Looking at Strixhaven spoilers, i´m getting this weird feeling of having colors do things they don´t normally do and it feels bad, kinda alien somehow, because it feels like colors are bleeding into each other doing things they don´t normally do.
I´m all up for trying new things but when you have something like Syr Konrad, the Grim that is clearly a black thing to do and Lorehold´s red and white colors suddenly shifts to cards like Quintorius, Field Historian and Stonebound Mentor then this effect doesn´t really become unique to black anymore thus removing what makes black, black.
It´s the same with Witherbloom in Strixhaven. A card like Witherbloom Apprentice feels very white and black to me. Caring about instants and soceries too feels weird to me
Magecraft in general just seems so out of place for colors outside of red and blue.
Maybe i´m simply old fashioned and should embrace changes in colors but when colors are bleeding and making each color less unique then it just doesn´t feel like the right way to do changes.
Wizards/Creative will always bend the Pie for set themes and world building. The biggest example would be New Phyrexia where all the colors got mean and felt tainted by Black. White had more life drain and negative rules agains the opponent. Blue got Vapor Snag, which Blue getting noncombat damage lifeless was big. So non Blue and Red colors caring about instants and sorceries is fine bc the whole set/plane cares about them, and Creative did do well to show the differences in *how* the colors care. Sure the Witherbloom Apprentice feels WB, but we've already seen BG get this effect in Poison-Tip Archer, we just now see it triggering off Magecraft. It's kind of nice seeing BG not care as much about the graveyard since we get than nearly every set these days.
And as for Boros getting graveyard matters abilities, that's def not a bad thing. Boros has been forced into the redzone for far too long and it's great that they expand flavorfully into new design space. Boros just feels like the archeology colors, we've seen this trope with the WR cards in Zendikar: caring about exploring, excavating, finding artifacts, etc. It will feel weird since Boros has largely been one note, but these new designs fit within the scope of the colors and the flavor of the world.
Overall, I think it's good that Creative went with different strategies that still fit within each color pair with this set than just say WR attacks, BG graveyard, WB lifedrain, UG gets everything (jkjkjk), and UR is the only one to care about spells in a magical school world.
Lots of players are more used to and more in line with a much stricter color separation , so you know what color does what.
Now we get much more mixing, so for lots of cases two or even three colors (and sometimes even all colors) get some mechanic, and they feel the same.
The Extort mechanic was a slow bleeding out the opponent, it felt very white/black, as the theme was more black aligned, draining life from the opponent, putting it in a mono-white deck (due to the hybrid cost thats possible) it felt much more out of place that a mono-white deck drains the opponents life.
Lifelink in general exists in black and white cards basically alike, for white its more about gaining life, for black its more about the entire draining life aspect, but its extremely samish in the end result.
Normally blue/red cares the most for instants/sorcery played, but in this set all colors and all combinations get that mechanic, so its natural again that it feels very samish, even if the colors prefer to do different things with the actual triggers and abilities, the theme overlap is real.
Just imagine we get to Ravnica, and suddenly all Guilds have Dredge in some way, play might have different costs (paying life, exiling cards from the graveyard, hand or anything), it would still feel bad, as the differences between the guilds in Ravnica are much cleaner and they do their own thing, without much overlap at all.
Right now Magic does not respect its color pie, and all colors get access to much more than they used to, which robs the colors of their identity and makes deck themes more relevant.
That means, right now it doesnt matter that you play "white" as a color, its much more relevant that you play a "Cleric theme" deck, or an "Angel deck".
The only mechanics that WotC so far did not disconnect from its old school color pie are discard and counterspells, thats the only thing that really still feels extremely connected to the colors themselves.
Greens ramp or Regrowth effects got mixed up extremely into ALL colors in various ways (and plenty of artifacts as well, making it straight up colorless).
Exile effects where predominately white removal, now we get it in all colors.
All these mixing and mashing the color pie together leaves the problem that colors more and more lack an identity, thats even more relevant as now the color combinations have their own identities and they change between the sets and mechanics of the set ... quite a lot of people do not like that, so you are absolutely not alone or special in that view, its a very common issue of old school players as thats a very major change in how Magic is produced now (and quite possible a source of many issues that people have with the new designs, as cards now require a lot more powercreep to be special or some special wording and mechanic change to even look remotely special, as so much is otherwise the same just in different colors).
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WotC could have honored the traditional color pie more and build around that, instead they abandoned it and mixed a lot of mechanics.
And once thats done its basically impossible to undo these changes, as these then mistakes still exist, and "banning" them would be a landslide of cards.
To make a date when that color bleeding together happened, i would say its Ravnica that started it, when they made mechanics for the color combinations specifically, players naturally assume that mechanic is the soul core of that color combination, and that was true for a long time (so the Ravnica mechanics are much more what players expect to get from a color combination and its themes).
Then we got hybrid cards, which kinda bleeded mechanics into colors that wouldnt not really get them normally, and if a card is hybrid, mono colors of either side get exactly the same effect, so that produces the issue that suddenly 2 colors and their combination get the exact same card, for the same cost, no differences ; so gone is the part where one colors is naturally better at something or more efficient.
With phyrexian mana we got mechanics outright into "colorless" , each color suddenly gets something for the cost of life, that hurt the color pie a lot, as it completely ignored it all together (and the cards powerlevels did quite a lasting damage as well).
The last bunch of years in Magic focused a lot more on the 10 different 2-color combinations and provided cards in each set that used that as a theme, as we get a massive amount more multicolored cards now too, and mono-colored is a very fringe theme if at all (its mostly just mono-red that gets a deck once in a while, the other colors benefit a lot more from not being mono colored, as sets almost never give you any reason to stay mono colored at all, thats extremely rare now).
Multicolor sets basically became the normal, Shards of Alara, more Ravnica, every single set is focusing on color combinations, and the mono-colors themselves lost more and more, if not all of their identity by now.
Looking at Strixhaven spoilers, i´m getting this weird feeling of having colors do things they don´t normally do and it feels bad, kinda alien somehow, because it feels like colors are bleeding into each other doing things they don´t normally do.
I´m all up for trying new things but when you have something like Syr Konrad, the Grim that is clearly a black thing to do and Lorehold´s red and white colors suddenly shifts to cards like Quintorius, Field Historian and Stonebound Mentor then this effect doesn´t really become unique to black anymore thus removing what makes black, black.
It´s the same with Witherbloom in Strixhaven. A card like Witherbloom Apprentice feels very white and black to me. Caring about instants and soceries too feels weird to me
Magecraft in general just seems so out of place for colors outside of red and blue.
Maybe i´m simply old fashioned and should embrace changes in colors but when colors are bleeding and making each color less unique then it just doesn´t feel like the right way to do changes.
What do you think?
And as for Boros getting graveyard matters abilities, that's def not a bad thing. Boros has been forced into the redzone for far too long and it's great that they expand flavorfully into new design space. Boros just feels like the archeology colors, we've seen this trope with the WR cards in Zendikar: caring about exploring, excavating, finding artifacts, etc. It will feel weird since Boros has largely been one note, but these new designs fit within the scope of the colors and the flavor of the world.
Overall, I think it's good that Creative went with different strategies that still fit within each color pair with this set than just say WR attacks, BG graveyard, WB lifedrain, UG gets everything (jkjkjk), and UR is the only one to care about spells in a magical school world.
[Edits for spelling and clearing up points]
Lots of players are more used to and more in line with a much stricter color separation , so you know what color does what.
Now we get much more mixing, so for lots of cases two or even three colors (and sometimes even all colors) get some mechanic, and they feel the same.
The Extort mechanic was a slow bleeding out the opponent, it felt very white/black, as the theme was more black aligned, draining life from the opponent, putting it in a mono-white deck (due to the hybrid cost thats possible) it felt much more out of place that a mono-white deck drains the opponents life.
Lifelink in general exists in black and white cards basically alike, for white its more about gaining life, for black its more about the entire draining life aspect, but its extremely samish in the end result.
Normally blue/red cares the most for instants/sorcery played, but in this set all colors and all combinations get that mechanic, so its natural again that it feels very samish, even if the colors prefer to do different things with the actual triggers and abilities, the theme overlap is real.
Just imagine we get to Ravnica, and suddenly all Guilds have Dredge in some way, play might have different costs (paying life, exiling cards from the graveyard, hand or anything), it would still feel bad, as the differences between the guilds in Ravnica are much cleaner and they do their own thing, without much overlap at all.
Right now Magic does not respect its color pie, and all colors get access to much more than they used to, which robs the colors of their identity and makes deck themes more relevant.
That means, right now it doesnt matter that you play "white" as a color, its much more relevant that you play a "Cleric theme" deck, or an "Angel deck".
The only mechanics that WotC so far did not disconnect from its old school color pie are discard and counterspells, thats the only thing that really still feels extremely connected to the colors themselves.
Greens ramp or Regrowth effects got mixed up extremely into ALL colors in various ways (and plenty of artifacts as well, making it straight up colorless).
Exile effects where predominately white removal, now we get it in all colors.
All these mixing and mashing the color pie together leaves the problem that colors more and more lack an identity, thats even more relevant as now the color combinations have their own identities and they change between the sets and mechanics of the set ... quite a lot of people do not like that, so you are absolutely not alone or special in that view, its a very common issue of old school players as thats a very major change in how Magic is produced now (and quite possible a source of many issues that people have with the new designs, as cards now require a lot more powercreep to be special or some special wording and mechanic change to even look remotely special, as so much is otherwise the same just in different colors).
----
WotC could have honored the traditional color pie more and build around that, instead they abandoned it and mixed a lot of mechanics.
And once thats done its basically impossible to undo these changes, as these then mistakes still exist, and "banning" them would be a landslide of cards.
To make a date when that color bleeding together happened, i would say its Ravnica that started it, when they made mechanics for the color combinations specifically, players naturally assume that mechanic is the soul core of that color combination, and that was true for a long time (so the Ravnica mechanics are much more what players expect to get from a color combination and its themes).
Then we got hybrid cards, which kinda bleeded mechanics into colors that wouldnt not really get them normally, and if a card is hybrid, mono colors of either side get exactly the same effect, so that produces the issue that suddenly 2 colors and their combination get the exact same card, for the same cost, no differences ; so gone is the part where one colors is naturally better at something or more efficient.
With phyrexian mana we got mechanics outright into "colorless" , each color suddenly gets something for the cost of life, that hurt the color pie a lot, as it completely ignored it all together (and the cards powerlevels did quite a lasting damage as well).
The last bunch of years in Magic focused a lot more on the 10 different 2-color combinations and provided cards in each set that used that as a theme, as we get a massive amount more multicolored cards now too, and mono-colored is a very fringe theme if at all (its mostly just mono-red that gets a deck once in a while, the other colors benefit a lot more from not being mono colored, as sets almost never give you any reason to stay mono colored at all, thats extremely rare now).
Multicolor sets basically became the normal, Shards of Alara, more Ravnica, every single set is focusing on color combinations, and the mono-colors themselves lost more and more, if not all of their identity by now.
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