A lot of people getting upset that I said "white is good and black is evil" My original intention is that this is how a new player would see the colour pie at a glance and then I followed it up with how it actually is presented. edit: I probably could've worded that a lot better. This post and people's concerns have nothing to do with race. second edit: The original comment that connected it to race was commenting on how people were being too sensitive. Since I've made the original edit, a bunch of people are falsely attributing this edit to mean that someone was offended that I was talking about race. No, it is just someone being annoying about a non existent person getting offended, and then a series of other people trying to dogpile on that. Oh what fun!
i didn't take it as terms of race, but how they are NOT about good vs evil. They are about what the value - White is about community and black is about selfishness. That is why The Orzhova are presented as the Mafia Church. They are their own selfish community. While can be evil and black can be good, like the D&D alignment chart.
Awesome video! I never understood the appeal to Purple, but seeing it as the "unnatural" color compared to Green's focus on the natural world makes a lot of sense to me
Thanks! I wish there was more of an emphasis on colourless being the opposite of green now but unfortunately, since green is the best at ramping, anything colourless can do, green can do as well.
@CajunCatguy I'm with you. Eldrazi have things that steal someone's creatures, exile cards from libraries, and have annihilator. Green cultivates and things pop up; colorless erases and banishes them.
@CajunCatguy I think there's a decent chance in the next few years that we get more colorless/artifacts that require colorless mana. It's a significant enough consideration for mana bases that you can push a card with it more than an all generic mana artifact, while still potentially being playable in any color(s) of deck. As a side note, while I recognize that there are design reasons they haven't/won't make another basic land type (Wastes being basics without a land type), I do kind of wish they would have made it so Caves could inherently tap for colorless. Except for the cycle of discover caves and the backside of some cards, almost all the caves they printed could make colorless. And if they did change it, they could technically print a card that looked like: Cave Basic Land - Cave (Tap: Add C.) And it wouldn't _have_ to be considered a basic land type. (I'm also of the opinion though that most things in the game would function perfectly fine with a sixth basic type, iirc domain-style effect are the biggest concern/reason Wastes didn't have a land type, but very few cards would be actually busted by having another land type available)
@@HarrisontheManaDorkMaybe I didn't investigate the lore enough, but for me: Black/White and Red/Blue oppositions aren't that perfect. As said in video, Red is the color of chaos and emotion, which is more opposed to White focus on order and stoicism than Black. But let's say they add a new color to oppose Green. The purple/mind focus seems... not really opposed to Green. Green also encapsulates nature spirit and spirituality, which doesn't clash enough with purple. The truer opposition would be exploitation, industrialism, pollution and disregard to nature. A Tradition vs Progress thing. So... Isn't an industrious Orange/Brown color more fitting than Purple, with a Hill terrain focus (with Mine and such) rather than a magic portal terrain? Some might say that Orange/Brown isn't the middle color between Blue and Black... but so is Red between Green and Black (Blue would have fit better there). It could have a gameplay about drawing, sacrificing mana/terrain and having the sense of always going forward up to screw yourself (got most of your deck removed, yet only got 4 terrain but turn 10). But... this is already encompassed with Red and Artifact already. Which makes me wonder why Red's exploitative isn't opposed to Green's nature preservation to begin with.
I am so sad that snow-covered wastes now exist, One of my favorite whacky mtg facts was that there where 11 differently named basic lands, but now there are a nice round 12
I kinda love the joke of snow covered wastes. I wish there was some bigger application for them than Arcum's Astrolabe but I will also concede that we lost a great piece of trivia when it went from 11 to 12.
@@HarrisontheManaDork i mean, it is ultimately a fine card to run in any deck that runs both cards that cares about colorless mana and runs snow mana cards, it doesnt necessarily need to be a colorless focused deck. It is a fine addition if you have snow cards and splash something like Null Elemental Blast and Eldritch Immunity, for example
To me, one of my absolute favorite things about the color pie is that no color has a direct opposite. The less symmetrical nature of having 5 colors really is what makes the game work. Yes, black and white seem like opposites, but, they, like their shared ally blue, value knowledge, black looking to leverage understanding for gain and white for order and structure. Red and blue may seem like opposites, but they both share the ambition of their shared ally, black, with red feeding mindlessly into its lust for glory and blue carefully, but resolvedly, crafting its way to its goals. Each enemy pair has some common ground with those they oppose, making each color pair a unique and interesting concept. If we had 6 colors, we'd have more diameteically opposed colors, making some color pairings feel so much more wrong, while making the rest feel so much less interesting.
I get what you're saying, but at the same time, they already do have opposites black and white blue and red And before colorless came out, green was just seen as the neutral color now the addition of colorless green and colorless.
@@cablefeed3738 Where you around before colorless was released? I've been playing since the late '90's and I can assure you, at least from my perspective, that that was not the case before the colorless mana symbol was introduced, nor is it what colors are about even now. Black and white represent the opposite values of selflessness and selfishness, while green and black represent the opposite values of life and death. Blue and red are opposites in that one is led by logic and one is led by emotion, but blue and green represent opposite sides of the coin of the natural and the artificial (or maybe stated better as submitting to fate or controlling ones own destiny). Even red and white are strong opposites, with white being the color of order and red being the color of chaos. All the enemy color pairs are strong opposites, and always have been. The point of my original comment is that this multiple enemy colors system is a really positive thing. If you're approaching it from the perspective that white and black are opposites and so are red and blue, as well as apparently green and colorless, than I'd encourage you to try looking at the color wheel from a star perspective, with two enemies to each color. This really adds a lot to the game for me, and is fundamental to my love of the game. A great way to get into this mindset is playing a 5 player game, where you're all playing a mono-colored deck and whoever defeats their two opposing colors first wins. It's a lot of fun and can really be flavorful if everyone builds to their color's core identity.
@jaredwonnacott9732 I've done plenty of five player games where each person is one color. And if you read my comment again, I said that green was seen as neutral touching all four other colors. But that might have just been at my game store, where a lot of the same people were also playing Dungeons & Dragons. Friday night magic Saturday night D&D.
@@cablefeed3738 I love playing monocolored commander and have no idea what you’re talking about??? Yes every color can be made to play like another, that comes with the territory of a game several years old, but green does not play like the others. Red plays chaotically, often dealing large damage out of no where, but like emotions often burn out if dealt with long enough. Blue (my least favorite) plays like a logical chess game; each move curated to counter your threats while encouraging other threats while knowing everyone’s moves. Green plays brainlessly, anomalistically; you play big creatures and ramp uncontrollably, big stompy and all that. Black plays with blood, you hurt yourself to hurt everyone else like one takes back alley deals. Honestly white is the color which dips into all of them but very conditionally; white can draw, can destroy, can exile, and can grow and ramp but conditionally, as if someone maintaining conditional order. Each color plays intentionally a specific way because that’s how they act.
Isn't colorless both a functional sixth color with wingdings, but also positioned as ideologically opposed to green by being the largest home for artifacts, and the second largest for stax effects and sacrifice outlets?
In theory, yes. In paper, I don't think so. Most of colourless' big flashy things are spells that cost like 10 mana. Green being the most ramp happy colour in magic can easily hit those. I think if two colours are going to be enemies, they shouldn't compliment each other that well.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI disagree. Opposing colors should help each other. White gives you life to pay the life with black. Blue and red both work together with sorceries and instants to storm
@@Chronor3 White and black are also great at both single-target removal and board wipes (which means that decks that combine them get to use the best options from both colors) White and black are also good at making a bunch of cheap creatures for you to sacrifice. Red and blue are also good at artifact stuff. Green and blue are great at casting all the spells you draw, and casting big sea monsters. Red and white are good at turning your armies of creatures into damage, and are good at combat-modifying abilities, like combat tricks or equipment. Green and black are good at fuelling your graveyard strategies, including both dumping stuff into your graveyard and being able to spend mana to cast stuff from your graveyard. Colorless really is a great opposite for green (which already thematically makes sense). It's basically what purple was meant to be, anyways, but with more artifacts (though purple would likely have a lot of artifacts if its core identity was "unnatural", which seems like what it was meant to be)
I would say that colorless is more akin to light before it hits a prism, speading out into what is the color pie of Magic. Embodying all colors, yet none. In a way, this also fits thematically with how many of the strongest beings of their time are also represented as colorless, Ugin, Urza and the Eldrazi for example.
On Reddit's Hellscube, a custom draft cube of humourous custom cards, there was a handful of purple cards in previous versions of it. Purple's main mechanic was interacting with the sideboard, and also just doing really weird effects that bend or break the rules of normal magic. The blue/red archetype interacted with purple the most, but it was something any color could splash. This was because most purple costs where the 2 generic/1 purple hybrid cost, so even if you don't have means of making purple mana you can play still play it.
If they wanted to, they could make more Snow-related cards to basically make it its own color, with its identity literally just being stealing from/meshing with other colors
I think to get the full effect would be if snow cards could be paid for in their regular costs or with snow mana. Like instead of two and a green, you could also pay two and a snow. Now that I type that out, I feel like that could be fun to play but miserable in draft.
@HarrisontheManaDork I mean it's not just eldrazi specific, devoid itself is. But myr, and with the introduction of vehicles they are starting to fill that spot up. Yeah, we didn't get dedicated colorless mana till oath but with all the artifacts and generic mana spells before then you could make the argument that colorless stealthily became the 6th color. It's now the color of technology whether it be new or old. It opposes green and those artifacts that require say color to cast could be considered dual color artifacts. As it's the color utilizing technology. Blue which is directly next to it allies best with it.
For that bit, I used Mark Rosewater's guide. According to his blog, in WUBRG order, Marge is White, Lisa is Blue, Bart is Black, Homer is Red, and Maggie is Green. Although, I would agree if that went beyond the core characters, Mr. Burns would definitely be black.
@@HarrisontheManaDork I can't say I agree with Rosewater's thinking because Bart constantly showed remorse for his actions, especially in earlier to midseason episodes. Lisa being blue is a copout (I think there is a better argument there for green) and Homer is definitely Boros. Maggie is colorless. Still didn't mean to nitpick your video, which was interesting I didn't know they actually made a joke purple, I thought there was one set pitched during the designer creation contest that had a new color
@@jrightly Maggie loves people. Colorless is emotionless. Lisa is pretentious like blue, Bart is often a selfish schemer, and Homer is often too distracted to follow rules, even resulting in the death of Frank Grimes the rules stickler.
@@CTimmerman pretentious eh? I guess you got counterspelled one too many times lol. The reason I think Lisa is green is because of her veganism and general concern for nature.
Having a new color (not necessarily purple) be a foil to green could be very interesting. You could have purple be technology and the base land be city as stated in video to counter green’s nature theme.
@RenzZlax I mean you could consider colorless to be "the 6th color" as well artifacts do act as a foil in theme to greens typical nature loving ability. I run shorikai as my main commander deck, and it's a colorless deck at heart running mostly colorless creatures and the typical green fight deck is mad because we'll my stuff is mostly vehicles that do their own thing till I win.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI always thought of Colorless as Greens nemesis. For instance, Artifacts are historically More Colorless than not, thus satisfying the Anti Technology bent. Additionally, Green is traditionally the color of Overproducing Mana in Color/Multiple Colors. Whereas Colorless might produce a lot of Generic/Colorless Mana, or Artificially produced Mana of Color..., usually so problematically that Wizard's later bans/restricts it. _😮MOX's, we're looking at you._ ............. Besides which, I've usually reasoned that Purple Mana is Five Color Split Mana. Looking at the Color Pie... Five colors in a wheel... Gold/Multi color is all over... Generic/Artifact Backlit's the pie... Colorless/Eldrazi tops it... Split Mana is in between, with Purple Taking the Center, almost Naturally.
Honestly, i am glad this color never came to fruition - Colorless expresses the original idea of Purple infinitely better than having "Purple" could ever do. You can make Purple by mixing Red and Blue, but you can't make Colorless by mixing colors, as Colorless drains the color from the world around it, twisting the ideas found in those colors.
Inquest was not published by Wizards of the Coast. Their magazine was The Duelist. Inquest was published by a totally separate company called Wizard Press which also published price guides for comic books and other things. Wizards of the Coast. Wizard Press. I could see how you might mistake the two. BUT I WAS LIKE THERE, MAN. I bought issue one of Inquest and Duelist.
I feel like the colorless cards really did fill the gap that purple would have used. Like the idea of opposing nature with death or civilization wouldn't have worked in my opinion since those are already themes of other colors and I don't think they would have really fit that well into the surrounding colors. But opposing the natural with the unnatural and otherworldly seems like a fitting idea. And Purple being an ally to blue, the ones that seek knowledge, and black, the ones that seek power even at a cost. Would be fitting, while it being sort of enemies/neutral with white&red too since those colors actually care a lot about the things in the world, so they'd be opposed to a color that is so unnatural and rewrites reality. The only weird change would be blue & black going from allies to neutrals/enemies, but I'd say that egotism can work just as well against logic as it can work toegether with it. Heck even artifacts kinda work as an opposite to green, so I guess in a way greens opposite are the colorless cards.
I wholeheartedly agree. It does then frustrate me that since a lot of the big flashy colourless cards are high mana value, it means that green is better positioned to run colourless cards than the others.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkyou can say the same about red and blue both being good at playing alot of low cost cards quickly, or white and black both being good at removal and life gain
Purple would have been more like an unnatural, alien-like, horror theme, it could have worked for sure, just look at Duskmourn, the entire expansion could have been used for a consistent theme on Purple, maybe with Delirium and Manifest being THEIR own thing from the start
As someone in a lot of custom magic spaces, the "colorless as a sixth color" analogy is actually used all the time to describe how to design those cards! Great video!
Colourless not being a colour feels like the most pedantic piece of rules text in all of Magic. I love that there is at least some community out there that values colourless for what it is.
I feel like your stance on Purple changing the amount of allied and enemy colors is spot on. I too share the opinion that Green is sort of the middle man when it comes to a direct enemy/ally, and a 6th color would make it much more streamlined.
I really like the one for one enemy colours dynamic too. Like I get where red and white are enemies but they have more overlap than white and black. Sure they're enemies, but black feels like the an absolute nemesis.
They could've had purple have suspend type abilities, sacrificing instantly casting things for having a mana discount, and cast powerful spells, or maybe it gets more powerful the longer it's susoended, and you can choose when to cast it like Plot, and used "When this enters" abilities because of the portal theme, as the enemy of green, that would all fit rather nicely. Especially because green focuses on mega creatures, so the color purple focusing on increasingly powerful spells makes sense.
@@HarrisontheManaDork especially with the doctor who universes beyond stuff. There's certainly room for it but it's kinda too late for a new color plus devoid/artifacts exist.
And it was great that they made the Time Shifted Symbol PURPLE. Man Time Spiral was just the best block. I think it may have been my favorite block ever overall.
I remember playing a Standard tournament just before Time Spiral rotated out. I showed up with Time Spiral slivers (only using cards from that Block) and swept the whole thing. No one was prepared for Slivers with all the latest tribes showcased. The only game I dropped was in the finals to an aggro tribal goblins deck. But I made him scoop a game when I showcased the deck's six card infinite lifegain combo, Dormant, Reflex, Gemhide, Darkheart, Pulmonic, and any 1 cost Sliver(I used Sidewinder and Virulent.) You just put Dormant's draw effect on stack, tap for the mana used to cast the 1 cost, sacrifice it to gain 3 life and put it on top of your library, then draw. My land base mostly only showed Green and White between Basics and Horizon Canopy, but I could branch out to all 5 colors with Gemhide Sliver, and barring that, I also had Gemstone Mines. Since none of my Slivers ever had more than 1cc that was blue, black or red, the Mine would work in a pinch. I also kept it hidden by playing it as late as possible, so people would be lulled into a false sense of security thinking I only had access to green and white if they kept the Gemhides in check. Slivers may have gotten a bad reputation, but the way I balanced that deck was one of my proudest deckbuilding moments. So many little combos like Quilled and Fungus to turn a mere 2/2 into an absolute monstrosity. Homing to find any puzzle piece I needed with Slivercycling.
I remember when planes walkers first came out (I was in middle school lol) and I remember saying something along the lines of "what are they going to do next, add a sixth color?!)
Every now and then, there is a new "death of Magic" where people online get a little too ahead of themselves when talking about something they don't like. It would be funny to look back at some of those earlier "death of magic" events.
The color pie always seemed to me as an interesting alignment system like in D&D. Pretty much, a way of philosophically grouping anything and everybody into one of a few groups. It seemed that it might have been a central part of many other games and tie them all together, but alas, that was not to be.
Purple (or some other theoretical color) could be really cool as a mechanic if it only appeared in dual+ color cards. It could be a very powerful mana type with _no_ basic lands, the only way to get it would be through lands and other cards with harsh requirements. Kind of an engineered scarcity to block powerful cards.
The epilogue i think nails it, and i would say was the true solution all along, the idea of a "Forced" colorless cost effectively lets you do what a new color would do, the manabase was already there essentially, and making a colorless basic land (Wastes) just made it official Now you can make those cards that steal from everything else, but also lock-in a "New" color cost to worry about, while also not doing anything new per-se
Flavor-wise, a sixth color opposed to green sounds great and opens a lot of fun possibilities. But in practice it would have been a logístical nightmare to implement and would cause some problematic ripples in eternal formats and even for the limited formats of future reprint sets like Modern Masters, it would force them into a super awkward position
I think if they tried it a lot earlier into magic, it would be fine by now. It wouldn't be as good in old formats but like modern forward would've been fine. It only being one set really makes that more of a nightmare and would have been something everyone would know is dead in the water a couple years after release.
I have an idea to reintroduce purple into MTG Otherworldly Inversion It's name is a play on the words "inverted" and "invasion" It can be it's own card game, it's colors can either have the themes of their original but pushed to the extreme, or invert their original's theme. White = Purple Purple could be synonymous with control and expansion, basically Conquest. Their land is portals, and that could tie into the themes of conquest, like the purple Planeswalkers are using other worlds as batteries for their spells. Red = Magenta Its land is caverns Blue = Cyan Its land is tundra Green = Yellow Its land is junkyards Black = Gray Its land is clouds
What if purple was about reflecting damage and spells at the caster. It could be Greens enemy because it defies the natural order of things by it also being able to delaying spells and transfers mana from past turns. Like it uses four mana in turn a and turn be it gets that four mana for that turn alone.
I was going through the first few sets and it became very apparent that the original colour pie was designed around fantasy class archetypes. Blue mage White knight Red barbarian Green Druid Black necromancer
Honestly I feel like the original set of purple, including the “portal” lands could work as a color type based around the idea of taking from other colors. Not like “direct damage and card draw”, but instead it contains all the time, creature, and mana stealing blue mostly gets. It might not be the most balanced or coolest but a whole color based around taking your opponent’s stuff, fusing your own creatures to create more powerful versions, and copy/mirroring would be awesome to see
As a Whit/Black player I gotta say that I absolutely love the color system and how there's just so many different combinations for so many different play styles
a real fun mechanic i could see purple doing is a double edge sword play style. hurt yourself to hurt other players even more. most magic cards that are similar in that aspect are board wipes, hurting yourself for benefits (ex. pay 2 life draw a card, draw 3 discard 2) and rule changing cards. id like to see pay life destroy target. or when controller draws/discards, other player draw/discard. i know there are plenty of cards that fit this theme (mostly red and black) but its not really a staple. idk, i dont play magic as much as i used to so maybe im just throwing an idea thats already there.
It makes metatextual sense that Purple would be the color of disruption, of breaking the norm and the natural. Because that is exactly what it would be doing, by simply existing it would disrupt the entirety of the color pie. I feel like magic may have been better for it if they could have figured out what unique mechanics to give it. Inherent to the nature of the color pie, it would also have to steal from its allies, and then its allies would have to steal from theirs and so on. It would most certainly be a mess and all the colors would end up changed. If it were to work purple would need to lean into exactly that, it being change and upheaval.
I absolutely adore when Magic's mechanics can properly reflect and tidbits of the lore. When Battle for Zendikar dropped and the lore was that there were a bunch of Eldrazi, and that set led to eldrazi decks running rampant, that was perfect to me. I very much agree with your ideas how they could have properly addressed adding a new colour. I think since they were on a time crunch and knew they needed an idea, they went with something they could do without much hassle but given infinite time, it'd be cool to see something like what you mentioned where it feels like it is properly integrated.
I like that the sixth color we ended up with is colorless, because that also goes with what you are saying. It's so unnatural that it exists outside of the color pie completely.
I wish they had decided to add purple, and I wish they had it be a permanent thing instead of just a one-off if they did. The reason is simple - now that they don't print hate effects anymore, you really forget that colours like red/white or red/blue are supposed to be enemies. They complement each other too well gameplay-wise. Maybe if they had added a sixth colour and made it so each colour only had one enemy we'd still be seeing hate effects and colour enemies would still seem important instead of just a flavour thing in the background.
I feel like it could be really cool if purple popped up only on certain planes and didn’t always stay on the same spot on the color wheel some kind of un natural force corrupting the natural colors.
Turns out all purple needed was for cards to cost an obscene amount of mana… except for those few cards… and that land that made them cost 2 less, and also except for that other land than made 2 mana for just purple. Im sure it was all fine really.
This was super cool. I remember that issue of inquest when i was in middle school - back in the day with Orcish Lumberjack, Ball Lightning, and Bedserks. I did get a chance to try to rebuild that deck with green when the colourshifted cards came out. I always thought it was just a joke and they never actually considered following through with it. Gotta say, i agree with all of their reasoning as well as the decision to not let it go through. The idea of messing with turn phases was kinda cool - but that would be really disruptive to gameplay. Great video!!!
Thanks! I almost bought a copy online but shipping was like double what the actual thing cost. They come back to the idea of messing with turn order and stuff like that every now and then. It is definitely best in small doses.
I think the main reason we'd never get Purple as a color is that they'd have to change the cardbacks to reflect the new color pie. They haven't even removed the little scribble on the Deckmaster logo (hell, even the Deckmaster logo itself), so something tells me they're not going to want to update the WUPBRG dots
Purple should be all the cool physical actions like Chaos Orb or Enter The Dungeon, so when someone is mono purple you know your in for a Mario Party match.
For purple the idea of anchoring could be perfect for a purple mechanic though it feels similar to green mutation I think they're called, it's been awhile since I played, idea is purple version of mutations/enchantments that isn't permanent always shifting allowing for much more flexibility and if anchoring card attached to a creatures card for example was going to be destroyed the player can have that card move another card like sort of parasite that won't die before everything else does, this affect is fast how ever as counter some of purple anchoring cards don't play nice with other anchoring cards while some anchoring cards can be packed on same card. Purple anchoring cards are classified as anchoring #. the number being 1~9 When a single card has two anchoring cards attached to it with same numbers they become unstable and will cause both anchoring cards and cards they are attacked to to be banished at the end of the turn they were placed on the same card, however if they don't have the same anchoring number they will remain stable so in theory a non anchoring couple card could have maximum of 9 stable anchored cards The idea of purple is powerful but highly unstable and twisted Nature instead of going to the graveyard or back to the deck or something they are usually banished out right, it is mirror of nature while also being Nature, do to this both types of nature of green and purple cannot coexist easily like how matter and dark matter are said to eliminate each other's existence or something like that a similar affect is happening.
My favorite color shifted card is Dash Hopes because like Mana Tithe, nobody sees it coming. A close second would be Darkness, and while not being a card from Planar Chaos, is still a really funny gotcha card because nobody expects black to have a Fog/Holy Day effect. Rounding out my top 3 is Brute Strength simply because its Giant Growth shifted to red. Color shifted cards are my favorite gender.
I love me a good fog and the absolute best fogs are 1 mana, and the absolute perfect fogs aren't green. It isn't perfect but throwing down Festival out of nowhere is always a blast.
I think an underrated aspect of the color pie is the thematic conflict between green and blue - green's connection to the "natural world" implies its relationship to things that are concrete and physical. Blue, of course, often relates to things that are ethereal, or conceptual, or that change their form. Not that green represents things that are immutable, but they change in predictable ways that make sense. Hydras grow, werewolves transform back and forth - these things are pretty much "natural" in a fantasy setting. In contrast, blue things become duplicates of other things, or turn things into sheep or frogs, or do whatever Morphling is doing (though that's not so exclusive anymore). I think Simic, the guild itself, is interesting in this way - they're all about taking ordinary natural things and shaping those things to fit whatever they can imagine.
The hypothetical purple could have focused on space, time, the planes, and the ways to get to everywhere and everywhen. Plus the alien influences like the Phyrexians still could have been in that new color. This design process is wild.
Maybe as a signature creature type purple could have horrors, weirds, changelings, possibly even eldrazi? All of those give me the feeling of being unnatural
Ooh, yeah, I like that a lot. The creature types that have to be created. Have some of the ones you mentioned on the lower end along with stuff like homunculus and then the eldrazi at the top. 10/10
Here's the colour pie, oversimplified and boiled down to each colour's core. White: Devotion Blue: Intellect Black: Ambition Red: Passion Green: Individual Might
Not sure if this was said, but what if purple was centered around taking control of other people's cards from anywhere, such as playing from your opponent's grave, hand, or library. Also the ability to temporally remove things like blink affects that only affect opponents. I think this would make it the opposite of green both in the lore and gameplay wise, while also making feel in-between blue and black. Using your abilities to take control of the destiny of others ( Card Steal).
Also think this is fun because purple's power would be based on opponents. Which really plays with the testing fate theme that a color opposing Green should have.
My main concern with that idea is how it is reflected in the commons and uncommons. Removal and interacting with your opponents cards is something that is inherently powerful and would need to be seriously reigned in.
Purple being a thing would be dope, could be a streamlined mix of black and red in gameplay. Maybe specifically an emphasis on exile and playing out of the exile pile and cloning.
Love seeing others talk about purple. For yhe past year or so ive been remastering a lot of old purple cards ive found all over the web and posting them to reddit. I've got a lot of insight on the huge variety of mechanics people have made for purple, and a google drive full of purple cards
I am so glad you mentioned how green feels like the oddball out. Now I love how they did colorless but I could have seen it being the opposite of green. It is the unnatural with constructs, creatures outside reality, and mana itself. The thing is it being not a part of the color wheel fits too well in the current role. Because it is in the middle so it does take parts from everything, it is the in-between of the wheel so all can easily use it but it is all the border around the wheel because it is outside the wheel. That gave it a identity.
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the tcg called wastelands, that came out 2 years after mtg and functions just like it but without lands and with 7 colors, indeed made an 8th color that is purple and represents everything unnatural 1 year before the prank article.
I think if they had fully tilted into it, being an opposite of green, making Purple the defacto artifact color makes the most sense. There would've been a lot more stuff to iron out, but I think that would've been the best place to start
Alosis functions more like a creature that is suspended for a turn, but can still block. On the following turn, it becomes an enchantment. I'm not sure how one might go about turning this into an effective keyword for creatures becoming enchantments the following turn, either mechanically or lore wise, but it sounds pretty cool.
Colourless really is the 6th colour imo, love its theme of being both a tool or machine sentient or not but also lovecraft abominations that are impossible to comprehend in terms of motive or reason.
The ironic thing about this is that yellow fits into the intended color pie oppositions better than purple or colorless does given that Magic has black vs. white. So, red vs. green was an intended opposition besides blue vs. yellow. Within this scheme, yellow would have primarily been the color where you normally had to play your cards to find their identities during a match. This probably would have been implemented physically by color shifting the backs of its cards.
If I had to make the 6th color, I would use the idea of portals. Make the color the best one to shift things in the battle field (Change ownership of permanents, suspending cards, temporaly removing/disabling creatures, creating copies of permanents) as a way to illustrate the portals sending and pulling things to and from random places or places more advantageous for the purple player.
Adding onto that, maybe being like a Meta commentary of magic, like being able to change the direction the players are taking turns in, or interact with real world things outside of the board, have a lot of emphasis on plane changing and stasis counters maybe a new mechanic sorta like poison counters but like insanity or something
I think an interesting idea for doing purple is by making it a sub system- a secondary smaller deck of cards you bring with you to play that is drawn to its own (smaller) hand of cards, with a cost to entry: playing a purple land requires you to remove two basic lands from your field, but grants you the ability to play into purple cards, with most only requiring 1 or 2 purple mana (& some mana of any colour) to play for accsess to somewhat tweaked & twisted versions of the other colours effects This allows anyone from the solo green to the madman running all 5 colours to play into purple, but playing purple in of itself slows down game ramp by forcing you to permanently trade 2 mana from lands for a single purple mana, a cost that prevents it from speeding up games too much
An interesting space for purple would have been "reality distorting" effects that no color had; effects that intentionally break the rules or break the 4th wall in a way -- almost an "un" set, but not as goofy. For example, effects that swap players' libraries or graveyards, or that let them draw from their sideboards, etc. This would also include randomized effects, changing the structure of a turn (for example, making untap steps occur after combat), etc. If green's emphasis is on natural order, then purple's could be about unnatural chaos.
Purple is literally blue and black together. If there was a 6th color, it would make sense for it to be orange, this being the classic 4 type combo of colors. The 4 type combo lose their identity and get homogenized. Black Blue Green and Red is nothing different from Black White Green and Blue. Of course these cards already exist, but being recognized as their own thing, the orange (works with brown or yellow as well) could work to simplify things a bit. An orange card could be treated as the combo of ANY 4 other colors except orange. It might actually work with orange as part of the 4 types actually. So instead of having the any 4 mana and one other color for example, a 4 orange could mean any 4 colors but 1 each not a combo of 3 of a color of another or 2 of a color and 2 of another color. It must be 4 with 1 of each. This would be the only thing that would make sense as a 6th color. Other than this, I cannot think of anything else that could exist that cannot be put into an already existing color already.
Another fun thing they could've looked at would be a whole new color set just as a one off gag, I think an unset might be able to have some fun with it. But instead of just adding purple to the existing world, they get a whole new gang of five like Orange, Purple, Brown and other colors that look and feel similar, but act very differently from the original pie
Ive thought about there being a purple color to magic years ago and always thought it would belong almost exclusivly to eldrazi. The idea that itd be antithesis to green, ie nature, would make sense given the eldritch themes of eldrazi. Imagine if purple was the only color that could retrieve things from exile or a purple creature coming in as a copy of a cmc 3 or less from your sideboard
One major part of the eldrazi is that we aren't seeing the actual eldrazi, we're seeing in universe representations of figures much bigger than a single person can comprehend. I'd like it if purple or something like purple was used to explore that. I guess that is what colourless was, but I guess I just want more.
What a great video on a relatively obscure topic from MTG’s design history! As someone who’s experimented with 6-color design and even 10-color design, there’s a lot of interesting untapped space with extra color - but also a lot of very interesting difficulties that come with that space. I think Garfield and the rest of the design team found the perfect number of colors at 5 with how cleanly 5 both divides and combine to create cycles and color combinations, but I’d love to see a one-off/un-/acorn environment that experiments with one or more new colors. I need to revisit my concept from 2020 and clean it up for a better limited environment.
Thank you! My absolute dream purple card would have to be either in an acorn set or one of the test cards from the mystery booster products. It would cost like two and two purple and the only way you could cast it is with sources that say they tap for any colour.
@@HarrisontheManaDork I’ve worked on a custom set project that took that approach, sitting the purple pips in the activated ability of a colorless mana rock.
I honestly wish they would do purple and add it to the color wheel exactly where you said. Each color SHOULD only have one enemy. I always felt that purple should be space themed. It’s completely the opposite of nature and most of the creature could be alien types of some sort. The basic land would be something like asteroid and then purple creatures could have a specific ability for that color. Red gets haste, green gets trample, white gets vigilance, black gets deathtouch, and blue gets Unblockable. Purple would get the ability portal which would allow a creature to move where it wanted to effectively allowing it to attack any creature on the board. So instead of just declaring an attack and the opponent chooses the blockers, you can attack a particular creature or plainswalker. You could also bring back phasing for purple and refine its usage. It would be perfect. Blacks evil vs whites good, reds rage vs blues intellect, and greens nature vs purples science. Aside from the above mentions in portal or phasing, another possible ability could be to give a good portion of purple creatures the type “unknown” so they get no type bonuses but also no type hindrances. There are so many things you could do if you just get creative. There are many abilities that have only been done once that you could tweak and rename. Flanking was a neat ability that has not been around since alliances (no that I’m aware of) that could be assigned to purple creature as an ability that gives defending creature -0/-x and attacking creatures +x/+0 and call it ambush. Example would be an attacking creature with ambush gives the defending creature -0/-1 but when it’s defending it gets +1/+0. So many things you could do with it. Then to play a little catch up since the other colors have been around so long, do some reprints of things that would fit better in purple than their original color printing and release a set of these old cards just reprinted in their new home.
Colors not having perfect enemies probably lets their identities be more flexible. Though I have felt that green is a little too genericly nature based that it's hard to characterize it with the other colors that have a more of an focus on personality characteristics.
I love the idea of making purple unatural. I think they could make it work, maybe make a new card type too to give purple the room to do something differently to the other colors.
Wow, what a well produced video. I did not see the views or your subscriber count until the end. I thought I was watching a channel with 250k subscribers and a video with 100k views. Keep up the good work, you’re going places.
Inquest was published by Wizard Entertainment who began as Wizard Magazine, a comic book price guide with monthly articles. Inquest was their step into TCGs. They were not related to WotC. WotC published The Duelist.
If they had made it so each color only had 1 enemy and purple became Green's enemy, then I think the idea of making cities their basic land type would've been really flavorful. White and Black have a whole Life/Death, Law/Order dichotomy between them. Red and Blue have a Fire/Water elemental opposition thing going on. Meanwhile, if they had made purple's land type cities, then Green and Purple would've had a Nature/Synthetic sort of dynamic. If they leaned into this dynamic opposition to Green, it could've also inspired the design decisions behind what purple could do. It could have become the most heavily artifact focused color, taking that title from Blue. Meanwhile, it could've had powerful kill spells for creatures to put it in more direct mechanical opposition for Green. It would give them the 'flavor' of allowing Purple to do everything the other colors can do in a sort of 'knock-off' artifical way by leaning into the aesthetic of their cards being synthetic recreations of the natural abilities of the other colors. Also, from a gameplay standpoint, I would take the opportunity of introducing a new color to make it a fairly heavy counterspell color. The fact that blue has a near monopoly on counterspells, I've honestly never found healthy for the game. Also White is in a distant second place for counterspells compared to Blue, but it does at least lay the precedent that Blue's ally colors can dabble in counter magic, and in this new color pie Purple would be Blue's new ally so it would work out in that regard too.
A fun time mechanic, if it doesn't exist. Would be an x cost counter spell, that doesn't counter the spell but instead delays it for x turns. Place a die on the card and tick it down until it then gets back into play as if nothing happened.
It would be neat if we had "Gold" as a kind of mana symbol, as the inverse of colorless. Like... You could pay with any color of mana, and also the cards themselves would count as all five colors. Lots of interesting design space there.
i think that a good place for purple is to become the "reverse green" color. green is all about ramp and mana generation. Purple is all about "mana drain" cards that increase the cost of spells, cards that make the opponent generat less mana. green is all about big creatures, Purple will be all about creatures that drain other creatures, like they add -1/-1 counters or they get power based on who they are having combat with. they are all about draining the oponnent resources more than creating resources, while they can't be drained of resources. make "Cant be countered" a common purple key world, give purple cards a mix of abilities, for example, you can "pre-cast" a purple creature, and they come later with extra effects. make puplre the Exile color, Purple can't exisle cards, but can play around exile,
I recommend watching It is Dan Sheehan's video on Green in Magic. Really fun video essay that talks about Green in Magic the Gathering. I've linked it here. th-cam.com/video/gAvwYA84KJs/w-d-xo.html
Feel like purple, if they kept portals as the basic land, could mess with exiled cards. Think like sending a card into a portal to be lost forever, or pulling one out from a strange dimension. I know the entire point of exiling cards is so they can't be interacted with again, but it would be cool to have a whole color built around breaking that design rule. That unique property alone allows for so many possibilities without stepping on the other color's toes. The tradeoff is of course that purple can't do anything in the graveyard.
I think they could’ve made the Eldrazi purple since they’re extra-planar beings. The portal land type would’ve been a cool way to illustrate how they came into the main dimension.
Here is my take on how to balance purple! Powerful cards that state "you can only have 1 of this card in your deck" and have several purple/X multicolor cards. And make making purple mana a hassle (seeing that other colors have amazing dual lands...purple wouldn't) give us a black/purple hymn to torach that's modern legal and you can only have 1 in your deck. Fetch lands wouldn't grab purple lands! Give purple "bolt lands" with "you can only have 1 of this card in your deck" Purple can be advertised as a ancient kind of mana from before when the colors were all one. One issue that needs solved is lands that add 1 mana of any color! Mana confluence would spike! But also be on theme!
For purple 🟣 I think they could do a lot with weak creatures but effects like Phasing/Morphing enemy creatures, bottom deck manipulation, limiting card draw. Effects constrainted by hard once-per turn rules. Casting from other opponents exile, possession type effects. Maybe making enemy creatures timebombs (when this creature dies, it's controller loses X life) or (when this creature deals damage to [purple player], that player gains life instead of losing life). - rather than enchanting creatures with cards- it can make the enemy creatures "gain" that text. That has little direct counter play, but not insurmountable. Another card idea would be like Teferi's protection whereby all permanents you control phase out- but not you and no inherent protection of your life total- but for each creature that declared attack towards you that turn, you can phase in 1 permanent back in response. Very hard to see them implementing purple though, lack of cards, the iconic 5 colours printed on the back of cards would forever date the cards.
I heard about Purple being an additional color with Cave being its basic land type. To simplify product design, I could have seen the color system being a more simplified ROYGBIV + black & white. Perhaps one day, we will have orange, indigo, and violet // purple. In the meanwhile, I simply organize my cards using the 5 base colors (including devoid cards), gold // multicolir, artifact (no colored mana symbol) // colorless, and lands as my 8 color piles.
If I remember correctly another reason they decided not to do it is because they would have had to redesign the back of the card to include purple. Which was something they couldn't really do because that extra pip on the back would make it different than every other card not in that set. I may be wrong though and they never considered redesigning the back of the card and that was just something I heard
It could've been cool if we had a separate color pie which had deck building restrictions on including the color with the original pie colors like say orange being about selflessness so it cannot be played with black
MTG's color pie is infinitely better than D&D's alignment. Also, white wasn't "good", it's order. Pure white is basically Sauron or most Megaten Law Endings.
Honestly, they could introduce a 6th color, no problem. This game has been going for over 30 years. - there are a million examples of Red cards doing White effects, White cards doing Black effects, Green cards doing Red effects, etc. The notion that, for example, Haste "belongs to" or is even "mostly associated with" Red is long dead. Every color has done everything, and if you disagree, the Ravnica guilds exist. Look at Pokemon - discarding Energy for big attacks is mostly associated with Fire and Electric, but Water, Fighting, and Psychic have all had meta decks - not just cards - in the past few years with the same gimmick. Hell, even when they introduced archetypes for the 2021 block - Single Strike and Rapid Strike - the two played nearly identically almost immediately.
Maybe something purple can do is steal effects and keywords from the opponents. Not quite like copy and more like "Pay XX purple mana and target opponent creature, remove all effects from said target and replace this cards effects with the target creatures effects". This would work really well both long and short term since no matter what the players would play, the purple cards could keep up with any effect that comes out. Just a thought
Id argue that Artifice was intended to be the 6th colour. In the old magic books, they do alot to flesh out Artifice as a method of magic (a character in The Gathering Dark being one such mage). Artifice is also the foil to green - one is the mechanical world and one is the natural world - green is about destroying artifacts and flying things. This theory can be broken by saying that those are Blues domains but older artifacts were in all colours, and Mirrodin exists
I have an interesting idea for Purple. it would represent the unnatural or unknown, which would have creatures with high power but either no toughness or a worthy drawback for having the lowest CMC. its creature keyword could be something like Intimidate, hexproof, and it's unique keyword, Ambush (which makes it attack only on every opponents' combat phase instead of defending) as for noncreatures, it would excel in enchantment removal, exiling your hand as card draw, and exiling your own cards and being able to cast cards from exile, but it's fair drawback is having poor or no interactions with graveyards and cannot remove artifacts. I'm open to any feedbacks or criticism of this idea because I also want to know more of MTG.
Just a slight correction. Inquest wasn't published by WOTC but by Wizards Press. Similar name but different company, they were the same company that started off publishing guides to comics. Inquest covered games by lots of different companies, not just WOTC. WOTC also didn't publish 50% of TCG's in the late 90's, pretty sure they only had Magic, Jyhad (Vampire: TES), BattleTech, Netrunner and a few using the ARC system. There were absolutely loads of other TCG's around at this time as everyone was getting on the bandwagon. Inquest was a much more irreverent take on TCG's the WOTC's Duellist Magazine and I remember the colour purple article as being typical of the sort of stuff they published.
Imo, the way the color pie works is great, almost perfect. The way the colors interact with each other is very intuitive as it is, and like you mentioned, all their bases are pretty much covered. Adding a sixth color would simply change this sort of harmony in ways that (at least in my eyes) simply doesn't work. No need to reinvent the wheel, yk?
I very much agree. I think learning the colour wheel could be a valuable asset to learning how to write characters that actually feel three dimensional. It feels like a proper alignment chart. I do wish there was more of a foil to green but I also don't think that needs to be its own colour.
I completely disagree with the "one enemy" section with saying XY axis and including red as the enemy of blue. I think people got hung up on the "good vs evil" part and the misunderstanding of blue went over their heads. What you said of "blue can be a color to make people be better than they were" is THE MAIN IDEA of blue. it's not intellect, it's Study... Study in the sense that you're trying to be better than you were before. That is the soul of blue. And with that comes breaking up with Tradition which is one of the main ideas for Green. Blue is more ideally opposed to Green than Red. With Red being opposed to Blue in it's elemental facet (Fire vs Water) mainly.
lol I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'll have to do something that talks about the other colours that get referenced randomly by silver border products. I think there is at least one card that mentions gold too
A lot of people getting upset that I said "white is good and black is evil" My original intention is that this is how a new player would see the colour pie at a glance and then I followed it up with how it actually is presented.
edit: I probably could've worded that a lot better. This post and people's concerns have nothing to do with race.
second edit: The original comment that connected it to race was commenting on how people were being too sensitive. Since I've made the original edit, a bunch of people are falsely attributing this edit to mean that someone was offended that I was talking about race. No, it is just someone being annoying about a non existent person getting offended, and then a series of other people trying to dogpile on that. Oh what fun!
wouldn't have thought about you saying that for a second without the comment and the edit. now i'm raising the ol' eyebrows
That's .... THAT'S what people are worried about???
i didn't take it as terms of race, but how they are NOT about good vs evil. They are about what the value - White is about community and black is about selfishness. That is why The Orzhova are presented as the Mafia Church. They are their own selfish community. While can be evil and black can be good, like the D&D alignment chart.
So death is a good think and gaining life is bad. Damn. How thinks have chance.
@@DavidSilva-zz6ej YT keeps deleting my comments, but black = selfishness and white = community. Not death and life gain.
Awesome video! I never understood the appeal to Purple, but seeing it as the "unnatural" color compared to Green's focus on the natural world makes a lot of sense to me
Thanks! I wish there was more of an emphasis on colourless being the opposite of green now but unfortunately, since green is the best at ramping, anything colourless can do, green can do as well.
@CajunCatguy I'm with you. Eldrazi have things that steal someone's creatures, exile cards from libraries, and have annihilator. Green cultivates and things pop up; colorless erases and banishes them.
@CajunCatguy I think there's a decent chance in the next few years that we get more colorless/artifacts that require colorless mana. It's a significant enough consideration for mana bases that you can push a card with it more than an all generic mana artifact, while still potentially being playable in any color(s) of deck.
As a side note, while I recognize that there are design reasons they haven't/won't make another basic land type (Wastes being basics without a land type), I do kind of wish they would have made it so Caves could inherently tap for colorless. Except for the cycle of discover caves and the backside of some cards, almost all the caves they printed could make colorless.
And if they did change it, they could technically print a card that looked like:
Cave
Basic Land - Cave
(Tap: Add C.)
And it wouldn't _have_ to be considered a basic land type. (I'm also of the opinion though that most things in the game would function perfectly fine with a sixth basic type, iirc domain-style effect are the biggest concern/reason Wastes didn't have a land type, but very few cards would be actually busted by having another land type available)
@HarrisontheManaDork black is pretty much the opposite, life vs death
@@HarrisontheManaDorkMaybe I didn't investigate the lore enough, but for me: Black/White and Red/Blue oppositions aren't that perfect. As said in video, Red is the color of chaos and emotion, which is more opposed to White focus on order and stoicism than Black.
But let's say they add a new color to oppose Green. The purple/mind focus seems... not really opposed to Green. Green also encapsulates nature spirit and spirituality, which doesn't clash enough with purple. The truer opposition would be exploitation, industrialism, pollution and disregard to nature. A Tradition vs Progress thing.
So... Isn't an industrious Orange/Brown color more fitting than Purple, with a Hill terrain focus (with Mine and such) rather than a magic portal terrain? Some might say that Orange/Brown isn't the middle color between Blue and Black... but so is Red between Green and Black (Blue would have fit better there).
It could have a gameplay about drawing, sacrificing mana/terrain and having the sense of always going forward up to screw yourself (got most of your deck removed, yet only got 4 terrain but turn 10).
But... this is already encompassed with Red and Artifact already. Which makes me wonder why Red's exploitative isn't opposed to Green's nature preservation to begin with.
I am so sad that snow-covered wastes now exist,
One of my favorite whacky mtg facts was that there where 11 differently named basic lands, but now there are a nice round 12
I kinda love the joke of snow covered wastes. I wish there was some bigger application for them than Arcum's Astrolabe but I will also concede that we lost a great piece of trivia when it went from 11 to 12.
Petition to add Cave basics to make it a lucky 13!
@@HarrisontheManaDork i mean, it is ultimately a fine card to run in any deck that runs both cards that cares about colorless mana and runs snow mana cards, it doesnt necessarily need to be a colorless focused deck. It is a fine addition if you have snow cards and splash something like Null Elemental Blast and Eldritch Immunity, for example
@@Red-Tower would existing Lands with "Cave" in the name get errata'd to Cave?
@@HarrisontheManaDork For necrobloom, it means you can get its ability to proc with basic lands alone
To me, one of my absolute favorite things about the color pie is that no color has a direct opposite. The less symmetrical nature of having 5 colors really is what makes the game work. Yes, black and white seem like opposites, but, they, like their shared ally blue, value knowledge, black looking to leverage understanding for gain and white for order and structure. Red and blue may seem like opposites, but they both share the ambition of their shared ally, black, with red feeding mindlessly into its lust for glory and blue carefully, but resolvedly, crafting its way to its goals. Each enemy pair has some common ground with those they oppose, making each color pair a unique and interesting concept. If we had 6 colors, we'd have more diameteically opposed colors, making some color pairings feel so much more wrong, while making the rest feel so much less interesting.
I like that a lot. The asymmetrical imperfections give it more meaning
I get what you're saying, but at the same time, they already do have opposites black and white blue and red And before colorless came out, green was just seen as the neutral color now the addition of colorless green and colorless.
@@cablefeed3738 Where you around before colorless was released? I've been playing since the late '90's and I can assure you, at least from my perspective, that that was not the case before the colorless mana symbol was introduced, nor is it what colors are about even now. Black and white represent the opposite values of selflessness and selfishness, while green and black represent the opposite values of life and death. Blue and red are opposites in that one is led by logic and one is led by emotion, but blue and green represent opposite sides of the coin of the natural and the artificial (or maybe stated better as submitting to fate or controlling ones own destiny). Even red and white are strong opposites, with white being the color of order and red being the color of chaos. All the enemy color pairs are strong opposites, and always have been.
The point of my original comment is that this multiple enemy colors system is a really positive thing. If you're approaching it from the perspective that white and black are opposites and so are red and blue, as well as apparently green and colorless, than I'd encourage you to try looking at the color wheel from a star perspective, with two enemies to each color. This really adds a lot to the game for me, and is fundamental to my love of the game.
A great way to get into this mindset is playing a 5 player game, where you're all playing a mono-colored deck and whoever defeats their two opposing colors first wins. It's a lot of fun and can really be flavorful if everyone builds to their color's core identity.
@jaredwonnacott9732 I've done plenty of five player games where each person is one color. And if you read my comment again, I said that green was seen as neutral touching all four other colors. But that might have just been at my game store, where a lot of the same people were also playing Dungeons & Dragons. Friday night magic Saturday night D&D.
@@cablefeed3738 I love playing monocolored commander and have no idea what you’re talking about??? Yes every color can be made to play like another, that comes with the territory of a game several years old, but green does not play like the others. Red plays chaotically, often dealing large damage out of no where, but like emotions often burn out if dealt with long enough. Blue (my least favorite) plays like a logical chess game; each move curated to counter your threats while encouraging other threats while knowing everyone’s moves. Green plays brainlessly, anomalistically; you play big creatures and ramp uncontrollably, big stompy and all that. Black plays with blood, you hurt yourself to hurt everyone else like one takes back alley deals. Honestly white is the color which dips into all of them but very conditionally; white can draw, can destroy, can exile, and can grow and ramp but conditionally, as if someone maintaining conditional order.
Each color plays intentionally a specific way because that’s how they act.
Isn't colorless both a functional sixth color with wingdings, but also positioned as ideologically opposed to green by being the largest home for artifacts, and the second largest for stax effects and sacrifice outlets?
In theory, yes. In paper, I don't think so. Most of colourless' big flashy things are spells that cost like 10 mana. Green being the most ramp happy colour in magic can easily hit those. I think if two colours are going to be enemies, they shouldn't compliment each other that well.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI disagree. Opposing colors should help each other. White gives you life to pay the life with black. Blue and red both work together with sorceries and instants to storm
@@Chronor3 White and black are also great at both single-target removal and board wipes (which means that decks that combine them get to use the best options from both colors)
White and black are also good at making a bunch of cheap creatures for you to sacrifice.
Red and blue are also good at artifact stuff.
Green and blue are great at casting all the spells you draw, and casting big sea monsters.
Red and white are good at turning your armies of creatures into damage, and are good at combat-modifying abilities, like combat tricks or equipment.
Green and black are good at fuelling your graveyard strategies, including both dumping stuff into your graveyard and being able to spend mana to cast stuff from your graveyard.
Colorless really is a great opposite for green (which already thematically makes sense). It's basically what purple was meant to be, anyways, but with more artifacts (though purple would likely have a lot of artifacts if its core identity was "unnatural", which seems like what it was meant to be)
I would say that colorless is more akin to light before it hits a prism, speading out into what is the color pie of Magic. Embodying all colors, yet none. In a way, this also fits thematically with how many of the strongest beings of their time are also represented as colorless, Ugin, Urza and the Eldrazi for example.
Green is often tied to nature/life and collorless twist life and eats it till there's only wastes left.
On Reddit's Hellscube, a custom draft cube of humourous custom cards, there was a handful of purple cards in previous versions of it. Purple's main mechanic was interacting with the sideboard, and also just doing really weird effects that bend or break the rules of normal magic. The blue/red archetype interacted with purple the most, but it was something any color could splash. This was because most purple costs where the 2 generic/1 purple hybrid cost, so even if you don't have means of making purple mana you can play still play it.
Oooh, I really like the emphasis on making it easy to splash into purple. That would make it feel actually playable.
I was imagining that it would interact well with the board as well. It could be pretty neat.
If they wanted to, they could make more Snow-related cards to basically make it its own color, with its identity literally just being stealing from/meshing with other colors
I think to get the full effect would be if snow cards could be paid for in their regular costs or with snow mana. Like instead of two and a green, you could also pay two and a snow. Now that I type that out, I feel like that could be fun to play but miserable in draft.
I think it would have been awesome to have a sixth color that only pops up occasionally, but I understand why they droped it.
Honestly, colourless does a good job of this but I'd really like if it wasn't an eldrazi exclusive
@HarrisontheManaDork I mean it's not just eldrazi specific, devoid itself is. But myr, and with the introduction of vehicles they are starting to fill that spot up. Yeah, we didn't get dedicated colorless mana till oath but with all the artifacts and generic mana spells before then you could make the argument that colorless stealthily became the 6th color. It's now the color of technology whether it be new or old. It opposes green and those artifacts that require say color to cast could be considered dual color artifacts. As it's the color utilizing technology. Blue which is directly next to it allies best with it.
we have that in gold, don´t we ?
@@daftwulli6145and pink!
Black is clearly Mr. Burns due to his greed and ruthlessness, while Bart is red because he can't control his impulses.
Willy is green,
Because thats the colour of the highlands
For that bit, I used Mark Rosewater's guide. According to his blog, in WUBRG order, Marge is White, Lisa is Blue, Bart is Black, Homer is Red, and Maggie is Green. Although, I would agree if that went beyond the core characters, Mr. Burns would definitely be black.
@@HarrisontheManaDork I can't say I agree with Rosewater's thinking because Bart constantly showed remorse for his actions, especially in earlier to midseason episodes. Lisa being blue is a copout (I think there is a better argument there for green) and Homer is definitely Boros. Maggie is colorless.
Still didn't mean to nitpick your video, which was interesting I didn't know they actually made a joke purple, I thought there was one set pitched during the designer creation contest that had a new color
@@jrightly Maggie loves people. Colorless is emotionless. Lisa is pretentious like blue, Bart is often a selfish schemer, and Homer is often too distracted to follow rules, even resulting in the death of Frank Grimes the rules stickler.
@@CTimmerman pretentious eh? I guess you got counterspelled one too many times lol. The reason I think Lisa is green is because of her veganism and general concern for nature.
Having a new color (not necessarily purple) be a foil to green could be very interesting. You could have purple be technology and the base land be city as stated in video to counter green’s nature theme.
I really like it as a foil to green. In a way, blue does that but blue also feels a lot more focused on being red's foil than green
Yeah I thought of that too, always bothered me how green was just out of that scheme
@RenzZlax I mean you could consider colorless to be "the 6th color" as well artifacts do act as a foil in theme to greens typical nature loving ability. I run shorikai as my main commander deck, and it's a colorless deck at heart running mostly colorless creatures and the typical green fight deck is mad because we'll my stuff is mostly vehicles that do their own thing till I win.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI always thought of Colorless as Greens nemesis.
For instance, Artifacts are historically More Colorless than not, thus satisfying the Anti Technology bent.
Additionally, Green is traditionally the color of Overproducing Mana in Color/Multiple Colors.
Whereas Colorless might produce a lot of Generic/Colorless Mana, or Artificially produced Mana of Color..., usually so problematically that Wizard's later bans/restricts it. _😮MOX's, we're looking at you._
.............
Besides which, I've usually reasoned that Purple Mana is Five Color Split Mana.
Looking at the Color Pie...
Five colors in a wheel... Gold/Multi color is all over... Generic/Artifact Backlit's the pie... Colorless/Eldrazi tops it...
Split Mana is in between, with Purple Taking the Center, almost Naturally.
@@whackify agreed. Artifact/Generic(colorless?) Against Green...
It just works.
Honestly, i am glad this color never came to fruition - Colorless expresses the original idea of Purple infinitely better than having "Purple" could ever do. You can make Purple by mixing Red and Blue, but you can't make Colorless by mixing colors, as Colorless drains the color from the world around it, twisting the ideas found in those colors.
Colorless opposes green since its other worldly and artificial as well
Moron
Inquest was not published by Wizards of the Coast. Their magazine was The Duelist. Inquest was published by a totally separate company called Wizard Press which also published price guides for comic books and other things. Wizards of the Coast. Wizard Press. I could see how you might mistake the two. BUT I WAS LIKE THERE, MAN. I bought issue one of Inquest and Duelist.
I'm looking back at my sources. I definitely glanced at the one and wrote down the other. Whoops
@@NicksMagicstorytime I still have all my Magazines I ever bought. Duelist, inquest, scrye, topdeck. 2 milk crates full.
I feel like the colorless cards really did fill the gap that purple would have used.
Like the idea of opposing nature with death or civilization wouldn't have worked in my opinion since those are already themes of other colors and I don't think they would have really fit that well into the surrounding colors. But opposing the natural with the unnatural and otherworldly seems like a fitting idea. And Purple being an ally to blue, the ones that seek knowledge, and black, the ones that seek power even at a cost. Would be fitting, while it being sort of enemies/neutral with white&red too since those colors actually care a lot about the things in the world, so they'd be opposed to a color that is so unnatural and rewrites reality.
The only weird change would be blue & black going from allies to neutrals/enemies, but I'd say that egotism can work just as well against logic as it can work toegether with it.
Heck even artifacts kinda work as an opposite to green, so I guess in a way greens opposite are the colorless cards.
I wholeheartedly agree. It does then frustrate me that since a lot of the big flashy colourless cards are high mana value, it means that green is better positioned to run colourless cards than the others.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkyou can say the same about red and blue both being good at playing alot of low cost cards quickly, or white and black both being good at removal and life gain
Purple would have been more like an unnatural, alien-like, horror theme, it could have worked for sure, just look at Duskmourn, the entire expansion could have been used for a consistent theme on Purple, maybe with Delirium and Manifest being THEIR own thing from the start
As someone in a lot of custom magic spaces, the "colorless as a sixth color" analogy is actually used all the time to describe how to design those cards! Great video!
Colourless not being a colour feels like the most pedantic piece of rules text in all of Magic. I love that there is at least some community out there that values colourless for what it is.
I feel like your stance on Purple changing the amount of allied and enemy colors is spot on. I too share the opinion that Green is sort of the middle man when it comes to a direct enemy/ally, and a 6th color would make it much more streamlined.
I really like the one for one enemy colours dynamic too. Like I get where red and white are enemies but they have more overlap than white and black. Sure they're enemies, but black feels like the an absolute nemesis.
They could've had purple have suspend type abilities, sacrificing instantly casting things for having a mana discount, and cast powerful spells, or maybe it gets more powerful the longer it's susoended, and you can choose when to cast it like Plot, and used "When this enters" abilities because of the portal theme, as the enemy of green, that would all fit rather nicely. Especially because green focuses on mega creatures, so the color purple focusing on increasingly powerful spells makes sense.
There definitely is a lot of fun space to play around with in purple and a time theme.
@@HarrisontheManaDork especially with the doctor who universes beyond stuff. There's certainly room for it but it's kinda too late for a new color plus devoid/artifacts exist.
And it was great that they made the Time Shifted Symbol PURPLE.
Man Time Spiral was just the best block. I think it may have been my favorite block ever overall.
I remember playing a Standard tournament just before Time Spiral rotated out. I showed up with Time Spiral slivers (only using cards from that Block) and swept the whole thing. No one was prepared for Slivers with all the latest tribes showcased. The only game I dropped was in the finals to an aggro tribal goblins deck. But I made him scoop a game when I showcased the deck's six card infinite lifegain combo, Dormant, Reflex, Gemhide, Darkheart, Pulmonic, and any 1 cost Sliver(I used Sidewinder and Virulent.) You just put Dormant's draw effect on stack, tap for the mana used to cast the 1 cost, sacrifice it to gain 3 life and put it on top of your library, then draw.
My land base mostly only showed Green and White between Basics and Horizon Canopy, but I could branch out to all 5 colors with Gemhide Sliver, and barring that, I also had Gemstone Mines. Since none of my Slivers ever had more than 1cc that was blue, black or red, the Mine would work in a pinch. I also kept it hidden by playing it as late as possible, so people would be lulled into a false sense of security thinking I only had access to green and white if they kept the Gemhides in check.
Slivers may have gotten a bad reputation, but the way I balanced that deck was one of my proudest deckbuilding moments. So many little combos like Quilled and Fungus to turn a mere 2/2 into an absolute monstrosity. Homing to find any puzzle piece I needed with Slivercycling.
@@voshadxgathicI'd actually love to see your full decklist if you still have it somewhere!
I wasn't playing at the time but every now and then I find myself on the scryfall pages for these sets and I could just read these cards forever.
I remember when planes walkers first came out (I was in middle school lol) and I remember saying something along the lines of "what are they going to do next, add a sixth color?!)
Every now and then, there is a new "death of Magic" where people online get a little too ahead of themselves when talking about something they don't like. It would be funny to look back at some of those earlier "death of magic" events.
It should be "Space" High power cards that take time, things like Black Holes, Space Ships, Aliens." It should play with "time".
@@meektheshy Or maybe like Prime magic in WoD.
I guess we'll find out in 2025
The color pie always seemed to me as an interesting alignment system like in D&D. Pretty much, a way of philosophically grouping anything and everybody into one of a few groups. It seemed that it might have been a central part of many other games and tie them all together, but alas, that was not to be.
I’d personally like to see some more cards that are like snow permanents in concept. Snow is such a cool idea
I think I need to be sold on snow more. It really doesn't excite me too much and there are way too many cards that should be snow but aren't.
Purple (or some other theoretical color) could be really cool as a mechanic if it only appeared in dual+ color cards. It could be a very powerful mana type with _no_ basic lands, the only way to get it would be through lands and other cards with harsh requirements. Kind of an engineered scarcity to block powerful cards.
The epilogue i think nails it, and i would say was the true solution all along, the idea of a "Forced" colorless cost effectively lets you do what a new color would do, the manabase was already there essentially, and making a colorless basic land (Wastes) just made it official
Now you can make those cards that steal from everything else, but also lock-in a "New" color cost to worry about, while also not doing anything new per-se
Honestly, fuck the reserve list
Maybe take it out for dinner first
@HarrisontheManaDork Looks at "average" cost of reserve list cards. I'll pass.
Flavor-wise, a sixth color opposed to green sounds great and opens a lot of fun possibilities. But in practice it would have been a logístical nightmare to implement and would cause some problematic ripples in eternal formats and even for the limited formats of future reprint sets like Modern Masters, it would force them into a super awkward position
I think if they tried it a lot earlier into magic, it would be fine by now. It wouldn't be as good in old formats but like modern forward would've been fine.
It only being one set really makes that more of a nightmare and would have been something everyone would know is dead in the water a couple years after release.
I have an idea to reintroduce purple into MTG
Otherworldly Inversion
It's name is a play on the words "inverted" and "invasion"
It can be it's own card game, it's colors can either have the themes of their original but pushed to the extreme, or invert their original's theme.
White = Purple
Purple could be synonymous with control and expansion, basically Conquest. Their land is portals, and that could tie into the themes of conquest, like the purple Planeswalkers are using other worlds as batteries for their spells.
Red = Magenta
Its land is caverns
Blue = Cyan
Its land is tundra
Green = Yellow
Its land is junkyards
Black = Gray
Its land is clouds
What if purple was about reflecting damage and spells at the caster. It could be Greens enemy because it defies the natural order of things by it also being able to delaying spells and transfers mana from past turns. Like it uses four mana in turn a and turn be it gets that four mana for that turn alone.
I was going through the first few sets and it became very apparent that the original colour pie was designed around fantasy class archetypes.
Blue mage
White knight
Red barbarian
Green Druid
Black necromancer
It absolutely was the most basic of basic fantasy ideas and they just had to work backwards from there.
Honestly I feel like the original set of purple, including the “portal” lands could work as a color type based around the idea of taking from other colors. Not like “direct damage and card draw”, but instead it contains all the time, creature, and mana stealing blue mostly gets. It might not be the most balanced or coolest but a whole color based around taking your opponent’s stuff, fusing your own creatures to create more powerful versions, and copy/mirroring would be awesome to see
As a Whit/Black player I gotta say that I absolutely love the color system and how there's just so many different combinations for so many different play styles
a real fun mechanic i could see purple doing is a double edge sword play style. hurt yourself to hurt other players even more. most magic cards that are similar in that aspect are board wipes, hurting yourself for benefits (ex. pay 2 life draw a card, draw 3 discard 2) and rule changing cards. id like to see pay life destroy target. or when controller draws/discards, other player draw/discard. i know there are plenty of cards that fit this theme (mostly red and black) but its not really a staple. idk, i dont play magic as much as i used to so maybe im just throwing an idea thats already there.
It makes metatextual sense that Purple would be the color of disruption, of breaking the norm and the natural. Because that is exactly what it would be doing, by simply existing it would disrupt the entirety of the color pie.
I feel like magic may have been better for it if they could have figured out what unique mechanics to give it.
Inherent to the nature of the color pie, it would also have to steal from its allies, and then its allies would have to steal from theirs and so on. It would most certainly be a mess and all the colors would end up changed. If it were to work purple would need to lean into exactly that, it being change and upheaval.
I absolutely adore when Magic's mechanics can properly reflect and tidbits of the lore. When Battle for Zendikar dropped and the lore was that there were a bunch of Eldrazi, and that set led to eldrazi decks running rampant, that was perfect to me. I very much agree with your ideas how they could have properly addressed adding a new colour. I think since they were on a time crunch and knew they needed an idea, they went with something they could do without much hassle but given infinite time, it'd be cool to see something like what you mentioned where it feels like it is properly integrated.
I like that the sixth color we ended up with is colorless, because that also goes with what you are saying. It's so unnatural that it exists outside of the color pie completely.
I wish they had decided to add purple, and I wish they had it be a permanent thing instead of just a one-off if they did.
The reason is simple - now that they don't print hate effects anymore, you really forget that colours like red/white or red/blue are supposed to be enemies. They complement each other too well gameplay-wise. Maybe if they had added a sixth colour and made it so each colour only had one enemy we'd still be seeing hate effects and colour enemies would still seem important instead of just a flavour thing in the background.
0:15 I'd say the four awesome things; don't forget how interesting the attack/blocking system is, it makes for a lot of good microdecisions.
I feel like it could be really cool if purple popped up only on certain planes and didn’t always stay on the same spot on the color wheel some kind of un natural force corrupting the natural colors.
Turns out all purple needed was for cards to cost an obscene amount of mana… except for those few cards… and that land that made them cost 2 less, and also except for that other land than made 2 mana for just purple. Im sure it was all fine really.
I think it’d be cool if purple was a Jack of all trades. It could go into the centre of the colour wheel as it’s core.
This was super cool. I remember that issue of inquest when i was in middle school - back in the day with Orcish Lumberjack, Ball Lightning, and Bedserks.
I did get a chance to try to rebuild that deck with green when the colourshifted cards came out.
I always thought it was just a joke and they never actually considered following through with it. Gotta say, i agree with all of their reasoning as well as the decision to not let it go through. The idea of messing with turn phases was kinda cool - but that would be really disruptive to gameplay.
Great video!!!
Thanks! I almost bought a copy online but shipping was like double what the actual thing cost. They come back to the idea of messing with turn order and stuff like that every now and then. It is definitely best in small doses.
I think the main reason we'd never get Purple as a color is that they'd have to change the cardbacks to reflect the new color pie. They haven't even removed the little scribble on the Deckmaster logo (hell, even the Deckmaster logo itself), so something tells me they're not going to want to update the WUPBRG dots
Purple should be all the cool physical actions like Chaos Orb or Enter The Dungeon, so when someone is mono purple you know your in for a Mario Party match.
Oooo a new magic creator i haven't seen before!! Happy days
Thank you for the support!
For purple the idea of anchoring could be perfect for a purple mechanic though it feels similar to green mutation I think they're called, it's been awhile since I played, idea is purple version of mutations/enchantments that isn't permanent always shifting allowing for much more flexibility and if anchoring card attached to a creatures card for example was going to be destroyed the player can have that card move another card like sort of parasite that won't die before everything else does, this affect is fast how ever as counter some of purple anchoring cards don't play nice with other anchoring cards while some anchoring cards can be packed on same card.
Purple anchoring cards are classified as anchoring #. the number being 1~9
When a single card has two anchoring cards attached to it with same numbers they become unstable and will cause both anchoring cards and cards they are attacked to to be banished at the end of the turn they were placed on the same card, however if they don't have the same anchoring number they will remain stable so in theory a non anchoring couple card could have maximum of 9 stable anchored cards
The idea of purple is powerful but highly unstable and twisted Nature instead of going to the graveyard or back to the deck or something they are usually banished out right, it is mirror of nature while also being Nature, do to this both types of nature of green and purple cannot coexist easily like how matter and dark matter are said to eliminate each other's existence or something like that a similar affect is happening.
They should make purple mess with shuffling, turn phases, bottom deck manipulation/drawing, cards exiled by opponents, etc
My favorite color shifted card is Dash Hopes because like Mana Tithe, nobody sees it coming. A close second would be Darkness, and while not being a card from Planar Chaos, is still a really funny gotcha card because nobody expects black to have a Fog/Holy Day effect. Rounding out my top 3 is Brute Strength simply because its Giant Growth shifted to red. Color shifted cards are my favorite gender.
I love me a good fog and the absolute best fogs are 1 mana, and the absolute perfect fogs aren't green. It isn't perfect but throwing down Festival out of nowhere is always a blast.
8:16 The other problem with making purple a worse version of the other colors... white already exists HEYOOOO
I think an underrated aspect of the color pie is the thematic conflict between green and blue - green's connection to the "natural world" implies its relationship to things that are concrete and physical. Blue, of course, often relates to things that are ethereal, or conceptual, or that change their form. Not that green represents things that are immutable, but they change in predictable ways that make sense. Hydras grow, werewolves transform back and forth - these things are pretty much "natural" in a fantasy setting. In contrast, blue things become duplicates of other things, or turn things into sheep or frogs, or do whatever Morphling is doing (though that's not so exclusive anymore). I think Simic, the guild itself, is interesting in this way - they're all about taking ordinary natural things and shaping those things to fit whatever they can imagine.
The hypothetical purple could have focused on space, time, the planes, and the ways to get to everywhere and everywhen. Plus the alien influences like the Phyrexians still could have been in that new color. This design process is wild.
Maybe as a signature creature type purple could have horrors, weirds, changelings, possibly even eldrazi? All of those give me the feeling of being unnatural
Ooh, yeah, I like that a lot. The creature types that have to be created. Have some of the ones you mentioned on the lower end along with stuff like homunculus and then the eldrazi at the top. 10/10
Here's the colour pie, oversimplified and boiled down to each colour's core.
White: Devotion
Blue: Intellect
Black: Ambition
Red: Passion
Green: Individual Might
Not sure if this was said, but what if purple was centered around taking control of other people's cards from anywhere, such as playing from your opponent's grave, hand, or library. Also the ability to temporally remove things like blink affects that only affect opponents. I think this would make it the opposite of green both in the lore and gameplay wise, while also making feel in-between blue and black. Using your abilities to take control of the destiny of others ( Card Steal).
Also think this is fun because purple's power would be based on opponents. Which really plays with the testing fate theme that a color opposing Green should have.
My main concern with that idea is how it is reflected in the commons and uncommons. Removal and interacting with your opponents cards is something that is inherently powerful and would need to be seriously reigned in.
Purple being a thing would be dope, could be a streamlined mix of black and red in gameplay. Maybe specifically an emphasis on exile and playing out of the exile pile and cloning.
Love seeing others talk about purple. For yhe past year or so ive been remastering a lot of old purple cards ive found all over the web and posting them to reddit. I've got a lot of insight on the huge variety of mechanics people have made for purple, and a google drive full of purple cards
Seeing custom cards and people talking about it on reddit was definitely an inspiration for me to originally come up with this video.
Green is the center of the political compass because everything tends to want to live and grow.
I am so glad you mentioned how green feels like the oddball out. Now I love how they did colorless but I could have seen it being the opposite of green. It is the unnatural with constructs, creatures outside reality, and mana itself. The thing is it being not a part of the color wheel fits too well in the current role. Because it is in the middle so it does take parts from everything, it is the in-between of the wheel so all can easily use it but it is all the border around the wheel because it is outside the wheel. That gave it a identity.
the tcg called wastelands, that came out 2 years after mtg and functions just like it but without lands and with 7 colors, indeed made an 8th color that is purple and represents everything unnatural 1 year before the prank article.
I think if they had fully tilted into it, being an opposite of green, making Purple the defacto artifact color makes the most sense. There would've been a lot more stuff to iron out, but I think that would've been the best place to start
Planar Chaos Fat Pack was my first set of cards that got me into the game
Alosis functions more like a creature that is suspended for a turn, but can still block. On the following turn, it becomes an enchantment.
I'm not sure how one might go about turning this into an effective keyword for creatures becoming enchantments the following turn, either mechanically or lore wise, but it sounds pretty cool.
Colourless really is the 6th colour imo, love its theme of being both a tool or machine sentient or not but also lovecraft abominations that are impossible to comprehend in terms of motive or reason.
The ironic thing about this is that yellow fits into the intended color pie oppositions better than purple or colorless does given that Magic has black vs. white. So, red vs. green was an intended opposition besides blue vs. yellow. Within this scheme, yellow would have primarily been the color where you normally had to play your cards to find their identities during a match. This probably would have been implemented physically by color shifting the backs of its cards.
If I had to make the 6th color, I would use the idea of portals. Make the color the best one to shift things in the battle field (Change ownership of permanents, suspending cards, temporaly removing/disabling creatures, creating copies of permanents) as a way to illustrate the portals sending and pulling things to and from random places or places more advantageous for the purple player.
Adding onto that, maybe being like a Meta commentary of magic, like being able to change the direction the players are taking turns in, or interact with real world things outside of the board, have a lot of emphasis on plane changing and stasis counters maybe a new mechanic sorta like poison counters but like insanity or something
I think an interesting idea for doing purple is by making it a sub system- a secondary smaller deck of cards you bring with you to play that is drawn to its own (smaller) hand of cards, with a cost to entry: playing a purple land requires you to remove two basic lands from your field, but grants you the ability to play into purple cards, with most only requiring 1 or 2 purple mana (& some mana of any colour) to play for accsess to somewhat tweaked & twisted versions of the other colours effects
This allows anyone from the solo green to the madman running all 5 colours to play into purple, but playing purple in of itself slows down game ramp by forcing you to permanently trade 2 mana from lands for a single purple mana, a cost that prevents it from speeding up games too much
Eldrazi, with their colorless pips, was truly an elegant solution to the desire to add a sixth color 😅
An interesting space for purple would have been "reality distorting" effects that no color had; effects that intentionally break the rules or break the 4th wall in a way -- almost an "un" set, but not as goofy. For example, effects that swap players' libraries or graveyards, or that let them draw from their sideboards, etc. This would also include randomized effects, changing the structure of a turn (for example, making untap steps occur after combat), etc.
If green's emphasis is on natural order, then purple's could be about unnatural chaos.
Purple is literally blue and black together. If there was a 6th color, it would make sense for it to be orange, this being the classic 4 type combo of colors. The 4 type combo lose their identity and get homogenized. Black Blue Green and Red is nothing different from Black White Green and Blue. Of course these cards already exist, but being recognized as their own thing, the orange (works with brown or yellow as well) could work to simplify things a bit. An orange card could be treated as the combo of ANY 4 other colors except orange. It might actually work with orange as part of the 4 types actually. So instead of having the any 4 mana and one other color for example, a 4 orange could mean any 4 colors but 1 each not a combo of 3 of a color of another or 2 of a color and 2 of another color. It must be 4 with 1 of each. This would be the only thing that would make sense as a 6th color. Other than this, I cannot think of anything else that could exist that cannot be put into an already existing color already.
I had a subscription to Inquest from 1997 to 2000, still have them in pretty good shape
Another fun thing they could've looked at would be a whole new color set just as a one off gag, I think an unset might be able to have some fun with it. But instead of just adding purple to the existing world, they get a whole new gang of five like Orange, Purple, Brown and other colors that look and feel similar, but act very differently from the original pie
Ive thought about there being a purple color to magic years ago and always thought it would belong almost exclusivly to eldrazi. The idea that itd be antithesis to green, ie nature, would make sense given the eldritch themes of eldrazi. Imagine if purple was the only color that could retrieve things from exile or a purple creature coming in as a copy of a cmc 3 or less from your sideboard
One major part of the eldrazi is that we aren't seeing the actual eldrazi, we're seeing in universe representations of figures much bigger than a single person can comprehend. I'd like it if purple or something like purple was used to explore that. I guess that is what colourless was, but I guess I just want more.
What a great video on a relatively obscure topic from MTG’s design history! As someone who’s experimented with 6-color design and even 10-color design, there’s a lot of interesting untapped space with extra color - but also a lot of very interesting difficulties that come with that space. I think Garfield and the rest of the design team found the perfect number of colors at 5 with how cleanly 5 both divides and combine to create cycles and color combinations, but I’d love to see a one-off/un-/acorn environment that experiments with one or more new colors. I need to revisit my concept from 2020 and clean it up for a better limited environment.
Thank you! My absolute dream purple card would have to be either in an acorn set or one of the test cards from the mystery booster products. It would cost like two and two purple and the only way you could cast it is with sources that say they tap for any colour.
@@HarrisontheManaDork I’ve worked on a custom set project that took that approach, sitting the purple pips in the activated ability of a colorless mana rock.
My favorite color-shifted card is Sinew Sliver, because it helps carry my pauper slivers deck
I honestly wish they would do purple and add it to the color wheel exactly where you said. Each color SHOULD only have one enemy. I always felt that purple should be space themed. It’s completely the opposite of nature and most of the creature could be alien types of some sort. The basic land would be something like asteroid and then purple creatures could have a specific ability for that color. Red gets haste, green gets trample, white gets vigilance, black gets deathtouch, and blue gets Unblockable. Purple would get the ability portal which would allow a creature to move where it wanted to effectively allowing it to attack any creature on the board. So instead of just declaring an attack and the opponent chooses the blockers, you can attack a particular creature or plainswalker. You could also bring back phasing for purple and refine its usage. It would be perfect. Blacks evil vs whites good, reds rage vs blues intellect, and greens nature vs purples science. Aside from the above mentions in portal or phasing, another possible ability could be to give a good portion of purple creatures the type “unknown” so they get no type bonuses but also no type hindrances. There are so many things you could do if you just get creative. There are many abilities that have only been done once that you could tweak and rename. Flanking was a neat ability that has not been around since alliances (no that I’m aware of) that could be assigned to purple creature as an ability that gives defending creature -0/-x and attacking creatures +x/+0 and call it ambush. Example would be an attacking creature with ambush gives the defending creature -0/-1 but when it’s defending it gets +1/+0. So many things you could do with it. Then to play a little catch up since the other colors have been around so long, do some reprints of things that would fit better in purple than their original color printing and release a set of these old cards just reprinted in their new home.
Colors not having perfect enemies probably lets their identities be more flexible. Though I have felt that green is a little too genericly nature based that it's hard to characterize it with the other colors that have a more of an focus on personality characteristics.
I love the idea of making purple unatural. I think they could make it work, maybe make a new card type too to give purple the room to do something differently to the other colors.
Wow, what a well produced video. I did not see the views or your subscriber count until the end. I thought I was watching a channel with 250k subscribers and a video with 100k views. Keep up the good work, you’re going places.
Thank you! Your kind words are very appreciated!
Inquest was published by Wizard Entertainment who began as Wizard Magazine, a comic book price guide with monthly articles. Inquest was their step into TCGs. They were not related to WotC. WotC published The Duelist.
I like how colorless was new and also there all along.
If they had made it so each color only had 1 enemy and purple became Green's enemy, then I think the idea of making cities their basic land type would've been really flavorful. White and Black have a whole Life/Death, Law/Order dichotomy between them. Red and Blue have a Fire/Water elemental opposition thing going on. Meanwhile, if they had made purple's land type cities, then Green and Purple would've had a Nature/Synthetic sort of dynamic.
If they leaned into this dynamic opposition to Green, it could've also inspired the design decisions behind what purple could do. It could have become the most heavily artifact focused color, taking that title from Blue. Meanwhile, it could've had powerful kill spells for creatures to put it in more direct mechanical opposition for Green. It would give them the 'flavor' of allowing Purple to do everything the other colors can do in a sort of 'knock-off' artifical way by leaning into the aesthetic of their cards being synthetic recreations of the natural abilities of the other colors.
Also, from a gameplay standpoint, I would take the opportunity of introducing a new color to make it a fairly heavy counterspell color. The fact that blue has a near monopoly on counterspells, I've honestly never found healthy for the game. Also White is in a distant second place for counterspells compared to Blue, but it does at least lay the precedent that Blue's ally colors can dabble in counter magic, and in this new color pie Purple would be Blue's new ally so it would work out in that regard too.
A fun time mechanic, if it doesn't exist. Would be an x cost counter spell, that doesn't counter the spell but instead delays it for x turns. Place a die on the card and tick it down until it then gets back into play as if nothing happened.
It would be neat if we had "Gold" as a kind of mana symbol, as the inverse of colorless.
Like... You could pay with any color of mana, and also the cards themselves would count as all five colors.
Lots of interesting design space there.
i think that a good place for purple is to become the "reverse green" color.
green is all about ramp and mana generation. Purple is all about "mana drain" cards that increase the cost of spells, cards that make the opponent generat less mana.
green is all about big creatures, Purple will be all about creatures that drain other creatures, like they add -1/-1 counters or they get power based on who they are having combat with.
they are all about draining the oponnent resources more than creating resources, while they can't be drained of resources.
make "Cant be countered" a common purple key world, give purple cards a mix of abilities, for example, you can "pre-cast" a purple creature, and they come later with extra effects.
make puplre the Exile color, Purple can't exisle cards, but can play around exile,
Interesting point about the fact that green is just it's own wheel. They've definitely given green enough abilities for it to just be it's own game.
I recommend watching It is Dan Sheehan's video on Green in Magic. Really fun video essay that talks about Green in Magic the Gathering. I've linked it here. th-cam.com/video/gAvwYA84KJs/w-d-xo.html
Feel like purple, if they kept portals as the basic land, could mess with exiled cards. Think like sending a card into a portal to be lost forever, or pulling one out from a strange dimension. I know the entire point of exiling cards is so they can't be interacted with again, but it would be cool to have a whole color built around breaking that design rule. That unique property alone allows for so many possibilities without stepping on the other color's toes. The tradeoff is of course that purple can't do anything in the graveyard.
I think they could’ve made the Eldrazi purple since they’re extra-planar beings. The portal land type would’ve been a cool way to illustrate how they came into the main dimension.
Here is my take on how to balance purple!
Powerful cards that state "you can only have 1 of this card in your deck" and have several purple/X multicolor cards. And make making purple mana a hassle (seeing that other colors have amazing dual lands...purple wouldn't) give us a black/purple hymn to torach that's modern legal and you can only have 1 in your deck. Fetch lands wouldn't grab purple lands! Give purple "bolt lands" with "you can only have 1 of this card in your deck"
Purple can be advertised as a ancient kind of mana from before when the colors were all one.
One issue that needs solved is lands that add 1 mana of any color! Mana confluence would spike! But also be on theme!
For purple 🟣 I think they could do a lot with weak creatures but effects like Phasing/Morphing enemy creatures, bottom deck manipulation, limiting card draw. Effects constrainted by hard once-per turn rules. Casting from other opponents exile, possession type effects. Maybe making enemy creatures timebombs (when this creature dies, it's controller loses X life) or (when this creature deals damage to [purple player], that player gains life instead of losing life). - rather than enchanting creatures with cards- it can make the enemy creatures "gain" that text. That has little direct counter play, but not insurmountable. Another card idea would be like Teferi's protection whereby all permanents you control phase out- but not you and no inherent protection of your life total- but for each creature that declared attack towards you that turn, you can phase in 1 permanent back in response.
Very hard to see them implementing purple though, lack of cards, the iconic 5 colours printed on the back of cards would forever date the cards.
I heard about Purple being an additional color with Cave being its basic land type. To simplify product design, I could have seen the color system being a more simplified ROYGBIV + black & white. Perhaps one day, we will have orange, indigo, and violet // purple. In the meanwhile, I simply organize my cards using the 5 base colors (including devoid cards), gold // multicolir, artifact (no colored mana symbol) // colorless, and lands as my 8 color piles.
If I remember correctly another reason they decided not to do it is because they would have had to redesign the back of the card to include purple. Which was something they couldn't really do because that extra pip on the back would make it different than every other card not in that set. I may be wrong though and they never considered redesigning the back of the card and that was just something I heard
It could've been cool if we had a separate color pie which had deck building restrictions on including the color with the original pie colors like say orange being about selflessness so it cannot be played with black
MTG's color pie is infinitely better than D&D's alignment. Also, white wasn't "good", it's order. Pure white is basically Sauron or most Megaten Law Endings.
Honestly, they could introduce a 6th color, no problem. This game has been going for over 30 years. - there are a million examples of Red cards doing White effects, White cards doing Black effects, Green cards doing Red effects, etc. The notion that, for example, Haste "belongs to" or is even "mostly associated with" Red is long dead. Every color has done everything, and if you disagree, the Ravnica guilds exist.
Look at Pokemon - discarding Energy for big attacks is mostly associated with Fire and Electric, but Water, Fighting, and Psychic have all had meta decks - not just cards - in the past few years with the same gimmick. Hell, even when they introduced archetypes for the 2021 block - Single Strike and Rapid Strike - the two played nearly identically almost immediately.
Maybe something purple can do is steal effects and keywords from the opponents. Not quite like copy and more like "Pay XX purple mana and target opponent creature, remove all effects from said target and replace this cards effects with the target creatures effects". This would work really well both long and short term since no matter what the players would play, the purple cards could keep up with any effect that comes out. Just a thought
Id argue that Artifice was intended to be the 6th colour. In the old magic books, they do alot to flesh out Artifice as a method of magic (a character in The Gathering Dark being one such mage). Artifice is also the foil to green - one is the mechanical world and one is the natural world - green is about destroying artifacts and flying things. This theory can be broken by saying that those are Blues domains but older artifacts were in all colours, and Mirrodin exists
There was MtG: Arena book (fantasy story book) where there was purple magic as forbidden house. It was cool
That gives me hardcore Dimir vibes. I really like doing that with something like purple though. So secret that they don't even end up on cards.
I have an interesting idea for Purple.
it would represent the unnatural or unknown, which would have creatures with high power but either no toughness or a worthy drawback for having the lowest CMC.
its creature keyword could be something like Intimidate, hexproof, and it's unique keyword, Ambush (which makes it attack only on every opponents' combat phase instead of defending)
as for noncreatures, it would excel in enchantment removal, exiling your hand as card draw, and exiling your own cards and being able to cast cards from exile, but it's fair drawback is having poor or no interactions with graveyards and cannot remove artifacts.
I'm open to any feedbacks or criticism of this idea because I also want to know more of MTG.
Just a slight correction. Inquest wasn't published by WOTC but by Wizards Press. Similar name but different company, they were the same company that started off publishing guides to comics. Inquest covered games by lots of different companies, not just WOTC. WOTC also didn't publish 50% of TCG's in the late 90's, pretty sure they only had Magic, Jyhad (Vampire: TES), BattleTech, Netrunner and a few using the ARC system. There were absolutely loads of other TCG's around at this time as everyone was getting on the bandwagon. Inquest was a much more irreverent take on TCG's the WOTC's Duellist Magazine and I remember the colour purple article as being typical of the sort of stuff they published.
Purple as the city color, and the color of Stax is very perfect :P
Stax as in "one land a turn, green" and "no combos"
Purple's land being cities is such a homerun when it is contrasted to green's forests.
Cities are a white thing though. @@HarrisontheManaDork
Imo, the way the color pie works is great, almost perfect. The way the colors interact with each other is very intuitive as it is, and like you mentioned, all their bases are pretty much covered. Adding a sixth color would simply change this sort of harmony in ways that (at least in my eyes) simply doesn't work. No need to reinvent the wheel, yk?
I very much agree. I think learning the colour wheel could be a valuable asset to learning how to write characters that actually feel three dimensional. It feels like a proper alignment chart. I do wish there was more of a foil to green but I also don't think that needs to be its own colour.
I feel.like everything you have attributed to purple is basically just what colorless is now. We have 6 branches but only 5 colors.
I completely disagree with the "one enemy" section with saying XY axis and including red as the enemy of blue. I think people got hung up on the "good vs evil" part and the misunderstanding of blue went over their heads. What you said of "blue can be a color to make people be better than they were" is THE MAIN IDEA of blue. it's not intellect, it's Study... Study in the sense that you're trying to be better than you were before. That is the soul of blue. And with that comes breaking up with Tradition which is one of the main ideas for Green. Blue is more ideally opposed to Green than Red. With Red being opposed to Blue in it's elemental facet (Fire vs Water) mainly.
If this isnt about pink I will be very disapointed
Ok this was way more interesting.
lol I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'll have to do something that talks about the other colours that get referenced randomly by silver border products. I think there is at least one card that mentions gold too