Recent most excellent threads concerning Magic's color pie and some people's tendency to negate the philosophical relevance of color pie with relativistic philosophy got me thinking about a way to discuss the motivation behind, if not the morality of, each color without reducing or even relegating them to relativism. I think most if not all of us understand amorality if not the concept of "beyond good and evil" - at least intellectually, theoretically, philosophically, and so on, but probably not experientially. I thought it might help to put them into some sort of context that essentially forces us to examine them like human beings with moral motivations instead of pseudo-gods with amoral aspirations - rather than imagining that if a known serial killer kicked down your front door and put an axe through your child's skull, you'd just shrug and say "some serial killers are emotional, and this serial killer probably thinks he or she had logical intentions for murdering my child and certainly isn't evil because evil doesn't exist."
Anyways, my search for an alternative context by which to compare and contrast the colors led me to the D&D alignments and which alignments best fit the colors of Magic to give an overall picture of the overarching principles of each color.
(For those of you who don't know, Wizards makes D&D and M:tG.)
Great Username but I disagree with D and D style color pie how is feasting and preying upon your opponent to devour them chaotic good???
Red is okay.
Black is not evil, black is death and decay and the absence of life not evil I hate when people say that.
White is not chaotic in anyway shape or form.
Blue is not as bad is about the boundless thought and lack of mental restrictions so not terrible but not good either sorry but the color pie is not character alignments. Also White is not good.
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Ophelia Le Doux (R/B)
Creature - Vampire Assassin
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ValentineX is spot on. The problem is, the two systems actually don't coincide in any meaningful way. While the D&D Alignment system is a two-axis system (Good/Evil and Order/Chaos,) the Magic Color Pie system is an at least five-axis system that deals with motivation - (Law/Freedom, Community/Individualism, Intelligence/Emotion, Progression/Tradition, Abstract/Concrete). The only axis that has any bearing on the D&D axis is the Law/Freedom axis, which pretty directly relates to D&D's Order/Chaos axis. Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and Lawful Evil, then, are on the White side of the Law/Freedom axis, while Red gets Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, and Chaotic Evil. But, if you were to map the other three colors on the D&D alignment, they would all be true neutral. The other colors' axis don't exist in the dimensions spanned by the D&D Alignment System. Furthermore, one of D&D's axis (Good/Evil) doesn't even exist in Magic since all colors can behave in a good or evil fashion. In the Magic "color pie," Good and Evil instead represents a plane to which each axis is tangent. It's taking the extent of my linear algebra knowledge to conceive of Magic's system.
Simply put, the color pie system is much too complicated to be modeled with in D&D. While D&D has 9 possible "alignments," Magic has 31 possible "alignments" each of which encompasses Good, Evil, and Neutral. Such complexity allows for the "why" that actually makes a character interesting. Think of some of the best villains you know. How many of them can be simplified down to a label like, "Neutral Evil," not many I expect. I can think of only one character that could possibly be interpreted that way, and even that interpretation is probably skewed by the bias of the audience's perspective. In my opinion, it makes for a much more useful system for which to categorize and compare characters. It makes the underlying theme of many situations far more apparent. For example, it was determined that The Dark Side of the Force is Red, while the Light Side of the Force is mostly White. This is interesting as we discover the central conflict of Star Wars is not really Good vs. Evil at all, but rather the dangers of not tempering one's emotions. This bears special meaning when we consider that A New Hope was released in the midst of The Cold War, a time in history when the temperance of emotions was of extreme importance. This may lend a partial explanation as to why Star Wars was so well received and to the nature of audiences at the time.
The D&D system, by comparison, is not nearly so useful. Say we categorize the Rebel Alliance as Chaotic Good and the Sith Empire as Lawful Evil. That doesn't really get us anywhere except for some vague anti-governmental sentiment, and really, when has that ever not been true about the populace at large?
For those reasons, the Color Pie system is a much more useful and meaningful system for which to determine alignment, and the D&D system is shallow and flawed.
@Alabran: It should be noted that the examples given for Good/Evil behavior point in a certain direction that makes it possible to correlate green with (Chaotic) Good/True Neutral and black with (True) Evil.
In fact if you take each alignment and each color and feed in keywords to correlate them blue is very close to true neutral in the lawful evil quadrant. I don't have the original work at hand, but this is a simplified sketch of what happens if you normalize the alignments and place them on a unit circle (as opposed to the unit square that is more common for such depictions) and then place the colors in that square as opposed to the other way around (so it's not exactly what the OP suggests).
Note that I work from memory and overemphasize some stuff and the method used simplifies some stuff that probably strongly influences green and blue.
Note also that the keywords chosen for alignments used much more conjecture than the keywords chosen for the colors.
tl; dr: Take the whole thing with two grains of salt.
ATTACHMENTS
Color Pie Alignment
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Planar Chaos was not a mistake neither was it random. You might want to look at it again.
[thread=239793][Game] Level Up - Creature[/thread]
Several years ago, Wizards did a Magic Arcana that assigned D&D alignments to the Ravnica guilds. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate the specific post on teh Interwebs, but I believe it went something like this:
First, they assigned alignments to each color:
W- Good
U- Lawful
B- Evil
R- Chaotic
G- Neutral
Then they applied this to the guilds:
Azorious, WU- LG
Dimir, UB- LE
Rakdos, BR- CE
Gruul, RG- CN
Selesnya, GW- NG
Orzhov, WB- GE??
Izzet, UR- CL??
Gruul, BG- NE
Boros, RW- CG
Simic, GU- LN
As you can see, these end up fitting the guilds pretty well, at least in terms of how D&D classifies morality. (Remember- good and evil in D&D [at least in 3.5] are mostly judged by how much value the character places on sentient lives.)
I'm not sure what alignments were assigned to Orzhov and Izzet, since the alignments above are contradictory/nonexistent in D&D.
SecretInfiltrator: That's fascinating, but it doesn't seem to account for Green being Evil or Blue being Good, either of which can happen.
Golgari is neutral evil? But Golgari is the guild that provides free food to the poor of Ravnica, among other things. No I don't think it's quite as simple as that.
Gonna just step in here to say I it's really odd that White hasn't been listed as all the Lawful allignments including Lawful Evil, and Black isn't listed as possibly Neutral Good.
Personally I'd work from a negative system, so Red isn't Lawful, White isn't Chaotic, and the other colours need more work than I'm currently willing to give them.
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“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.” Esmeralda Santiago Art is life itself.
I'd note here that white is also not necessarily obsessed with morality. It is obsessed with both civil and social law, which often implies morality, but doesn't necessitate it.
Golgari is neutral evil? But Golgari is the guild that provides free food to the poor of Ravnica, among other things. No I don't think it's quite as simple as that.
SecretInfiltrator: That's fascinating, but it doesn't seem to account for Green being Evil or Blue being Good, either of which can happen.
Does anyone know of any sets in which any given color as a whole is "out of alignment" for lack of a better term - i.e., good black, evil green, lawful red, etc.
In Kamigawa, the "big bad" was Konda (white) and the hero was Umezawa (black).
In the original Ravnica the villains were Simic, Azorius, and Dimir.
Braids and Phage were often "good" during the Onslaught saga and Akroma was frequently portrayed as the villain.
In Kamigawa, the "big bad" was Konda (white) and the hero was Umezawa (black).
In the original Ravnica the villains were Simic, Azorius, and Dimir.
Braids and Phage were often "good" during the Onslaught saga and Akroma was frequently portrayed as the villain.
Does this mean that white as a color was evil and black was good?
(BTW - There are other discussable posts I want to reply to when I'm not on an iThing.)
Does this mean that white as a color was evil and black was good?
Not all of white. These sets are too large and varied to put a moral stamp on any one color. Though I never actually read the novels, I think the Kitsune were probably "good," meanwhile the Nezumi were probably "evil," which just goes to show why that's true.
Similarly, in Innistrad, it was Lilliana that freed Avacyn from the Helstone. The White society were keeping her in there.
TLDR: Magic is specifically designed so that each color can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Some of the colors just tend to lean toward one or the other a lot of the time.
SecretInfiltrator: That's fascinating, but it doesn't seem to account for Green being Evil or Blue being Good, either of which can happen.
This is because the method gives only a stochastic analysis (among other things). The way you would read it is approximately this:
Choose a point in the circle area.
Draw a circle around it with a certain radius R.
Any person with that alignment is with a chance p(R) not any color not found within the circle area.
The borders are drawn absolute straight lines, but are actually beyond fuzzy. I wanted to finish the sketch at some point.
Green & Evil: Not surprising. Green is often perceived as "at most evil" neutral. Nature is considered amoral (as opposed to immoral). I cannot count the storyline discussions about how blue gets more consistently villains than black, but green even more rarely than white.
Note also that "Evil" (capital E) is quantified for this experiment in a way that may not be entirely congruent with a notion of "evil" (lower case E) you might have e. g. D&D might have an "Evil" outsider character act in a way that you don not perceive as "evil".
Blue & Good: Blue actually is the color that gets access to both sides of both axes and through that the greatest coverage of alignments.
There are many other comments that need to be made e. g. that this sketch is a little inaccurate close to the center (the minimum distance of the green-blue border to the center is actually less than the minimum distance of the blue-black border to the center).
Another fact worth mentioning: There is a certain reasonable change in weights that moves green almost to the center and blue much further towards lawful (and black towards Evil). It's what happens when you base your weights strongly on number of creatures with a certain alignment (i. e. almost all animals are True Neutral/undead are Evil).
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Re: Guilds and Alignment
I actually started the project to map the colors to alignments with the guilds and mapping the guilds to alignments. The best method is to have something like:
Oh, I see. So the graph actually represents a probability density of the color being found within that area on the D&D chart? In that case, I think I can mostly agree. Though it seems that blue is inherently a little more bent towards good than evil.
As for Green & Evil - yeah, I agree. It certainly doesn't happen very often, since usually green traits don't lend themselves towards evil. There was a competition I took part in years ago where we were to represent evil, and as a personal challenge I decided to do mostly green cards. This forced me to brainstorm for quite some time about green forms of evil, and one possible contender I thought of was the concept of eugenics.
I would be curious to hear the actual definition of Evil if you have it on hand.
Oh, I see. So the graph actually represents a probability density of the color being found within that area on the D&D chart? In that case, I think I can mostly agree. Though it seems that blue is inherently a little more bent towards good than evil.
That's an understandable view. Short and simple: Blue might be the color of doing Evil things for Good reasons.
It also might be a side effect of white suppressing "Good" blue in this projection.
I would be curious to hear the actual definition of Evil if you have it on hand.
AFAIK there is no clean definition of D&D alignments. I did not use a single definition partly because there is none. I used keywords like "anarchy" (chaos), "parasitism" (evil), "community" (good and lawful) and assigned them values and used a clustering algorithm.
Typical phrases for Evil come from the wikipedia article on D&D alignments (section True Evil) and similar sources that show up on a basic google search. These phrases (with positive weight) include "treachery", "dishonor", "immoral", "scheme", "assassin", "murder", "sadism", "selfish", "parasitism", "power", "liar", "theft", "self-serving", "villain", "crime", "death", "darkness", "vindication" etc.
I would be curious to hear the actual definition of Evil if you have it on hand.
Doing unto others as you would not have done unto you. Namely unwanted acts of violence, theft, betrayal, and deception regardless of the motivations of the offender.
TLDR: Magic is specifically designed so that each color can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Some of the colors just tend to lean toward one or the other a lot of the time.
Okay, explain lawful red (aside from Boros) and chaotic white? I mean, maybe chaoticgood white, but lawfulevil is morecommon in white than chaotic good (because white is defined as, well, lawful).
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Good and Evil are depend on the person and situation.
Each guild can be seen as good and evil even the House of Dimir can be seen as good. Which is why the tradional good and evil system has been shown to be heavily flawed and way too obtuse to be used effective to describe a person or guild seen each guild, shard, wedge, group or person is capable of good and evil so a person or group can not be seen as completely evil or good which why I think the color pie system is a great system because of how it goes into depth which the D and D system does not because it is situation.
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Ophelia Le Doux (R/B)
Creature - Vampire Assassin
Haste First Strike
1/1
How is House Dimir lawful? Their entire purpose is to dismantle the Guildpact.
The Dimir used a loophole in the guildpact to dismantle it. They are certainly close to True Evil, but their methods appear Lawful enough.
Imagine a corporation lobbying for a law that contains a loophole that exempts the corporation from taxes and/or punishes only its competition. Using loopholes you inserted into the law yourself is a prime example of lawful.
I have often been reminded that a Lawful character doesn't necessarily uses the law to its intended end and doesn't even necessarily bow to the general law if it conflicts with its adopted personal law (e. g. a paladin entering an evil kingdom might not honor the "Kill paladins at sight" laws if they conflict with its orders "Live to smite evil" commandment).
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Planar Chaos was not a mistake neither was it random. You might want to look at it again.
[thread=239793][Game] Level Up - Creature[/thread]
Kamigawa was filled with evil or misguided White characters. Kataki, War's Wage is an insane butcher who slaughters entire villages because one person there offends its code of honor, Takeno, Samurai General is a fascist militarist serving the main villain, Eight-and-a-Half-Tails helped Konda steal That Which was Taken thanks to pride, Konda, Lord of Ejano stole That Which Was Taken to become immortal, and O-Kagachi's forces devastated Kamigawa searching for That Which was Taken.
It also had one of the most surprisingly evil Green characters in MtG with Ayumi, the Last Visitor.
Though I never actually read the novels, I think the Kitsune were probably "good," meanwhile the Nezumi were probably "evil," which just goes to show why that's true.
Plenty of Nezumi were evil, but Marrow-Gnawer worked with Toshiro Umezawa to fight against Hidetsugu. If you're thinking about this as "Kitsune bad, Nezumi evil," you're thinking about it wrong. The individual Kitsune we met in the books and short stories were good (Eight-and-a-half made a mistake he clearly regrets and tries to atone for), which doesn't mean there was never a bad Kitsune. Similarly, Marrow-Gnawer proves that even the Nezumi have folks whose actions benefit the greater good.
How is House Dimir lawful? Their entire purpose is to dismantle the Guildpact.
Boros are lawful also. The more extreme Boros want to turn Ravnica into a police state.
Okay, explain lawful red (aside from Boros) and chaotic white? I mean, maybe chaoticgood white, but lawfulevil is morecommon in white than chaotic good (because white is defined as, well, lawful).
That's because you think lawful = agrees with current regime, chaotic = otherwise. Which is not the case.
In D&D lawful means one is concern with the system of laws. It might seen to be fair to make a exception to certain rules (like let a thief who stole to not starve go unharmed) but his concern that, if he does that, his weakening the system of law that keeps civilization/communities cohesive, while a chaotic character see the world in a more practical view and might think it is correct to let the guy go.
It might be that a lawful character disagree with certain regime and will act/judge based on his own perspective of law. The thing is, chaotic character are pragmatic while lawful are idealistic. The chaotic will do as he seen to fit for the moment, while the lawful will not betray the system in his head.
A lawful character in a regime that he disagree with will not participate in a revolution, but will try to fix the system from inside out. Probably because revolution involves breaking laws that are holy to him.
Those bashing D&D system are not right. There some basis for that system. In Nietzche's philosophy the idea of good vs. evil comes from slave-morality, which later was absorbed by Christianity. In master-morality (the morality of pre-Socratic greek aristocracy, which is basis of greek tragedy according to him and became lost in time) there's no concern with good and evil matters but only Apollian vs. Dionysian which is pretty much lawful vs. chaotic.
So the good-evil axis is one position according to slave-morality and the lawful-chaotic is one position according to master-morality.
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Konda is not evil, his just a villain. Nor is Akroma or Radiant (which seems to be neutral). The good and evil in D&D are really loaded. Evil means getting joy while or from harming others.
Akroma, Konda and Radiant harm others but they take no joy in that. They would actually avoid the whole bloodshed and they actually try to minimize the suffering involved in their brutality. They are all pretty much Lawful Neutral, with Konda with evil tendencies.
Some people seen to struggle with that notion because they think how one feel shouldn't determine the morality of their actions. Like, if someone kills out of joy and other kills out of duty, there's no difference. Moral views aside, this is not true for the philosophy D&D basis on. How you feel while committing a infraction can absorb you from that.
That's why a bear that kills to eat is neutral and a human to eat having other options is not. The feeling and instinct behind every action counts, not only the action isolated.
It sucks that all wrote all that w/o touching mtg 5 colors. But here my take:
W - LG, NG, LN, TN. Maybe CG but I'm struggling to find a CG white character. U - Anything honestly. Blue doesn't care much for one's moral background. B - Anything non-good. R - Anything non-lawful. G - Neutral + 1.
Recent most excellent threads concerning Magic's color pie and some people's tendency to negate the philosophical relevance of color pie with relativistic philosophy got me thinking about a way to discuss the motivation behind, if not the morality of, each color without reducing or even relegating them to relativism. I think most if not all of us understand amorality if not the concept of "beyond good and evil" - at least intellectually, theoretically, philosophically, and so on, but probably not experientially. I thought it might help to put them into some sort of context that essentially forces us to examine them like human beings with moral motivations instead of pseudo-gods with amoral aspirations - rather than imagining that if a known serial killer kicked down your front door and put an axe through your child's skull, you'd just shrug and say "some serial killers are emotional, and this serial killer probably thinks he or she had logical intentions for murdering my child and certainly isn't evil because evil doesn't exist."
Anyways, my search for an alternative context by which to compare and contrast the colors led me to the D&D alignments and which alignments best fit the colors of Magic to give an overall picture of the overarching principles of each color.
(For those of you who don't know, Wizards makes D&D and M:tG.)
Here's my lineup:
W - Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral
U - Lawful Neutral, Neutral Good, Neutral Evil
B - Neutral Evil, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil
R - Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Good
G - Chaotic Good, Neutral Good, Lawful Neutral
Red is okay.
Black is not evil, black is death and decay and the absence of life not evil I hate when people say that.
White is not chaotic in anyway shape or form.
Blue is not as bad is about the boundless thought and lack of mental restrictions so not terrible but not good either sorry but the color pie is not character alignments. Also White is not good.
Ophelia Le Doux (R/B)
Creature - Vampire Assassin
Haste First Strike
1/1
Gold: 0
Inventory: Clothes
Abilities:
Traits: Speed
Experience: 6/20
Mana: R
Odula Besa (U/B)
Creature - Vampire Artificer
T: Target artifact creature gets your choice of -1/-0 or +1/+0 until end of turn.
1/1
Gold: 41
Inventory: Adventurer's Clothes, Basic Artificer Toolkit, 3 pounds of Basic metal.
Abilities: N/A
Current Goals:
Experience: 1/20
Mana: 2(U/B)(U/B)
Simply put, the color pie system is much too complicated to be modeled with in D&D. While D&D has 9 possible "alignments," Magic has 31 possible "alignments" each of which encompasses Good, Evil, and Neutral. Such complexity allows for the "why" that actually makes a character interesting. Think of some of the best villains you know. How many of them can be simplified down to a label like, "Neutral Evil," not many I expect. I can think of only one character that could possibly be interpreted that way, and even that interpretation is probably skewed by the bias of the audience's perspective. In my opinion, it makes for a much more useful system for which to categorize and compare characters. It makes the underlying theme of many situations far more apparent. For example, it was determined that The Dark Side of the Force is Red, while the Light Side of the Force is mostly White. This is interesting as we discover the central conflict of Star Wars is not really Good vs. Evil at all, but rather the dangers of not tempering one's emotions. This bears special meaning when we consider that A New Hope was released in the midst of The Cold War, a time in history when the temperance of emotions was of extreme importance. This may lend a partial explanation as to why Star Wars was so well received and to the nature of audiences at the time.
The D&D system, by comparison, is not nearly so useful. Say we categorize the Rebel Alliance as Chaotic Good and the Sith Empire as Lawful Evil. That doesn't really get us anywhere except for some vague anti-governmental sentiment, and really, when has that ever not been true about the populace at large?
For those reasons, the Color Pie system is a much more useful and meaningful system for which to determine alignment, and the D&D system is shallow and flawed.
In fact if you take each alignment and each color and feed in keywords to correlate them blue is very close to true neutral in the lawful evil quadrant. I don't have the original work at hand, but this is a simplified sketch of what happens if you normalize the alignments and place them on a unit circle (as opposed to the unit square that is more common for such depictions) and then place the colors in that square as opposed to the other way around (so it's not exactly what the OP suggests).
Note that I work from memory and overemphasize some stuff and the method used simplifies some stuff that probably strongly influences green and blue.
Note also that the keywords chosen for alignments used much more conjecture than the keywords chosen for the colors.
tl; dr: Take the whole thing with two grains of salt.
Finally a good white villain quote: "So, do I ever re-evaluate my life choices? Never, because I know what I'm doing is a righteous cause."
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First, they assigned alignments to each color:
W- Good
U- Lawful
B- Evil
R- Chaotic
G- Neutral
Then they applied this to the guilds:
Azorious, WU- LG
Dimir, UB- LE
Rakdos, BR- CE
Gruul, RG- CN
Selesnya, GW- NG
Orzhov, WB- GE??
Izzet, UR- CL??
Gruul, BG- NE
Boros, RW- CG
Simic, GU- LN
As you can see, these end up fitting the guilds pretty well, at least in terms of how D&D classifies morality. (Remember- good and evil in D&D [at least in 3.5] are mostly judged by how much value the character places on sentient lives.)
I'm not sure what alignments were assigned to Orzhov and Izzet, since the alignments above are contradictory/nonexistent in D&D.
Golgari is neutral evil? But Golgari is the guild that provides free food to the poor of Ravnica, among other things. No I don't think it's quite as simple as that.
Personally I'd work from a negative system, so Red isn't Lawful, White isn't Chaotic, and the other colours need more work than I'm currently willing to give them.
Art is life itself.
Free food in the form of reheated corpses...
Does anyone know of any sets in which any given color as a whole is "out of alignment" for lack of a better term - i.e., good black, evil green, lawful red, etc.
In Kamigawa, the "big bad" was Konda (white) and the hero was Umezawa (black).
In the original Ravnica the villains were Simic, Azorius, and Dimir.
Braids and Phage were often "good" during the Onslaught saga and Akroma was frequently portrayed as the villain.
Amoral drivel unless perhaps you're eating a loved one's reheated corpse.
See op.
Does this mean that white as a color was evil and black was good?
(BTW - There are other discussable posts I want to reply to when I'm not on an iThing.)
I actually expect most of the food was fungus based. Who knows how many Golgari Rot Farms they have.
Not all of white. These sets are too large and varied to put a moral stamp on any one color. Though I never actually read the novels, I think the Kitsune were probably "good," meanwhile the Nezumi were probably "evil," which just goes to show why that's true.
Similarly, in Innistrad, it was Lilliana that freed Avacyn from the Helstone. The White society were keeping her in there.
This is because the method gives only a stochastic analysis (among other things). The way you would read it is approximately this:
Choose a point in the circle area.
Draw a circle around it with a certain radius R.
Any person with that alignment is with a chance p(R) not any color not found within the circle area.
The borders are drawn absolute straight lines, but are actually beyond fuzzy. I wanted to finish the sketch at some point.
Note also that "Evil" (capital E) is quantified for this experiment in a way that may not be entirely congruent with a notion of "evil" (lower case E) you might have e. g. D&D might have an "Evil" outsider character act in a way that you don not perceive as "evil".
Blue & Good: Blue actually is the color that gets access to both sides of both axes and through that the greatest coverage of alignments.
Another fact worth mentioning: There is a certain reasonable change in weights that moves green almost to the center and blue much further towards lawful (and black towards Evil). It's what happens when you base your weights strongly on number of creatures with a certain alignment (i. e. almost all animals are True Neutral/undead are Evil).
---
Re: Guilds and Alignment
I actually started the project to map the colors to alignments with the guilds and mapping the guilds to alignments. The best method is to have something like:
Azorius - any Lawful
Orzhov - Lawful Evil +1
Dimir - ~True Evil (Lawful)
Izzet - ~Chaotic Neutral (Evil)
Rakdos - Chaotic Evil +1
Golgari - ~True Neutral (Chaotic)
Gruul - ~Chaotic Neutral (Good)
Boros - any Good
Selesnya - Lawful Good +1
Simic - ~True Neutral (Lawful)
It results in each Guild covering about three to four Alignments.
Finally a good white villain quote: "So, do I ever re-evaluate my life choices? Never, because I know what I'm doing is a righteous cause."
Factions: Sleeping
Remnants: Valheim
Legendary Journey: Heroes & Planeswalkers
Saga: Shards of Rabiah
Legends: The Elder Dragons
Read up on Red Flags & NWO
As for Green & Evil - yeah, I agree. It certainly doesn't happen very often, since usually green traits don't lend themselves towards evil. There was a competition I took part in years ago where we were to represent evil, and as a personal challenge I decided to do mostly green cards. This forced me to brainstorm for quite some time about green forms of evil, and one possible contender I thought of was the concept of eugenics.
I would be curious to hear the actual definition of Evil if you have it on hand.
That's an understandable view. Short and simple: Blue might be the color of doing Evil things for Good reasons.
It also might be a side effect of white suppressing "Good" blue in this projection.
AFAIK there is no clean definition of D&D alignments. I did not use a single definition partly because there is none. I used keywords like "anarchy" (chaos), "parasitism" (evil), "community" (good and lawful) and assigned them values and used a clustering algorithm.
Typical phrases for Evil come from the wikipedia article on D&D alignments (section True Evil) and similar sources that show up on a basic google search. These phrases (with positive weight) include "treachery", "dishonor", "immoral", "scheme", "assassin", "murder", "sadism", "selfish", "parasitism", "power", "liar", "theft", "self-serving", "villain", "crime", "death", "darkness", "vindication" etc.
Finally a good white villain quote: "So, do I ever re-evaluate my life choices? Never, because I know what I'm doing is a righteous cause."
Factions: Sleeping
Remnants: Valheim
Legendary Journey: Heroes & Planeswalkers
Saga: Shards of Rabiah
Legends: The Elder Dragons
Read up on Red Flags & NWO
Doing unto others as you would not have done unto you. Namely unwanted acts of violence, theft, betrayal, and deception regardless of the motivations of the offender.
Boros are lawful also. The more extreme Boros want to turn Ravnica into a police state.
Okay, explain lawful red (aside from Boros) and chaotic white? I mean, maybe chaotic good white, but lawful evil is more common in white than chaotic good (because white is defined as, well, lawful).
On phasing:
She was frequently portrayed as the antagonist from the perspective of the novels.
Each guild can be seen as good and evil even the House of Dimir can be seen as good. Which is why the tradional good and evil system has been shown to be heavily flawed and way too obtuse to be used effective to describe a person or guild seen each guild, shard, wedge, group or person is capable of good and evil so a person or group can not be seen as completely evil or good which why I think the color pie system is a great system because of how it goes into depth which the D and D system does not because it is situation.
Ophelia Le Doux (R/B)
Creature - Vampire Assassin
Haste First Strike
1/1
Gold: 0
Inventory: Clothes
Abilities:
Traits: Speed
Experience: 6/20
Mana: R
Odula Besa (U/B)
Creature - Vampire Artificer
T: Target artifact creature gets your choice of -1/-0 or +1/+0 until end of turn.
1/1
Gold: 41
Inventory: Adventurer's Clothes, Basic Artificer Toolkit, 3 pounds of Basic metal.
Abilities: N/A
Current Goals:
Experience: 1/20
Mana: 2(U/B)(U/B)
The Dimir used a loophole in the guildpact to dismantle it. They are certainly close to True Evil, but their methods appear Lawful enough.
Imagine a corporation lobbying for a law that contains a loophole that exempts the corporation from taxes and/or punishes only its competition. Using loopholes you inserted into the law yourself is a prime example of lawful.
I have often been reminded that a Lawful character doesn't necessarily uses the law to its intended end and doesn't even necessarily bow to the general law if it conflicts with its adopted personal law (e. g. a paladin entering an evil kingdom might not honor the "Kill paladins at sight" laws if they conflict with its orders "Live to smite evil" commandment).
Finally a good white villain quote: "So, do I ever re-evaluate my life choices? Never, because I know what I'm doing is a righteous cause."
Factions: Sleeping
Remnants: Valheim
Legendary Journey: Heroes & Planeswalkers
Saga: Shards of Rabiah
Legends: The Elder Dragons
Read up on Red Flags & NWO
In theory not reality. Please see original post.
It also had one of the most surprisingly evil Green characters in MtG with Ayumi, the Last Visitor.
Plenty of Nezumi were evil, but Marrow-Gnawer worked with Toshiro Umezawa to fight against Hidetsugu. If you're thinking about this as "Kitsune bad, Nezumi evil," you're thinking about it wrong. The individual Kitsune we met in the books and short stories were good (Eight-and-a-half made a mistake he clearly regrets and tries to atone for), which doesn't mean there was never a bad Kitsune. Similarly, Marrow-Gnawer proves that even the Nezumi have folks whose actions benefit the greater good.
She's an angel who has the Order following her and... Uh... Yeah, that's it.
Onslaught block wasn't exactly a high point for the story.
Thanks to Rivenor of Miraculous Recovery Signatures!
That's because you think lawful = agrees with current regime, chaotic = otherwise. Which is not the case.
In D&D lawful means one is concern with the system of laws. It might seen to be fair to make a exception to certain rules (like let a thief who stole to not starve go unharmed) but his concern that, if he does that, his weakening the system of law that keeps civilization/communities cohesive, while a chaotic character see the world in a more practical view and might think it is correct to let the guy go.
It might be that a lawful character disagree with certain regime and will act/judge based on his own perspective of law. The thing is, chaotic character are pragmatic while lawful are idealistic. The chaotic will do as he seen to fit for the moment, while the lawful will not betray the system in his head.
A lawful character in a regime that he disagree with will not participate in a revolution, but will try to fix the system from inside out. Probably because revolution involves breaking laws that are holy to him.
Those bashing D&D system are not right. There some basis for that system. In Nietzche's philosophy the idea of good vs. evil comes from slave-morality, which later was absorbed by Christianity. In master-morality (the morality of pre-Socratic greek aristocracy, which is basis of greek tragedy according to him and became lost in time) there's no concern with good and evil matters but only Apollian vs. Dionysian which is pretty much lawful vs. chaotic.
So the good-evil axis is one position according to slave-morality and the lawful-chaotic is one position according to master-morality.
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Konda is not evil, his just a villain. Nor is Akroma or Radiant (which seems to be neutral). The good and evil in D&D are really loaded. Evil means getting joy while or from harming others.
Akroma, Konda and Radiant harm others but they take no joy in that. They would actually avoid the whole bloodshed and they actually try to minimize the suffering involved in their brutality. They are all pretty much Lawful Neutral, with Konda with evil tendencies.
Some people seen to struggle with that notion because they think how one feel shouldn't determine the morality of their actions. Like, if someone kills out of joy and other kills out of duty, there's no difference. Moral views aside, this is not true for the philosophy D&D basis on. How you feel while committing a infraction can absorb you from that.
That's why a bear that kills to eat is neutral and a human to eat having other options is not. The feeling and instinct behind every action counts, not only the action isolated.
It sucks that all wrote all that w/o touching mtg 5 colors. But here my take:
W - LG, NG, LN, TN. Maybe CG but I'm struggling to find a CG white character.
U - Anything honestly. Blue doesn't care much for one's moral background.
B - Anything non-good.
R - Anything non-lawful.
G - Neutral + 1.
BGU Control
R Aggro
Standard - For Fun
BG Auras