[Question 6] Weakest and Strongest Colors?

[Peter_Rotten]

What is Legacy's weakest color and strongest color? Why? If you were to rank the colors, what would your ranking be? What are the most played and least played colors? Do you see a correlation between the strongest color and the most played color?

If you are looking to further develop your answer, feel free to reflect and comment on some of the ideas found in the following two threads that raise issues relevant to this week's question:

1. Fixing Green.
2. Legacy: Red's Format?

[Machinus]

Blue
Red
White
Green
Black


There is a weak relationship between the strength of a color and the amount it gets played. It doesn't define it though. What really matters is how good individual cards are from each color. There are only sixty cards available in a decklist, so even one or two cards that are playable from a color can constitude a big percentage of a decklist - see UGW threshold.

Blue and red are the most highly played because they contain some of the most powerful individual cards in the format.

(I hope I have recreated my previous post on this adequately. I don't remember what I wrote)


UPDATE

I notice a lot of different answers to this question. I'd just like to clarify mine somewhat.

To me, this question is about deckbuilding, not format analysis. A a color's overall effect on the format means something different than it's effect on a deck. Blue is a much better color to build a deck with than red, because red's good cards don't work together, while blue's do.

I also think it's an important observaton that Eldariel made - a big reason why red has such apparent strength is that is very good against the traditionally strongest color, blue.

[Tacosnape]

Oo. A fun question!

First off, Legacy has never been more balanced in strength of color than it is now. So these rankings by no means indicate I believe certain colors are overpowered or certain others need fixing.

But here we go anyway.

1. Blue
2. Black
3. Red
4. Green
5. White

Blue and Black do things no other colors do: Provide disruption packages that work against absolutely everything. Blue does it in Countermagic, Black does it with Discard. Blue gets Force of Will and secondaries like Daze, Counterspell, Spell Snare, and Stifle. Black has Duress, Hymn, and Cabal Therapy.

In addition, Blue has the best draw spell in Legacy (Brainstorm), and Black has terrific acceleration (Dark Ritual), several undercosted threats, and several tutoring spells.

Red is somewhere in the middle. Despite the disruption it lacks, Red does what it's meant to: Beat you in the face. It packs a vast array of Burn, all the Goblins, board-sweeping damage spells, the best artifact removal in Legacy (Shattering Spree), and one of the best tutoring spells (Burning Wish)

Green, I think, has moved from being the worst color to the second worst with recent printings. It has several undercosted superthreats like Nimble Mongoose and Tarmogoyf, an excellent removal spell in Krosan Grip, one-card engines like Life from the Loam and Survival of the Fittest, and is part of some of the best multicolored spells, like Pernicious Deed. Green still can't get rid of a creature or stop a combo, though.

White has probably fallen to the weakest color, which is a difficult assessment to make given the strength of Swords to Plowshares and the fact that it's the only color that can really do absolutely everything. It just does none of them exceedingly well. Beyond STP, Meddling Mage, and Armageddon/Ravages of War, White offers very few amazing tools and outside of a select couple decks has largely been reduced to a splash color.

However, I personally think the color scheme in Legacy is as balanced as it has ever been right now. Blue hasn't gotten anything decent printed for it in about six sets, and as a result other colors are catching up. Green's additions of Tarmogoyf and Krosan Grip got it out of the doghouse, and Survival and Loam continue to be strong decks. Red is still strong, with Empty the Warrens picking up slack where the creatures are dragging. Black is holding strong, as discard is one of the strongest strategies in Legacy right now. And even White, despite being at the bottom of the list, is not underpowered by any means, as it still possesses the absolute best removal spell in the format, as well as a handful of other tools.

[Peter_Rotten]

Although I have had an easy time picking the weakest color, the strongest is tough for me to spot.

Red, however, presents a pretty convincing case. It currently has EtW – maybe the best storm win condition currently legal in the format. It has the best wish of the five colors – Burning Wish – to get the best storm wincon and other broken goodies. It has the best team of synergistic beaters – Goblins. It has one of the better answers to both EtW and Goblins – Pyroclasm. To top it off, Red also has rather versatile removal that can be aimed at the opponents head (see the Bolts in Red Death). Also, the red ritual effects enable the color to make EtW truly bomb-tastic. Lastly, that stupid Fledgling Dragon is nothing to scoff at.

If Red is Legacy’s strongest color, then Blue and Black are fighting for a close second place. Although Blue will always have a place in Legacy’s upper tier decks since it has the best draw spells, cantrips, and free counters, I think that Black may have a slight advantage over it. Black – with its proactive disruption - may at first glance be a little weaker than blue, but let’s look at Black’s cards. Hand disruption is still viable, and Engineered Plague has become an even more valuable card since it can answer a horde of EtW tokens. Dark Ritual will probably forever be the best ritual in the game. Leyline of the Void is replacing Tormod’s Crypt as graveyard hate of choice. Unfortunately, neither color has great win conditions. Brain Freeze requires a huge storm count. Black weenies are decent (but rarely impressive) beaters that come with a price attached (See Carnophage, Sarcomancy, Rotting Giant, Negator). One card that may soon give Black a boost is Bridge from Below. Unfortunately, Legacy is a format ripe with yard hate and creatures (that die and go to the owner’s graveyard), so that card may never pan out.

Green’s strengths will involve lands and critters and both are generally easy to answer. It has the best undercosted beats – Tarmogoyf, Werebear, and Mongoose – and great (but slow) card advantage engines – Survival and Life from the Loam. Green also seems to be an easily splashable color. However, its formerly sought after mana accelerants like BoP and Elves are not keeping up with the changes in the meta. Also, Green rarely does anything too broken or disruptive. It seems to play its critters and hopes that you can’t kill ‘em.

I believe Legacy’s weakest color to be white. White offers the best targeted creature removal spell, but there seems to be a huge drop off in quality Legacy White cards after STP. The “best” creature sweeper, Wrath of God, isn’t that great anymore since it often comes online too late (especially for EtW), forces you to have a heavy commitment to a weak color (), and can’t handle hasty goblins. Its best LD spell, Armageddon, also comes online a little too late for the current meta. Its creatures cost too much or are simply too ineffective. White’s most fearsome weenie is Jotun Grunt, which often kills itself with its upkeep. Otherwise, what white weenie do you fear? The hound? Mother of Runes (a highly overrated card for far too long)? Silver Knight? Avenger? White’s best fatties are, once again, too slow: Exalted Angel, DoJ, and Eternal Dragon, have all seen a significant decline in play. Whenever I play with White, I never get that, “Oh, this card is so good, I feel like I’m cheating” feeling. White seems too fair.

So in short, I tentatively believe the order of strength to be this:

Red
Black
Blue (I’m particularly shaky about Black being better than Blue)
Green
White

Last point: Gold cards turn my list on its head. Green and White probably have the strongest Gold cards in PDeed, Mystic Enforcer, MMage. Blue and Black are regulated to the middle tier, while Red multicolored cards rarely see play.

[Zilla]

I'd base my answers to questions about objective power based primarily upon cards which have the highest impact on the format as a whole, and secondarily upon versatily and efficiency.

From this standpoint, red is unquestionably the most powerful color in this format. The two cards which have the highest impact (and potentially unbalancing effect) on the rest of the format are Goblin Lackey and Empty the Warrens. These two cards alone force every single other deck in the format to have an early (first or second turn) answer to them; if they don't, they're extremely likely to lose the game.

In addition the most format-impacting cards, red has a great deal of versatility. It has one of the most efficient and versatile removal spells available in Lightning Bolt. It has efficient mass removal in Pyroclasm and Pyrokinesis. It has insane amounts of accelleration in Goblin Lackey, Goblin Warchief, Simian Spirit Guide, Desperate Ritual, Seething Song, and Rite of Flame. It has one of the best tutors in the format in Burning Wish. It has efficient, resilient artifact removal in Shatering Spree. It has some of the most efficient blue-based control hate in Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast. It has some of the most efficient storm-based combo hate in Pyrostatic Pillar. It even has one of the best draw engines in the format with the Vial/Ringleader combo. Red's greatest (and only) weakness is its inability to answer enchantments, which are arguably the least prevalent threats in the format (although a continued increase in popularity of Aluren and Enchantress may change this.)

Last, red provides far and away the most viable mono-colored strategies in the format, most notably Vial Goblins. Red is versatile, efficient, and highly relevant in its effect on the construction of essentially every other deck in the format. It is the "best" color in Legacy, bar none.

The second "best" color would be blue, simply because Daze, Stifle and Force of Will have the second highest impact on the way other decks are constructed and played behind Lackey and EtW. Both cards will allow any deck running them to keep pace with the extremely fast nature of the format. Add in Brainstorm + Fetchlands as the most efficient draw engine in the format, combined with the strength of cantrips as a means of consistency and you have a very powerful color indeed.

It's important to note, however, that blue's role is almost entirely one of support. As a mono-color strategy, it is basically unviable in this format. Solidarity was once a counterexample, but that deck is simply too slow now to compete with the other combo in this format. I'm not sure how relevant this distinction is, however, since the same applies to almost every other color besides red.

Black is the third "best" color in Legacy. Cards like Dark Ritual, Duress, Therapy, and Tendrils are having an increasingly strong impact on the format. This color's power is largely responsible for blue's effectiveness in the format. Without the strength of turn 1 combo, aggro would have a stronger place in the metagame, and blue would in turn be less effective. As fast combo continues to gain ground, the other colors (most notably green and white) will continue to experience a decline, which will keep both blue and black in positions of prominence.

Green is the fourth strongest color, based almost entirely upon Nimble Mongoose and Tarmogoyf. These are very fast, efficient threats which can at least hope to keep pace with Goblins and combo. It also provides engines to the more popular combo-control strategies in the format, Enchantress and Aluren. Its combination of aggressively consted beaters, acceleration, combo engines, and efficient removal (Naturalize, Oxidize, Krosan Grip) make it a fairly strong color. Its relative slowness, lack of answers to creatures, and difficulty with fast combo make it relatively weaker than red, blue, and black though.

White is the weakest color. This is due almost entirely to the rise in prominence of fast combo. While Orim's Chant and Abeyance are decent against combo, they are simply not enough. Glowrider and Rule of Law are strong anti-Storm options, but they are quite often too slow to matter. The same applies to Wrath of God and Armageddon. Silver Knight is fantastic against Goblins, but is pretty crappy against most other things, and the rise of combo also means rise in stock of aggro-control decks like Thresh, which lowers the viability of Knight and other efficient beaters like Isamaru. Jotun Grunt and Serra Avenger are quite strong, but they're also relatively slow. Typically neither one will come online and start attacking before turn 4, which is a full turn or two behind Goblins' and combo's fundamental turn.

White's greatest strength is Swords to Plowshares, but even that is losing relavence, given that it's completely dead against combo, and isn't enough on its own to make a difference against Goblins. White is still a very strong support color, thanks to Meddling Mage and StP, but overall it offers the least objectively powerful options available by far.

In summary:

Red
Blue
Black
Green
White

[SpatulaOfTheAges]

From a different angle, I'm going to rate in terms of cards I'm afraid of seeing.

1. Red(Goblin Lackey & Friends + Empty the Warrens)
2. Green(Tarmagoyf, Aluren, Survival, Life from the Loam)
3. Black(Tendrils of Agony, Hymn to Tourach, Dark Ritual into anything, Dark Confidant)
4. Blue(Cantrip into whatever-you-need-engine, High Tide)
5. White(Eldar Land Wurm)

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I don't understand how you could rank anything but Red at the top. Red offers quintessential cards to numerous decks. The Goblin engine is obviously a hugely defining aspect of the metagame, and the Red Ritual engine into Burning Wish and Empty the Warrens (and even Goblin Charbelcher is slightly red- it's far better with two Taigas than with two Bayous) is growing to become an equally huge aspect of the metagame. Burning Wish is also powerful in Life from the Loam, where it grabs Devastating Dreams and Recoup and Hull Breach and other goodies, and in Survival, where it suppots other red cards like Anger and Flametongue Kavu. Red is also essential in what I think is now clearly the best build of Threshold, Red Thresh, which has Lightning Bolt and Magma Jet to remove dorks and go to the face, giving it extra speed, and Pyroclasm in the board to answer Goblins, whether Lackey or Storm generated. And Red in Landstill, where it provides a powerful array of removal, as well as additional speed to the clock of a deck that often has to worry about going to time, seems underexplored to me. Red has power and versatility like no other color.

Next, I think, has to be Green. It's potentially present in all three of the tier 1 decks at the moment (Green Goblins, Red Thresh, and CRET Belcher). While not as strong as the red sweep, Tinder Wall and Elvish Spirit Guide aren't to be laughed at, nor Land Grant, nor the answers it gives you with Burning Wish. While not a huge percentage of Threshold decks, it contributes the singlularly most relevant cards- huge creatures like Mongoose, Werebear, and Tarmogoyf that are both strong offensive tools and powerful blockers that aggro decks have a difficult time dealing with, and that are out of reach of the best color's most iconic removal, Lightning Bolt. While Green's not as huge in Goblins, I think Tin Street Hooligan, in multiples, are an important addition to the deck, providing answers to Equipment and Needle while smoothing the curve and being a very decent beater in matchups where he's not relevant. Krosan Grip or Tranquil Domain in the board aren't anything to sneeze at either. Going down tier a bit, Green also offers a number of powerful engines entire decks can be built around- Life from the Loam, Enchantress, and Survival are all strong engines that have won tournaments and may not yet be full optimized or exploited. It also offers potentially strong tools to control in cards like Pernicious Deed, Crime/Punishment, Glittering Wish (and it's numerous Green targets, including the previous cards and Hierarch, Dueling Grounds, Putrefy, etc.), Gaea's Blessing, Moment's Peace, Nantuko Monastery, Gigapede. And I still want to see a deck that finds a home for Call of the Herd in Legacy. Perhaps in some variant of Zoo, another archetype that leans heavily on both Red and Green for cards like Kird Ape, Rancor, Watchwolf, Wild Mongrel... red has a number of very beefy creatures, many of which have not had their day in the sun yet.

Third has to be Blue. Blue's power is a little subtle, because Blue only really wins the game at all in Solidarity or Spring Tide. However, while the power of the cantrip-base backed up by a few 1-for-1, or even 1-for-2 counters that happen not to cost anything isn't as flashy as something like Life from the Loam or Goblins or CRET Belcher, it's worked for a number of decks, smoothing out draws and playing efficient beats, usually Green, while casting Dazes and Force of Will, with the occasional Stifle or Counterspell backup, on a few choice targets to counter an opponent's entire gameplan. Force of Will has been gone over a lot, and while it's sometimes over-rated, it does certainly help maintain the health of the format. It's a card that is inherently always good while never being busted. Of course, at the moment the strength of the color is seen primarily in four counters (Force of Will, Daze, Counterspell, and Stifle) with the backup of a few cantrips (Serum Visions, Brainstorm and Portent, with Predict and Mental Note following behind). Solidarity currently being on the decline, and Spring Tide in a similar situation, we don't get to see as much of Blue's other offerings, powerful card advantage spells in things like Meditate, Cunning Wish, Fact or Fiction, Ideas Unbound and Diminishing Returns, cards that are powerful but perhaps too slow for the current format.

White is not heavily played these days. Swords to Plowshares shows up across the place, as do Jotun Grunt and Meddling Mage. Occasionally a deck really uses the color, like a Zoo list with Isamarus and Savannah Lions and Watchwolf and Boros Swiftblade, or LftL or Enchantress, or some control deck with Eternal Dragon and DoJ as powerful, versatile kill conditions to back up Wrath and StP and possibly Wing Shards, and Exalted Angel and Loxodon Hierarch pop up a bit (but life gain is becoming less relevant when you can simply kill the opponent much faster with hordes of 1/1s for a 5/6 1G Tarmogoyf), but white is noticeably absent from the top tier, relegated to being a bit player.


Black, on the other hand, is a blip on the horizon. It has some potentially powerful disruption tools in Duress and Hymn to Tourch, and to a lesser extent Unmask and Cabal Therapy, but these are generally less efficient than instant speed Force and Daze, and don't come with the neat stabilizing cantrips that those do. Dark Ritual is a card that has for a long time defined the color, and is why R&D was so careful not to print cards that were too good with it. Which, in effect, seems to have shafted Black, because most monoblack decks suck without a Ritual opening now. The creatures simply aren't that impressive or have frighteningly bad drawbacks, ala Flesh Reaver and Phyrexian Negator. The color does offer some strong tools to control, including Deed, Vindicate, Damnation, Decree of Pain, the discard suite + Haunting Echoes. Cabal Coffers is a card that might yet make a serious impact on the metagame, particularly with the printing of Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. But in terms of actual power and presence, right now, Black is pretty solidly in last place.


So:

1) Red
2) Green
3) Blue
4) White
5) Black

[Bardo]

While pretty wasted last night, I accidentally deleted my post above, just after destroying the keyboard with a glass of white wine. Here it is--many thanks, P_R.

--

Now that I've given up my SCG slot, I'll have more time to answers these questions. Also, to be fair and not get influenced by others, I'll answer the questions without reading how others have answered their's.

What is Legacy's weakest color and strongest color? Why? If you were to rank the colors, what would your ranking be? What are the most played and least played colors? Do you see a correlation between the strongest color and the most played color?

This seems to be a particularly awkward set of questions to answer. I think in formats with a much smaller set of cards, this would be a lot simpler to wrap my head around. In T2 you have cards which are just clearly better than competing cards, take Damnation and Teferi, for instance. There you can just analyze the card pool, find the gems, and position decks for whatever metagame you anticipate. The playable pool is rarely more than 200 or so cards.

So, what are the best cards in Legacy, by color (not necessarily in order, just in the order they came to my mind):

Blue
Brainstorm
Force of Will
Daze
Intuition
Vedalken Shackles (a colored artifact)
Brain Freeze
Counterspell?
Standstill?
Stifle?
Misdirection?
Fact or Fiction?

Green
Survival of the Fittest
Tarmogoyf
Aluren
Pernicious Deed
Berserk?
Life from the Loam?

Red
Empty the Warrens
Burning Wish
Lightning Bolt
Fireblast

Black
Dark Confidant
Dark Ritual
Pernicious Deed
Cabal Therapy
Tendrils of Agony
Infernal Tutor
Duress?

White
Swords to Plowshares
Humility
Orim's Chant
Armageddon
Moat
Solitary Confinement
Serra Avenger?

Colorless
AEther Vial
Pithing Needle
Lion's Eye Diamond
Wasteland
Chalice of the Void
Isochron Scepter
Umezawa's Jitte
Sword of Fire and Ice

(Cards with a "?" are borderline "best cards in legacy" in my mind. I also didn't consider sideboards cards, since you can't really think about that without a particular metagame in mind.)

Looking at the question this way, I think blue and 'colorless' have the best cards in Legacy, since their good cards are plentiful, versatile and very powerful. Black and white have a lot to offer and red and green would appear to get the shaft. (Only green truly does.)

But Magic is not so easily analyzed since cards do not exist in a vacuum. Goblins is a terrific example of this. On its own, Goblin Ringleader and Goblin Piledriver are just awful. But when you put them in the same deck with another 22 goblins, they go from "terrible in the abstract" to "ridiculously powerful." That's largely why the question above is hard to answer: you can't analyze colors and their cards without a deeper context of interactions within subsets of "abstractly weak" cards.

And notwithstanding the efficiency of Rishadan Port and Wasteland in the picture, when you have the A/B/U/R duals plus the Onslaught fetchlands to build manabases, splashing colors rarely comes with the risks you'll see in formats with smaller card pools--so "colors" can bleed together almost seamlessly. A good example is Threshold and Goblins splashing white for Swords to Plowshares or Psychatog splashing green for Pernicious Deed. It basically costs you very little: exposure to Wasteland which is largely obviated by Onslaught fetchlands. At this point, the questions above are not much more useful than as a purely academic exercise. And I really can't rank them at this point, other than to say that "Green is bad and blue is the best."

A more interesting question to me is, which colors best contribute to successful strategies?

Combo: Black/Colorless/Blue/EtW (red)
Aggro: Red/Black/White
Aggro-control: Blue/White/Red/Colorless/Green/Black
Control: Blue/Black/White

I could explain why I think this is true, but I couldn't do it in less than 2,000 words. :) But really, the most profitable sort of analysis in this sort of thing is to look at decks and how they interact with other decks they'll commonly have to play against.

I'll read everyone else's answers later.

[Deep6er]

For simplicity's sake, I'll try to be brief.

1. Red. Red has the most effect on the (current) format without question. Goblin Lackey, Empty the Warrens, even the 'pure' Burn decks have affected Legacy's metagame's to such drastic degrees that it boggles the mind.

2. Green. Tarmogoyf is quite possibly THE Most Retarded Creature EVER. It continues to impress and at times astound me with it's sheer ridiculosity. Also, Green is a strong supplemental color in two of the decks that I believe are Tier 1 (CRET Belcher and Red Threshold). Nimble Mongoose is also quite the force to be reckoned with. However, as strong as an untargetable 3/3 for 1 is, he still doesn't match Tarmogoyf for pure insanity. Also, Life from the Loam is so amazingly versatile. I continue to advocate Life from the Loam's power (even in combo heavy environments) for reasons that come back to it having a truly surprising persistence in the face of adversity. Survival of the Fittest, while not necessarily very good now, has certainly (and I believe will in the future) shape the metagame to a substantial degree.

3. Blue. Threshold's cantrip engine is the pinnacle of efficiency. No other color can duplicate this effect without bending themselves into odd contortions that obviate the strength gained. Countermagic continues to be a strong supplemental/tempo strategy and again Threshold achieves this ideal admirably. Obviously, there are other remarkably powerful cards in blue, but I think these cards are the (current) hallmark of blue's power in Legacy.

4. White. White has taken a bit of a beating. Maintaining cards that are efficient and powerful albeit narrow has been the primary reason for White's decline in my opinion. White has a problem adapting it's cards to be as versatile as possible. While it has a straightforward approach to things, (currently) other colors fulfill White's objectives arguably better than White itself.

5. Black. Black's power continues to be funneled into other decks as a supplemental strategy. While Dark Confidant is an amazing card, it's ease at integration maintains it's ease of transition into OTHER colors. I think Black's weakness is slowly deteriorating and soon will come back to a position of prominence. However, currently black-BASED decks do not have astounding game against the decks that can arguably incorporate Black's own power to a fuller extent. It sounds very confusing, but what I'm saying is that Black's power lies in it being a supplemental color and that isn't enough to justify it being stronger than White.

[MattH]

1. Red, for the reasons already stated. I would have said blue before Belcher went and got all nutty.

2. Blue. The 'cantrip & control' shell has been pushing every combination of U-splash aggro control to the top for like two years now, and blue's card searching/drawing mechanisms (Intution especially) fuel many more decks.

---huuuge dropoff---

3. Green. I think it's a huge blunder to name green as the second place color, for the same reasons Gearhart just put black as fifth: because green is always the supplement, and never in the driver's seat.

All those threshold decks? Those are U/r or U/w control & cantrip shells, splashing for green creatures (when they splash for nongreen creatures they usually get called Fish). Belcher really only uses green because it has to. If they had planeshifted Land Grant into black (searching for swamp cards), no way in hell would anyone be talking about Rg Belcher - but Land Grant is unique and a necessary evil for the deck.

Green is not some integral part of Belcher (or Threshold) the way it is of Survival decks. You can remake Threshold without green and have it be worse, but essentially the same sort of deck. You can remake it without white and have it be the same sort of of deck. You could not remake it without blue, because it is at heart a blue deck that splashes green for its creatures and some other color for its removal (white for STP, red for burn, black for Edict/Demise).

I mean, when was the last time a green-BASED deck really tore shit up? When was the last time you saw a card with more than one mana symbol on it somewhere do anything at all?

4 & 5. White gets last place over black. While both show up in approximately equal numbers, black gets the edge because of its diversity, while white is almost literally summed up in only three cards - Meddling Mage, Swords to Plowshares, and Orim's Chant. Every other card white provides is expendable. Disenchant effects are found throughout green in many forms. Weenie creatures are found in every color but blue. Wrath is now in black, and is not really played anyway. Mystic Enforcer is good but not really necessary to threshold. Armageddon would be useful if the format were simply a little slower, but it isn't and doesn't look to be anytime soon. Replenish gives white some hope for a comeback but until that happens, white is super-narrowly defined.

Black, on the other hand, contributes in many areas - it has one amazing creature (Confidant) and several very good ones (Negator, Specter). It has excellent disruption that is used in many decks - Duress is a stellar SB card against combo, and Therapy is generally good all around, useful in combo, aggro, and Survival strategies. Black's tutors and rituals make up the backbone of several combo decks - mostly Tendrils combo but also Gamekeeper. Black also has many strong board control spells - Massacre and Infest and E. Plague sweep well, Edict can take out many creatures that nothing else will, Demise isn't bad, and it tag teams with green to make Pernicious Deed. It also has the thermonuclear bomb Haunting Echoes and the sniper shot Extirpate. Black has a very broad palette of playable effects and a deep cardpool.

Black's biggest problem, and what is holding it back from rivaling green for spot #3, is that while it is strong in many areas, those areas don't combine well into one deck. The aggro and disruption cards don't tend to go well in the same deck as the control cards, and its tutors don't really go well with either of them.

But merely ranking the colors does not provide the whole picture. Let's imagine a scale where red is given a score of 100 points. How do I feel the other colors stack up?

Blue: At least a 90. Very strong.
Green: Big dropoff - 60.
Black: Another dropoff, maybe 45.
White: Doghouse - 30ish. If Replenish does anything, raise this to 40.

[Ewokslayer]

Red
Green
Blue
Black
White

Red has such a large and diverse impact on the metagame that it is clearly the most powerful color in Legacy. It provides the bulk of the creatures in the format (Goblins, FTK, Imperial Recruiter, Anger, Kird Ape), the bulk of the mana acceleration (Rites of Flame, SSG, Desperate Ritual, Seething Song), Random broken cards (ETW, Burning Wish), the best sweepers in the format (pyroclasm, Devastating Dreams). There is very little relevant things that Red can't accomplish in this format. Red seems to dominate the early turns either via Goblin Lackey or ETW.
Green provides quite a number of interesting tools in the format. It provides some mana acceleration to decks like Belcher (ESG, Tinder Wall, Land Grant) and the creature suite in Threshold. However, both of these while improving the decks they are in don't make the "core" of the deck. Green's real and often overlooked strength I believe is in its enchantment. Cards such as Survival of the Fittest, Alluren, and the numerous Enchantress cards define Green in Legacy. Green is also best able to handle opponent Enchantments and Artifacts.
Blue's Strength is in its cantrip engine (Brainstorm specifically), FOW, Daze, and Stifle. Blue is as always great at stalling the game or finding a specific card in your deck. The biggest problem with blue is that outside of Brain Freeze it doesn't win the game on its own.
Black's disruption is unparalleled and is often important on both sides of a combo matchup. Unfortunately most of its creatures are too expensive or have too large a draw back. Dark Ritual has lost a lot of its power as Red has begun to receive a large number of ritual like effects. With Rituals it would seem that Quantity > Quality.
White sucks. A lot. Except for Orim’s Chant and Abeyance White doesn’t seem to have one unique ability. It does have the best answers to Red but a deck full of answers ends up playing crap like Bandage.

[Obfuscate Freely]

Blue is the strongest color, because of Force of Will, and because of Brainstorm & friends. Honestly, it's hard to overstate what cantrips do for a deck. One important benefit of a cantrip engine is that it grants a deck a greater amount of freedom to splash other colors, and thus better access to the tools of every other color.

Red isn't too far behind blue, though. As others have said, the format is pretty heavily defined by red at the moment. The best aggro deck is built around a completely mono-red core of cards. One of the best combo decks is based on red's mana acceleration and a red win condition. The best (aggro-)control deck splashes red for removal.

Green is next. It may only show up as a support color, but the fact that Green's best cards are splashable makes the color that much more relevant.

Fourth best is black. Discard (read: Duress and Cabal Therapy) is a uniquely black tactic, and is absolutely vital to some strategies. Engineered Plague can almost be worth splashing for on its own. Dark Ritual and Tendrils of Agony are worth mentioning, as well.

White is the worst color in Legacy, because it simply doesn't have as many playable cards as the other colors. When you consider splashing white in a deck, it's hard to come up with many reasons beyond Swords to Plowshares and (maybe) Orim's Chant. There are other good white cards, but many of them have restrictive costs, like Serra Avenger and Parallax Wave. Some, like Wrath of God and Humility, also place heavy restrictions on deck design. It has become very difficult to improve a Legacy deck by adding white to it, and there is no base-white strategy that makes up for that (Rebels are not Goblins).

[Eldariel]

I find blue to be the strongest colour since it does everything. It has a few great creatures, by far the most effective library filtering and bad-draw-fixing cards making blue decks very able to bear poor draws. It also has huge tempo-cards in Daze and Force and it's by far the best colour at wrecking comboes. The only issue with blue is that...well, it's blue. That makes it vulnerable to many a red card. Also, many natural inclusions just happen to hose blue in a way or another, cards such as Life from the Loam, Aether Vial, Duress and such are all great specifically against blue, but would still be played even if the entire colour didn't exist.

Next comes red. The colour has a huge bunch of powerful cards especially with Rituals and Red Storm both seeing print and it's the colour most able to prey on blue, especially since one of the natural bombs of the colour, Goblin Lackey, just happens to be a wrecking ball against the prime colour. So yea, red packs lots of power, and lacks reactive gameplan almost entirely. Sounds about right, it does what it does in an awesome manner.

The last three are very hard to classify, white is the jack of all trades with good creatures, anti-combo cards, removal and such, but nothing absolutely great like the red or blue cards. Black is the #1 metagame colour with huge hosers against just about anything, but its proactive plans are somewhat weak as there's no burn in black for Black Sligh to work as well as Red Sligh, and other kill conditions have largely eclipsed Tendrils of Agony. Green has incredible creatures and few awesome engine-cards. But yea, I think red and blue are the two best and the remaining three are rather equal.

[Sims]

I skipped the past 2 questions because I felt that my answers were already posted in better detail and description by other adepts.

Personally, I find the strength of each color to be placed upon the cards that are played and how preveleant they are in the format. For that reason my list would be something along the lines of this:

Red
Blue and Green as a tie
Black
White

I feel Red, Blue, and Green are all fairly even upon the top as they have some of the strongest cards in the format. Red has a very resilient set of cards when put together in the Goblin suite as well as 2 of the best combo finishers in Empty the Warrens and Burning Wish.... Okay, B.Wish isn't exactly a finisher, but in some decks it might as well be. Red also has a few very resilient and useful creatures outside of Goblins with Fanatic, Grim, Fledgling Dragon, and more. Easily the best color in that the cards are inherently strong and they see a lot of play.

Blue would be right up there in a tie for second with Green. I put them around the same spot because neither color does a whole lot on it's own, outside of Solidarity for blue and.... uhm... Elves!? for green? They have their own jobs, and they do them well, and they do them amazingly combined with other colors. Blue has the best search/draw engines (do I really need to list them?) in the game as well as some of the best answers in Force of Will, Counterbalance, Disrupt, Daze, Meddling Mage, and CoVapor/Echoing Truth... But not much in the threats department. Green on the other hand is the color that provides our format with much of it's acceleration and beats. Werebear, Nimble Mongoose, Tarmogoyf, and Mystic Enforcer are some of the biggest and most undercosted beats in the format... Combined with green being able to accelerate mana and allow bigger spells of whatever color to be played earlier than they should, it makes an amazing support color for any Aggro or Aggro-Control deck. The fact that Survival of the Fittest, Eternal Witness, Basking Rootwalla, Arrogant Wurm, Wall of Roots, and Wall of Blossoms are all in green as well is icing on a great Beats cake. I group these 2 colors together because they both have inherently powerful effects (Draw 3 essentially for 1 mana? Reveal 5 and force your opponent to play properly for 4? a potential 4/5 or bigger for 2? 3/3's for 1?) when given the proper support, typically from one another.

Below that would be Black.... Black I don't rate higher, despite it being one of my favorite colors flavor-wise, because it doesn't do much on it's own... Less so, i.m.o, than Green. Black tends to get a few cards played constantly: Dark Ritual, Duress, Cabal Therapy, and to a lesser extent, Hymn. The first 3 can be put in nearly any combo deck, and Duress/Therapy can both go in just about any aggro control deck as a splash. Black's best cards don't really require a heavy commitment to Black outside of Hymn, Sinkhole, Nantuko Shade, and to a lesser extent Hypnotic Specter. Red Death, Sui, and the B/w archtype aren't horrible decks and will pick up steam if they can consistently dismantle the combo decks that are getting better and better, or maybe if Bridge/Ichorid decks can become more refined and consistant.... But I don't feel the card is powerful enough to stand on anything other than Ritual, Duress, and Therapy.

White... I'm not sure I'd really rate it below Black but I definately wouldn't put it near Red, blue, or green. White, like Black, is primary a splash color.... sprinkle a little W in for Swords to Plowshares, or maybe Meddling Mage/Mystic Enforcer. White has many of the weaker cards in the format, and while Serra Avenger, Jotun Grunt, and Exalted Angel are all houses they are no where near as prevelant as Werebear, Nimble Mongoose, and Goblin Lackey. The color needs heavier support from U, G, or maybe R to be anything other than a color of slow Board control.


That's just how I see the color breakdown in Legacy.