The Color Pie is Stale – A Rebuttal

 Like every Thanksgiving, I had to choose between multiple flavors of pie for dessert (the correct choice is always apple). But this Thanksgiving, there was another pie that I just couldn’t get out of my head: the color pie.

            On November 14, Brian DeMars ran an article on ChannelFireball called “The Color Pie is Stale.” In this article, DeMars makes several claims, but the fundamental argument is that Wizards of the Coast should relax the rigid boundaries between the mechanics allowed in each color. Doing so, he says, would lead to increased depth and more options for players. Along with the mana system and the trading card game format, the color pie is considered by Mark Rosewater (head designer for Magic) to be one of the “golden trifecta” of genius ideas that Richard Garfield had when he created Magic. The color pie is fundamental to the game, so this is a bold suggestion; does it have merit?

            First off, DeMars asserts that the color pie is for flavor, not mechanics. He provides key concepts that he associates with each color that are emblematic of that color’s philosophy. While his are a reasonable approximation, I prefer the more nuanced motivations provided by Rosewater:

White - peace through structure
Blue - perfection through knowledge
Black - power through opportunity
Red - freedom through action 
Green - growth through acceptance

DeMars then provides marquee mechanics for each color. Again, I’m going to revise his list slightly to make it more accurate, pulling from the June 5 Rosewater article on color pie mechanics:

White: Banisher Priest-like effects, preventing action, pumping the team (one-shot), destroying large creatures, destroying attacking creatures, damage prevention/redirection, enchantment interactions, tokens, “pacifism” effects.

Blue: Bounce, card draw, countermagic, copying permanents, flying, flash, artifact friendly, hexproof, instant/sorcery friendly, looting, prowess, milling, tapping/untapping

Black: Sacrifice, graveyard interaction, destroying creatures, Deathtouch, Discard, drain life, tutoring

Red: Artifact destruction, temporary copies, +N/+0 to team (one-shot), deal damage to creature/player/planeswalker, extra attacks, first strike, forced attacks/blocks, freeze land, “Impulsive draw,” temporary mana production, wheeling

Green: Artifact destruction, animating lands, can’t be countered, enchantment destruction, fighting, creature friendly, land friendly, life gain, mana production/ramp, Trample, token generation

            The list above is a fraction of the full number of mechanics that each color is “primary” in, and DeMars’ list is even narrower. He then goes on to make two claims. First, that the narrow list he’s constructed is a boring set of clichés about each color that stems from nothing more than historically seeing which tournament decks perform the best. Explicitly stated is that these mechanics are not flavor-related. Second, he claims that the color pie has always been (and still is) unbalanced.

            Regarding his first claim, it is easy to show that, in most cases, the mechanics are in fact strongly connected to flavor. Why does White exile? Because it doesn’t philosophically believe in killing, except in self-defense (destroy attacking/tapped creature) or to protect the weak (destroy creature with high power). Blue seeks to gain knowledge, so it draws more cards and is friendly to artifice. As for Black, just look at the list of keywords and things it cares about; it becomes pretty clear as to what the flavor of Black is. Red is emotional, impulsive, and aggressive. Its mechanics grant it temporary card, mana, and combat advantage, usually at the expense of long-term advantage. Its mechanics also make its creatures really good at attacking. Green, the color most connected with nature, destroys anything “unnatural” (artifacts or enchantments), interacts with lands, and is the most creature-centric.

            As Rosewater has stated in the past, when flavor and gameplay come into conflict, gameplay will usually win out. Additionally, R&D must be careful, as generous applications of flavor can justify almost anything mechanically. I certainly do not claim that every mechanic given to each color has a direct connection to flavor. Yet it is undeniable that each color, overall, has a strong philosophical connection to the set of mechanics it is allotted. DeMars actually provides a list of cards that he says should feel wrong purely due to mechanical considerations. For example, he creates a black spell that destroys an artifact or enchantment, suggesting that it feels wrong because it’s not something that Black has mechanically done in the past. But Black’s lack of mechanical ability stems from its philosophy; highly dependent on killing, Black cannot interact with something that is not alive. It can destroy all living permanents (planeswalkers, creatures, lands) and cannot destroy any nonliving permanent (artifacts and enchantments). The same arguments can be made for DeMars’ other sample cards; they don’t feel wrong solely because of a lack of mechanical precedent. They feel wrong because they violate the philosophical identity of the color.

            DeMars’ second claim is that the color pie has always been unbalanced and always will be unbalanced. To argue his case, he compares the set of Jace planeswalkers to the set of Chandra planeswalkers. He then points out that the Jaces do more, drawing the conclusion that it is because Blue is more interesting and has more design space than Red, which is an example of a color pie imbalance. However, this assessment lacks nuance.

            First, Jace planeswalkers doing more than Chandra planeswalkers does not indicate anything about the mechanical space of Blue versus Red. The planeswalker card type was only introduced in 2007 in Lorwyn, meaning they’ve been around for less than half of the game’s life and can only suggest, at most, a mechanical space for the last ten years. But even this upper bound is far too generous; planeswalkers are not supposed to be emblematic of their entire slice of the color pie! When Liliana of the Dark Realms was printed, it felt wrong, even though all the card’s abilities were within black’s color pie. Why was that? Because the character that the card represented was a necromancer, not someone who cared about Swamps and black mana. As such, pretty much all other Liliana cards work with discard and the graveyard because that is Liliana’s power set, not because that is all Black is capable of doing. Chandra is a pyromancer, and pyromancers light stuff on fire, ie, they deal damage. Jace is a mind mage, granting him a far wider set of abilities. Additionally, Jace is the most popular character in the Magic multiverse, thus incentivizing Wizards to print Jace cards that are exciting and have more variety. Of the other four monored planeswalkers (Daretti, Koth, Sarkhan, and Tibalt), only three of their combined twelve abilities deal damage.

            Another reason that looking at planeswalkers as an indication of the color pie is a bad idea is because planeswalkers are mythic rares. There are incredibly few printed and most Magic players, who play casually, will never see all Jace cards and all Chandra cards side-by-side. They are much more likely to see commons and uncommons, and at this level, the full breadth of each color’s abilities is on display. This problem is symptomatic of a wider problem in DeMars’ article, which is that it takes an extremely competitively-oriented view of the game. He talks about mythic rares and Tier 1 decks, when, in fact, most players have no idea what Tier 1 decks are. It is easy, when you are a particular type of player, to assume that others will think and care about the same things as you, but, as a paid writer for ChannelFireball who regularly plays on the Pro Tour, DeMars is actually in the minority.

            So yes, Jace cards do more than Chandra cards. But Jace and Chandra are different characters with different popularity and different power sets, at a rarity many players won’t see, who are not intended to be representative of their entire slice of the color pie. DeMars claims that Chandra is not interesting because Red is not interesting, but that claim takes an extremely narrow view of the role of planeswalkers in Magic.

            The Jace vs. Chandra case was made in support of his larger thesis – that the color pie is and always has been unbalanced. When the game was first created, Blue was certainly the best color (again, at a competitive level) and Green was the worst. It is not a coincidence that, at the beginning of the game, spells (which Blue cares the most about) were overpowered and creatures (which Green cares the most about) were underpowered. Wizards has recognized this problem and has been correcting it by weakening spells (and therefore Blue) and strengthening creatures (and therefore Green). This is why many players who have played since the beginning complain of Wizards making Blue terrible and Green too good.

Do I agree with everything that Wizards has done with respect to the color pie? Of course not. For one, I think that Wizards has given Green too much card advantage and justified it by tying it to permanents. But the important takeaway is that Wizards has recognized that the colors were imbalanced and took steps to move in the right direction. Similarly, they’ve realized that Red is somewhat narrow in the set of mechanics available to it. That’s why, over the last couple of years, they’ve experimented with giving Red new, in-flavor abilities such as “impulsive” drawing and land-freezing. Again, steps in the right direction.

            Globally (from the beginning of the game to the present), the color pie should be balanced, and Wizards continuously works to balance it in terms of power and mechanics. On a shorter time scale, however, the imbalance of the color pie is a feature, not a flaw. In Shadows Standard, White was a must-play color. In Dragons Standard, Blue was a must-play color. The pendulum swings over small time scales because people like different things and Wizards likes to give all players a chance to have their color be competitive. Again, though, we must take a step back. This is development, not design; we’re talking about Tier 1 decks, while most players will play only casually, at the “kitchen table.” These players see far more commons and uncommons, and when this larger card set is considered alongside the rares and mythics, the color pie becomes still more balanced, even on short time scales.

            DeMars’ piece eventually leads to his radical proposal: that opening up the color pie will open up more options for players. The final rung of the ladder taking him here is the claim that the color pie is what produces the aggro/midrange/control/ramp/etc archetypes. He further argues that Tier 1 decks are either “broken-mechanic” decks or one of the above “cliché” decks. By loosening the restrictions of the color pie, he believes that we would have, for example, more blue aggro decks and green control decks.

            This is true. Tier 1 decks do tend to either exploit a broken mechanic or take on the shape of a familiar archetype. But, yet again, most players do not play with or care about Tier 1 decks. Furthermore, and this is the crux of everything, the color pie is not what generates the list of “cliché” archetypes. Try to come up with a deck, for a moment, that is not an aggro deck, a midrange deck, or a control deck. Not ramp, not combo, and not a mishmash of these five fundamental archetypes. You can’t because they don’t exist. Do they not exist because Green doesn’t have counterspells? Of course not. These archetypes exist because of the way that Magic: the Gathering is built. Expanding the color pie does not change the archetypes available to players. The only thing it changes is which colors tend toward which archetypes.

            So is this a worthwhile goal? I cannot emphasize enough, in the strongest possible terms, that the answer to this question is an unequivocal “NO!” The color pie is absolutely fundamental to the game. DeMars has claimed in his comment thread that he is not arguing against eliminating the color pie, only giving colors access to other colors’ mechanical space at a higher cost. But how is this meaningfully different from eliminating the color pie altogether? If all colors have access to all abilities, even at a higher cost, then the fundamental brilliance of the restrictions that the color pie provides is lost.

This effect can already be seen in the Commander format with cards like Desert Twister and Chaos Warp; the existence of these cards, even with their downsides (high cost/random effect) undermines the key weaknesses of their respective colors. Why is it important for colors to have weaknesses? Because weaknesses force players to dip into other colors to cover these weaknesses. If each color can do anything given a high enough mana cost, then it is often not worth it to take the hit to the manabase that splashing a second color would require.

            Additionally, the existence of strengths and weaknesses within each color is what gives colors their identities. Planar Chaos, the set with color pie breaks throughout, does exactly what DeMars proposes. What is the result? The same archetypes, but different colors. The other, far more damaging result from breaks within Planar Chaos and the Commander product line is that non-enfranchised players become confused as to what each color is supposed to represent and be doing. When players see all colors doing everything, the colors cease to be distinct from each other, and color means nothing.

            In conclusion, DeMars first argues that there is no connection between flavor and mechanics, which is demonstrably incorrect. He then argues that, on a large time scale and on a small time scale, the color pie has always been imbalanced, and this is a bad thing. In fact, the color pie on a large time scale tends always toward balance, and imbalance on a small time scale is a feature, not a bug. His final claim is that the “cliché” archetypes of Tier 1 decks are an emergent property of the existence of the current color pie, when they are actually emergent from the structure of the game itself. DeMars ends his article with the proposal that increasing the mechanical space of each color will increase the number of viable archetypes for players, which, because archetypes come from the game and not the color pie, is again incorrect.

            I hope that, as you digest what was hopefully lots of pie from the Thanksgiving weekend, you also take some time to digest the arguments presented here. The color pie is fundamental to Magic as a game, and DeMars’ proposals and lines of thinking are dangerous to its continued existence.

Ryan is a grinder from Boston with SCG & GP Top 8’s and a PT Day 2. His fragile self-esteem is built on approval from others, so be sure to tell him what you think of his articles on Twitter @RyanNormandin.