Every Magic: The Gathering theme colour has its own personality, and a play style it is attuned to. If you want to win at the trading card game , you'll need to work those mana colours to your advantage.
It makes building your first deck a lot easier. However, as you progress, you can mix in other elements to bulk your deck up - and take your opponents by surprise. Red draws from the fiery heart of emotion. The theme where you draw first and think later. Its lands are towering peaks and rugged plains. As a Magic: The Gathering deck, it features all the traditional fantasy elements: dragons, goblins, ogres and er, minotaur pirates.
Red spells, in particular, are super destructive: raining fire and stone on your enemies, or annihilating their mana. Its planeswalkers are pyromancers, like Chandra and Jaya Ballard.
These cards are reckless and super damage-heavy. Red cards are perfect for going on the offensive and wrecking the battlefield. From a more philosophical perspective, some see this as the colour of chaos or heightened emotions.
Or the bloodthirsty fighter Kratos, protagonist from the God of War series of video games. He is driven almost completely by fury and fight. The red theme is ideal for players who like big, bloody wins. Those folks who want to destroy it all with fire. With thousands of different entries in each color, every hue can adopt a multitude of strategies; however, each color does gravitate towards certain strategies. Today we'll review all the info you could need about each color to help you determine how to play their strengths and decide which best suits your build!
Red spells are the most offense-oriented of any color. When you want to damage your opponent or their creatures, cast something crimson and utilize lave, flame, stone, and lightning to obliterate your foes. Many red creatures have abilities that further enhance their rapid path of destruction; the haste trait lets them attack the turn they're cast, and trample allows them to deal damage to an opponent if their power exceeds a blocking monster's toughness.
With red, unpredictable, furious assaults corner opponents before they have time to react. Just be careful—as a tradeoff for such power, most red creatures have limited toughness and their effects are often only applied for a single turn.
Still, the above Utvara Hellkite showcases a rare red ongoing ability that provides dragon tokens whenever a dragon you control attacks. Usually perceived as a peaceful color, may surprise new players with its monstrous titans. Green creatures often require more mana than other colors, but they have superior power and toughness.
To offset the high costs, it also contains plenty of cards to collect and play lands faster. Green's creatures are renowned for trample, letting them bulldoze through defenders, but often lack flying, making them vulnerable to aerial assaults although some utilize the reach trait to block flyers.
In short, green mages recognize the power of an expansive plant and beast database and strive to rapidly pulverize foes with high-cost, high-power spells.
The above Omnath, Locus of Mana allows players to accumulate unspent mana to use on future turns. Blue—the color of control. Summoning the powers of seas and sky, blue decks tend to shoot the long haul; they utilize countering to negate enemy spells and extra draws to expand their options. Blue possesses fewer monsters than other colors; however, many of its spells allow you to alter the allegiance of opponent's creatures, and it bypasses the annoying indestructible trait of creatures with its hand-returning removals.
It also contains many valued instants and sorceries like Mana Drain. Remember when I talked about big creatures mattering in Naya? Make it double for Temur.
Lots of big creatures making smaller creatures, and smaller creatures making bigger creatures. Add the big creatures to some Izzet spell-copying shenanigans and you can have some fun. Once again, there will be a lot of creature growth or other benefits with the keyword ferocious. Take a look:. All of the 4-color combos come from the Nephilim creature type introduced in Guildpact.
Only five were created, mainly to help those who wanted to play with more than the 2-color guilds. Lore-wise, they were Old Gods monsters with very limited intelligence who were the symbols of Ravnica well before the time of the Guildpact. They were the main antagonists if you can call something whose main drive is to mindlessly feed an antagonistic quality of the storyline of the set.
Their main purpose is to allow you the freedom to build in any of the colors, while still having some level of restriction since one of the colors is left out.
Here are the combos along with the Nephilim they get their name from:. Only one combination here, since there are only five colors in MTG.
I am consciously ignoring pink. WUBRG gets its name from the shorthand for the colors. There sadly is no mythical beast called the Whoo-Burg, although it definitely sounds like something for an Un-set. Yes, having access to all colors does allow you to play pretty much anything you want, but think about it for just a couple more seconds. In order to play a card that costs you would need 4 mana total, one of which must be green and one of which must be black.
You have 60 cards in your deck with somewhere around 22 to 26 lands of all five colors. The likelihood of you having the mana you need exactly as you need it would be rare. Playing a deck like this requires strategy. Eldrazi Horror Illustration by Jason Felix. Yep, you can have an entire deck that does not care what color mana you use or, for added difficulty, you can have a deck that uses colorless mana. The good thing about color combos is you can do with this info whatever you want, really.
A lot of the 3-color decks worked wonderfully in their respective sets and meta-games, but their mileage may vary outside of them. Commencement of Festivities Illustration by Zack Stella. Which color combination should you play?
That completely depends on your personality and play style. If you want to make sure you get to beat face unimpeded, look at mono-white, mono-blue, Azorius, or Selesnya. I will say that in terms of popularity, 2-color and 3-color tend to be the combos that get the most play.
Glad this was typed and not spoken. Have you spotted something our list is missing? Do you have a question about how to better use the combos or some that you feel are underused in the current meta?
Feel free to leave a comment below, or join us on our Discord server for a chat! All rights reserved. The copyright for Magic: the Gathering and all associated card names and card images is held by Wizards of the Coast.
Our Privacy Policy. Table of Contents. Ethan has been playing Magic since and is a writer and Discord mod for Draftsim. Because generic costs don't need a specific type of mana, colorless cards can be played in decks of any color.
Colorless cards can have mechanics usually reserved for a specific color, but typically at a higher mana value for a given effect. For instance, colorless equipment can grant otherwise color-exclusive effects to any deck, but with less mana efficiency than a colored aura. Artifacts can be considered a "Jack of all trades, master of none," though they too have unique strengths; in the case of equipment, it doesn't leave the battlefield with its attached creature like auras do.
As another example, haste is primary in red. Artifacts are often indestructible , but there are a set of mechanics unique to them like modular , imprint , and sunburst. Many of these mechanics involve combining with other cards like equip , fortify , crew or living weapon.
The Eldrazi on the other hand have their very own tribal mechanics like annihilator , devoid and ingest. Face-down cards placed by morph and manifest are also colorless. Some cards are multicolored sometimes called "gold" due to their card frame , meaning they require more than one type of mana to use. Although Invasion block , the first set prominently themed around multicolor, was a smashing success as evidenced by a definite spike in tournament attendance , in Mark Rosewater 's words, it wasn't really a mechanic they explored much.
The card pool was dominated by "Chinese menu" cards, meaning they took one ability from two colors, scrunched them together on one card, and saw what happened. The "guild model" from Ravnica block has given way to a new era of understanding color combinations especially two-color combinations.
Mark Rosewater boldly campaigned to showcase all ten two-color combinations equally. Later the "small plane model" shards from Alara block and the "clan model" wedges from Tarkir block added a deeper understanding of the three-color combinations. The " triomes " from Ikoria gave new names to the wedge colors but the colors are not tied to factions or existing wedge identities.
Finally Commander gave an Identity to the notoriously hard to design four-color combinations. Over the course of the game, the Magic development team has occasionally moved mechanics already established in one color to another.
This is usually for balance reasons, particularly if a color has enough tools to negate its weaknesses, or has a disproportionate amount of design space.
A major mechanical shift was made around ; at the time, blue and black had too many mechanics at the expense of the other colors. Change can also result from a re-examination of flavor; for instance, efficient artifact destruction was moved from white Disenchant to green Naturalize in order to better emphasize green's conflict with blue regarding technological progress.
Conversely, effects broad in scope can be split in order to prevent widely used mechanics from being tied to a single color. In terms of flavor black and red tended to be portrayed as evil in early lore while white, blue and green were generally good, but not soon after nuances were introduced and protagonists and antagonists became represented in all colors.
When cards in a certain color do something that the color doesn't normally do, it is called color bleed. When the bleeding goes too far it is called a color bend or in the worst case a color break. A bend pushes in a direction that falls within color philosophy but outside of normal mechanical implementation. A break undermines a weakness that is core to the color. The Unhinged set features a sixth color: pink.
Water Gun Balloon Game can create a pink permanent and for abilities that let you produce mana of any color, you can choose pink. However, there is no Unhinged Basic Land card that can produce pink mana and no cards which actually require pink mana in any form. In fact Unhinged features a lot more possible colors since Avatar of Me has the color of its players eyes so grey and brown would be possible as well.
A more serious discussion of a new color took place during the design of Planar Chaos. The sixth color, purple , would have been in opposition to green , but the idea never made it past the concept stage. Even though colorless is not a color, the appearance of the colorless mana symbol in Oath of the Gatewatch birthed the idea of colorless as the sixth Magic color.
With the expansion Kaladesh , energy was introduced as a way to pay ability costs rather than traditional mana. MTG Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit this Page. Edit source History Talk A characteristic of an object.
An attribute mana may have. Colors There are five colors in the Magic game: white, blue, black, red, and green. An object can be one or more of the five colors, or it can be no color at all.
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