Guild Mana Shorthand

[Mindstab_Thrull]

Right. Due to frutstration with searching on Apprentice ALREADY for cards with guild mana costs, I decided to go through the ten colour pairs and try and make a single-character symbol for them. The rules are:

1. Only English letters allowed, as they can be reproduced on most keyboards easily enough - Europe, the Americas, Australia, Africa, and portions of Asia all use the same basic 26 letters, some with variations, some without. The KISS theory works wonders here (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

2. B, G, R, U, and W are, for obvious reasons, already used, so thus not allowed. X, Y, and Z are likewise ruled out for the same reason. A and L are occaionally used for Artifact and Land, and I and O are too close to 1 and 0 as to be confusing depending on the place (ie, is a card with a cost listed of O one guild mana or zero mana?).

3. Each guild mana shorthand letter should at least somewhat be similar to the two letters for the guild colours - eg, if we're looking at a red/green guild, the letter for it should somewhat resemble both R and G.

4. For reference, the colour pairs are:  WU UB BR RG GW WB UR BG RW GU.

So, without further adieu.. after some discussion in the chat room, this is what we came up with:

   WU -> V
   UB -> S
   BR -> P
   RG -> H
   GW -> E
   WB -> M
   UR -> D
   BG -> F
   RW -> K
   GU -> C

Any comments?

[Ephraim]

   WU -> V
   UB -> S
   BR -> P
   RG -> H
   GW -> E
   WB -> M
   UR -> D
   BG -> F
   RW -> K
   GU -> C

Any comments?

These might be good in theory, but nobody is ever going to remember them. Nobody would know what you're talking about until you explain it and I don't think anybody's going to be eager about having to scan their keyboard for letter similarities if they forget that the shorthand for U/B is S (which is really pushing the letter-similarity anyhow.)

[Matt]

You know how to find them? Memorize the guild names and do a search for "golgari" or similar.

[Klep]

In creating 10 new letters to place in costs, you have already violated KISS.  People are already just using W/U etc. to represent guild mana, there's no need for additional letters to handle this task.

[jcb193]

This is simple:

U/B  references a Blue Black deck
UB references guild mana

[Matt]

On that note, back at the beginning of August I made a thread in the mod lounge about creating new mana smileys for the guild mana. Another example of your beloved leader's foresight!

[Mindstab_Thrull]

Actually, I have a reason for doing this, which boils down to being able to calculate the CMC of a card automatically (eg, using Excel, or perhaps Sibyl or other bots). I have a spreadsheet in Excel that allows me to do this, but it requires every character be a single mana symbol, such as Ancestral Recall's U, Lord of the Pit's 4BBB, Terminate's BR, Triskelion's 6 or even Fireball's XR. (For convenience, X in these count as 1.) It can even handle Decree of Justice's XX2WW without a problem. Where the hiccup comes is with Guild Mana, where it's two symbols smashed together. I'd already considered using the intial for each guild, but as Golgari starts with G as does Green, and Boros' B breaks into Black's territory.. it really makes a mess of things.

As for jcb193's comment.. I guess you haven't seen anyone list their deck as a UB deck before then. Happens a lot online. Also, the guild symbols on MTGSalvation have been listed as (U/B) - but some people write U/B when describing their deck. After about 12 years of the game, it's hard to tell someone 'Do it this way' as opposed to 'You can do it either way'. Ask those that were around for the 6E rules overhaul, or even look back to the introduction of the new card face, and you'll see how much of an issue it is when we're told we can't have things how we had them before anymore. The difference is, you're talking about shorthand vs something that actually impacts the game one way or another.