Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1013: Colorless with Ben Weitz

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

So far, I've talked with all five color representatives. That means it's time to talk with a sixth, the colorless representative Ben Weitz.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I've been doing a series where I interview members of the Council of Colors. And I interviewed white, blue, black, red, and green. So you think I'd be done, but I'm not. There's a sixth member. So Benjamin Weitz is here to talk about colorless. Hey, Ben. Hey, how's it going, Mark? Okay, so let's start with the first question. What exactly is the colorless member? What do you do?

Well, I am sort of in charge of reading over the colorless cards when we review them. You know, all of our sets have plenty of colorless cards to sort of support decks where um you know with more generic creatures maybe or maybe there's like exciting artifacts or vehicles and stuff and you know those cards don't fall into any particular color uh and so you know part of my job on the team is looking at those and making sure that they're you know, part of my job on the team is looking at those and making sure that they're appropriate for magic and that, you know, we don't get too much like ubiquity, for example, of a single card. Yeah. So one of the interesting things about colorless and so you're, you were on the play design team and it wasn't a mistake that we made you the colorless person. Real quickly for

the audience, we tend to use the colorless position as the entry level, like learn the color pipe, console, your console colors. It's an intro position a lot of times, but we constantly decided that we wanted to get a play designer in this role because of how important colorless is to rate. So can we talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, for sure so um one of the most important parts of like my job as the colorless color pack counselor is making sure that the colorless cards are at an appropriate rate uh so what that means basically is you know making sure that the the pure stats or the pure mana value on the card doesn't outshine cards in other colors. So like, for example, you know, if the best creature around is a colorless creature, what that means is that just means every deck plays that creature, right? And you don't get the variety or the like different kinds of experiences

that we want people to have when they play magic. So it's important for me to be able to look at a card and be like, oh, well, this is like, you know, the strongest, you know, two drops that we've printed in a long time. So like, you know, we need to tone it down a little bit here so that we don't get every single deck playing this two drop or whatever.

And I think my history on the play design team sort of gives me a unique perspective into that thing because you know or that aspect because we look at all the cards basically and we test their strengths and we balance them and stuff like that and so uh i think people yeah my i was i was really happy to be added as the colorless color pack counselor because I felt that I was going to be able to help out a lot. Just having an eye for, you know, this card has one too many toughness or one too many power or whatever. You know, stuff like that.

Yeah, usually I think the key is, and this is why you have to know the colors really well, is that whenever you look at a card, you have to say, okay, what color is supposed to be the worst at it? And then how does this compare to that color? Right, exactly. And, you know, some colors are allowed to be better than the worst color at things,

right? Like, or times students say colorless is allowed to be better than the worst color at things sometimes, right? Like, we've printed colorless three ones for two um even though those are like more aggressive than we might do in you know for example blue or something like that um but it's important it is very important that it's not the like better than what the best color can do right because i should i should have a reason to play red or i should have a reason to play white um and the reason to do that is because i can have the most aggressive

two drop or the best two drop or whatever i shouldn't be like well i don't even need to go and put red in my deck if i want to be aggressive because i can just play a zenith chronicler or whatever choose a card from one so um let's get a practical example. So let's talk about like you see a card. What's the kind of, let's give an example of a note you would get. So you're looking at a file. You look at the colorless cards. What's the kind of note you would get?

So some of the notes I've given in the past is like maybe there's a very cheap artifact that like mills you some amount on ETB and you know self mill is supposed to be a specific strength of some of the colors and so I might look at this cheap artifact and be like oh wow this card

is like really strong at milling you much better than most of the creatures or most of the spells that we would make in these other colors then that would be like a red flag for me i would i would say to the i would leave a note on the on the set file or speak to the um the lead and say like hey uh you know this card is performing its function at like too high of a rate um as compared to you know the other colors where this is supposed to be their strength, you know, please either reallocate the power so that it's not like

doing this thing so efficiently or, you know, make it more expensive or something like that. That's often something I'll see. Another question I get a lot is sort of like what power and toughnesses are appropriate for colorless creatures. And so that's something I've thought about a while. Like for a long time, you know, we weren't really happy with printing like a colorless 2-2-4-2. I think the first time we did it was in like Amonkhet or something, a drawback there's one in kaladesh that has a drawback but uh yeah so like that sort of question of oh how how good are all those creatures supposed to be like those are those are notes that i'll often leave in files um yeah stuff like that yeah it's interesting you talk about how that we do make colors cards that are better than the worst color, but we're careful when we do it and how we do it.

And, you know, so like, I think we think it's okay that if I'm really bad at something that I could look at colorless as a way to help me out. Yeah, you should be able to be, you know, you should, we want to make the colorless cards still attractive for someone, right? Like, we don't want everyone to hate all the colorless cards so they should have a reason they can they can perform functions better than some colors but they should never perform them the best of all the colors right so like you know i i can go to a colorless card if i want to um you know get a sort of unique effect so i guess one that comes to mind is like Maze Mind Tome. So Maze Mind Tome is a call list card that draws cards.

And a lot of decks have looked to Maze Mind Tome for card advantage. And that's cool. That's good. But we don't want blue decks and blue card draw to be stronger than what Maze Mind Tome would be. So then you're like,

okay, if I want to play card advantage, I have a reason to go play blue. decks and blue card draw to be stronger than what maze mind tone would be so that you're like okay if i want to play card advantage i have a reason to go play blue like i this is one of blue strengths and in order to use that strength i need to use the color blue in my deck it's okay if i want to get the that part of the game this card advantage part of the game at like a lower efficiency rate maybe my red white mid right you know there's reasons I might want to play red, white, mid range or whatever. And if I do that, I want to have something I can go to. But it just shouldn't be the strongest thing around. Okay, so I want to get into a common misconception that I want to sort of address.

So there's some people that like to think of colorless as the sixth color. And I always like to stress the way I always say this is barefoot is not a shoe. Colors is the absence of color. And so let's talk a little bit about like, is there an identity to colorless?

Not really. Like colorless, like you said, it's not a color. It has no guiding philosophy, right? You know, with white you get stuff like community and togetherness and really like colorless like you said it's not a color it has no guiding philosophy right uh you know with white you get stuff like community and togetherness and you know black is like selfish or um you know self-motivated uh colorless doesn't really have any of that there's no you know when you talk about characters you wouldn't there's not a lot of characters that you would say oh this is a colorless person um so it's not really associated with any any philosophies or any temperaments or anything like that it's more sort of like everything exists in like a colorless sphere as long as

it's at the appropriate like efficiency level yeah the way i like to think of it is a lot of the colors are about sort of philosophical things, and the colorless is a little more about utility, meaning the things we most often do at colorless are things we want everybody to have access to, like limited, for example, is a good place. A lot of common colorless cards are like, oh, it's important for this limited environment that all the colors have access to this thing yeah exactly so like little like helper creatures like the the things that help you scry when you play them for example uh lets lets you play games of magic lets you fill

out your curve uh a little better um mana fixing is something we often put it colorless but of course note that all the colorless mana fixing we do with like mana rocks and stuff we like want it to be weaker than green uh who you know has mana fixing as like a core strength of of that color um yeah definitely like colorless is like the utility and like the the objects of the world i guess i think i think in the past colorless used to have more of an identity as, oh, these are magical artifacts that people use, but now we tend to associate those magical artifacts with their color in whatever function that they do.

Like, we make a lot of colored artifacts. And I think that's been part of the shift, I guess. So here's another thing, is what do we not let colorless do? Like, what's kind of sort of off-limits for colorless? Yeah, I would say nothing is, like, truly

off-limits. Like, if you're willing to pay enough mana, I think you can do almost anything. Like, we've even printed some very narrow colorless counterspells in the past, which is maybe one of the effects that we're most careful with widening its color scope. But one aspect that we make sure to shy away from is we should not undermine the weaknesses of certain colors with efficient colorless cards. of certain colors with uh efficient colorless cards um so naturalized effects you know you like as long as you pay enough mana you can do it but we shouldn't do it at a rate where

blue is suddenly like oh great now i can remove permanence from the battlefield easily because of this colorless card like that's something we really want to shy away from um yeah let's talk about the line so um because this is the most one of the most famous ones so we long ago drew a line in the sand saying okay we'll let color's things destroy anything but that there's a like there's a limit there's a mana limit we had to set it at you want to talk about that yeah so uh seven mana has usually been the like number so if you can think of like universal solvent from i think aether revolt or kaladesh more recently goblin i don't remember the name it's a card from brothers war but uh you know it's a little

trinkety artifact that you play and then you can pay seven mana to destroy something or like scour from existence is a seven mana spell where you can destroy something that's sort of like the mana line that that we've set um it's like you can you can do this but only for you know only if you are at least this inefficient um and there's like a similar sort of line for like a lot of different effects in colorless and sort of part of my job is um, drawing, and like holding that line and also knowing when it's appropriate to change it, right? Because like magic evolves and changes over time and these lines are going to move over time. But sort of figuring out when the appropriate time it is to relax a little bit and when it is to hold fast, rather. relax a little bit and when uh when it is to to hold fast rather yeah in some ways i think a lot of your job is knowing where the line is and then bringing it up when we cross the line

yeah that's yeah exactly like a lot of the you know not everyone in the building is as like immersed in the color pie as all of us and especially not in like oh what's the exact amount of mana that we want to be charging for what effect and so you know like people will put cards into files all the time that are like oh you know this is like a little a little too too efficient or a little too much and you know flagging those and either asking them to be changed or if there's like a very good reason for them existing we like discuss as a group and like uh talk about okay what sort of modifications can we make to this because like maybe the solution is maybe it's important that it costs uh a lower amount of mana and the solution is okay instead of killing anything maybe it just like kills some of these permanent types um so like from strixhaven there's the five mana exile target creature um lesson uh and that card

was like pretty important to that format um it is obviously like a lower mana value than seven but it only hits creatures and it has a drawback so you know there's all these sorts of knobs and changes we can add to effects if we need to um reduce the value. But we want to find that design that makes sense for that set. Okay, so let's talk about another aspect. There are other things you look at that actually do have some color in them. And let me talk about stuff like prototype.

So sometimes there's things that you can cast for colorless you know or for generic mana but they have a cost that has color in it so let's talk about how do you evaluate stuff like prototype yeah um i mean usually for prototype it's just i only have to look at the half of the card that costs colorless mana obviously some power of the card comes from the colored half of it but if you're playing the colored half of it that means you're playing lands of that color and so it's not really a question of the colorless power anymore so for me I would like mostly just

monitor the expensive halves of the prototype cards. And so Steel Seraph, I guess, is the closest one. This is the one I remember talking about the most as a flying lifelink creature. It has the potential to act as a Baneslayer Angel type card for other colors other than white. And so that was a card I really had my eye on. But I was quite happy with where we landed on that card. It has lifelink only on your turn, basically. It's not as good at blocking as Baneslayer Angel and stuff like that.

But it has a lot more power than Baneslayer Angel if you're playing white mana, because you can cast it for three. So, yeah. There's also, like... Oh, go ahead. Sorry, I was just going to say, there's also occasionally cards where you can, like, cast their alternate...

They have, like, an alternate colorless mode. This happens a lot less often these days, but every once in a while, there's a card that, like, you don't have to pay mana for that, like, does something out of the graveyard, maybe. days but um every once in a while there's a card that like you don't have to pay mana for that like does something um out of the graveyard maybe and so those i have to kind of be careful about as well and review those and often i'll say something like oh can you add if you control a mountain or sacrifice a mountain or something to the cost of the of the card so maybe like you know the the

evoke elementals from mh2 are a good example where you have to have a card of that card's color, right? To play Solitude, you have to exile a white card from your hand. You bring up a good point that I think we tend to think of things with generic mana costs or colorless mana costs. But also there's like, oh, I have a card that has an alternate cost that you could spend the alternate cost rather than the mana. Or I have something like Phyrexian mana where, right, spend the alternate cost rather than the mana. Or I have something like Phyrexian mana where I can pay life rather than the mana. You also have to look at things... I mean, I know you sort of look at anything that says,

hey, can I... Without using colored mana, can I get this... can I play this? Yeah, exactly. I have to be careful about all that sort of stuff and sort of... It's part of my job to review those cards and files. Yeah, Phyrexian Mana is probably the biggest example of, you know, a color pie break in the early days of Magic. Like I would say Dismember is one of the bigger colorless color pie breaks.

It's giving access to other colors a very efficient removal spell and you know when we brought phyrexian mana back we were like a lot more you know cautious about it you'll the all the planeswalkers have colored mana symbols in addition to their phyrexian mana so yeah but that wasn't really something i had to worry about quick behind behind the scenes from new phyrexia. When we first pitched the idea of the Phyrexian mana, one of the things that I really tried to stress at the time was you have to think of these like artifacts and you have to make sure that they're costed such that if you're not paying the colored mana,

it acts like an artifact. And that just got ignored. Yeah. But like, thank you for your for your input okay so I want there's another topic I want to bring up which is an interesting

I'm curious to get your take on this this is an ongoing discussion in the Council of Colors so the question is if a color can do something or not how often does rate play into that like how often is

it important that the color could do it at a certain rate? One of the classic examples is, is Swords to Plowshares in white's color pie? In the sense that white can do what Swords to Plowshares does, but can it do it at the rate? Like, is there a point at which rate makes you break color pie?

Yeah, I would say that there is. So, in Magic, we want colors to have certain core strengths, right? And when color, like, colors share mechanical space where, like, white and black

are both very good at killing things but they should be good at killing things in different ways and if white gets too strong a way to kill something that like steps on black's toes that can be like a color pie break in my opinion so like swords to plowshares is like probably the strongest pinpoint removal spell ever made um and you know that's something that in newer magic we would prefer to reserve for black cards and so we try to make try to give like black the strongest pinpoint removal spells obviously we can't go back in time and change swords to plowshares but printing swords to plowshares in a standard legal set would

I think be considered a color pie break in terms of the format level color pie, where we want green to be strong at big mana and ramp and black to be strong at killing things and white to have the best go-wide small creature strategies.

This is not an exhaustive list or anything like that, but basically we want to preserve those core strengths. I think one of the things, the reason I bring this up is a lot of times when people are making cards outside of the console colors, there's really like, this color can or can't do this thing, and then they will push cards to make them good and not realize that you like there's a point at which you make something good enough that you are breaking the color pie, even though the color can do that. Yeah. So like the way I like to think about it, I guess, is cards have multiple axes of power level.

And we want cards of a color to have the majority of their power level along the axes that are associated with their color. So it's hard to come up with an example off the top of my head. But you can think of a card that is both a a card advantage card and a um creature or something like that we want you know if it's green we want the most powerful part of the card to be along the creature axis right green has cantrip creatures um but it should like those creatures, like, big or strong or something like that. If it's blue, then the power level should be along, like, the evasion axis or maybe more along the card advantage axis, right? So, like, maybe, like, you know, blue gets three mana, one, one flyer, ETB cantrip,

but green would get, like, big creature cantrip, but, like, at a more expensive mana value, like four mana, three, three cantrip and so the but like a more expensive mana value like four mana three three cantrip so you see those the power of those cards is like distributed along different axes of the card uh more associated with their color even though they're sort of the same card design right right for example the way to think of it is so much power goes to creature and so much power goes to card drawing and where are you allocating it what what makes it a strong card so it's less about like what those colors can or can't do and it's more about how you're allocating the power level along those different um axes i mean one of the

things the reason i think the colorless position is a in ways the hardest. I mean, there's the least number of cards to look at, I guess. But there's a lot of nuance in sort of what colors can and can't do and power level and power level between colors. I mean, it's a very complicated issue. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I need to know a lot more than just what does colorless do? Because I mean, like sort of, as we talked about, colorless does everything.

It just does it all a little bit worse. So yeah, it's definitely hard because just keeping the, being so like rate conscious and knowing the like ordering of stuff is yeah very nuanced okay so i want to talk two other things now um one is is there any difference um between artifacts and like colorless permanent spells or? Yeah. Yeah. So between artifacts that have a generic cost versus color, just things that aren't artifacts that are just colorless things. I mean, Eldrazi is the most associated with it, but we've done other stuff.

Is there a difference for your purposes? Is there a difference between that or not really? your purposes is there a difference between that or not really um there's sort of a difference because art like we've done a lot of like artifacts matters over the year so like artifacts are sort of inherently more powerful we haven't really done a ton of like colorless matters over the years like when we do it's usually eldrazi of some kind. So being an artifact affects your rate to some extent. So that matters for me. Beyond that, I mean, it doesn't matter a ton. For me, it matters, did you have to pay colored mana to get access to this thing?

No, then we're going to have to make sure it properly follows the rules of colorless cards. Okay, which then brings us to colorless mana. So not generic mana, but actual colorless mana, like... Like Thotnots here. Yeah, something in which you specifically have to spend colorless mana as a cost.

It's shown... What was the set? The Eldrazi set. Both of the Gatewatch. Both of the Gatewatch introduced it. How do you judge that? How much, how does colorless stuff

get treated different than generic? So that is a great question. And the answer is it's somewhat ongoing conversation. It's something I've been thinking about. I think it matters a non-zero amount where, you know, having to play literal colorless mana is an actual cost as opposed to, oh, I can just put this card in my red-blue deck.

Because having lands that produce actual colorless mana is a downside. So it should buy you something it could because it it pushes against the like ubiquity of colorless cards which is what i like i would be uh so afraid of so it definitely buys you something i think it depends on how many colorless mana symbols there are like i think the first colorless mana symbol is mostly free and doesn't really matter very much but like once you get into two or three now we start saying like oh you can do some pretty weird stuff if you're willing to actually play a true colorless deck um yeah i it's the sort of thing where i wouldn't want it to push into any like really core strengths of any colors still but I think you can be like a little more efficient than you would otherwise get

there's a card for most of the gatewatch which costs one and a colorless and gives target creature plus three minus three that card you know it's not really stronger than Lightning Strike. It's not really that much stronger at killing things than a lot of black cards that we would make. But it's stronger than, like, a normal colorless card that we would make. Like, it's stronger than, like, a two-man artifact that we would make. And I think that that's okay.

Like, I think that card landed pretty well. It saw some play when it was legal and standard as just like a removal spell that you could put in your colorless deck. That's the kind of power that I think it sort of buys you, where it's like still noticeably weaker than the best options, but a little bit stronger than we would normally do.

Okay, so I'm almost to my desk here. So my last question for you is, any final sort of thoughts about being the colorless? Like, anything we haven't talked about that's sort of an interesting aspect of this role? Navigating high mana value colorless stuff is very fun because it usually gets really weird and really powerful because it's nice to make, like when you have a colorless card, it's nice for it not to just be like, oh, this card could be blue. You know, it's nice for it to do something cool and unique.

And so a lot of the normal cards that we make will fall neatly into a color and we'll make them in that color or whatever but some of the expensive colorless cards can get really wild and it's kind of fun to read them the other thing that we get to do in colorless is we can mix and match things that don't naturally go in one color yeah that comes up sometimes. I mean, sometimes we do that in multicolor, obviously, but we can make weird things that just sort of

no one color would do this, but we let colors do some stuff like that. Yeah, I think for the Nuts and Bolts colorless cards, we usually keep them pretty simple. We're talking about expensive rare cards. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah for the Eldrazi titans of the world or whatever

you can get really wild well I want to thank you I don't think like I said I think when people think about the color pie that they think a lot about the five colors but the fact that there really is this whole other aspect that we have to worry about

like I said, when I started this, you and I talked about it you weren't even sure whether I was going to interview you and I go, of course I want to interview you I know the public doesn't think of there being this exposition, but it does exist and it's an important position so

I thank you for, like I said it is in a lot of ways a tireless task because you're just always trying to think of things that other people just aren't thinking about because it's very tangential sometimes to how the rest of the discussions go. Yeah, for sure. But it's been fun. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say thanks for having me on. Oh, you're welcome part of doing the series

was I want the players to realize how much thought goes in to the color pie it's neat to have people that are really focused on just one aspect of it it's kind of like for example when you direct something it's nice that you have

actors that are like all they think about is that character and that they come up with things that no one else will think of because they're very invested in that character um and i feel the color pie is really similar in that you know i'm i oversee the team but i'm thinking in very broad strokes and then i'll talk to each color and they're like they're really really thinking about how their color what matters for their color and and matters for their color. Or their non-color. Or their lack of color, in your case. So thank you, Ben, for being with us.

It was a lot of fun. I hope you guys, everyone learned all about what it means to be the colorless person. So thank you, Ben. Yeah, thank you, Mark. And to everybody else, I am at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.