Ok, I knew I shouldn't have given examples... How about Psionic Blast.. I'm not complaining about power level. I want white dragons, blue fireballs, green angels, ect...
thanks, I knew of Alabaster Dragon.. Should be green ones, blue ones, black ones, white ones.. I can't be the only one who wants to see the color pie shifted sometimes.
I feel like a completely strict color pie is too restricting. Yes, each color should have things they are best at, but I feel like there should be options that let you do things outside their slice of the pie as long as you're willing to pay a flavorful and/or significant price. I feel like low power level, off-color cards like Hornet Sting are okay. Green can get you one damage for your mana, red can get get you 2-3 because it's the best at damage. I feel like they could make a red or black spell that destroyed only enchantments as long as they gave it a drawback, either in overcosting, underpoweredness, or ideally, a flavorful drawback. For instance, I think a card that was 1R
sorcery
Destroy target enchantment. Deals 4 damage to you.
would be a good fit in red. You're playing mono-red and want to destroy artifacts? That's easy! Enchantmens? You can have it, but it's not gonna be easy. Don't like those options? Consider multicolored.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My decks
Standard - RIP Cat
Modern - Death & Taxes
Commander - Mazirek, Trostani, Angry Omnath
I almost wanted to vote for I like it, the color pie needs to be very strict to keep the colors balanced against each other, but Balance is the wrong thing, in fact it would be much much more easy to balance the game if every color had the exact same things.
What the color pie really does is add depth to the game. It forces you to chose between having access to particular abilities or cards and having a more reliable mana base. If you didn't have the color pie, you wouldn't have that dynamic.
I thought the entire point of magic was to splash the colors needed to shore weaknesses as much as possible and to construct a good manabase. If every color can do the same things why splash, why is it even magic?
I don't mind over costed color bleed. I care about bleed when it is strong enough to affect constructed magic (gameplay matters to me more than flavor). For example, I dislike cards like Delver and TNN because I don't think blue should have such efficient creatures.
I like the concept of a strict color pie, but the pie as it is today could use an update. Some colors have a vast cornucopia of viable mechanics that can power a large number of deck strategies, while other colors are pigeon-holed into small niches.
I'd like the color pie better if it were more balanced. White not getting card draw is laughable at best. It's no secret blue is broken in legacy/vintage.
I think part of the problem of cards like Beast Within and Rapid Hybridization are not that they are off flavor, but that they are not mechanically well executed to communicate that flavor. What could be more blue than a wizard turning an opposing creature into a frog? What could be more green than finding the beast within a magical "object"? The problem lies in the use of the term "destroy target [x]" as sort of a necessary mechanical shorthand. Then again, how else do you reflect these aspects of the color? How else does a blue wizard turn a creature permanently into a newt?
The color pie should, and does, have plenty of wiggle-room. Colors have always had shifting roles, and that's great. Any given color could be terrible at something one year, and great at it the next. Whatever keeps the game environment healthy. Pretty much any play style can be fit into any color, so long as you look at it the right way.
I don't mind over costed color bleed. I care about bleed when it is strong enough to affect constructed magic (gameplay matters to me more than flavor). For example, I dislike cards like Delver and TNN because I don't think blue should have such efficient creatures.
This, really. I'm OK with colors being terrible at something, but not so much with colors having no answers at all for something. Enchantments exist, so answers to enchantments need to exist. Each color should have some way to answer everything, even if the "answer" is laughably inefficient and overcosted. Black should be able to destroy enchantments at the cost of life payment, while red could conceivably overload and destabilize an enchantment at the cost of a lot of power (mana).
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Haven't read the thread yet, but I do have an opinion.
I like the color pie, but not its execution. It's gotten to the point where a lot of Magics design feels very tiresome, even cliche. It seems like some lines are drawn, yet others ignored. In the early days of magic, stuff like ice storm, wall of ice, winter blast and blizzard were all green cards, because those are all something that occur in nature, but now we would never see something like that. Now we ignore that birds are not part of nature, and somehow just being in the sky makes something not green. I get the reasoning behind the color pie, but some decisions just demand a roll of the eyes. I think the thing that annoys me the most is the cliche artwork, with pretty much every red card having a red hue, blue mages wearing blue robes, and black's theme could be summed up as a halloween theme park. It's like a white soldier being seen next to water is a crime, or a tree growing on a mountain automatically means red/green.
For the record, I'm okay with cards like beast within and pongify. Flavor reasons to give a color access to something they wouldn't normally have, albeit infrequently, is fine by me, as long as the reasoning is good. What I dislike is that most of the reasoning seems more arbitrary than flavorful.
Haven't read the thread yet, but I do have an opinion.
I like the color pie, but not its execution. It's gotten to the point where a lot of Magics design feels very tiresome, even cliche. It seems like some lines are drawn, yet others ignored. In the early days of magic, stuff like ice storm, wall of ice, winter blast and blizzard were all green cards, because those are all something that occur in nature, but now we would never see something like that. Now we ignore that birds are not part of nature, and somehow just being in the sky makes something not green. I get the reasoning behind the color pie, but some decisions just demand a roll of the eyes.
If green could do anything found in nature it would easily have the largest portion of the color pie. You should listen to (or read the transcript of) the podcast that MaRo did on green and the color pie. It addresses this.
Quote from MaRo »
The other thing is it does not like flying. Another big dichotomy between green and blue is blue is the air and green is the ground. And that green does not have great faith in the air, and one of its greatest enemies lives in the air, which is blue, so green is much more grounded, and as such green does not like flying.
Now, some people might say, “Wait, there are many flying things in nature.” And the answer is while green is about nature, it is not about every single aspect of nature. And that in order to make Magic work, we also had to trim a few things mechanically. Yes, if you cared about nature, you would care about things that fly that are natural, but we’ve sort of shifted that mostly out of green. That birds and creatures of the sky are not really green’s thing. Green is more about the things on the ground. The reason green has reach is because of its anti-flying nature.
I love the color pie, and believe that it should stay fairly strict.
Put simply, the color pie is what makes Magic Magic. If there were green fireballs (as someone posted), what would be the point of the colors? They would be purely cosmetic, rather than having a real, tangible effect on the game. As others have mentioned, the color pie creates tension between "covering all the bases" while also having a manabase that isn't a total trainwreck. Additionally, the color pie just oozes flavor. I identify personally and philosophically with white, and I almost always play white. I love lovelove how the mechanics of white coincide with the flavor. Not only do I enjoy playing Death and Taxes/Hatebears because of what it does mechanically, but I also love the flavor of it -- it makes everyone (itself included! Arbiter and Thalia aren't one-sided!) play fair. It wouldn't be my favorite deck of all time if it weren't for the mechanics and the flavor lining up perfectly.
Delver of Secrets - This one isn't okay, it's too efficient a creature for blue. I might be fine if it turned into a 2/1 flying, rather than the 3/2 flying Insectile Aberration we got.
True-Name Nemesis - I'm not sure I care all that much here. This kind of evasiveness of weird protections is a very blue mechanic. It's also in Legacy/Vintage, and not in Modern, and it's damage really isn't that high on it's own, plus it doesn't have vigilance to be an attacker and a blocker at the same time to take advantage of it's ridiculous form of protection. Sure it is waaay undercosted for it's ridiculous ability, but we're talking about the most broken of formats anyway. Commander is the only other place it might be relevant, and that is a multiplayer focused format where it is often much weaker, and singleton rules keep it from dominating too much. If I were in charge at WotC I don't think this would have seen print though, protection from a chosen player is a ridiculous mechanic I'd hesitate to put on something regardless of it's CMC. Very 'oops I win' kind of card.
Psionic Blast - Flavor-wise, I like the idea of this kind of thing in blue. Mechanically, I think this was the wrong implementation of the ideas involved. I'm not sure how I'd implement it, but I think it should affect hands or libraries to some degree, at least if it targets a player, and affect activated abilities if it targets and doesn't kill a creature, since it involves attacking the mind. I also might make it so that the cost to play it is, rather than just taking damage, also/instead discarding a card, to represent the mental effort involved. It's also too efficient for a blue burn, even with the drawback, IMO. I think other colors should never get burn that exceeds CMC, that should be red's thing alone, so at CMC 3 it's damage should max out at 3.
-----
'Pie-breaking' in general, and maintaining the distinctiveness of the pie for the sake of MTG.
I think pie breaking should in general be minimal. Mechanically, it should be preferable to splash another color in constructed than to use an off-color trick (they should always have inefficient CMC and should often have some kind of drawback). But I think the pie should regularly be broken, to some degree, as long as flavor requirements are satisfied.
Beast Within is a good example of what I'm not okay with CMC wise, but fits what I'm fine with flavor wise. I'd say it should be at least CMC 4, if reduced to a sorcery, and CMC 5 if it remains an instant. Because it can destroy any permanent, including creatures, which is generally outside of green's typical color pie, at least when it comes to directly doing so, rather than fight mechanics or something along those lines.
Rapid Hybridization/Pongify is another example, but different in nature, I'm fine with a shapeshifting effect in blue, but this is the wrong way to represent it mechanically I think. I'd be fine with Pongify as an aura to attach to an enemy creature at it's current CMC, but Rapid Hybridization I feel should be a higher CMC and exile the enemy creature, more like Curse of the Swine. Both of them destroying the creature feels wrong flavor wise for a shapeshifting effect, and seems like too efficient permanent creature removal for blue.
On the the other hand, I'm fine with stuff like Serra Sphinx, since blue already has vigilance as part of it's pie (if more rarely than white), and it isn't _too_ efficient for blue, p/t wise, especially at rare, rather than Serra Angel's uncommon. This isn't even really pie breaking IMO. Other than being virtually identical to a white card. They even changed the creature type.
I'm also fine with stuff like Illusory Angel. It's drawback is a relatively blue one, and it has flavorful reasons for it (whatever you just cast helps generate the 'belief' that the illusion angel subsides on), and because of the requirement, she usually won't be that badly off curve, or if she is, you're basically paying for her with two cards.
I'm not really fine with Snapcaster Mage. Bringing back a spell temporarily and exiling like that feels more black or red than blue. Blue is more about recovering that card from the graveyard into your hand properly, not turning it into a one-off flashback that can only be used that turn. It's also too efficient for blue as a creature, passing the vanilla test and having flash thrown on top of it, and a really strong ability on top of that. IMO, it should have been red or black, probably red, and at least CMC 3, probably higher, or maybe red/blue at 1UR, or UR, with the blue only added for the flash aspect. I feel like it's too efficient a creature for blue to have with flash, even though flash is a blue mechanic, and it has too much else going for it, it's not really paying for the flash in terms of CMC, let alone it's super-powerful ability, which I'd hesitate to put at such a low CMC. It's ability is something I'd hesitate to put on an instant (without a creature body added) at CMC 3 in red, the most likely color for the mechanic, IMO.
Prodigal Sorcerer - A classic, this guy is actually a bit more efficient than I think blue should be allowed these days for this effect. I'd probably put him at CMC 4, for the same thing as red would get at CMC 3, although I might allow him a bit of extra toughness for the high price. It's an off color effect now, even if it was originally blue. But I think occasional splashing like that is fine, just as long as it's less efficient than the core color's version. Red now has guys with this ability and haste, which helps excuse this guy some these days. Not that he's constructed viable anyway. If I was to re-make him, I'd probably make some kind of weird add-on to keep his pinginess blue-tinted, perhaps make the player pay 1 or U for it in addition to tapping, and have it note that the ability is treated as if it were coming from a red source, so it looks like he's using blue's ability to manipulate the color pie and emulate other colors (like how blue has spells that can change a land's type temporarily and such). Yes, it would probably make him a bad card, but I feel like in general, strongly off color cards should usually be 'bad' to some degree, and his ability has moved in the color pie since his creation (blue had waaay to much stuff back in the day).
Damnation - I... am sorta okay with this. I don't really like it, I feel like black should be more of a Plague Wind type. I'd prefer it if it worked something like this instead, Sacrifice all your creatures, then destroy all creatures target opponent controls, they can't be regenerated. That seems more black in feel, less treading on white's flavor and being a straight up Wrath of God mimic. I feel like I can let black get away with it due to it being a thing that you often pay a price for, which is a very black thing, and that black has similar effects, but I'd prefer it if it had a more mechanically flavor-linked implementation to black's style, and was slightly less good as Wrath of God in certain circumstances because of that. But CMC isn't the real problem on this one, given creature destruction and backlashes for more efficient CMC are heavily black things. Black even has a bit of a 'steal other colors' stuff if you pay the price' thing going on. Another thing I might have been fine with is if black payed a small life cost for this variation of Wrath of God, even as small as 1 life, just to say 'yeah, this is black'.
'Pie-breaking' in general, and maintaining the distinctiveness of the pie for the sake of MTG.
I think pie breaking should in general be minimal. Mechanically, it should be preferable to splash another color in constructed than to use an off-color trick (they should always have inefficient CMC and should often have some kind of drawback). But I think the pie should regularly be broken, to some degree, as long as flavor requirements are satisfied.
Beast Within is a good example of what I'm not okay with CMC wise, but fits what I'm fine with flavor wise. I'd say it should be at least CMC 4, if reduced to a sorcery, and CMC 5 if it remains an instant. Because it can destroy any permanent, including creatures, which is generally outside of green's typical color pie, at least when it comes to directly doing so, rather than fight mechanics or something along those lines.
Rapid Hybridization/Pongify is another example, but different in nature, I'm fine with a shapeshifting effect in blue, but this is the wrong way to represent it mechanically I think. I'd be fine with Pongify as an aura to attach to an enemy creature at it's current CMC, but Rapid Hybridization I feel should be a higher CMC and exile the enemy creature, more like Curse of the Swine. Both of them destroying the creature feels wrong flavor wise for a shapeshifting effect, and seems like too efficient permanent creature removal for blue.
You miss the point. These are perfectly on color. Green is all about beasts and releasing the beast that is within all magic, so that is what the spell is doing. The fact that it destroys something is simple a side effect from the perspective of green, even if the player sees it as the primary effect. Green makes midrange beast tokens all the time for a pretty efficient cost. Blue, as you say, is aligned with polymorphing. Both of these effects are permanent (in MTG you don't just get to kiss the frog to turn it back into a prince) so what other way do you mechanically represent this other than "destroying" the original object?
On the the other hand, I'm fine with stuff like Serra Sphinx, since blue already has vigilance as part of it's pie (if more rarely than white), and it isn't _too_ efficient for blue, p/t wise, especially at rare, rather than Serra Angel's uncommon. This isn't even really pie breaking IMO. Other than being virtually identical to a white card. They even changed the creature type.
I'm not sure where you get that Vigilance is part of blue's slice of the pie. I can't find a single blue modern legal (non TS block) card that grants vigilance without the addition of another color (green or white).
With regards to anything out of the color-pie, it can be done sparingly indeed if it can fit the flavor to some degree. In many cases, these color-pie breaking things fit the set that they're in, just like all the stuff that happened in Planar Chaos.
Planar Chaos wasn't about randomness. It was about a different color pie in a way that still 'made sense'.
Some of them actually work better this way. Take flying hate in red. I still say it doesn't need to exist at all, but picture something like this:
Bird BoltR
Instant
Bird Bolt deals 2 damage to target creature or player. If that creature has flying, it deals 4 damage instead.
More useful than Leaf Arrow or Plummet by far, since it can target any creature or player. More flavorful too.
I have more of an issue with particular effects, though. Mesa Enchantress and Pongify, mostly, since they totally eliminate that color's weakness. On the other hand, how can you argue that Prodigal Sorcerer and Psionic Blast should be blue?
Future Sight is the set I always had the most issue with. So many rules issues, and having to repeatedly explain each of the keywords. (Less of a problem for the RAV and Core Set ones, but the new keywords? The futureshifted cards?)
thanks, I knew of Alabaster Dragon.. Should be green ones, blue ones, black ones, white ones.. I can't be the only one who wants to see the color pie shifted sometimes.
Haven't read the thread yet, but I do have an opinion.
I like the color pie, but not its execution. It's gotten to the point where a lot of Magics design feels very tiresome, even cliche. It seems like some lines are drawn, yet others ignored. In the early days of magic, stuff like ice storm, wall of ice, winter blast and blizzard were all green cards, because those are all something that occur in nature, but now we would never see something like that. Now we ignore that birds are not part of nature, and somehow just being in the sky makes something not green. I get the reasoning behind the color pie, but some decisions just demand a roll of the eyes.
If green could do anything found in nature it would easily have the largest portion of the color pie. You should listen to (or read the transcript of) the podcast that MaRo did on green and the color pie. It addresses this.
Quote from MaRo »
The other thing is it does not like flying. Another big dichotomy between green and blue is blue is the air and green is the ground. And that green does not have great faith in the air, and one of its greatest enemies lives in the air, which is blue, so green is much more grounded, and as such green does not like flying.
Now, some people might say, “Wait, there are many flying things in nature.” And the answer is while green is about nature, it is not about every single aspect of nature. And that in order to make Magic work, we also had to trim a few things mechanically. Yes, if you cared about nature, you would care about things that fly that are natural, but we’ve sort of shifted that mostly out of green. That birds and creatures of the sky are not really green’s thing. Green is more about the things on the ground. The reason green has reach is because of its anti-flying nature.
Hilariously, Maro is still wrong. Plants need pollinators, which tend to fly.
He's just trying to justify something that shouldn't exist. In fact, the only reason anyone played Hurricane is because it damaged players, and creatures generally sucked in the early days of Magic. But obviously Hurricane isn't flavorful anymore, so you get...weird ***** to try to give flavor to stuff that, in all honesty, is pretty flavorless. I mean, honestly, how many flying hate cards that aren't spiders with reach have any resonance?
It's really "At the end of the day, we thought it would be extra lulzy for one color to be completely unplayable in limited. But we'll fix it by giving it 9001 *****ty cards. Whee!"
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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!
Hilariously, Maro is still wrong. Plants need pollinators, which tend to fly.
He's just trying to justify something that shouldn't exist. In fact, the only reason anyone played Hurricane is because it damaged players, and creatures generally sucked in the early days of Magic. But obviously Hurricane isn't flavorful anymore, so you get...weird ***** to try to give flavor to stuff that, in all honesty, is pretty flavorless. I mean, honestly, how many flying hate cards that aren't spiders with reach have any resonance?
It's really "At the end of the day, we thought it would be extra lulzy for one color to be completely unplayable in limited. But we'll fix it by giving it 9001 *****ty cards. Whee!"
No, in no where in the quote did he say that flying creatures are any less theoretically green. He acknowledges it. He then goes on to say that in order for green to not have an overly dominant part of the creature combat pie it needed to mechanically give something up, even if that choice was a bit artificial. Sometimes balance trumps pure adherence to the color pie.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "strict". Obviously there needs to be a pretty rigidly enforced color pie or why would there be colors? That said, interesting and/or flavorful bending of the "rules" is perfectly fine.
I think the color pie is an important concept for Magic, but the way they handle it is pretty frustrating sometimes. The choices they made for what each color can and cannot do is not very balanced at all.
This.
I like a strict color pie in concept, but I think it suffers from both the weight of M:tG tradition and the subjectivity of countless magic card designers. So given that flavor is so subjective, and the color pie is so messy already, I don't see the use in worrying about it.
...Until M:tG is rebooted from the ground up, with all the accumulated wisdom of its design history aimed at rethinking and redefining the color pie.
Hilariously, Maro is still wrong. Plants need pollinators, which tend to fly.
He's just trying to justify something that shouldn't exist. In fact, the only reason anyone played Hurricane is because it damaged players, and creatures generally sucked in the early days of Magic. But obviously Hurricane isn't flavorful anymore, so you get...weird ***** to try to give flavor to stuff that, in all honesty, is pretty flavorless. I mean, honestly, how many flying hate cards that aren't spiders with reach have any resonance?
It's really "At the end of the day, we thought it would be extra lulzy for one color to be completely unplayable in limited. But we'll fix it by giving it 9001 *****ty cards. Whee!"
No, in no where in the quote did he say that flying creatures are any less theoretically green. He acknowledges it. He then goes on to say that in order for green to not have an overly dominant part of the creature combat pie it needed to mechanically give something up, even if that choice was a bit artificial. Sometimes balance trumps pure adherence to the color pie.
"Balance" he says. It's basically giving green a bunch of niche cards because they decided for no real reason that a color needed to hate flying. It's why I never play green in limited unless the set is so obviously warped by the theme that not playing green would be stupid.
Again, can we all agree Maro is not a developer? Because as it is, green has about 4 niche commons in every large set, far more than any other color.
But it's particularly irritating because whenever it comes to white and blue, Maro is happy to take away their weakness, give white better card draw than blue and give blue better removal than black. But black, red, and green? Not so much. Well, red more these days, because of a certain card in M15, but still...
At the very least, more Howlgeist-type creatures. And please, develop the spiders slightly better. Giant Spider was unplayable in Alpha, and it's unplayable now, so yes, Garruk, nature still has some constants.
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!
I like a rigid color pie. My problem is I don't think WotC is using it too creatively. I would like Standard seasons to not just be RDW, U/x Control, and G/x ramp over and over again. Why not rattle the board a bit from time to time? This also ties into color pairs. Why does G/B almost always involve reanimation shenanigans? Why is U/W so inclined to a control strategy? Instead imagine a whacky season dominated by:
R/W Control
U/B Reanimator
G/B Aggro
U/R Aggro
W/G Control
I think even with a strict color pie, such things are possible, it's just a matter on putting a focus on cards that allow these colors to play off beat. For example, Red is very capable of board control within the color pie; it just needs such cards to be accented.
I am fine with the color pie bleeding/bending a little for a card like Harmonize. It has a high enough CMC cost and a double-color mana requirement. Stuff like PtE and StP I am fine with, because each has a "negative" ability on it. PTE is not a straight 1-mana kill spell, it has a downside, as does Swords.
Stuff like Pongify and Rabid Hybridization I dislike a lot, since it gives blue something it sorely lacks, and at a very low CMC cost. Blue doesnt deal well with creature permanents, their way to deal with them is normally a bounce effect. Giving them a 1CMC kill spell with the effect it has is just too far. Hornet Sting is another card I don't like at all either. I would be okay if it said to a flying creature, but straight direct damage is something that is red. (yes they made psionic blast but I am okay with that....its not like they timeshifted lightning bolt to blue.)
I think if they want to bend the rules of the color pie, it should be a similar effect to what it would normally do, like how red draw spells have discarding attached to them, how a spell like Chaos Warp has the "randomness" to it that lets red deal with a permanent, but at a price.
Agreed, and I think that development is where things like Delver getting pushed (though I honestly think it is fine) starts to irritate people.
But it's particularly irritating because whenever it comes to white and blue, Maro is happy to take away their weakness, give white better card draw than blue and give blue better removal than black.
Where in modern design does white (by itself) have better card draw than blue? Where does blue have better removal than black? I play Modern a lot and I don't see any of that.
Agreed, and I think that development is where things like Delver getting pushed (though I honestly think it is fine) starts to irritate people.
But it's particularly irritating because whenever it comes to white and blue, Maro is happy to take away their weakness, give white better card draw than blue and give blue better removal than black.
Where in modern design does white (by itself) have better card draw than blue? Where does blue have better removal than black? I play Modern a lot and I don't see any of that.
I'd rather face down a Path to Exile over a Rapid Hybridization, TBH. If you're using removal on anything weaker than a Hill Giant, you're doing it wrong. And of course, PTE is generally considered better than most black removal. Oh, and Maro's biggest problem with RH is that it destroys rather than exiling.
What does black have that's better than RH in...ever? I really can't think of anything.
(This is also a problem for Beast Within, but at least it's not a common.)
And I distinctly remember back when Puresteel Paladin came out, players were eager to add it to WU Caw-Blade...then Stoneforge and Jace got banned.
I am fine with the color pie bleeding/bending a little for a card like Harmonize. It has a high enough CMC cost and a double-color mana requirement. Stuff like PtE and StP I am fine with, because each has a "negative" ability on it. PTE is not a straight 1-mana kill spell, it has a downside, as does Swords.
Stuff like Pongify and Rabid Hybridization I dislike a lot, since it gives blue something it sorely lacks, and at a very low CMC cost. Blue doesnt deal well with creature permanents, their way to deal with them is normally a bounce effect. Giving them a 1CMC kill spell with the effect it has is just too far.
Hornet Sting is another card I don't like at all either. I would be okay if it said to a flying creature, but straight direct damage is something that is red. (yes they made psionic blast but I am okay with that....its not like they timeshifted lightning bolt to blue.)
Hilariously, I hate the "destroy creatures with flying" thing more. It's non-resonant and produces bad design. It should have gone to the same bin as Red Elemental Blast (which, interestingly enough, at the time, would very rarely be used against permanents red can outright destroy, since neither artifacts nor lands are colored) and friends. But we say "Well, green can destroy creatures with flying." Because some people in design are in love with Hurricane. It makes for people who think red can't do damage to creatures with flying as well. And people who are surprised that I'm not using Elvish Skysweeper in a deck with all five Grave Pact variants!
Also, Leaf Arrow exists and wasn't played at all, but the flavor text is unintentionally hilarious because it can target exactly zero Eldrazi, any of which (notwithstanding the spawn) would say Lightning Bolt tickled. Well, they would, if one word from them didn't cause your mind to shatter.
Seriously, if you like "destroy creatures with flying" effects, you should be ashamed.
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!
There are 5 white dragons.
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=517520
1R
sorcery
Destroy target enchantment. Deals 4 damage to you.
would be a good fit in red. You're playing mono-red and want to destroy artifacts? That's easy! Enchantmens? You can have it, but it's not gonna be easy. Don't like those options? Consider multicolored.
Standard - RIP Cat
Modern - Death & Taxes
Commander - Mazirek, Trostani, Angry Omnath
What the color pie really does is add depth to the game. It forces you to chose between having access to particular abilities or cards and having a more reliable mana base. If you didn't have the color pie, you wouldn't have that dynamic.
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
Give Zaliki a CardI must have all the cats!
This, really. I'm OK with colors being terrible at something, but not so much with colors having no answers at all for something. Enchantments exist, so answers to enchantments need to exist. Each color should have some way to answer everything, even if the "answer" is laughably inefficient and overcosted. Black should be able to destroy enchantments at the cost of life payment, while red could conceivably overload and destabilize an enchantment at the cost of a lot of power (mana).
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
I like the color pie, but not its execution. It's gotten to the point where a lot of Magics design feels very tiresome, even cliche. It seems like some lines are drawn, yet others ignored. In the early days of magic, stuff like ice storm, wall of ice, winter blast and blizzard were all green cards, because those are all something that occur in nature, but now we would never see something like that. Now we ignore that birds are not part of nature, and somehow just being in the sky makes something not green. I get the reasoning behind the color pie, but some decisions just demand a roll of the eyes. I think the thing that annoys me the most is the cliche artwork, with pretty much every red card having a red hue, blue mages wearing blue robes, and black's theme could be summed up as a halloween theme park. It's like a white soldier being seen next to water is a crime, or a tree growing on a mountain automatically means red/green.
For the record, I'm okay with cards like beast within and pongify. Flavor reasons to give a color access to something they wouldn't normally have, albeit infrequently, is fine by me, as long as the reasoning is good. What I dislike is that most of the reasoning seems more arbitrary than flavorful.
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
Put simply, the color pie is what makes Magic Magic. If there were green fireballs (as someone posted), what would be the point of the colors? They would be purely cosmetic, rather than having a real, tangible effect on the game. As others have mentioned, the color pie creates tension between "covering all the bases" while also having a manabase that isn't a total trainwreck. Additionally, the color pie just oozes flavor. I identify personally and philosophically with white, and I almost always play white. I love love love how the mechanics of white coincide with the flavor. Not only do I enjoy playing Death and Taxes/Hatebears because of what it does mechanically, but I also love the flavor of it -- it makes everyone (itself included! Arbiter and Thalia aren't one-sided!) play fair. It wouldn't be my favorite deck of all time if it weren't for the mechanics and the flavor lining up perfectly.
Modern: GW Hatebears/midrange, WGU Knightfall/evolution midrange stuff
Standard: nope
Legacy: W Death & Taxes
EDH (not Commander!): W Avacyn, Angel of Hope, GR Ruric Thar, the Unbowed, WGB Anafenza, the Foremost, WU Hanna, Ship's Navigator
Delver of Secrets - This one isn't okay, it's too efficient a creature for blue. I might be fine if it turned into a 2/1 flying, rather than the 3/2 flying Insectile Aberration we got.
True-Name Nemesis - I'm not sure I care all that much here. This kind of evasiveness of weird protections is a very blue mechanic. It's also in Legacy/Vintage, and not in Modern, and it's damage really isn't that high on it's own, plus it doesn't have vigilance to be an attacker and a blocker at the same time to take advantage of it's ridiculous form of protection. Sure it is waaay undercosted for it's ridiculous ability, but we're talking about the most broken of formats anyway. Commander is the only other place it might be relevant, and that is a multiplayer focused format where it is often much weaker, and singleton rules keep it from dominating too much. If I were in charge at WotC I don't think this would have seen print though, protection from a chosen player is a ridiculous mechanic I'd hesitate to put on something regardless of it's CMC. Very 'oops I win' kind of card.
Psionic Blast - Flavor-wise, I like the idea of this kind of thing in blue. Mechanically, I think this was the wrong implementation of the ideas involved. I'm not sure how I'd implement it, but I think it should affect hands or libraries to some degree, at least if it targets a player, and affect activated abilities if it targets and doesn't kill a creature, since it involves attacking the mind. I also might make it so that the cost to play it is, rather than just taking damage, also/instead discarding a card, to represent the mental effort involved. It's also too efficient for a blue burn, even with the drawback, IMO. I think other colors should never get burn that exceeds CMC, that should be red's thing alone, so at CMC 3 it's damage should max out at 3.
-----
'Pie-breaking' in general, and maintaining the distinctiveness of the pie for the sake of MTG.
I think pie breaking should in general be minimal. Mechanically, it should be preferable to splash another color in constructed than to use an off-color trick (they should always have inefficient CMC and should often have some kind of drawback). But I think the pie should regularly be broken, to some degree, as long as flavor requirements are satisfied.
Beast Within is a good example of what I'm not okay with CMC wise, but fits what I'm fine with flavor wise. I'd say it should be at least CMC 4, if reduced to a sorcery, and CMC 5 if it remains an instant. Because it can destroy any permanent, including creatures, which is generally outside of green's typical color pie, at least when it comes to directly doing so, rather than fight mechanics or something along those lines.
Rapid Hybridization/Pongify is another example, but different in nature, I'm fine with a shapeshifting effect in blue, but this is the wrong way to represent it mechanically I think. I'd be fine with Pongify as an aura to attach to an enemy creature at it's current CMC, but Rapid Hybridization I feel should be a higher CMC and exile the enemy creature, more like Curse of the Swine. Both of them destroying the creature feels wrong flavor wise for a shapeshifting effect, and seems like too efficient permanent creature removal for blue.
On the the other hand, I'm fine with stuff like Serra Sphinx, since blue already has vigilance as part of it's pie (if more rarely than white), and it isn't _too_ efficient for blue, p/t wise, especially at rare, rather than Serra Angel's uncommon. This isn't even really pie breaking IMO. Other than being virtually identical to a white card. They even changed the creature type.
I'm also fine with stuff like Illusory Angel. It's drawback is a relatively blue one, and it has flavorful reasons for it (whatever you just cast helps generate the 'belief' that the illusion angel subsides on), and because of the requirement, she usually won't be that badly off curve, or if she is, you're basically paying for her with two cards.
I'm not really fine with Snapcaster Mage. Bringing back a spell temporarily and exiling like that feels more black or red than blue. Blue is more about recovering that card from the graveyard into your hand properly, not turning it into a one-off flashback that can only be used that turn. It's also too efficient for blue as a creature, passing the vanilla test and having flash thrown on top of it, and a really strong ability on top of that. IMO, it should have been red or black, probably red, and at least CMC 3, probably higher, or maybe red/blue at 1UR, or UR, with the blue only added for the flash aspect. I feel like it's too efficient a creature for blue to have with flash, even though flash is a blue mechanic, and it has too much else going for it, it's not really paying for the flash in terms of CMC, let alone it's super-powerful ability, which I'd hesitate to put at such a low CMC. It's ability is something I'd hesitate to put on an instant (without a creature body added) at CMC 3 in red, the most likely color for the mechanic, IMO.
Prodigal Sorcerer - A classic, this guy is actually a bit more efficient than I think blue should be allowed these days for this effect. I'd probably put him at CMC 4, for the same thing as red would get at CMC 3, although I might allow him a bit of extra toughness for the high price. It's an off color effect now, even if it was originally blue. But I think occasional splashing like that is fine, just as long as it's less efficient than the core color's version. Red now has guys with this ability and haste, which helps excuse this guy some these days. Not that he's constructed viable anyway. If I was to re-make him, I'd probably make some kind of weird add-on to keep his pinginess blue-tinted, perhaps make the player pay 1 or U for it in addition to tapping, and have it note that the ability is treated as if it were coming from a red source, so it looks like he's using blue's ability to manipulate the color pie and emulate other colors (like how blue has spells that can change a land's type temporarily and such). Yes, it would probably make him a bad card, but I feel like in general, strongly off color cards should usually be 'bad' to some degree, and his ability has moved in the color pie since his creation (blue had waaay to much stuff back in the day).
Damnation - I... am sorta okay with this. I don't really like it, I feel like black should be more of a Plague Wind type. I'd prefer it if it worked something like this instead, Sacrifice all your creatures, then destroy all creatures target opponent controls, they can't be regenerated. That seems more black in feel, less treading on white's flavor and being a straight up Wrath of God mimic. I feel like I can let black get away with it due to it being a thing that you often pay a price for, which is a very black thing, and that black has similar effects, but I'd prefer it if it had a more mechanically flavor-linked implementation to black's style, and was slightly less good as Wrath of God in certain circumstances because of that. But CMC isn't the real problem on this one, given creature destruction and backlashes for more efficient CMC are heavily black things. Black even has a bit of a 'steal other colors' stuff if you pay the price' thing going on. Another thing I might have been fine with is if black payed a small life cost for this variation of Wrath of God, even as small as 1 life, just to say 'yeah, this is black'.
I'm not sure where you get that Vigilance is part of blue's slice of the pie. I can't find a single blue modern legal (non TS block) card that grants vigilance without the addition of another color (green or white).
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
So, you don't like things like red direct damage and black kill everything? *chuckle*
Planar Chaos wasn't about randomness. It was about a different color pie in a way that still 'made sense'.
Some of them actually work better this way. Take flying hate in red. I still say it doesn't need to exist at all, but picture something like this:
Bird Bolt R
Instant
Bird Bolt deals 2 damage to target creature or player. If that creature has flying, it deals 4 damage instead.
More useful than Leaf Arrow or Plummet by far, since it can target any creature or player. More flavorful too.
I have more of an issue with particular effects, though. Mesa Enchantress and Pongify, mostly, since they totally eliminate that color's weakness. On the other hand, how can you argue that Prodigal Sorcerer and Psionic Blast should be blue?
Future Sight is the set I always had the most issue with. So many rules issues, and having to repeatedly explain each of the keywords. (Less of a problem for the RAV and Core Set ones, but the new keywords? The futureshifted cards?)
Given that SCG sells Vindicate for $30, I highly doubt that.
How about three colors at once? Also, in black, you have Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon.
Hilariously, Maro is still wrong. Plants need pollinators, which tend to fly.
He's just trying to justify something that shouldn't exist. In fact, the only reason anyone played Hurricane is because it damaged players, and creatures generally sucked in the early days of Magic. But obviously Hurricane isn't flavorful anymore, so you get...weird ***** to try to give flavor to stuff that, in all honesty, is pretty flavorless. I mean, honestly, how many flying hate cards that aren't spiders with reach have any resonance?
It's really "At the end of the day, we thought it would be extra lulzy for one color to be completely unplayable in limited. But we'll fix it by giving it 9001 *****ty cards. Whee!"
On phasing:
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
This.
I like a strict color pie in concept, but I think it suffers from both the weight of M:tG tradition and the subjectivity of countless magic card designers. So given that flavor is so subjective, and the color pie is so messy already, I don't see the use in worrying about it.
...Until M:tG is rebooted from the ground up, with all the accumulated wisdom of its design history aimed at rethinking and redefining the color pie.
"Balance" he says. It's basically giving green a bunch of niche cards because they decided for no real reason that a color needed to hate flying. It's why I never play green in limited unless the set is so obviously warped by the theme that not playing green would be stupid.
Again, can we all agree Maro is not a developer? Because as it is, green has about 4 niche commons in every large set, far more than any other color.
But it's particularly irritating because whenever it comes to white and blue, Maro is happy to take away their weakness, give white better card draw than blue and give blue better removal than black. But black, red, and green? Not so much. Well, red more these days, because of a certain card in M15, but still...
At the very least, more Howlgeist-type creatures. And please, develop the spiders slightly better. Giant Spider was unplayable in Alpha, and it's unplayable now, so yes, Garruk, nature still has some constants.
On phasing:
R/W Control
U/B Reanimator
G/B Aggro
U/R Aggro
W/G Control
I think even with a strict color pie, such things are possible, it's just a matter on putting a focus on cards that allow these colors to play off beat. For example, Red is very capable of board control within the color pie; it just needs such cards to be accented.
Stuff like Pongify and Rabid Hybridization I dislike a lot, since it gives blue something it sorely lacks, and at a very low CMC cost. Blue doesnt deal well with creature permanents, their way to deal with them is normally a bounce effect. Giving them a 1CMC kill spell with the effect it has is just too far. Hornet Sting is another card I don't like at all either. I would be okay if it said to a flying creature, but straight direct damage is something that is red. (yes they made psionic blast but I am okay with that....its not like they timeshifted lightning bolt to blue.)
I think if they want to bend the rules of the color pie, it should be a similar effect to what it would normally do, like how red draw spells have discarding attached to them, how a spell like Chaos Warp has the "randomness" to it that lets red deal with a permanent, but at a price.
Where in modern design does white (by itself) have better card draw than blue? Where does blue have better removal than black? I play Modern a lot and I don't see any of that.
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
I'd rather face down a Path to Exile over a Rapid Hybridization, TBH. If you're using removal on anything weaker than a Hill Giant, you're doing it wrong. And of course, PTE is generally considered better than most black removal. Oh, and Maro's biggest problem with RH is that it destroys rather than exiling.
What does black have that's better than RH in...ever? I really can't think of anything.
(This is also a problem for Beast Within, but at least it's not a common.)
And I distinctly remember back when Puresteel Paladin came out, players were eager to add it to WU Caw-Blade...then Stoneforge and Jace got banned.
You understand that Swords to Plowshares is ridiculously OP, right?
Agreed.
Hilariously, I hate the "destroy creatures with flying" thing more. It's non-resonant and produces bad design. It should have gone to the same bin as Red Elemental Blast (which, interestingly enough, at the time, would very rarely be used against permanents red can outright destroy, since neither artifacts nor lands are colored) and friends. But we say "Well, green can destroy creatures with flying." Because some people in design are in love with Hurricane. It makes for people who think red can't do damage to creatures with flying as well. And people who are surprised that I'm not using Elvish Skysweeper in a deck with all five Grave Pact variants!
Also, Leaf Arrow exists and wasn't played at all, but the flavor text is unintentionally hilarious because it can target exactly zero Eldrazi, any of which (notwithstanding the spawn) would say Lightning Bolt tickled. Well, they would, if one word from them didn't cause your mind to shatter.
Seriously, if you like "destroy creatures with flying" effects, you should be ashamed.
On phasing: