Color Philosophy, A Primer

This post is going to be a little weird, particularly if you're here for the legal theory. This is going to be different from my last primer, about the six modalities of constitutional argument. But I got involved in a discussion about this stuff on Bluesky over the weekend, and I said I wanted to write about it at greater length, and I honestly think that this little suite of ideas is one I will keep coming back to, particularly in exploring ethical rather than political philosophy topics. So, here goes:

I am here today to talk about Magic: the Gathering.

Yes, you heard me right. The trading card game. For nerds.

Because the thing is, I actually think there's a surprisingly powerful philosophical framework embedded in the mechanics of this trading card game for nerds. It has certainly proven a useful framework for my own thinking about a lot of stuff. So if you've the patience, bear with me for a while as I explain the philosophy of the five colors of Magic.

Magic is an endlessly complex game, of course, and has more rules than you can shake a stick at. But at its core, as head designer Mark Rosewater loves to say, are three basic ideas:

• The idea of a trading card game
• The mana system
• The color wheel

The last of these is my focus here, but the first two are necessary to explain them. The central idea of a TCG is that it's like a board game except the pieces don't all come in the box. Instead, there are hundreds – thousands – by now about 30,000 – different pieces you can play with, and every time two players sit down to play a game they bring a slightly different collection of those pieces to the table with them. This idea has been copied endlessly, including by one Kazuki Takahashi, the author of one of my favorite stories of all time, Yu-Gi-Oh! (I absolutely refuse to be ashamed of being a total nerd haha. Also if you think you know Yu-Gi-Oh! from the English dub of the anime, you are wrong, it's a total travesty: the Japanese manga and anime are in fact High Art.)

Anyway, the second idea, the mana system, has also been copied endlessly, though notably not by Yu-Gi-Oh! It's basically a way of controlling the pace of the game, to ensure that the players don't just play the very most powerful cards in the game right away. The way this works in many games is that you get one "mana" (often called something else, presumably for copyright reasons) that you can use to pay the costs of your cards on the first turn, and then on the second turn you get two mana, then three, and so on. This way you begin with playing cards with modest effects, building slowly to the more powerful, swingy part of the game.

In Magic specifically, this is done by creating two kinds of cards, both of which go in your deck: lands and spells. Lands make mana; spells cost mana. Roughly speaking, each land can produce one mana each turn, and you can play one land each turn, building up in that same one-two-three-etc. pattern. Though because you have to put the lands in your deck, there's variance: you might draw too many lands, and not have enough spells to play that will actually affect the game, or you might draw too few lands and be unable to cast the many spells you have access to.

The third and final piece of the trifecta is intimately related to the mana system. The function it serves in gameplay is to ensure that people don't just jam all the strongest cards in the game into the same deck in a homogeneous fashion. This is accomplished by creating five "colors" of mana: white, blue, black, red, and green. Different spells require different colors of mana to be cast, and different lands produce different colors of mana. So if you want to put red spells in your deck, you need lands that make red mana. If you want to put cards of all five colors in your deck, then you need lands that can make all five colors of mana, which you have to pay various deckbuilding costs for; broadly speaking you're trading off the power of having access to all five colors for lessened consistency. This one is the most distinctive to MtG; it's copied some, but most games with a mana system don't have different flavors of mana like this.

Now, to serve that gameplay function, the five colors don't need to be anything other than five separate things. But a huge part of why the game has been so successful is its aesthetics, and the five colors are an enormous, and emblematic, part of those aesthetics. Each color has certain associations, which relate to the kinds of cards that use that color of mana. And while, again, this is in a sense just a gameplay device, over time the colors have come to have whole philosophies associated with them. This allows us to look at something other than a Magic: the Gathering card and ask "what color would this be?" And I've found that, strangely enough, this can be a very powerful analytical tool. I feel like I understand something better when I feel like I understand its color identity.

The purpose of this primer, then, is to explain what each of these five colors is about, so that when I want to speak this language going forward, y'all have the slightest idea what I'm talking about. So, without further ado!

White

White is the color of peace, order, civilization, light, healing, compassion, righteousness. White mana is represented by the symbol of the sun, and is produced by the basic land Plains. White magic includes healing, protection, and rule-setting. But white is also adept at battle, characteristically employing a style through which many individuals, though not separately strong, work together as a team and become greater than the sum of their parts.

Many instinctively associate white mana with moral goodness, but this is an oversimplification. No color is either good or bad, as such. White is the most concerned with a certain kind of unyielding virtue. But it is also the color of hierarchy, and can in that way become tyrannical. Not out of the desire to dominate as such, but out of the simple belief that there must be order. White characteristically disdains not only the ruthlessness of black but the chaotic individualism of red.

Blue

Blue is the color of knowledge, curiosity, sorcery, scholarship, artifice, self-improvement. Blue mana is represented by a water droplet, and is produced by the basic land Island. This is by a clear margin the least intuitive of the five colors' elemental associations, but I take the connection to be reflection. The blue mage's most characteristic trick, which no other color can imitate, is countermagic, which unravels another player's spell and stops it from ever taking effect. In keeping with this, blue is often highly controlling. Even when it fights more proactively, blue rarely engages its opponent directly, preferring instead to delay and deflect their threats while evading their defenses.

It would be wrong to say that blue is the color of intelligence; as white lacks a monopoly on virtue, blue cannot claim one on wisdom. But it is the color that values knowledge the most, and which most dedicates itself to the pursuit thereof. This can lead it to be cold and aloof. Blue disdains red as rash and impulsive, unwilling to think before it acts. And it sees green as brutish and backwards, opposing progress as "unnatural."

Black

There is no way around it: black is the color of death. Black mana is represented by a skull, and it is produced by the basic land Swamp (a slander on swamps, frankly, which in reality teem with life). But beyond this, black is the color of power, ambition, persistence, sacrifice, ruthlessness, individualism. Of shadow and skullduggery, the color that embraces what others fear. Much black magic brings death and destruction, but the quintessential black spell is reanimation, bringing the dead back to life. Black's fighting style is extremely flexible: since it is willing to pay any price for power, it has access to a broad range of techniques and abilities.

People often think black is evil. And to be honest, they have reason to! Black would often respond to such allegations not by refuting them but by saying something like "there is no such thing as good or evil, there is only power." Sounds like something a villain would say, doesn't it! But as with white, this is an oversimplification. There is such a thing as a black-aligned moral philosophy! It's called utilitarianism, which, though it looks to the greatest good, is without scruple in its pursuit thereof. The utilitarian places no means off-limits if they can be of use, and, if necessary, is willing to sacrifice some for the greater good of others.

Moreover, black's goals need not be wicked ones. Black can be fiercely loyal to those it cares about. Have you heard the old philosopher's chestnut about how friendship is theft, that caring more for some than others is anti-egalitarian? Yeah, black doesn't give a damn. And sometimes what black really wants with power is simply independence.

Black, naturally, sees white as naive and hypocritical, while it sees green as weak and therefore vulnerable.

Red

Red is the color of freedom, of passion and of impulse, of the dragon and the phoenix, of the spreading fire that consumes all with lust or anger or, well, literal fire. Red mana is represented by a blazing fireball, and it is produced by the basic land Mountain. Red is, by far, the most aggressive color, seeking to win as fast as possible by directly attacking its foe with fire and lightning. It cares less about accumulating resources for the future than about acting in the present.

Red can be violent and chaotic. But its passions are not only the destructive ones: red also feels gentler emotions like love with a particular ferocity. Red is also the color of the artist's impulse to create simply for the joy of creativity. The core belief is that people should be free to act on their feelings. Thus, red sees white's rules as stifling, and blue's reason as calculated, abstract, false.

Green

Green is the color of nature, growth, cultivation, harmony, wilderness, innate potential, ancient roots, of the web of community and the connections between all things living. Green mana is represented by a sturdy tree, and is produced by the basic land Forest. Green magic is often used for so-called mana ramp, generating an overwhelming abundance of mana that can be used to, say, summon enormous beasts to trample their foes underfoot.

Green can be gentle and nurturing, or it can be wild and ferocious. Such is nature. Its most powerful rage is reserved for all things unnatural, for those who think they can do better than eons of evolution and coexistence. Thus, green opposes both the artificial "progress" of blue and the grasping ambition of black.

Note that these colors can also combine in any number of permutations. And although the color pairs are divided into "ally" and "enemy" (I have sketched out the enemy pairs in the descriptions above), in practice a color can work with its enemy just as well as with an ally. There just might be a bit more tension involved.

I don't want to give as thorough a description of each of the ten color pairs as I did for the individual colors, but I will give a brief sketch of some typical ways that each of the pairings might manifest:

• Blue-white, also known as Azorius, is often very concerned with law, which uses reason and scholarship to impose order upon society.
• Blue-black, a.k.a. Dimir, is typically very sneaky and underhanded, using secrets and lies to manipulate others.
• Black-red, a.k.a. Rakdos, is typically chaotic and violent, devil-may-care – the exact opposite of the Azorius.
• Red-green, a.k.a. Gruul, is full of wild savagery. They typically aren't much for thinking, and instead prefer smashing.
• Green-white, a.k.a. Selesnya, is all about natural harmony. This is where the more nurturing side of green comes to the fore.
• White-black, a.k.a. Orzhov, can manifest, among other things, as a kind of fierce tribalism. It will be ruthless toward outsiders so as to secure peace and harmony for the in-group.
• Blue-red, a.k.a. Izzet, is all about wild creativity, adding that chaotic red energy to blue's intellectual pursuits.
• Green-black, a.k.a. Golgari, revels in the natural cycle of life and death, seeing each as equally important and worthy of reverence.
• Red-white, a.k.a. Boros, is often oriented toward martial valor. Boros fights, but typically for something bigger than itself.
• Blue-green, a.k.a. Simic, is another one that can look pretty different in different contexts. Green makes a natural pairing with the wilder, more elemental side of blue. When paired with the scientific side of blue, however, the result is a philosophy of improving upon nature.

There are also three-color combinations with their own philosophies, even more subtly refined than the two-color pairings, but I think this is enough to be getting on with for now.

Note that all of this is just my own take on things. If you are interested in reading more about color philosophy, Mark Rosewater has written endlessly about it over the years, and has collected all of those resources here. (I don't always agree with his perspective though, especially in matters of philosophy rather than game design as such.)