[Question 7] How to Strengthen the Weaker Colors?

[Peter_Rotten]

This week's question is inspired by DrJones' question originally posted in the Community Forum.

In last week's question, most Adepts agreed that Red and Blue are by far the strongest colors in the format. What kinds of cards could Wizards print that would reasonably strengthen the other three colors, while maintaining fidelity to the color pie and a relatively "fair" power level? Feel free to use real decks as illustrative examples. (For example, white would be significantly stronger if (Deck) had a card like (fill in the blank) to bolster its strategy against (existing metagame challenges). If possible, consider how your suggestions might impact other formats like Block Constructed and Standard and how that might affect its feasibility. Feel free to suggest as many hypothetical cards as you like. It is not necessary to specify an exact casting cost/power/toughness/card wording here. We're looking for general examples, although you can get more specific if it's relevant to your point.

[Machinus]

The answer to this question depends on why blue and red are good to begin with. The color pie of those colors is large, but they happen to have the right tools to succeed in a format which is both fast and low-powered.

I will address black now since it's agreed it is at or near the bottom. All of the strengths of black are inferior to other manifestations of it's strategy in other colors. Red has faster acceleration, Green has better creatures, and Blue has better disruption. These colors, as well as lands and artifacts, have a powerful array of removal and other effects which basically leave black with two tools - discard, and the few combo cards which survived the banned list.

Black needs good reasons to build a deck around it and therefore make use of the small set of viable support cards. A resilient engine could do this, but I think what black needs most are potent threats that somehow manage to be good in an environment of both StP and Pyroclasm. Better support cards that fit into consistent aggro-control strategies aren't black's strength, since it tends to produce cards that either go in monoblack control or multicolored combo decks.

Some sort of absolutely incredible 3-4 drop or amazing 1-drop would help green a lot.

: Nimble Mongoose, Basking Rootwalla, Birds of Paradise

: Troll Ascetic, Terravore, Arrogant Wurm, Burning-Tree Shaman, Trygon Predator

: Ravenous Baloth, Loxodon Heirarch, Mystic Enforcer

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

White could use more prison effects. Cards like Ghostly Prison, Abeyance, Orim's Chant, Glowrider, Rule of Law, Supression Field, Humility, Moat etc., are a good stard and indicator of White's ability to play prison, but it could use some more highly competitive ones. A white variation on In the Eyes of Chaos, for instance, or the Abyss, would be strong. Also, and related to that, if they pushed life-gain to be more competitive, it would help a lot. There are a few semi-playable life gain spells, but nothing that's relatively cheap that actually puts a dent in aggro strategies. Something slightly above the power level of Ivory Tower would be good. White also suffers from a lack of efficient mid-range creatures, which would supplement it's prison elements nicely.

Black needs more options for card advantage. In ancient times Black was amazing at this... but those cards are pretty much all banned. The only efficient form of card drawing Black has in this format dies to Mogg Fanatic. A robust draw engine, something about the power level of Survival or Life from the Loam, would do wonders here. Black could also use more competitive discard. Therapy is very limited, and aside from Duress and Hymn and in a few combo decks, Unmask, no competive, flexible discard has been printed in a long time. Black could also use some better creatures; a few efficient dudes that didn't absolutely destroy you in their drawback couldn't hurt that much, could it?

[Tacosnape]

White:
White can't be fixed until Wizards stops giving all of its good points to other colors. Outside of Swords to Plowshares, there is almost nothing in Legacy that other colors can't do as well or better than White. The whole Time Spiral block made this far worse by giving out Damnation to Black and Seal of Primordium to Green. You think Blue got the shaft in this block? Think again.

Green:
Tarmogoyf might be (okay, is) overkill, but it's the only green thing printed in the last aeon that fits green's scheme of simply having the best creatures. Some sort of absolutely incredible 3-4 drop or amazing 1-drop would help green a lot. Any form of disruption at all might help, also.

Black:
Give Black the futureshifted Fateseal mechanic, not Blue. Blue can deal with topdecks via counters. Black can't deal with topdecks at all. Black has to deal with almost everything via Discard. Fateseal synergizes well with discard.

Red:
Red's too strong already. If it needs anything at all, though, it's a decent creature removal spell that isn't Burn, as burn struggles a lot in Legacy lately due to ridiculously high toughnesses on creatures. Oh, and Stop freaking printing more Red acceleration cards.

Blue:
...Just in case someone actually thinks Blue needs to be improved, here's what you do: Stop going entire blocks without printing a single good Blue card. And give Blue a non-shitty creature. Preferrably one that costs , flies, and kicks ass in Faerie Stompy.

[Artowis]

Improving the colors has been a long standing issue only a few years after the game had featured any sort of competitive tournament scene. Thanks to the availability of huge amounts of card data and statistics, the issue has become more vocal over the past few years than before.

Anyway, as far as Legacy goes, obviously black would be strengthened by having additional tutors along the lines of Vampiric and Demonic Consultation, but the power level in other formats obviously is an issue. As far as draw goes, if they can find more card draw that leads a fine balance like Dark Confidant, that would help promote the color a bit more. I personally would like to see more cards like Braids and Nether Void be printed, cards that promote having solid mana bases without the random 'you're totally screwed' factor that Sinkhole had attached to it.

In addition, black could really use a few men that were actually effective in combat. It's a real rarity to see any man that costs less than four mana be able to stand up in combat in even Standard, let alone Legacy. The ones that have a big enough P/T to matter have life loss drawbacks and are otherwise vanilla creatures. Seems like a bit of a rip considering the last creature that was solid in combat was Nantuko Shade and you needed to invest plenty of mana to keep him alive.

Green has actually been getting more stuff from other colors that could be good, but it's always just a little too much mana or just not strong enough to be worthwhile. Like Harmonize is good, but not good enough to be played outside of a few fringe decks. Really what the color needs are a couple more cards that are green centric and a few bits from other colors that don't suck. For example, Ancestral Visions in green would go along great in the less powerful formats.

Really though green needs more cards that give options. Life from the Loam was an excellent example of what the color could use, it's an engine card that isn't instantly broken like Survival in fairer formats, but strong enough to be used in all but the fastest. Natural Order is another, cards with very powerful effects, but limited in general. A card like Show & Tell should've been green to begin with. A series of more limited Eureka effects could do wonders for the color, even a one-sided limited Eureka could work wonders in all formats, since the card's strength would be more or less equal to the formats power.

At absolute worst more effects using the card type system would be nice for drawing and opposing mana manipulation. Speaking of which, where did all the green mana manipulation go? Would more cards like Choke and Root Maze really be so terrible for the color? I can't see it. Instead of printing a 4 cost creature as a white Winter Orb, how about a green one?

Some people still whine about green's creatures, but really if you look at history Green has gotten a huge number of effective dorks. Goyf is looking to be the strongest 2-drop since Arcbound Ravager and the best green guy since Wild Mongrel. Troll A, Hierarch (whatever, it's green enough), Baloth, the thresh creatures, Arrogant Wurm, etc etc. If anything green gets too many solid drops and not enough real spells to go along with them.

The obvious problem is that almost any card that would be good in Legacy is going to be ultra efficient in other formats. We're currently seeing that with Tarmogoyf in Block and Standard, as the availability of such a cheap threat you can just play out without really building your deck around (and just gets better if you do) is excelling.

I may go over White's issues later, but I think Ben B. and Phil Stanton (Dr. Sylvan) have gone over those well in their respective articles.

[Peter_Rotten]

I saw Black as pretty strong based on its disruption abilities; however, I’ll play along. Although Black is great at disruption, the other things that Black was good at, it was too good at. Drawing cards? Necropotence, Bargain. Acceleration? Dark Ritual (I think we all can agree that it’s the best accelerant). Graveyard recursion? Yawg’s Will. So I’d like to see some playable, good, but NOT broken versions of those cards printed. First, Red needs to stop stealing all the acceleration. Could we have a Black version of Rite of Flame? Rite of Muck could be tasty. Could we revamp Necropotence to be fair-ish? What if you had to pay 2 life for each drawn card? 3 Life? I wonder what would be the right life amount to make it playable but not broken. I’m at a loss for how to make YawgWill more playable. Maybe if we limit it to a specific card type – only creatures for example. I also remember that I used to fear black critters (ages ago), but black critters are SO outclassed by many things. Maybe Black could use a super saucy beater with a drawback that could be turned into something synergetic. 1/1 – Whenever an opponent discards a card, lose 1 life and put a 2/2 counter on this. (This sounds a little too good, but serves as an example of the type of beater Black may need). Also, how about a cheap critter that when it dies, it rises from the dead as a Zombie token?

Alas, poor White. Is it doomed to be the worst for ever? What could save white? I think printing more, good, cheap critter removal. It could use something like this: instant – remove target creature from the game. It gets suspend and 3 time counters. However, time counters sound a little more like Blue. Grunt was a good step to giving White a solid beater, but I think that we could use a few more of those. I like IBA’s idea of giving White more prison effects. It already has a Sphere of Resistance variant and a Propaganda, so why not a Smoke Stack enchantment or creature? Saccing permanents could even fit into the theme of white’s taxing effects. It could be called cheesy like Taxation Without Representation. Enchantment (or maybe a 1/3 or 1/4 critter) at the beginning of your upkeep put a counter on this card. During each player’s upkeep, that player sacs a permanent for each counter on this. Lastly, wouldn’t you like it if Reverse Damage was playable? Maybe it could cost and destroy the source of the damage if it is from a permanent. Get on that WotC.

edit: I totally forgot to keep the other formats in mind. Many of my ideas would probably be too stupid for Type 2 and Block. WotC could somewhat mitigate the stupidity for Draft and Sealed by making the cards rare.

[kirdape3]

In order for cards to be printed that will affect Legacy in any way, you have to either print a card that outclasses what already exists (good luck, since we are talking about a format with design mistakes all up and down the line) or does something completely different that hasn't been done before. Doing the former is liable to unbalance formats that Wizards designs for (Extended and Standard and Block Constructed), in contrast to the stated policy. The latter is far more likely, but that new effect still has to be compared to existing effects in the format.

What's far more likely is something coming off the banned list and shaking up the format. You won't see anything absurd like Gush (I hope; nice format we have here otherwise), but the ability of Wizards to manipulate the banned list to 'artificially' create format change exists and I would expect it to be used.

[Eldariel]

I don't consider black all that weak actually. It has some very potent effects and hugely powerful hosers, so black remains the strongest hate-colour. That said, printing cheap sources of card advantage with added life investment like Phyrexian Arena and Dark Confidant have already gone a long way with the colour and now it has some added cheap fat in Urami, Tombstalker and Plague Sliver. One of the biggest problems the colour actually has is that while Confidant is the flagship-card, it doesn't actually go well with a large portition of the other bombs, which leads to higher-cost black playables usually sitting in the sidelines, along with good finishers from other colours if you want to utilize Confi. But yea, I think the direction Wizards is going to at the present looks just right for black and it doesn't really need any additional abilities. It remains an excellent source of hate for any given strategy and is a highly interactive colour with Duresses, Cabal Therapies and whatnot preventing solitaire.

Green could probably use some more ways to interact. Most of green's power comes from very strong creatures and potent threats such as Life from the Loam, Berserk or Survival. This leaves green decks dead in water against faster noninteractive decks. That isn't to say Green isn't good as it is; green actually sports a very large number of playables and some of the most important engine-cards along with the most influential creatures are green. Green just cannot exist alone, it's a good support colour but the lack of ability to interact outside the red zone is its greatest weakness. Perhaps it's fine as it is or perhaps it could use some cards with the philosophy of 'creatures protecting player' True Believer-style.

White is actually pretty potent, StP giving it something it sorely misses in other formats and still retaining its potent creatures and rules-cards. If white really needs anything, it's just more, different 'rules-effects', on bodies and without. Anti-creature effects should be as a rule on enchantments and anti-combo effects on creatures for maximum efficiency, as creature-decks tend to sport creature removal foremost, and combo-decks tend to require you to have a clock in addition to hate to beat them. But yea, something like mono-white variant of Meddling Mage (bit more potent than Null Chamber), some more big, cheap creatures and perhaps faster control finishers could help white out a great deal. Oh, and the thing 'm always after which flavourfully belongs, white reanimation. I think white should be #1 in reanimating creatures 'as is' (as a rule, black wants thralls so it zombifies the body for ease of control while white is for the good of the commune and resurrects the whole creature). White could be given some aggressive graveyard-based tools along with more graveyard-based card advantage tools a la Eternal Dragon. Oh, and perhaps some more rules-imposing instants in the Orim's Chant-style could really help. But I think there's already a potent white deck out there, it might not just have been found yet.


All in all, I think Wizards is already rather heading to the right direction as green's getting Tarmogoyf and Life from the Loam for an additional dominant creature and engine, white's rules-theme keeps progressing nicely and black already has pretty much all it needs to be strong in regards of utility, it might just need few more synergistic cards to really do its job. The only big issue I have with how cards are presently printed is the weakness of the white reanimation effects, I believe everything else will fall in place given time.

[Bardo]

(Again, I haven't looked at what anyone has written above me.)

For starters, how bad off are the "bad colors" really?

Let's look at the colors that made T8 at the last two large US tourneys (ignoring the GP for obvious reasons)

(Only looking at the maindeck)

Kadilak's Dual Land Draft III 4/28/07

Red Cards: 65

Blue Cards: 77

Green Cards: 77

White Cards: 26

Black Cards: 43

On second thought, let me just do that for one tournament--what a grueling pain in the eyes that was! :) [If I'm not at work, I hate having to load Excel...]

Just looking at this one tournament, red, blue and green seem just fine in this format. White, however, was very poor--mostly removal and black was mainly tutor and ritual effects.

I'm not sure how best to make black more playable--it has a lot of excellent strategies and cards, even going back to the GP, aka GP: Flash, black was an important force in the top 8. (Acceleration, efficient beatdown creatures, and excellent hand disruption). Honestly, I think black needs less "good cards" and just better deck designers.

The real issue is white--which is mainly given reactive, defensive type cards (StP, Wrath, Moat, etc.) when we all know that active strategies, especially in a format with such vicious threats, will trump reactive strategies over the long haul. So, white is just sort of fucked philosophically by R&D.

Switching gears just slightly, can anyone even think of Legacy-playable white cards that have been printed over the last two blocks? Porphyry Nodes? Shit, I'm drawing a blank... [Edit 3 - Oh, and Jotun Grunt.]

Seriously, if not for the printing of Swords to Plowshares in Alpha, White would hardly be playable at all--and that is a sad statement.

(Skimmed some answers above)

Edit - Here's one of the Dr. Sylvan articles Veggies was mentioning above: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/6775.html

Edit II - This one is also very good: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/9230.html

Shining Shoal is symptomatic of White's main deficiency: over-focus on creatures.

That's the nut of it.

[SpatulaOfTheAges]

Give white and green a way to disrupt non-permanents, or at least effect mana. More mana-taxing effects. Also make them enchantments. And make them only effect the opponent. Kthnxbye.

Give black a way to smooth out its early-mid-and-late game. It has lots of cards that are good situationally, but many situations that create dead draws. Sinkhole? Great if they're trying to develop mana, terrible if they're flooded. Hymn? Amazing turn 2, but if they have a board it's moot. Confidant? Amazing if you need to follow up early disruption, but it's terrible when you're struggling for control. Black's amazing cards are also, situationally, all terrible cards.

Black Brainstorm, perhaps?

[scrumdogg]

I didn't answer last weeks question between being ill & not agreeing with the parameters of the question. I guess I'll attempt to answer both in the here & now. The strongest color in Magic is combo (specifically Storm) followed closely by Goblins (or perhaps co-equal with Goblins if you count Empty The Warrens as a Goblin or not) followed closely by 'instant speed, ridiculously undercosted ways to protect what cheating things my deck is doing'. I suppose we could technically discuss the printed colors of these cards but except for category 3, blue, they are essentially color irrelevant. Combo has never cared what the actual colors were and as demonstrated will switch immediately if they see an advantage elsewhere (like the Storm based combos went from 'blue' and 'black' to 'red' with the printing of Rite of Flame, SSG, etc etc). Furthermore, most cards that combo utilizes do not see play anywhere else, making them the color of combo (and a dark, loathesome color it is...). Goblins is the same way - 'but Goblins are red!' you say. Then show me what other decks goblins see play in? Fanatic here & there? That is pretty much the sum totality of Goblins that see play outside the color of Goblins. By the way, Goblins would see just as much play if they were 'black' 'green' ' white' 'blue' or 'gold'. Yes, that's right, 'gold' because they don't often cast Goblins anyway between having 8 1cc cheats & a cost reducer, as well as tutors & free card draw. The last three are powerful but fair, however, no color (or tribe, if you insist) should be able to completely avoid having to pay mana for spells as that destroys the fundamentally fair symmetrical resource development contest upon which the game is based. This is also one of the reasons I dislike Storm as a color, as every spell they cast essentially gets played twice, for free, with the second incarnation being a game-wrecking victory condition that almost all the time requires the opponent to be playing 'blue' (and specific 'blue') to be stopped.

I could rank the traditional colors & their traditional strengths, weaknesses, and needs, wants & desires...but why bother? What every color needs is either WOTC to throttle back combo a bit (especially Storm) or print cards which affect Storm in Green, White, Red and Black. As a caveat to this, these cards need to be playable (i.e. not 4cc like Hindering Touch.....) and it wouldn't hurt if they had some versatility outside of the Storm matchup. The Charm cycles would be a perfect fit for cards such as these and split cards would also make a lot of sense, but sadly that would require WOTC designing & printing cards for our format - which they have stated they don't do. As it is, thank God for Engineered Explosives & Powder Keg or White & Green would be completely without hope. Goblins already obviates most other aggro decks because it cheats most efficiently...and in this age of rising combo, even Goblins is becoming a sub-optimal choice. I would never be sad to see Goblin Lackey leave the format, however, as that allows many more aggressive decks to have a chance - some of which could be outstanding against Storm but which have no chance against both Storm and Goblins (and the rest of our wide open format). The redundant slots that every deck has to pack to deal with Goblin Lackey would be open to the needs & designs of the deckbuilders, which I believe is a good thing.

[Lukas Preuss]

In my opinion, the only color that needs to be improved is white.

Blue and black are quite strong already and green has some very strong cards, as well that shape the format (Life from the Loam, Survival of the Fittest, Argothian Enchantress (etc.) as engines, Tarmogoyf, Nimble Mongoose, Wild Mongrel, etc. as strong creatures). Of course, green's pure beatdown strategy is not viable in such a diverse format as Legacy, but that's just the way things are. Green is definitely not too weak for the format.

Black sees more and more play, it has nice disruption (maybe not as good as blues, but still), it has acceleration (Dark Ritual). Many combo decks love black (SI, TES, IGGy Pop) and it has some nice tutors (Lim-Dul's Vault), as well. On top of that, it has recently gotten mass destruction like Wrath of God. Black is strong already, but people need to find ways to fit it into decks.


The weakest color in Legacy is, by far, white. White Weenie strategies are largely unviable because they are not fast enough to deal with combo, and die to control. White control is slow as hell, again unable to beat combo on a regular basis without losing the good aggro matchup.

If white is supposed to be any good, it needs more disruption cards, as well as creatures that have good effects (True Beliver is a nice card, for example that stops Tendrils of Agony, but isn't good enough).