The Color Wheel

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Introduction

I've always been more of a fan of the complexity, depth, and history of Magic's design than playing. I actually enjoy (most) Mark Rosewater articles more than any other part of Magic, and that's saying something. I love complicated systems, and trying to pin down their essence, what makes them tick, what could work better, etc. (this is why I'm such an excellent bureaucrat, by the way). My goal here is to share my enjoyment of this perspective on the game with you, the audience with the most appreciation for Magic's history and for seeing the deepest into the pool of what these cards make possible. This is what always attracted me to the broadest of formats---only in Vintage/Legacy can you experience the big picture.

When it comes to Magic design, there's just one paradigm at its center, and fortunately, I love the color wheel. It has flavor and function coming out of anthropomorphized orifices I don't even know the names for. It asks how to balance a five-sided scale while giving each side a very different set of abilities.

I don't know if I was alone in this, but when I read Chaos Theory and saw Damnation for the first time, my jaw dropped. Hard. I was speechless for minutes. Then I was indignant---can they do that? What about White? I had a sudden impulse to check if they had finally just decided to skip the charade and stop printing White cards altogether. This is the impact of the color wheel/pie (I'll use both depending on inclination of the moment). Even if a card doesn't seem playable in our format, we are fascinated with the direction the game can go, the decks that might be possible, if the abilities are divided up a little differently.

One note to all potential respondents before I get to the delicious "content": NO CARD IDEAS ALLOWED HERE. As I understand it, R&D cannot read anything with card ideas in it for legal reasons. In my dream of dreams, R&D would read what I've got to say and like it, so I don't want to do anything to prevent them from doing so. We're talking about colors and abilities generally, with examples of past cards. That's all.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: A Brief History of White Weenie

I think of Magic as divided into four periods: Ancient (up to Alliances), Renaissance (Mirage to Prophecy), Modern (Invasion to Saviors of Kamigawa), and Post-Modern (Ravnica forward). Over these many years, colors' abilities have changed dramatically, but one thing has remained constant: R&D has believed that the core of White rests in its small "weenie" creatures. Strangely, the times that this brought about actual winning* were mostly during the "Ancient" and "Renaissance" periods---when the most design mistakes were made and perpetuated.

( * : White players be sure to check with a dictionary or a Blue player for the definition here. )

Early on, White Weenie was a deck stocked with pump-Knights, which were good against Ancient control decks because they forced a one-for-one Wrath of God or Nevinyrral's Disk. There wasn't much if any combo in the Ancient period, and what there was had to fight Counterspell, then Mana Drain, and then Force of Will (the counterspells got better every set or two Back In The Day). Necropotence made aggro (and protection from black in particular) better, and thus White Weenie built up early cred as the color's enduring strategy. Worlds 1996's WW win sealed it.

Over Mirage and Tempest blocks, White kept getting more and more dudes, most notably the aggro-packed Tempest block array of Soltari Monk, Soltari Priest, and Paladin en-Vec, combined with the Mirage block strength of Empyrial Armor. In an environment where mono-Red and mono-Black aggro were important opponents, protection was at an all-time best, because mono-decks just couldn't kill them, so Empyrial Armor never fell off. Even against the dreaded speed of Fireblast, it was a fair plan.

Urza block was, of course, a mess. No White Weenie deck that I know of kills first turn (and there wasn't much to work with even after things settled down). Then, in Masques block, WW went off the charts thanks to the unlimited tutoring-into-play idea, and an intentionally slower pace than Saga/Legacy/Destiny. Rebels, while not as incredibly focused as the various Goblin deck iterations, shows what uncounterable tutoring-into-play does to an environment with a small card pool of countermeasures, especially with Rishadan Port murking up the workability of 4-cost or higher mass removal. This mechanic blew away its environment, but did not do well outside of that cage, based on Urza block on one side and Fires of Yavimaya decks on the other (check out the 2001 Worlds coverage if you doubt it).

Since the Rebels-centric Block Constructed experience, in what I call the Modern and Post-Modern design eras, R&D has tried to issue new troops to White Weenie players repeatedly. They've even tried to create intentionally synergistic teams of guys in hopes of making a good deck. It hasn't worked. Let's look at each block's additions and comment on the specifics.

Invasion: Skeptics of my anti-White Weenie thesis might point to Zvi Mowshowitz's "The Solution" U/W deck, which won the IBC Pro Tour: Tokyo in 2001. However, that deck was playing exactly as much blue as white (the only all-white maindeck cards were Voice of All and Crimson Acolyte). I would also quickly point out that the only other Top 8 deck with more counterspells than Zvi's was Tsuyoshi Fujita's U/B control deck---which Zvi met in the finals. And that's if you don't count Meddling Mage as at least one counterspell in the hands of an iconic player like Zvi. Clearly this is not a case of vindication for the "2/2 for WW with combat ability" bargain pricing.

Odyssey: The Mystic threshold creatures looked like they had potential, except that once again the deck with the efficient creatures and counterspells became more than a little notorious. Perhaps if you were playing OTJ Block or Standard or Extended (or Vintage in Italy or near Adam Bowers pre-Dragon) you might have played a thousand matches against U/G Madness? Randy Buehler wrote shortly afterward that the WW deck was weakened in development for fear of it being too good, and that it was a mistake to give Green the best creatures across the whole mana curve, but, on the bright side, now they know what it takes to make Green good. Still, what kind of Threshold-enablers were there in White, Patrol Hound? Even if there had been no Basking Rootwalla, Wild Mongrel, Werebear, Nimble Mongoose, or Seton's Scout, I'm still not convinced Green wouldn't have been a better partner for Blue than the White's Mystics. The best case of such a retroactive hypothetical would be another "Solution" deck winning on the back of Blue with White creatures accompanying Aquamoeba, since the White cards had neither hope of getting threshold on their own, nor of surviving Black removal spells.

Onslaught: Soldiers couldn't do much to compete with cycling (Astral Slide), Explosive Vegetation hugeness, or the highly-synergized Goblins. There were, of course, at least eight 2-power, 2-cost guys, plus Aven Farseer and Cloudreach Cavalry, and strong 1-cost support like Weathered Wayfarer and Deftblade Elite. Stoic Champion was, I believe, the most widely played, thanks to Astral Slide. Worth noting: Exalted Angel, one of the most successful White cards ever, is not a "weenie". Plenty of White was played from this block on the back of a board control enchantment, a way for White to control its library, and a superior non-weenie creature. Naturally, such a formula was never pursued again.

Mirrodin: Equipment and White Weenie were paired together here. Affinity and then Arcbound Ravager were also printed. Mirrodin/Darksteel Block Constructed at PT Kobe 2004 featured five White cards (all Leonin Abunas) in the whole Top 64, prompting my collaboration with Tony Sculimbrene on this enormous article (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ) suggesting many changes that might help Block Constructed and Magic as a whole.* Of course, Auriok Steelshaper was later referred to exclusively in jest. Not much information exists on Premiere-level post-mass-banning Standard, but I can't imagine the Mirrodin White Weenies being much luckier than the Onslaught ones breaking through against decks that could live against Ravager.

( * : Many of these changes have, apparently, been taken to heart or independently decided upon internally at Wizards, particularly the crucial avoidance of set mechanics that lead to confluences of unstoppable power and obviousness like U/G Madness and Affinity. Seriously, props to R&D. )

Kamigawa: Okay, okay, a White Weenie deck did make Top 8 at the Kamigawa Block Constructed PT: Philadelphia 2005. It didn't even have Blue in it. However, it did lose in the quarterfinals. And the deck archetype was 48 / 261 in the field (over 18%), meaning a single Top 8 spot is actually underrepresentation. R&D was clearly suggesting the strategy with Tallowisp, Isamaru, and Eight-and-a-Half-Tails, and it sure didn't hurt that it could play lots of bodies to attach to Umezawa's Jitte. I don't know if this instance should be credited to the pilot, the cards, the matchups, or the luck, but I do know that at GP Salt Lake City 2005, the last Premiere Kamigawa Block Constructed event that I can find, the Top 8 was Plains- and WW-free.

Ravnica: This issue is clouded by gold cards possibly even more than in Invasion, but the close proxy is R/W Boros, which has made it all the way out to Extended. However, take a look at, say, Osamu Fujita's "Deadguy Boros" Extended GP Singapore 2007 Top 8 deck. My eyes see White mana symbols, but my spider sense detects a Red deck that has some nifty White bodies attached. So basically, mana fixing of the caliber that Sacred Foundry's cycle provides made it easy enough that Sligh could play two colors. In Raphael Levy's deck from the same tournament, do you notice that ALL the spells are nonwhite (except Armadillo Cloak and Lightning Helix---whoo, life gain!---a.k.a. fixed Rancor and fixed Incinerate), and the white creatures are all basically just the most efficient damage-dealing bodies to be found?

At Standard PT Honolulu 2006, a B/W Orzhov aggro and a R/G/W Zoo deck both played enough white creatures to be candidates for discussion. However, if you'll look at the lists, I think you'll agree that Black and Red were the colors of choice for actual abilities; White is an afterthought that gives the weenies a little extra size. Seriously, you think they're playing Mortify for the enchantment removal? Maybe Castigate gets some White benefits, and certainly Bathe In Light and Otherworldly Journey (B/W sideboard) are White, but that's pretty thin. One deck is being played for the burn, the other is being played for the discard, and neither cares particularly about White, just bodies; that's all I'm saying.

So in other words, Ravnica shows that when someone builds an aggro deck and can include White thanks to mana fixing, they'll take some cheap bodies, but otherwise the color is devoid of merit; everything else is better. I'll happily concede that those Extended sideboards have some important White tools, especially Kataki, War's Wage, but as you'll come to see, that's one card I wholeheartedly praise.

Time Spiral: At last, the current block. Check out the coverage of the 43 players with a 6-2 record or better. "White Weenie, the most publicly talked about deck entering the Pro Tour, did shockingly badly with this group. Of these 43 players, there were only two playing a dedicated white decks, [sic] and both have a pair of losses. Within Day 2 there's a smattering of White Weenie decks about, but this was an archetype people were clearly gunning for. Respected power level or not, the white decks could not overcome the tide of anti-white measures most of the red and blue-black decks used." That about says it all as far as I'm concerned. Highly talked about, and with a bunch of historically-good 2-mana guys with good combat abilities. And it lost. To Blue and Red. What a shock.

There, I know that was a little long (though not necessarily exhaustive), but come on---year after year, time after time, this just doesn't work. I think that if it was going to start working, we'd have noticed by now. Some of these creatures are just about as good as they can be for two mana---we've got forays into 3-power*, powerful damage abilities like Double-strike**, destruction-prevention***, and on and on. The deck loses.

( * : Watchwolf, Serra Avenger, and now Blade of the Sixth Pride
** : Boros Swiftblade
*** : Knight of the Holy Nimbus, Saffi Eriksdotter, Whitemane Lion, and, a little higher cost, Loxodon Hierarch [a.k.a. "Play Creatures, We're Awesome!"] )

So why does it lose? Because everything else is better. Every block, there will be mass removal, burn, some counterspells, and other colors will get creatures. Some of these cards will be good. White Weenie will lose to those good cards. It won in 1996 because Protection from Black was awesome against Necro, which did its best to kill itself. It won in Tempest because Red and Black monodecks couldn't handle a race with an aggressive Empyrial Armor deck, and Draw-Go was under the pressure of the Red and Black.* It won in Masques because the Rebel mechanic was stronger than the ultra-slow cards surrounding it. The rest of the time, natural conditions prevailed and good cards with fair creatures beat combat-prepped, "efficient" 2/2s whose backup power was damage prevention and life gain.

( * : I'll be honest that my memory of what I've read on these pre-Invasion events isn't 100%, as I was barely adolescent at that time. I think the point stands. )

I'm totally confused what the R&D plan is on this, or why they haven't come to this realization on their own. I just came back to the game after being out since roughly Betrayers of Kamigawa, and was at first encouraged that modern formats have White cards at least usable on occasion. But I dug deeper for this op-ed, and figured out that not that much has changed.

The issue is one of basic mechanics. I used to focus my arguments on Vintage data because that's what I spent my non-color pie time on, and perhaps that diluted my point. Well, above you should note the dominance of Block and Standard data. White Weenie doesn't lose to broken decks, it loses to any good deck. From a function standpoint and a flavor standpoint, the slice of pie given to White makes no sense. There is something outrageously wrong when White is being put in the aggro decks to boost the pace of the kill. That's not setting rules, that's raw attacking. Red is the true weenie color. The best that can be said for the color pie shifts as far as White is concerned is that White is now a sidekick to Red rather than Blue.

Now, let me qualify my critique: R&D has started to understand the problem, and I think that they're starting to work toward a better future. White has started to get some cards that set meaningful limits on the opponent (Rule of Law, Kataki, Suppression Field, Rebuff the Wicked, etc.). But I will still happily deliver the nail into WW's design coffin.

And as for alternatives, White should control the early game through rule-setting that dampens other colors' excesses like the cards I just mentioned, then aim to overwhelm late game through its army flavor. Some of the Whitest cards I've ever seen? Sacred Mesa, Mobilization, Decree of Justice, and Icatian Crier (and, incidentally, Humility). That's how White wants to kill; it just needs the cards that make that kind of long-haul control strategy work.

[Godder]

I hope I'm not too much in the way here, but I think the primary issue is that WW loses to Wrath of God. WW that doesn't lose to Wrath has historically been very strong*, but RnD are so nervous of allowing that, they nerf the really good stuff. I don't know how much testing they get time to do in the FFL, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're so busy trying to push WW that they build that first and then spend the whole time trying not to make it too broken, rather than worrying about making it good. Also, StP was amazing spot removal, and White hasn't seen anything nearly as good, so getting rid of something like Wall of Roots is much harder than it used to be.

*Promise of Bunrei is a recent attempt to make a 'fair' workaround, but the best solution in the old days was to prevent it from happening at all with Armageddon or Cataclysm, or to play threats that could win the game by themselves e.g. Empyrial Armor or a Pump Knight. Cards like Sacred Mesa, Mobilization and Cursed Scroll are other directions to take, in that they all offer protection from Wrath in their own way.

[Dr. Sylvan]

Other workarounds to mass removal they've tried include the destruction-prevention I mentioned, plus cards like Ghostway. Armageddon is obviously better, but I honestly don't think that they want to print that ever again, given its huge effect on mana curves and their renewed efforts to make counterspells worse. (This is, incidentally, why I didn't discuss it in the article above, although I should have mentioned it---I had created a mind block around it saying "not gonna happen".)

Losing to Wrath may be bad for aggro, but that alone doesn't explain why it fails repeatedly in (non-Rebels) Block Constructed, where there is no Wrath of God (except this block, in Black's Damnation). In Standard, it loses to a variety of decks over time, not just decks with reset buttons. Other decks can expect to get better creatures than WW's as turns progress, and the clock on WW isn't fast enough to stop that (e.g. Fires). Or, some opposing deck will just be able to win on the back of one-for-ones (removal, counterspells, whatever) until it gets to much bombier spells, often with an avalanche of card advantage (doesn't even have to be Blue, e.g., Odyssey Mono-Black).

You're right that Armageddon and StP prevented a lot of problems, and in their absence White's ability to cut opponents off from their assets is greatly diminished, but since those cards are considered mistakes that clearly aren't coming back, I don't think they're what should be seen as an ideal or model to build from. Instead "not losing to Wrath" might support the truth I attempted to outline above: that aggro doesn't win without other spells to either buy time (like discard/counters) or an avenue to victory that doesn't rest on vulnerable bodies (like burn). White needs some share of something like that no matter what, and I don't think it should be an accompaniment to aggro, based on the reasoning above.

[Matt]

I think that STP is a red herring when talking about why white sucks. Yes, WW was better when STP was in print, but I think that's correlation not causation (now, Geddon really DID make WW playable). I think what it really was that made 1996-1998 WW playable was that the creatures were so ridiculously bad in those days that a pump knight was considered one of the best creatures of all time. At the time, white had the best creatures of any color, bar none. It had Serra Angel and a slew of cheap efficient weenies. While black had the weenies, red had - Orcish Artillery? Green had - Erhnam Djinn and nothing? (Blue has never been what you might call a "creature color")

If you want to make WW good again, stop printing Hierarchs and FTKs and Ascetics.

[Anusien]

You had me until you went onto a Name Excised-style whine fest.  Honestly, you don't get to claim "Here is what makes WW good" and then discount Savannah Lions and Isamaru in Boros because they're being played "just for the guys".

Anyway, my thoughts are that WW is fundamentally a fair deck, lacking something like Lin-Sivvi or Armageddon.  The problem is that every deck in Magic is built to beat a fair deck.  UW Control goes Wrath, and Fires says, "Have another Blastoderm... WITH HASTE!"  RDW goes "Nice.  Magma Jet, Fireblast, Fireblast."  WW goes, " Soltari Priest?" And then UW Control answers with "Exalted Angel" and WW goes ":'(" (Crying, for those of you that can't tell).  WW almost always lacks sufficient disruption, or the lategame that other decks have.

What happened in Time Spiral was that WW was the deck to beat, and people figured out how to.  People discovered the red deck, which was just like WW except that it beat WW and had... REACH!

There's no call for that.
-Jacob

[Dr. Sylvan]

Well, I'll leave it unedited rather than try to dampen what whiny-ness there may be, but maybe I can rephrase the point. At the beginning of the post I outline WW's moments in the limelight, and try to connect it to specific abilities that made it better at those times. My problem with the Boros/Orzhov type of decks* is that no White abilities are pushing the decks. If White is supplying literally vanilla (or close to it) creatures to a deck that would otherwise just fill those slots with the least-bad Red creatures to form an RDW/Sligh iteration, then White isn't doing anything interesting, broken, clever, swingy, or anything. It's not fundamentally different from the long, tired past where White loses; the only difference is that Red or Black has abilities that make it work out.

( * :  Incidentally these are way more important than I thought, because in between the Honolulu Standard and the recent TSBC event, 2006 Worlds had some kind of Boros convention in the Standard portion that I did not previously take note of. )

As you say, WW is a fundamentally fair deck. That is exactly what I dislike about it, and why I hope R&D will try to give White a new direction.

--------------

For the record, here are my earlier reviews of some of the imbalances of the color wheel, and the quick version of what I recommended:

2004-02-25 Where All the White Cards At In Vintage?

Back then I thought Enchantresses in White might be a big help. The good news: White got an Enchantress in Planar Chaos. The bad news: that's not gonna dig White out of its hole.

2005-03-22 The Color Wheel: White

In this I discuss how creature bodies are bad; they are the worst part of a creature card, and the best creatures are always the best because of their abilities.

2005-04-14 The Color Wheel: Black

Here I recommend splitting up the complete Blue dominance of card-drawing mechanics. Blue would retain things like direct draw (Concentrate) and rearrangement (Ancestral Knowledge); White would get hand-equality things along the lines of Draw-7s (Diminishing Returns) and punishment for hubris (Plagiarize); Green would get filtering (Impulse, Commune With Nature) and creature damage triggered draw (Ophidian, Hystrodon, Ohran Viper); Red would get often-card-disadvantageous draw with discard (Careful Study, Merfolk Looter); Black would retain resource-conversion direct draw (Skeletal Scrying) and unlimited tutoring (Diabolic Tutor).

When I said this, someone even wrote a whole article in rebuttal about how other colors getting draw/search would break the game (aggro could refill after running out of steam, etc.). But since then, Mesa Enchantress, Harmonize, and Ohran Viper have been printed. Those plus Commune With Nature, Enshrined Memories, and even Life From the Loam haven't broken the game either (the latter is close in Legacy, I've heard, but then I just heard about some Flash combo that wins turn two, so I guess not).

[Godder]

I think that STP is a red herring when talking about why white sucks. Yes, WW was better when STP was in print, but I think that's correlation not causation (now, Geddon really DID make WW playable). I think what it really was that made 1996-1998 WW playable was that the creatures were so ridiculously bad in those days that a pump knight was considered one of the best creatures of all time. At the time, white had the best creatures of any color, bar none. It had Serra Angel and a slew of cheap efficient weenies. While black had the weenies, red had - Orcish Artillery? Green had - Erhnam Djinn and nothing? (Blue has never been what you might call a "creature color")

If you want to make WW good again, stop printing Hierarchs and FTKs and Ascetics.

So true. Midrange creatures are much better than they used to be, and White runts just keep being fair. That 3/1 for 1W is on the right track, but the fact that WW still has no way of dealing with Wrath effects is still a total downer (and by Wrath of God, I also meant to include all Wrath variants, because Block Constructed inevitably has at least one available somewhere). Also, White removal doesn't need to be as awesome as StP, but it needs to be more effective than it currently is, because as long as something like Dawnstrider can ruin your day, your removal isn't good enough.

[Anusien]

Sorry, I forgot you wouldn't even get the reference.  My issue is basically that it's holding a double standard to say that White Weenie is cheap, efficient men and then complain when white accomplishes the same thing in alliance with a different color.  In other words, if BDW isn't a WW analogue (and I don't think it is), it's because the deck is primarily red in its choice of burn spells and its lower creature count, not just because it runs a second color.  I'd point out that some of the best white creatures don't have significant abilities (Isamaru, Savannah Lions).

If you're pushing creature abilities, I think part of the problem is what those creature abilities.  The best WW decks had abilities like:
: Hit for more damage
, : Make more men.

Nowadays, we get stuff like
Icatian Javalineers, whose special ability is to get in for 1 no matter what.  Too bad the gold standard is 2 damage
Kami of Ancient Law/Ronom Unicorn, who sacrifices to destroy enchantments (woo?)

Part of the problem may have been that modern deck design has evolved.  Magic deck designers understand the appeal of largely uninteractive decks.  If we go back to the Necro decks, could we make a Necro deck that doesn't lose to WW?  Even back in the deck, WW was only winning when it went broken (Armageddon, Cataclysm, Jitte, Lin-Sivvi).  What would it take nowadays to make WW good?  A White Psionic Blast?  They brought Rebels back but balanced it so it's not even that appealing (mainly because all they do is hit for 2 on the ground).

[Vegeta2711]

What happened in Time Spiral was that WW was the deck to beat, and people figured out how to.  People discovered the red deck, which was just like WW except that it beat WW and had... REACH!

This is ridiculously inaccurate. The WW deck is straight up better than the red deck in nearly every single match in TSP block. You were correct in that people 'figured' out how to beat the deck and this made for a very skewed metagame, but don't make it sound like the red deck is actually -better-. WW has better creatures, better enhancements and only did worse because literally 2/3rds of the players there played massive hate against the deck. There was nearly as much hate against WW that was present against Affinity at it's respective block PT and WW is nowhere near as good as that was.

The problem with WW, and this may just be me, is that there's no replenish or FOF type effect for it and WOTC is too scared to reprint a very powerful non-creature threat like Cataclysm or Armageddon. Like, I would've loved to see a Split-Second one shot Parallax Tide effect on my opponent's lands for a full turn. That rewards future planning on both players parts, WW gets to take advantage of the 'free turn' of non-development and the other player has to plan around such a thing instead of sitting back and waiting to drop Sulfur Elemental down. I think Griffin Guide and Mana Tithe were steps in the right direction, they just need to push the envelope for giving the deck a way to fight off Wrath.

Or not print such annoying hosers. Take Sulfur Elemental out of the equation and I think you would've seen a far more interesting WW vs. control paradigm emerge at the PT. I liked Teferi's Moat, but we dismissed it in testing because the double Sulfur Elemental plan was just easier to use.

[Polynomial P]

White weenie hast really been playable since Masques block. Not coincidentally, that was the last time there was really good incentives to play White creatures with other white creatures. Other than that 'wizard's rebel mistake' there is no real reason to play a white focused deck other than prohibitive mana costs of WW. If there is no incentive to put savannah lions with WW soldiers, then why not put savannah lions with good red or good green creatures?

I came back from a magic break when mirrodin was just printed. I was dismayed to see that Goblins had the tribal theme. The goblins I was familiar with were Mogg fanatic, mogg raider, orgg, and mogg assassin. Guys that care little for each other and with drawbacks. The whole 'sac: do something' fit right into the theme of red in the caotic theme of 'use resources, do something now' and 'throw a goblin at the problem to make it go away'. The Goblins I saw from the onslaught block should have been white soldiers. White wants to work well with other white creatures, red should not. White should give bonuses to each other, red should not. Warchief, Ringleader, and reckless one all seemed like white abilities to me. Incinerator and piledriver could have been somehow made into white creatures (like cycle this: do some sort of white removal and giving piledriver +1/+1 for each attacking soldier).

By switching the tribal theme to white you get 1) incentive to play mono-white or white/splash decks, 2) resiliency in the face of mass removal (warchief to power out more weenies, ringleader to get more weenies), 3) aggressive offensive bonuses, which has not been seen in white for a long time, 4) ways for white to deal with an x/3, by gasp, working together, and 5) Properly give white the piece of the color pie it deserves (good weenie creatures, value of others, working well as a team, make everyone better).

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Zones of Play

One of the more interesting Magic theories I've heard is that the player who is moving the most cards between different game zones is probably winning. Of course, the one who told me that had the favorite pet decks RecSur and Worldgorger Dragon, so it may have been a personal bias, but it's still interesting. We all know that there is inherent risk of brokenness whenever you're moving lots of cards out of your library or out of your hand to somewhere else. Looked at a certain way, most high-power decks can be seen moving lots of cards from one zone to another that your cards prefer for them to be in (e.g., Psychatog would prefer that your hand get loaded like a freight train, Astral Slide had cards moving in and out of all kinds of crazy zones, and Reanimator decks love to move cards to the graveyard). Combo decks can usually be seen taking long turns in which large portions of their library and/or graveyard are drawn/recurred/whatever.

Based on this theory, I'm going to show you a major reason I think the color wheel needs to be realigned in ways most people haven't considered.

This is an excerpt of my years-ago analogy about proactive versus reactive control, which I'm rehashing because I really love it:

"At first, it doesn't make sense that board control spells are considered inferior to spending resources on a card like Duress, which requires a net loss of mana for you in a one-for-one trade. The analogy I prefer is that Disenchant is akin to wearing a flak jacket - absorbing the impact of a resolved threat - whereas Duress is like shooting the gun out of the other guy's hand, Force of Will is like deflecting the bullet midair, and Wasteland is like stealing his ammo before he draws. Clearly you would rather just not get shot, and in many cases, once the threat has resolved, you're already at a significant disadvantage.

"This is much like David Price's adage applied to control decks: preemptive control cards are, from a certain point of view, the threats of a control deck, and this makes them superior to pure answers such as spot removal."

Now, R&D as voiced by Mark Rosewater has put forward the perspective that each color is best at destroying some permanent types and worst at others, with the exception of Blue, which can bounce or steal anything, but destroy nothing. I would like to take that back one level of abstraction: each color has some zones of play that it is best at influencing, and some that it is worst.

What are the major zones? Graveyard, library, hand, in-play, and the stack*. We'll ignore the removed from game zone as it isn't manipulated much, or as a consistent color pie share. Here's the ranks as I perceive them (I'm still working on the data for this**, but I suspect it will bear this out.)

( * : I think one time I heard that technically there's a phased-out zone, or something like that.
** : Let me just guarantee right now that when this data is ready, it'll blow your mind. It will also take a long time to get it ready. )

Powers of Manipulation, By Play Zone

Graveyard: Black, Green, White, Blue, Red*
Library: Blue, Black, Green, Red, White
Hand: Black, Blue, R/G/W
In-Play*: White, Blue, Red, Green, Black
Stack: Blue, Red, White, B/G

( * : Yes, I have heard of Goblin Welder. Fluke.
** : This is likely to be one of the more conterversial positions, but keep in mind that this column changes the most based on what kinds of removal are good block-to-block. E.g., in Mirrodin Green and Red were the board control colors, in Onslaught it was White and Red, in Odyssey it was Blue and Black.  )

Blue is awesome at manipulating the library and stack zones (drawing cards is library-centric in this interpretation), and can steal/bounce anything. Black has hand control (discard), is the best graveyard color, and the second-best library color. Red is second best on the stack, both because it can manipulate spell targets and because the direct damage mechanic usually conducts its business there. Green is mostly in-play, and second-best at the graveyard. White is often the best in-play color thanks to mass removal and the ability to, in principle, kill any nonland permanent.

Consider that matrix (or some substantially similar one you like better) and Blue's history of high power levels. While R&D has enforced a slowly mutating but overall strong mix of limits on which colors control which permanents, they have imposed a mix, just as slow to mutate as the permanent removal, of what colors own what zones. Blue/Black got the best end of the deal. Red, interestingly, is terrible at most things except the stack, but just being second-best at the stack is enough to make it viable a lot of the time because it can get around other colors' expectation that the opponent will have permanents.

Being able to influence permanents is good, but it's also very fair. R&D understands removal spells, bounce spells, combat manipulation, and damage-dealing very well, and it's not in anyone's best interest to print cards that break the regular costing paradigm. So colors that can only fight their opponent's permanents, like White has for so long and Green before it, keep getting cards that are incessantly fair. R&D has worked against this in two ways: by making the Blue cards less broken and by trying to give White and Green much better creatures. Both elements of this plan have made headway, but I once again think this is a patchwork solution that doesn't fix the fundamental issue.

The stack is clearly the best zone to control, because virtually all plans have to go that route. The hand and library are similarly important. The graveyard is less key because decks choose to proceed from there; they aren't required to, as with the stack, hand, and library. The ability to manipulate the contents, arrangement, and events of those three zones provides the colors that have it---Blue followed by Black---a head start in all environments, all card pools, and all situations, while leaving less able colors---historically Green and White---vulnerable to better colors' flexibility.

R/G/W control strategies are a passion of mine when deckbuilding because of my Johnny nature, and I can assure you, those three colors have an extreme dearth of non-aggro cards over time. I believe that this is a lingering misconception from the early formation of the color pie---the same type of misconception that confined "cleverness" and "thinking" to Blue. My last post already linked to my old explanation of how to give all colors card-drawing in different, flavorful ways, and next time, we'll talk about Time Spiral, and why it has given me hope that R&D is already on the right track.

[Godder]

I think this really typifies why Rebels were so good, and why that put-into-play mechanic should remain strongly in White (and possibly Green) - it really opens up Library and, to a lesser extent, Stack manipulation to those colours, where they don't get a lot of it otherwise. They also provide some serious card quality (your draws are better) and some defence against Wrath of God (one threat becomes an army, which lessens the effectiveness of Wrath, because you can just start again - Lin Sivvi was great in this respect).

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Time Spiral and Unlearning What You Have Learned

(This is my promised "next post"; Bennie Smith's article this week got me thinking as well, and some of the points he made and linked to will be the source of upcoming posts.)

What you have learned is that Blue and Black are the only colors that can play instants or sorceries which do not destroy permanents or deal/prevent damage. You can't help it; that's just what history shows. But I'm optimistic, because I know Mark Rosewater has gained much wisdom from his years as a public dartbaord, and his R&D* is already unlearning this historical truth.

( * : I use this abbreviation even though I do understand that Rosewater is head of Design, but not Development. My apologies to nitpickers everywhere. )

Head over to the handy-dandy SCG Advanced Search*. Search for cards with text containing "counter target spell" (all the words, not as an exact phrase), and then check everything but Blue in the color section. I get 130 results when I do this. Excluding the cards that are either (1) Blue despite not checking it or (2) accidentally have all the right words (e.g., Blastoderm), and including Bind as well as the results of a similar search for "change target" because I know the main search misses it, here's what we've got.

( * : Totally better than Gatherer when you want to find cards without knowing their name, though I'll admit to being a fan of Gatherer's imageless "Spoiler" display. )

RED:
Red Elemental Blast (Alpha)
Artifact Blast (Antiquities)
Goblin Artisans (Antiquities)
Pyroblast (Ice Age)
Burnout (Alliances)
...
Mages' Contest (Invasion)
Molten Influence (Odyssey)
...
Shunt (Darksteel)
Magnetic Theft (Fifth Dawn)
Sideswipe (Champions of Kamigawa)
Reroute (Ravnica: City of Guilds)
Torchling (Planar Chaos)

GREEN:
Lifeforce (Alpha)
Avoid Fate (Legends)
...
Bind (Invasion)
...
Avoid Fate (Time Spiral-TS)

BLACK:
Deathgrip (Alpha)
Stromgald Cabal (Ice Age)
Thrull Wizard (Fallen Empires)
Withering Boon (Mirage)
...
Dash Hopes (Planar Chaos)
Imp's Mischief (Planar Chaos)
Muck Drubb (Planar Chaos)

WHITE:
Equinox (Legends)
Order of the Sacred Torch (Ice Age)
Illumination (Mirage)
Unyaro Griffin (Mirage)
Vigilant Martyr (Mirage)
...
Dawn Charm (Planar Chaos)
Mana Tithe (Planar Chaos-TS)
Rebuff the Wicked (Planar Chaos)

ARTIFACT:
Reflecting Mirror (The Dark)
Ring of Immortals (Legends)
Null Brooch (Exodus)
...
Jester's Scepter (Coldsnap)

I have highlighted the long gaps with ellipses---and those are some epic-sized gaps. It was like seven years or so since the last time an artifact could counter a target spell, and for White and Black it had been since 1996. Countering spells is important, as I doubt I need to emphasize for anyone who reads TheManaDrain.com (it's the name of the site, FFS). I have previously gone on at great length about splitting up card draw as a mechanic that is too broad and too important to be monopolized by Blue. Counterspelling is another mammoth collection of abilities that has traditionally been seen as one monolithic entity, all of it Blue. Because, The Troubled One whispers, Blue is the color of undoing, cancellation, cleverness, thinking, and manipulation.

Unlearn that, please.

Now, I'm okay with "counter target spell" as a Blue share. But, as a fan of non-Blue control, I want the stack to be more polychromatic than it has historically been. Typically, when someone makes a non-Blue control deck in some format, what they actually mean is that they put together a lot of permanent removal effects and, if the cardpool is so inclined, a little bit of card-drawing (e.g., Skeletal Scrying in Mono-Black Control or cycling in Astral Slide). This works when the opponent puts their plan on the table and lets you shoot at it. However, one of the reasons why Blue has always been so hard to fight is that only by playing Blue can you attack Blue's best plans: instants and sorceries. There needs to be some way for other colors to fight spells with spells, and not just attack for two until Blue plays Upheaval-Psychatog and wins.*

( * : For example purposes only; actual Blue R&D mistakes may be on whole new levels of brokenness. )

I think that MaRo's R&D knows this. Planar Chaos is not going to be the last time we see non-Blue countering. Red has a permanent niche of redirection. Rebuff the Wicked is so quintessentially White that my brain thinks the art looks like that of Celestial Dawn. In 1994-96, they bled countering to other colors because, well, they didn't have a very rigorous control over things like that (check out how much -X/-0 and damage prevention Black has in Legends, or White's Holy Light from The Dark). In 2007, no less than every color got something (or, poor Green, a repeat of something) that messed up somebody else's plans on the stack. No accident, for sure.

It may never matter to Type YawgWill, but I, for one, am excited about this change's implications for all other formats. Soon, you'll be allowed to be interesting without going to an island to do it!

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Struggle Of a Johnny (Origins of Dr. Sylvan)

I don't think I've ever really discussed my Magic origin story, and since I can post about what I want (and moreover, anything related to my experience with Magic will inevitably lead back to the color pie and my viewpoint as a Johnny Melvin), I thought, what the heck, now's as good a time as any. I'll try to keep the things which are of personal, historical interest only to a minimum, but this topic has, by nature, more than a little of both. Let me know if you like or dislike it; feedback is the best thing since cardboard.

Personal Historical Interest Only

In a strictly technical sense, I first learned how to play Magic on a school bus in the 1995-96 school year*, which made me either nine or ten years old (4th grade). Someone (names omitted to protect the innocent, but don't think I don't remember every key participant) explained things like tapping and land, and told me how Walls were awesome. In fall of 1996, at a far nerdier gifted kid school, another kid let me play with some horrible decks, and gave me 28 of his extra cards, indirectly leading to thousands of dollars of WotC product purchases. I proceeded to spend the pre-high school years buying cards booster by booster, totally overlooking cards like Yawgmoth's Will, but thinking Exalted Dragon was just about the best thing ever. This was the point in time where I still thought that the deck size maximum (I have no idea where I heard of it but definitely thought it was a real rule) of 120 was a crushing limit.

( * : For foreigners, American primary and secondary schools run from approximately August to June, varying by municipality. )

At high school, the Illinois Math and Science Academy,* I met people who had heard of the internet, and, more importantly, had a cardpool of more than five hundred. Crucially, there were enough of them that the flow of ideas was not stagnant. One had both a White Weenie deck and a Stormbind/Ensnaring Bridge/Null Brooch deck (the latter of which was probably the most awe-inspiring thing I had ever seen up to that point). Another abused Priest of Titania and Rofellos. Another had a focused burn deck with only Jackal Pup and Ball Lightning for creatures. Another had a CounterSliver deck with two real Force of Wills. I suddenly realized that cards could be efficient, and actually complement each other.

( * : Abundant details upon request. For the record, it is a public school; just a weird one. )

Actually Potentially Interesting

The guys who taught me what deckbuilding was supposed to look like graduated, but at a school like IMSA, almost every male has, at one point, learned to play Magic, and needs only the spark to get back in, or bring his cards to campus (living in dorms for high school was a godsend and is double-plus recommended if any parents out there can find a way to do it). So a few of the most-obsessed of us got together to act as the officers of a Magic club. In a cutesy move which conveniently avoided infighting over hierarchy-based titles like "President", the officers were designated colors, so that there would be five equal seats to discuss the decisions the club would have to make. I was White, much to the amusement of everyone who's seen how pale and shockingly blond I am (to this day I'll turn my head toward the utterance of the nickname "Whitey").

We had certain fundamental constraints to getting people together to play which I'll enumerate, followed by our solutions. First, even though everyone lived within a couple hundred meters of each other, IMSA also enforced a 10pm "in-hall" limit Sunday-Thursday nights*, by which time you had to be in your building. We also had the concern that about a third of the campus went home to their disparate corners of Illinois each weekend, rendering Friday to Sunday almost completely out of the question as practicable organized play times.

( * : Recall that the students were 15-18, with some 14 year olds mixed in, and that the main goal of most campus rules must be to reassure parents that their kids will be safe when they are sent away to school. )

These factors led us to hold "Wednesday Night Magic" in a conveniently table-and-chair-abundant space known as the Math Study Area.* Each Wednesday some available subset of the officers would be present as sort of a core group to lend critical mass and encourage other people to seek out this play time. But we had higher hopes. We wanted continuity, competition, and innovation. We wanted a metagame, personalities, rivalries, everything. We even had a not-so-successful club website with some articles written by a couple of the officers on "Decks to Beat" and things like that.

( * : It is possible that it wasn't Wednesday and I'm just fuzzy because, at that point, I was playing several hours of Magic per day, not counting prep time like decklist drafting in classes or sleeving up the latest idea. )

So, first, I found out what the DCI rating formula was. I promptly assumed the responsibility for tracking any matches that individuals wanted to count toward their IMSA rating, which we intended to be a kind of meaningless stakes that might get people to feel competitive about it, and might let people draw a line between just trying out fun decks and the "for real" matches. We briefly considered if we could try sanctioning (maybe an adult or judge would have been necessary), but we wanted to have not just Portal legal, but also the gold-bordered World Championship decks as an egalitarian measure. We also allowed up to four proxies of any rare that you had one or more copies of (to prevent rampant, unbalancing Power Nine use). I wish to emphasize that almost no one involved in the club had ever purchased single cards---the occasional instance of someone doing so could throw the metagame into upheaval.

Partly because of that, and partly because of our Magic-spanning collection diversity, we decided to pursue a fundamentally "Eternal" format as our standard, based on Type One. However, because we were hoping to set up a dynasty, we wanted to set the precedent of exciting format variety that would enable more constant experimentation. Some of the formats: Peasant, "Tainted" (all decks must have at least four Black cardnames and four non-Black cardnames), and Extended (the 2002-03 version). To ensure no one showed up and wasn't allowed to play for lack of deck compliance, we had everyone turn in decklists the night before (and officers a day earlier so we couldn't metagame against the decklists that we would potentially be seeing before the tournament).

We knew we couldn't do something big and organized every week, so we had a tournament once per month, with four Swiss rounds on Tuesday night followed by a single elimination Top 8 on Wednesday.* We limited the Swiss rounds to a tight 40 minutes so that we could start at 7pm and still get back by 10; Top 8 matches were 50 minutes. Typically there were 16-30 participants.

( * : Key context---IMSA doesn't have classes on Wednesday; students do independent study projects or off-campus mentorships in nearby places like Fermilab. Or play StarCraft. Whichever they and the influence of their parents prefer. )

It was awesome.

Ever since that golden age, I've questioned what produced the great vibes and sensational devotion of the participants. And it was really quite amazing; we had over 10% of the school on our email list (so almost 20% of the entire male population) and dozens of us were playing pretty much daily. I remember someone once called the dorm room of my most frequent Magic buddies before calling my own room (pre-cellular ubiquity) because it was simply the better bet. I also have a lot of my "notes" from the classes that year, and I use quote marks there because about 80% of the things I wrote down in class were Magic decklists, not class notes. I was not the only one in the club who was this nuts that year.

For myself, it wasn't just that I had the highest rating or T8ed every time, although that certainly brought out the 5% of me that's secretly Spike and wanted to maintain my dominance. It was also helped by almost everyone being nice and generally having a lot in common due to the setting. But I think that the biggest factor, for me, was because I felt that I was winning because of my thorough understanding of the metagame, and my constant evolution of my deckbuilding prowess and collection. I recall poring over a list of the likely attendees of each tournament and trying to decide what they would play, and how I could best prepare to defeat them (e.g., my Swirling Sandstorm burn deck Peasant month technology in the face of a huge Blastoderm presence). The simultaneous limits and lack of limits on the cardpool forced outrageous diversity.

I'm not sure how or if competitive Magic can pull that off and elate the Johnnies of this world. I suspect that'll be a topic of future posts.

Just For Reference

Toward the end of my senior year (when this club happened), I developed my one true labor of love, which for some insane reason I cannot find the final decklist for. However, this was the first version.

WTFn00b.dec //actual original title circa winter 2002

4 Taiga
4 Mishra's Factory
3 Wasteland
3 Treetop Village
2 Mountain
2 Forest
2 Mossfire Valley
1 Mountain Valley
1 Strip Mine
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Wooded Foothills

4 Cursed Scroll
4 Tangle Wire
3 Lightning Bolt
3 Chain Lightning
3 Pyroclasm
3 Wall of Blossoms
3 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Steel Golem
3 Stormbind
2 Powder Keg
2 Naturalize
1 Tectonic Instability
1 Regrowth
1 Sol Ring

Sideboard:
1 Meekstone
1 Defense Grid
1 Covetous Dragon
3 Null Brooch
1 Nevinyrral's Disk
2 Hull Breach
3 Masticore //World Championship Deck version
1 Rishadan Port
1 Melting //These last two were definitely in-jokes of some kind that I'm not sure I get anymore.
1 Serra Advocate

I loved this deck. I know that the final version somehow used Swords to Plowshares, Fledgling Dragon, Sylvan Library, Abundance, my lone Sterling Grove, and Goblin Trenches, but goodness knows how I squeezed all of that in. Anyway, no iteration of this deck ever lost me a match, and it remains dear to me to this day. Trying to control the game without Blue or Black is an awesome Johnny task and its impossibility in pretty much every format is one of the real failings of the color pie.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: "French Vanilla" Keywords

Just a quick note about MaRo's article today.

You know what really grinds my gears? When White is the perfect fit for an ability, but instead it is given to Blue. In this case, I'm talking about the designation of Blue as the secondary color for protection, and specifically protection from things besides colors. Think back to Judgment, which included several White cards that had or granted the ability "protection from creatures". My straightforward interpretation of today's article is that now, Blue would be the color getting that ability. Same with "protection from Goblins", which White had in Onslaught (noting that Blue got that version first through "protection from Kavu" in Invasion). And when they do new (or semi-new), potentially good variants like "protection from instants", Blue is now the go-to color for it.

WTF? I understand the need for increasing the available keywords, since it often does seem like every cycle features Green trample, Blue flying, etc., but this small, arguably insignificant shift irks me to no end, as a Melvin, because if there's one thing the game didn't need, it was another ability moving from White to Blue.

[Godder]

Development's top 5 performers and underperformers for Constructed.

1. Serra Avenger

Many of us rated this the best Constructed card in the set. It was all over the FFL, we deemed it would be a staple of Constructed Magic, and we made it the full-frame Champs prize card. That’s not quite how it has played out. One deck in all the Regionals Top 8s reported so far played Serra Avenger. That’s the definition of a “fringe” card, not a top tier one. People have pointed out that Plains were a no-show at Regionals—that isn’t by design. We believed we were giving white some excellent, excellent cards in this block.

Funnily enough, the Avenger has seen more play in Legacy—the format where 99% of all cards ever printed are legal—than it has in Standard.

Oops...

Or maybe he’s a victim of other white cards also not being as good as we’d hoped.

Aaron Forsythe is actually talking about Magus of the Moat Disk here, but it says it all, really.

Edit: That's what it should have been .

[Vegeta2711]

Aaron Forsythe is actually talking about Magus of the Moat here, but it says it all, really.

Magus of the DISK, jeez get your crappy white cards correct.



In all seriousness, that small blurb on that and Serra Avenger is telling. We think we're making good white cards, but they always end up ridiculously outclassed by other colors fun stuff.

[Dr. Sylvan]

This is the kind of thing that makes me think that they should just stop pushing White Weenie---sure, it could be viable again if you printed a bunch of 5/5 protection-from-good-cards guys for one white mana, but that's the same as throwing up your hands saying "we have no ideas". That blurb was written with the same "oops, we thought we had solved the White problem; it was so good in FFL!" voice as the one about the Mystic creatures from Odyssey that Randy Buehler wrote like infinity years ago. The problem, their solution, and the results have remained the same.

In the really old days, the original mono-green Stompy deck was built with cards like Spectral Bears and Bounty of the Hunt. Clearly, even Green has escalated its game plan since then, but White hasn't---the pump-knights aren't that different from White's guys today. That's part of why White sucks. For the rest, see above and (in a couple of weeks) below, when I finally have the tools to dissect the color pie's entire history down to the smallest mechanical and philosophical shift.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Struggle Of a Johnny (Policy)

Mark Rosewater says that, "The common bond to all the Johnnies is that they are on a mission to show the world something about themselves. What they're showing varies tremendously, but at the core of each Johnny is a similar motivation: “Look at me world! Look at me!”" I will freely admit that this applies to me. And, like many Johnnies, deckbuilding is an irresistible joy to me---playing a deck someone else made feels, to our large category of Johnnies, like a shameful plagiarism, for how could the world know what cleverness we possess if we don't show it to them in a unique way? MaRo again: "Deck building isn't an aspect of the game to Johnny; it's the aspect."

This is why Johnnies tend to be the biggest alarmists about metagame health. Spike doesn't care if it's Affinity mirrors all day long if he gets the chance to consistently outthink his opponents in a way that leads to winning. Johnny will be unable to make himself play in such an environment; it's too boring and doesn't have room for uniqueness or creativity. Johnny knows Spike spends more time testing and honing his in-game decision making, so he doesn't necessarily expect to go around collecting wins. He just has to prove that his crazy idea was good enough. Spike wants to make---or even just play---a dominant deck (just watch how Menendian thinks in his articles), Johnny wants to make a playable new deck.

I firmly believe that this is much of why Type One got so much attention starting in 2003---Johnny could try something new here and it could actually win, because Spike hadn't ruined everything yet. It's fun for a Johnny just to watch, let alone participate in, a deckbuilding renaissance with a seemingly ever-mutating top tier of decks. Despite my cheering for a consolidated metagame in my various metagame analysis articles of yesteryear, Johnny loves it when a new deck shows up in each Top 8. I cheered consolidation on the theory that a semi-predictable set of top decks strengthens metagame decks which are designed to undermine some common strength of the "decks to beat".

So when change slows down, or it seems like one kind of deck (even a group of conceptually similar/converging decks) is very difficult to overthrow, Johnny gets impatient. Back in the day, I devoted a section of every metagame analysis to the "Watch List" of potential B&R candidates. This was partly because in the absence of a concrete percentage and historical rate of change, people pretty much say whatever they feel when the arguments start, but also because I wanted to have something to point to that would finally show, some day, that some card(s) was(were) deserving of the strike from Mt. Olympus that I so richly hoped they would receive. My Johnny nature often goads me into endorsing blunt format change to force turnover in the top decks. I'm sure that even a cursory probe of my posting history would show more than my fair share of participation in flamebait threads about B&R changes and the format in general---and I am among the least hotheaded living individuals outside of the world's various monastic orders. I can't help it; I like fun, new decks.

Back in 2003 during the whole Long.dec protracted site-wide B&R flamewar thing, Darren Di Battista said, "JOHNNY NEEDS TO FIGHT BACK SOONER SO HE CAN DRINK AND FUCK SAFELY FOR LONGER, GODDAMMIT!" alluding to the idea that Johnnies should play the broken combo deck to prove it's dumb and get it restricted out of existence so that then we could go back to having fun. I can support this as a theory, but as a Johnny it doesn't sit right with my temperament. Why play a deck if it's stupidly broken and not even in a surprising way? (This, by the way, is the kind of question that endangers Eternal formats' popularity.)

Ask Wizards* on Friday actually made this point obliquely. The question was "How much would a spell with the text, "Draw 100 cards" cost?" The answer from R&D's Noah Weil details the dilemmas behind creating a card that just says "you win the game" on it, and how that pretty much saps the soul out of any format where that card has some way to be viable. I'd contend that Tendrils of Agony is basically that card, and the other Storm win conditions are almost as abominable. I'm glad that the Director of R&D just said that "nothing good ever came of that abomination [the Storm mechanic]". I take it as a positive indicator for the future.

( * : "Ask Wizards" is by far the most variable-quality content on the site; one day they're answering what has to be some kid who's like 12 years old, which is yawns for me, great for the kid, and the next they're giving an intricate and very enlightening rules/editing explanation like May 14th's AW, which is yawns for the kid, great for me. I like it. )

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: The Card Catalog

For those who have a sense of suspense, read the next few paragraphs; for the rest, this 2MB of text is the current version of what I'm talking about.

Personally, I think that what I'm unveiling today is a mindgasm of epic proportions. I don't think it's ever been done before (though I'm half-expecting that five minutes after I post this someone will point out a better pre-existing version, and if there is one, please do tell me so that I can use it).

MaRo says Melvin is a player profile like this: "When Melvin evaluates something, [...] he tends to break things down into its components and then studies each part. He intellectually dissects whatever it is he is analyzing. Why does he do this? Because how something works is very important to Melvin. He enjoys understanding the rules that govern its creation." That's what this is.

What I've been up to since the end of March is classifying every Magic card ever printed by all of its functions. As it turns out, there are a lot of Magic cards, and that's why it took three months just for this part of the project. Between my perfectionism and the variety and renewal inherent in the game, I don't know if I'll ever finish exploring the possibilities I'm trying to lay the foundation for here.

As a Johnny Melvin (and I think that this project cements me as International Melvin of the Year barring some highly improbable eleventh-hour competition), this project lets me do things like examine the history of the color pie above and beyond any previous effort. It also presents a whole new perspective on tech discovery, and provides a vehicle for evaluation of new cards that's, to me, far more insightful, which I hope to be ready to demonstrate by the time Lorwyn is officially prereleased. I'm still trying to determine the ramifications for metagame analysis, but I suspect they're there.

I'm pretty proud of this even if it doesn't turn Spike's world on its head, because it sure as hell takes Melvin's and maybe Johnny's to a whole other level.

Bear in mind that this is just the "beta" version. Refinement is ongoing and I expect will take a month or two, possibly more depending on how much I need to rebuild from the ground up.

Not all of my raw data has even been added to this grossly underdeveloped version yet, but I just didn't want to wait longer to get the initial reactions from people.* The rest of the data can be found here, though I assure you that within a matter of days almost all of it will be in the main page, where I'll be operating for the future.

( * : Most men can find the end of their patience with about the same ease as they can scratch their noses, but I made it three months, so plus points for me. )

The Backstory

The word "hubris" was invented for projects like the one I undertook in March, 2007. It started out as a "simple" attempt to combine the rules of a large number of collectible card games into one grand hybrid game. It was much like trying to thread a needle with a hammer---it works if you make the needle about a million times bigger and redefine "thread" to include anything going through the needlehead. It was the ultimate Johnny Melvin challenge to create a very Johnny-loveable result: Johnny loves to express himself through the arrangement of the tools at hand, especially in ways that are either new to everyone or particularly appealing to him. I was just expanding the toolbox exponentially so that I could have more Johnny-fun.

However, after I developed the basic rules for that hybrid, the Melvin side took control. In the course of finding places where my rules would need to absorb some concept from another game, I had sorted all my cards from all the games by their approximate in-game function. This, firstly, exposed cards that were hard to classify, and thus that I might need to redefine or add something to make it make sense when "translated" into the hybrid wording. As it did that, though, it whispered to me that the classifications could do something by themselves. Something even grander than, say, providing side-by-side comparison of every way ever printed to do any task in the entire game.

I wouldn't need R&D's estimated color pie chart; I could make the most thorough, detailed, and objectively defined upgrade that such a chart could ever receive. Moreover, I could track its changes over time! This was what got me excited. As you'll see once the Card Catalog is in a near-final condition and ready for analysis, the history of what's actually printed on the cards is amazingly rich, let alone the backstories shared through wizards.com.

Everything afterward was gravy. I could finally get to the root of the entire issue: what makes colors bad, what makes them good, what themes and patterns exist that might explain the nature of the game that for whatever reason has so seized my interest.

Current Status

It hasn't been any kind of hyper-secret or anything, but I haven't been playing it up because I wanted to finish the first phase before "going public". That first phase was going through once and creating the category structure that could accommodate everything in Magic, and assigning every card to its appropriate categories. Right now it's much like a beta test---buggy and kinda awkward. The problem is that as I did it I got much better at seeing what structures were needed and how to make it clearer, so many parts of the early category breakdown were clumsy. I've fixed some but far from all of these; eventually they will be far more consistent and detailed.

Moreover, the individual card numbers are somewhat clumsy and inconsistent, because I wasn't keeping a sorted reference of all the cards I had already assigned numbers to as I went---they were literally just accumulating, line after line, in a couple of near-megabyte text files. So I have scattered notes to myself about many of the "last batch" (the cards that still don't have numbers because I wanted to plow through the majority before tackling corner cases) and lots of cards that I knew I had a comparable card for, but didn't want to hunt around for it on the first pass. These will disappear over the next few weeks, replaced by the more orderly, polished version.

I am also striving to tidy up certain sections such that, soon, it will be rare for there to be a broad umbrella function designated by a number more specific than the tenths place. (Example: In the first pass, 835.352 is ways to make creatures unblockable to some subset of creatures or unless some condition is met. This will probably be revised toward a position like 832.6, to prevent number designations from becoming obscenely long, e.g., 835.3524415.2 Thran Golem.)

Portal 2 and Portal Three Kingdoms have been excluded thus far because I wanted to have a couple of "virgin" sets ready to classify as a way of spotting flaws in a later-stage version of the catalog, and hey, what's less important than Portal? The only one allowed to complain about this exclusion is a certain Slovakian zealot, but I'm sure he's used to waiting by now.

Also, all the cardnames are dead links, and lots of the category titles say things like "Reserve Deck" instead of "library" or "Dead Pile" instead of "graveyard", both as vestiges of the whole combination-of-all-collectible-card-games thing. I'll clean it up sooner or later.

So please excuse the mess, the catalog is under construction.

Feedback

Please give me feedback.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Card Catalog How-To Guide

Now that I've introduced my project, here's how to actually use it. At my level of familiarity, I can just look at a number and know what it means, but obviously, this would be a ridiculous burden to place on every user. The numbers are hierarchical, though, and follow a set of organizing principles that I am striving to make as consistent and intuitive as possible. Primary among these is this:

Code:

To find a function, ask what it manipulates, then how it manipulates it.

In most cases, this means what play zone the card started in, and what zone it moved them to. This does require you to be looking at a list like this of the broadest categories:

100 Hand
200 Library
300 Graveyard
400 Spells / The Stack / RFG
500 Lands
600 Assets (Artifacts / Enchantments)
700 Creatures
800 Turns
900 Numbers

(In the future I am strongly considering making 500s encompass all permanents to clean up the cards that have 10+ categories because of the split, but for now this is the system.)

So if a card started in the graveyard and was moving to someone's hand, the function would be under 310, specified further based on its exact nature. I tried to consistently use each number to mean only a limited set of things, such that the structures for similar things will be parallel (e.g., "destroy target land" is 531.11 and "destroy target creature" is 731.11---notice that they go to the graveyard, hence the 3).

Many functions are also distinguished by whether they affect single or multiple targets, and I have been rapidly revising many sections so that the first layer is whether it happens for you, the opponent, or an indefinite (often targeted) player or both players.* In most cases (eventually, I hope, all), numbers after the tenths digit are just increasing the specificity of the description; the broad topic is defined at the tenths place or higher.

( * : This issue has been prominent for me since running into cards like Exhume, Forbidden Orchard, and Afterlife---my initial structure had a hard time annotating when you were granting your opponent the chance to do things that you would usually do only for yourself. )

Also, in many cases, effects that are either fundamental to a whole category, or cards that would otherwise be in more than one subset of a category, are listed once at the most basic number. For instance, Time Walk is simply 800 (Turns).

If you have the slightest question how to find something, or feedback of any kind, I am eagerly anticipating the opportunity to help. Anything you find confusing is especially interesting to me, and may be edited into this post in a kind of FAQ format. Feel free to PM me or email me at prstanto@gmail.com.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: The Pro Tour, Now In Technicolor

Here is the first step of my multi-stage approach to take Pro Tour data and dissect it for color wheel analysis (eventually, this will tie in with the Card Catalog project above). Grand Prix and other data will likely be added as I delve deeper.

I tried to go as deeply as I could based on the historical data available at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/coverage. There are a lot of gaps early on (e.g., no Worlds 1998 lists at all, as far as I can tell), but it has pretty comprehensive stuff for the modern era.

Another important caveat to my data is that, mostly for the earliest PTs, eight decks of cards would add up to something like 593 or 598, meaning that either I lost a few in the counting process or the lists were missing something to begin with. I didn't make a crusade out of redoing data from scratch when this happened, because it was less than 2% and the oldest events are the least relevant anyway. For the newer ones, the decklists have card counts at the top, and I was typically much more exacting. I think the Kamigawa Block Constructed PT came out two cards short. Hopefully, no one finds that too traumatizing.

Additionally, since World Championship Top 8s are derived from multiple formats, I did not use them. Instead, I used the group of decks that went undefeated on the individual day of a given Worlds Constructed format. If they only listed 6-0 decks, I used those; if it wasn't clear that they listed all of the best-record decks, I excluded it (e.g., calling it "A Sampling" as at Worlds 2003 Extended). This means that the results are derived from only six rounds rather than a typical PT's gauntlet of over twice that. The compensating factor is that Worlds is presumably the top level of the entire Magic universe, and undefeated decks there should not be ignored. Still, the number of decks is generally smaller and less rounds equals less definitive results.

Final disclaimers: Gold cards count for all of their colors, so something like Ravnica Block Constructed looks like it has about 150% of its total. Artifact lands are counted as lands but not artifacts (I'm open to changing this; it only exacerbates already broken Mirrodin numbers).

Code:

Color Prevalence In Top PT Decks 
(% of nonland cards in uppermost available decklists)
Blue, White, Green, Red, Black, Artifacts - Event (Format, # of decks)
25.0, _8.9, 24.6, 22.3, 14.7, _4.5 - Worlds 1997 (5E+IA-WL, 4)
29.6, ____, 13.1, 25.9, _0.5, 30.9 - PT New York 1997 (UrzaBC, 8)
23.6, ____, 14.2, 15.7, 21.9, 24.6 - Worlds 1999 (Standard, 8)
35.3, 15.7, 22.7, _5.2, _9.0, 14.7 - Worlds 1999 (Extended, 8)*
36.5, 13.1, 11.2, _4.3, 18.6, 20.1 - PT Chicago 1999 (Extended, 8)
23.2, 70.7, _2.8, ____, ____, _3.3 - PT New York 2000 (MercBC, 8)
44.0, 23.5, _8.3, _5.3, _8.3, 10.8 - Worlds 2000 (MercBC, 8)
23.5, ____, 42.6, 12.2, ____, 21.8 - Worlds 2000 (Team Standard, 8)
---------------------------INVASION
18.1, 23.0, 43.6, 21.0, _0.7, _5.9 - PT Chicago 2000 (Standard, 8)
21.7, _6.9, 31.1, 36.5, 26.4, ____ - PT Tokyo 2001 (InvBC, 8)
15.8, 13.3, 32.0, 36.0, 26.1, _3.0 - Worlds 2001 (Standard, 4)
33.3, 16.3, 28.2, _8.6, _1.2, 14.0 - Worlds 2001 (Extended, 9)**
30.2, 12.2, 19.1, _9.0, 25.4, _8.8 - PT New Orleans 2001 (Extended)
28.8, ____, 20.7, ____, 53.0, ____ - PT Osaka 2002 (OdysBC, 8)
63.2, _1.3, 14.8, 11.6, 20.7, ____ - Worlds 2002 (Standard, 3)
31.3, 13.5, 35.0, ____, 21.0, ____ - Worlds 2002 (OdysBC, 9)
29.2, _2.7, 26.5, _0.7, 46.5, _3.2 - PT Houston 2002 (Extended, 8)
____, 18.8, 24.2, 52.4, _4.6, ____ - PT Venice 2003 (OnslBC, 8)
36.5, 35.5, 15.4, 11.3, _4.8, _1.7 - Worlds 2003 (Standard, 6)
39.7, _0.2, ____, _4.6, _7.6, 50.3 - PT New Orleans 2003 (Extended, 8)
_3.9, _0.2, _7.7, 42.0, _3.4, 42.7 - PT Kobe 2004 (MirBC, 8)
_6.2, ____, 24.1, 19.2, _8.5, 42.0 - Worlds 2004 (MirBC, 6)
11.0, 13.3, 15.6, 26.6, _1.9, 31.6 - Worlds 2004 (Standard, 8)
33.9, 15.1, _6.6, 19.0, 16.3, 14.4 - PT Columbus 2005 (Extended, 8)
_9.2, 25.7, 31.8, ____, 23.3, 10.0 - PT Philadelphia 2005 (KamiBC, 8)
---------------------------RAVNICA
32.7, 16.0, 13.1, 31.3, 12.4, _4.3 - PT Los Angeles 2005 (Extended, 8)
16.9, 30.0, 25.6, 17.8, 21.8, _2.4 - Worlds 2005 (Extended, 4)
24.8, 14.1, 40.8, _2.9, 13.1, 13.6 - Worlds 2005 (Standard, 4)
29.2, 16.6, 15.9, 27.6, 17.6, 10.0 - PT Honolulu 2006 (Standard, 8)
23.6, 26.7, 31.8, 30.2, 31.6, _7.4 - PT Charleston 2006 (RavBC-Team, 12)
17.0, 20.4, _6.3, 33.9, 12.3, 20.9 - Worlds 2006 (Extended, 7)
11.4, 52.6, _3.0, 29.7, _7.6, _6.0 - Worlds 2006 (Standard, 7)
18.3, _3.0, 23.1, 40.9, 11.3, _9.3 - PT Yokohama 2007 (TSpBC, 8)

* : Two full sideboards are listed as Missing.
** : There were nine 6-0 and 5-0-1 decks based on my comparison of the Standings at the end of Rounds 12 and 18.

So what does all of that mean? In the course of compiling these card counts, I devised a few rules of thumb for spotting "broken" Top 8s that I think would stand the test of time. Some of these rules could conceivably bend in extremely multi-color environments, where the overcounts produced by gold cards are a major factor (again, RavBC totals to almost 150%). However, they're pretty good.

-any one color > lands (Example: NY 2000--Rebels, New Orleans 2003--Tinker)
-any two colors combined > 80% (Example: Osaka 2002 OdysBC, Kobe 2004 MirBC)

Experimental additions (meaning I'm not confident they're always bad signs) to this list include:

-artifacts > any one color (Worlds 2004 both MirBC and Standard)
-any two colors combined < 10% (Philly 2005 KamiBC)

Most of the broken examples provided have a signature card or cards---even Kamigawa Block Constructed had Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama's Reach at 28 copies each, and Worlds 2004 MirBC had 22 Oxidize in six decks (Standard in the same event did not have any of these "hallmark" cards, which is why I'm not sure about that rule). Worlds 2006 Standard had 20 Savannah Lions, of all things. (Don't doubt that I'll be coming back to the WW issue soon, but this time with delicious data.)

However, some of the worst offenders are from pre-Invasion (some like PT Rome 1998 I don't even have data for), and certainly others like PT Tinker can split the blame between the brokenness of Mirrodin and the insanity of the eponymous card from Urza's Legacy. Invasion is a valid split-point between epochs of Magic because of the internal R&D revolution post-Urza block. Years ago, MaRo pinpointed Mirage and Invasion as definitive breaks from what had gone before (and to this I would add Ravnica, the beginning of MaRo's own term as Head Designer).

As a result, the best we can do to evaluate R&D efforts to repair the color wheel is generate numbers from post-Invasion data and post-Ravnica data, albeit with a still-small number of data points for the latter.

Average Color Prevalence, Invasion-Saviors
(Chicago 2000-Philly 2005, 17 events)
24.2% Blue
22.1% Green
17.6% Red
17.1% Black
13.4% Artifact
11.7% White

Average Color Prevalence, Ravnica-Planar Chaos
(LA 2005-Yokohama 2007, 8 events)
26.8% Red
22.4% White
21.7% Blue
20.0% Green
15.9% Black
10.5% Artifact

The image presented by this innocent-seeming set of numbers is that R&D has in fact managed to knock Blue down a peg to the benefit of White and Red (before including Yokohama 2007, White is actually at the top of the post-Ravnica chart, flipping spots with Red). Over the next weeks and months, I hope to present a convincing case that the picture isn't as rosy as this looks.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Color Tilt Among Gold Cards

One of the factors that I articulated about the White Weenie issue was that I don't believe success by Orzhov and Boros decks proves anything about the quality of White Weenie for Constructed, given that White is used for vanilla/"french vanilla" creatures, few spells, and multicolor cards primarily based in their non-White side (not solely for these things, but primarily, and in such a manner as to distort the interpretation of the raw color prevalence provided in the prior post).

Of these three claims, the third is obviously the most subjective, so I want to make my case for that as clearly as possible. Let's use the goldest environment possible, the Ravnica Block Constructed PT, as our test case. Here are the White-inclusive gold cards from that PT's Top 4 (teams, meaning 12 decks), and my interpretation of their Whiteness (their White-ocity, if you're not into the whole brevity thing).

(Note on presentation: a card listed "1 Wrath of God" was maindeck, the listing "3 Wrath of God (2,1)" indicates two maindeck and one sideboard copies.)

Debateable
4   Watchwolf   

You can argue which color this card leans toward based on what you see as the driving force behind it. I, seeing a subconscious design bias against White around every corner, would say that, since they would likely not print a vanilla 3/3 for 2W or 1WW, but would do so unhesitatingly in Green for 1GG or possibly 2G, the card is primarily Green. The counterargument is that White is supposed to get good two-cost creatures, and Green is the difference between this card and the Future Sight 3/1 for 1W. Thus, I won't count this card as un-White.

More White Than Other: 10
6   Crime/Punishment (4,2)   
2   Odds/Ends (0,2)   
2   Razia's Purification

Since these argue against my point, I won't detail exactly why they lean White over their second color. Inquire if you're curious about these.

Even Split: 76
12   Loxodon Hierarch
10   Mortify (7,3)
10   Angel of Despair   
8   Skyknight Legionnaire   
8   Orzhov Pontiff (4,4)   
6   Grand Arbiter Augustin IV   
6   Trial/Error (4,2)   
4   Selesnya Guildmage   
4   Sunhome Enforcer (0,4)   
4   Boros Guildmage
3   Teysa, Orzhov Scion   
1   Windreaver   

These are what multicolor cards are supposed to be; with abilities clearly driven by both colors and not overwhelmingly powered by one color. (I have decided to back off on my argument about Mortify, since White is probably #3 at creature kill, and #2 at "destroy target creature"-type effects specifically, so the card's power is from both colors, like a post-Naturalize Vindicate.)

More Other Than White: 47
16   Lightning Helix (15,1)

Volcanic Hammer indicates that three damage is worth about 1R, more or less, to be good. Lifegain is worth the difference between 1R and WR. I think this is a clear-cut case of Red over White.

12   Castigate (8,4)   

Distress at BB is the obvious comparison. White RFGs the card, a power of varying importance depending on the metagame, but certainly not decisive---the card is first and foremost discard.

5   Swift Silence (4,1)

First and foremost a counterspell. I'm not sure why they added White (mass stack removal?), but it would be a nice precedent if R&D were signalling some migration of a White subset these abilities, which I doubt they are.

4   Ghost Council of Orzhova

The flickering ability is White, but it is powered by a Black-sourced creature sacrifice. I'd call it WBBB---mostly Black.

4   Debtors' Knell

We've pretty much got Resurrection, Breath of Life, and Reya Dawnbringer versus the entire history of Black reanimation; the #3 graveyard color compared to the undisputed #1. Clearly a Black-leaner.

3   Congregation at Dawn

The card itself is costed majority-Green, and the precedents for creature tutoring are heavily Green. In my above-discussed Card Catalog beta version, 219.17 Library--Put Into Hand--Search--Single--Creature (and its "Multiple" companion, 219.27, both of which include topdeck tutoring) features 13 G, 6 R, 4 B, 3 W, and 3 U cards, plus 1 UG, 1 UW, 3 GW---including Congregation at Dawn---1 WUBRG, and 2 Artifacts. So even counting gold cards, White has less than half of Green's history with creature tutoring, much less this brand of it.

3   Overrule

As with Lightning Helix, but replace burn with counterspelling.

So What?

All in all, there are over quadruple the gold cards that lean away from White as lean towards it. The un-White White cards were 28.3% (47 / 166) of the White cards played, and if they were simply not counted as White, it would drop from 26.7% of nonland cards (the #4 color at this event) to 19.1% (#5). Noting that applying this "tilt" process to only one color doesn't show what would happen to the rest, I think it shows how big a difference it can make to look deeper than raw color prevalence.

But why does this matter? Aren't they playing White anyway? It matters because most of the time White has to stand on its own rather than becoming more prevalent by piggy-backing on the cards based in other colors' superior abilities. If White's own abilities can't drive its success, then in blocks which aren't themed on multicolor play, you get color wheel train wrecks like PT Osaka 2002 and PT Kobe 2004.

Many people do not care about this, but MaRo has said many times that R&D agrees, for the long term health of the game, that the colors need to be more or less equal, with, of course, oscillations over time. I believe that White's prevalence numbers in Ravnica-inclusive environments are only possible because of the piggy-backing I describe, and that the basic situation of the color has not changed. White is still based on subpar powers which are inherently at a disadvantage against prepared opponents, as seen at PT Yokohama 2007.

Stay tuned for more!

[Matt]

I think your analysis of the hybrid spells is not a good place for the same treatment as gold. A hybrid card clearly had to be printable at every combination of its mana cost - a card that costs {X/Y} {X/Y} was clearly printable as , , or .

Thus I think it is safe to assume that Debtor's Knell could have been printed at . It could have been made all-white with no black influences.

[Anusien]

I agree; reanimation is as almost as much white as black (Resurrection and Zombify were legal at the same time).

Why is it you call Watchwolf debatable white as a 3/3 for , when they printed Isamaru who is a 2/2 for ?

I'm skeptical about Lightning Helix being mostly Red; part of this might be because you're used to seeing in decks that are predominantly red.  Incinerate for is slightly above the power curve I believe (seeing as how Hammer was legal for so long), and remember that going from to involved making it two color.  I would call it even simply because it's literally blending a White and a Red card together.

I do think some of the cards you have listed as even are anti-White like Mortify.

I'm very interested to see where you're going with this.  I like the analysis.

[Dr. Sylvan]

I might have treated hybrids differently than regular gold cards if I felt that it transformed the issue, or if there were more of them to define the category. Maybe they could have printed Debtors' Knell as a White card, but I think it's fair to say that reanimation is a basically Black ability. Regardless, even discounting it as another "Even Split", I wouldn't even have to change the wording of the "over quadruple" sentence. And as we can see from Anusien's mention of Mortify, my attempt to be conservative in naming cards non-White was reasonably successful---the tally might be worse in some interpretations.

Concerning Watchwolf, I wanted to single it out because, unlike most of the cards in the Even Split list, I really wanted to list it as non-White, but saw an immediate counterargument that made me err on the side of not counting it. And I don't think of Isamaru as the relevant precedent---White gets very few 3/3s under four mana (Haunted Angel? Jotun Owl Keeper?). It gets armies of 2/X guys, but 3/3 feels Green to me. Anyway, because of the ambiguity, I did not use it to bolster my argument.

Lightning Helix is one card I expected there to be no question about. The Red ability is dominant. If the lifegain text were removed, it would be played almost every time it would be played as-is. If the Bolt half was removed, it would be unplayably horrible, worse than Healing Salve. This is direct damage versus lifegain; every veteran player on the planet knows which is more powerful by probably an order of magnitude.

I don't think that the point is undermined by the possible movement of a few cards one way or the other: (1) Few part-White gold cards are primarily White. (2) A substantial number of part-White gold cards are primarily not White. (3) Thus we can posit that among similar spells in formats with more normal multicolor levels, the non-White ones would be the ones seeing play in their stead.

Hopefully this clarified what I meant. Thanks for the feedback!

[Vegeta2711]

it would be played almost every time it would be played as-is.

Not to single this out or anything, but I highly doubt it, at least as far as Standard and Extended goes. Three damage for two is just not a big deal and it's pretty much worse than Volcanic Hammer without the life-gain part.

I'm sure it'd see play, but it would border on the unplayable range anyway.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Savannah Lions = Jackal Pup

A long time ago, in my Type One articles, I occasionally made a seemingly irrational overreaction to a Vintage White Weenie appearance, while frequently bemoaning the inequities that forced (and force) everyone to play Blue. What gives? A White deck does well, and it makes Phil mad? I did my best to explain it once upon a time, back in February 2004. (At the time I was 17; gosh I feel old.)

At present, White is the best color at clogging its two-mana slot with subpar creatures. What an awesome plan. The problem is that R&D hasn't captured the best flavor of White, and instead is trying to give it bits and pieces of Green and Red. Onslaught block settled the matter permanently: Red is the best at weenie creatures. [...]

[example breakdown of creature varieties, about 80-90% of which I'd still support today]

The good part is that my examples are mostly recent, indicating that R&D already has most of it right, they've just got the lingering mistake of thinking White is the weenie color holding them back. White should never be conducting a blitz; that's way too Red and uncalculated. Instead, the army is based on a buildup of powerful logistical resources to an eventual overwhelming campaign.

R&D has followed my presentation of this argument with dozens of additional White Weenie-style creatures over the last three-plus years (though admittedly, they have taken the utility creatures to a whole other level of greatness with ones like Kataki and Aven Mindcensor). They clearly believe that White Weenie should be at the core of the color and will someday be good. At least for one shining moment in Worlds 2006, their wishes appeared to have come true.

Worlds 2006 Standard Undefeated (seven decks) White Cards

W 168 (107 md, 61 sb)
20   Savannah Lions
17   Soltari Priest
16   Icatian Javelineers
16   Knight of the Holy Nimbus
12   Paladin en-Vec (2,10)
12   Wrath of God (7,5)
11   Honorable Passage (0,11)
11   Ronom Unicorn (2,9)
8   Martyr of Sands (7,1)
8   Faith's Fetters (6,2)
5   Circle of Protection: Red (0,5)
4   Cloudchaser Kestrel (0,4)
4   Proclamation of Rebirth
4   Temporal Isolation
4   Weathered Wayfarer (3,1)
4   Worship (0,4)
3   Condemn
3   Disenchant (0,3)
3   Pacifism (0,3)
1   Adarkar Valkyrie (0,1)
1   Return to Dust (0,1)
1   Evangelize (0,1)

Gold 25 (23 md, 2 sb) (White only)
(16 WR, 9 WB)
16   Lightning Helix
4   Castigate
3   Ghost Council of Orzhova
2   Angel of Despair (0,2)

This section takes my argument about the individual cards from earlier this week, and expands it to whole decks. My goal is to convince you that RW/Boros decks have a structure which tilts heavily Red. As with the individual cards, this tilt implies to me that in a less multicolor environment, the same style of deck might show up, but it would probably not employ White, or at least not as much.

Above I argue that White is piggy-backing on other colors, and indeed, of the five decks playing Savannah Lions, four have no less than sixteen burn spells, and the fifth's other nonland, maindeck four-of spells were Dark Confidant, Hynoptic Specter, Temporal Isolation, and Castigate.

I also mentioned that, crucially, the WW creatures played are vanilla/french vanilla (which would mean they only have one basic keyword). This description is less apt in a post-Isamaru event, but Savannah Lions is the obvious, and top-played, example. Others like the Soltari, Javelineers, Knight, and Paladin are not strictly in the R&D definition of french vanilla, but they are combat-focused. They attack, and then do it again.

This sounds familiar. Sixteen or so burn spells. Sixteen or so creatures who live solely to move into the red zone as many times as possible. Could we be talking about Red Deck Wins, whose perennial iterations have been a staple of Constructed Magic since Sligh in, I believe, 1996? I'm not the only one to think of this; the deck is often referred to as Boros Deck Wins.

Before I can convince you that the RW decks cannot be seen as White Weenie (the occasional BW is a weaker case with fewer examples), we should define what we're talking about when it comes to an actual, honest-to-goodness, White Weenie deck.

The most important defining element is creatures. 1996 World Champion Tom Champheng had only 20 creatures, with the balance of the deck made from things like Disenchant, StP, Balance, Armageddon, etc. White Weenie is usually on a whole other level of creature concentration. Matt Linde's US Nationals 1998 champion deck had 27 creatures plus Cataclysm, Empyrial Armor, and Tithe. Kyle Rose's 1999 US Nats winner had 26 plus four Waylay (during the rules loophole for the card), with Crusade, Glorious Anthem, and Disenchant. The KBC WW Top 8 deck had 23 creatures plus Jitte, Indomitable Will ( > Holy Srength), Cage of Hands ( > Pacifism), Shining Shoal, and Blessed Breath. The theme of the support spells in these decks is removal of blockers/obstacles and permanent creature pumping.

When people refer to WW, they are talking about a deck with a history of playing well over 20 creatures, with some spells to make sure they break through (protection on the creatures or some kind of removal), and do so substantially (pump like Empyrial and Jitte). This is not the same as the Red deck skeleton; the creatures just happen to be White.

The RW Boros archetype is not structured like these decks; it is structured like the kind of deck Dan Paskins would play. That linked Flores article is all about RDW, and at every stage the deck is basically half burn, half creatures. Go ahead and read any number of RDW articles you want. To an RDW deck, a creature is often like a burn spell that buys itself back for free.

This is why I see Boros (and to a lesser extent Orzhov) decks as of a separate nature. In the absence of the Ravnica multicolor incentives, like the best dual lands since the originals rotated from Extended, the burn spells would not be paired with something like Soltari; they would go with Goblins. As a result, the White numbers from Ravnica-inclusive events should not be interpreted as a repaired color pie, but one whose damage is obscured.

Aside: You may be wondering, at this point, whether there is any evidence I would actually accept that White's long-term problems are fixed. Well for a short time (Onslaught block), I actually thought it was on its way to being so. The idea of a heavily-White control deck is exactly what I had wished for, and hope to see again. Then Mirrodin came along and knocked White straight back to the Odyssey-block penalty box. Ravnica block did a decent job making White work with other colors, and Time Spiral has, of course, subverted White's best card (Wrath -> Damnation) and returned to the historical theme of lots of good Blue cards. When we start hearing about White control again, or seeing noncreature White cards that do more than just combat tricks, I'll start relaxing from my mission as chief White Whiner.

[Matt]

I see no reason why white weenie shouldn't or couldn't follow the theme of an "army that builds up resources to an overwhelming campaign." How does that work with respect to white creatures? Easy:

Give white the Sliver mechanic.

I don't mean slivers themselves, of course, which are strewn throughout all colors. But rather, white should have as one of its primary themes "weenie guys who work together well" and that could encompass the "cards with the same attributes as this card all gain ability X." What I mean is that white should get "tribal" as a recurring theme, not only in tribal blocks. This is nothing really new: every color got graveyard toys in Odyssey, though the graveyard is only a recurring theme for black and green. A similar setup should be invoked for white and tribal.

Rebels was a good execution of this, and it showed in tournament play. Goblin Piledriver should have been white and a soldier: goblins don't work well together. If they work together at all, they would live in a dictatorship under some kind of warlord (Goblin King). Goblins should breed a lot and be expendable, but also occasionally get in each others' way. Soldiers should never do that. White has always had a ton of global enchantments that represent combat maneuvers (Defensive Formation, Knighthood, etc.) that were absolute suck, but would be exceedingly good if attached to a creature body. White should have guys who are the best in combat, as distinct from merely being the biggest, which is a green thing. For example, think of some guy in the middle of combat tossing his weapon to his buddy, who then proceeds to use it to crunch the guy he's fighting:

[card removed for some reason. it allowed guys to trade equipment mid-combat]

A series of guys like that, who can be combat tricks in hand and then deploy to clog the battlefield - that could be a strong card. Combine them with soldier-ized versions of Knighthood or whatever, and you have a strong set of weenies that wins in combat by superior training and discipline, not by overwhelming numbers (red) or by being the biggest dude around (green). You should never want to get in a fight with a white creature, because even though he may look small, he will FUCK your SHIT UP.