie, I

add in more deciduous material. So evergreen means you can do it all the time. Like, every set... Almost every set will do it. Deciduous means every set has access to it, but it's only used when it's needed. Hybridman is a good example of that. Double-faced cards are a good example of that.

Anyway, I decided that how did I do? Oh, that things that were deciduous, when I originally made the article, it was just so much work,

I didn't put the deciduous things in. And what's happened is, as things have moved to deciduous, I mostly have left them in. Freezeland really isn't being used, so I wouldn't even call it deciduous anymore. But things like prowess, which we'll get to, things that moved in deciduous,

I decided not to remove them. I do think long term I would like to get the deciduous stuff, meaning things we can use some of the time into this document. It's just a lot of work.

So one of these days when I have less work to do, maybe one of these years I'll rewrite it and I'll just add it in deciduous. But it's something I do plan to do over time. This is a living,

breathing document that I'm hoping to be able to update. Okay, anyway, next. Friendly to a card deck. So this is a new section. I think that I had... I think... Oh, I see. I think I...

It's not new. I just cleaned it up. So before, I had blue being friendly to artifacts. I had white primary, green secondary being friendly to enchantments. And I just sort of changed it around a little bit. Now I'm saying that white and blue are friendly

to artifacts and red is secondary to artifacts. And then for enchantments, I said white and green are friendly to enchantments and black is tertiary to enchantments. So mostly what I did, and this came from the Council of Colors meetings, we went and looked at sort of how often the things were being used,

and we said, you know what, while blue is friendly to artifacts, we've done a lot more recently to make white friendly to artifacts. So, we decided we'd move that up and just say, okay, both white and blue are primary, and we also noticed that we were doing enough stuff with red that I decided to call it secondary.

Likewise with enchantments, I realized that we've been doing a lot with green as well as white, so I moved green up to primary and then recognized that we were doing a little bit with black, especially in such theme with enchantment themes that black will sometimes get some stuff. I then added friendly to planeswalkers.

That wasn't a section that was there before. Primary and white. We decided that when we interact with Planeswalkers, we kind of like white being the one to do that. So we've made that a thing. Okay. I also added some sections talking about being friendly to other things.

So friendly to legendary permanents is something that's primary in white. Because of Commander, we've been making more legendary things and more legendary matter things. And we've just decided that we want white for that to sit. Another friendly thing is friendly to low mana value cards, meaning things that cost

usually mana value three or less, sometimes it's two or less. That's also something we've been doing in white. It's not a new thing. White's been doing it for a while. I just forgot to add it in, but it is something we do in enough regularity that I thought it should be in the thing. Okay, next up is Haste.

Old school, or 2017, it was primary in red, secondary in black, tertiary in green. The big change that happened, I don't know, about two years ago, is Play Design came to us and said they really wanted to use Haste more in green. Could we move it up? And we said yes. There was talk of moving black back down to tertiary, but we found that we really did have some needs for black in secondary. So basically what we said is red primary,

black and green secondary, although green is more so than black at secondary. But we decided to leave black in secondary because it's doing enough that I felt like it made sense at secondary. Next, the illusion text. So the illusion text first started on the Zenic Poltergeist

in Antiquities. It was a spirit thing. We've since moved it from black to blue to be an illusion thing. So in 2017 it was Sacrifice this creature if it's a target of a spell or ability. The one we currently do now is we took off ability.

It made it a little too easy to get rid of. So now the illusion ability and that's a nickname, is Sacrifice this. It made it a little too easy to get rid of. So now, the illusion ability, and that's a nickname, is sacrilegious creature if it's a target of a spell. You have to hit it with an actual spell to destroy it. So you have to use a spell. It can be any spell that targets, but it has to be a spell. It can't be an ability anymore.

Okay, next up is impulsive draw. So this is Red's way of card drawing. Basically, you exile the cards off the top of your library and then either until the end of turn, sometimes the end of next turn you can play a card that's been exiled I just

wanted to reference that in the 2017 article I said it was always until end of turn and I just wanted to reference that we have been doing until end of next turn some of the time sometimes if it's something where we want you to be able to do something grandiose with it, we'll give you some time, because normally you have to spend mana to make it,

but if I give you an extra turn, then you have a whole turn of mana to be able to cast the cards. Okay, next up, the Cabal ability, which is a nickname. We changed that to Rewards for Death. It was named after Cabal Ghoul, which was a Rabid Knights. It was one of those nicknames that no one remembered the original card, so I just changed it to a cleaner name. Okay, next, Land Destruction. So Land Destruction

was primary red, secondary black and green, tertiary white. Mostly for Armageddon-type stuff in white. Mostly what has happened is we've really pulled back on Land Destruction. So red is the only primary. White doesn't really do Armageddon effects anymore. And black and green occasionally do it,

but we move them from secondary down to tertiary. So black, red, and green can all still destroy land. Red does it most of the time. Black and green do it very infrequently. Okay, next new section, Life loss as a cost. So one of the things that had been brought up during the Council of Colors meeting was that I hadn't,

that there were some costs that I hadn't really been referencing. It's something that would be cool to do. So all the colors have some access, but black is primary and life loss as a cost. White, blue, red, and green are tertiary, meaning in a set that cares, like New Phyrexia or something, where there's a theme of paying life,

okay, all the colors can have some access to it, but as a default, black is a color that does that. Also, speaking of it, not only is there life lost as a cost, there's life lost as an effect. Mostly I just changed the name of that because when I was talking

about life lost both as cost and effect I needed the old one just said life loss it's still primary black that hasn't changed um next, lifelink so under the old system it was primary white, secondary black and I think Corey

who's the black represents black in the council of colors pointed out that black does it just as often as white. So instead of being primary white, secondary black is now just primary in white and black. Next, the Morrow ability. So this is the ability where its power and toughness are equal to the number of cards in your hand foreseen on the card Morrow. So under all, we listed is primary, blue, and green.

The reality is, while I do love the creature Marrow, we do it a lot less in green than we used to. So, it is primary, blue, secondary, and green. So, it's still doable in green. Green can do it. Marrow can't exist. But the ability is now strictly primary in blue. Blue does it more. Okay.

I think we are... Okay, so I'm realizing that I'm not going to finish this today. I have a bunch more. So I'm going to stop here, and I guess I will do a second podcast where I explain the changes of the color pie. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this.

Like I said, the color pie is a passion of mine. Somehow you can't realize that. I did recently, by the way, in my column, Making Magic, I did a whole article the week before I did the mechanical color pie article where I listed all my links to my color pie articles and podcasts, of which at the time I made the article, there was 38 articles and I think 38 podcasts. So if you enjoy the color pie,

if what I'm talking about today is interesting to you, there is many, many resources for you to learn all about the color pie if somehow you haven't already. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my talk today. Like I said, I didn't quite get done. So I will have a second podcast talking about the changes. But anyway, guys, I see my desk.

So we all know that means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.