Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1299: Color Pie Evolution

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

In this episode, I talk about how the color pie has evolved over the last three decades.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking about the color pie because I don't know if I'm contractually obligated, but I like talking about the color pie. So today's question came from my blog. And the basic question was

you talk about the color by as being this firm, untrenchable thing, yet you keep talking about changing the color pie. How exactly does the color pie evolve if the color pie is this unchanging thing? So that's today's topic, color pie evolution. So first and foremost, I guess the first thing you have to discuss is there are two core elements of the color pie. There's the philosophical elements of the color pie, what the colors represent philosophically. And then there's mechanical execution of that philosophy.

the philosophy does not change I mean or if it changes in very very subtle small ways but the basic idea of what white was in the early days of magic and what white is now is the same I've spent a lot of time fine-tuning it getting better words for it so I've definitely spent more time you know like one of the things I do is I got some words

for all of them right that like white wants its ultimate goal is peace and it gets it through structure. Blue wants perfection and it gets it through knowledge. Black wants power and it gets it through opportunity. Red wants freedom

and it gets it through action. Green wants growth and it gets it through acceptance. That each one has the thing that it wants and the means by which it gets it. And a lot of those words I've spent time and energy figuring out how best to describe it.

I don't think the core idea of the colors really change. I don't think the philosophy has basically changed. What has changed is me getting a little bit more elaborate in understanding how to explain it. So there's a lot of fine-tuning. So it's not as if I have not worked on the philosophy. I have. But working on the philosophy has been more explaining it, understanding what are the allies,

what are the enemies, and just having a better understanding of the system in a way we explain it. But philosophically, what it means, that really hasn't changed. And that, when we talk about the unchanging color pie, that is what is unchanging. the philosophical underpining of what the colors mean and what they represent. But there's a whole second component, and that is the mechanical execution of the color pie philosophy. And the mechanical execution, that has the ability to change to a certain extent. It is not totally changeable.

So essentially what happens is Richard comes up with the color pie. and then he's trying to naturally match what makes sense where I will admit one of the things about the very early days is everything was done more by feel meaning oh this kind of feels blue we'll put it in blue and one of the things that I spent a lot of time on

was kind of like each card was kind of made in a decision in a vacuum and much like sort of Bill took the rules with help from the rules team and consolidated it and made the six-edition rules and just made the rules like early rules

were every card sort of was out for itself like here's how I work but there wasn't continuity between the rules I did the same thing for the color pie where I'm like

look we can't in one set this can't be red and that is red like that's the continuity of what the colors are now some of that continuity like some of what was there

was there in the very beginning and we built on that and some of it was like okay and there definitely was a little period time in sort of the late 90s, where I was, like, cleaning and I did a little bit of moving mechanical things around. I didn't do anything radical, but I did definitely say, oh, you know what, rituals are much more of get it now thing and moved rituals to red and out of black.

Like, we, we, there was a period of time where we definitely did, like I said, in the late 90s after I started, where I spent a few years really trying to do a lot more of like, let's really clean it up and move it around. Other than that period of time where I was really sort of solidifying things, the color pie mechanically has mostly coalesced and that we're not making radical changes to the color pie. I'm going to walk through some changes we make and talk through the philosophy today, but a lot of the core ideas of what they are, the core strengths and weaknesses, that was

built in long ago. We've established that. But, and this is the important thing, magic is ever. changing. The game is changing. The formats people play is changing. We're making new cards. Just the general gist of how games played, you know, the rise of casual play, you know, a commander. There's a lot of different factors that fundamentally sort of change the game. The game is, like, I talk about this all the time, but it's important for today. Magic is this ever-evolving thing. It is not a static game. It is a game in flux. And that's one of the coolest things about it,

that you can play the game and learn the game and learn the strategy and think you know everything about the game and then we make new sets and the game changes or a new format rises and the game changes or there's many different ways but it's a living breathing game that's one of the cool things about magic is that it doesn't stay the same and so we like R&D and all the different facets of making magic have to adapt to the magic that is like we design to what the game is in the moment we are designing it there's no it's not like there's this static way we design and the game changes around us

we change with the game and that is true with the color pie and the thing to understand is we are not philosophically changing anything and even when we do mechanically change things we take great care to make sure that it lines up with the philosophical

okay so I'm going to use a couple examples today. So first off, I'm going to talk about red and white card drawing. So, Commander was a format not made by Wizards, made by people external, and slowly over time built up a lot of popularity. So one of the challenges with the Commander format is it changes a few fundamental things about the game. You know, Magic when it was originally designed, was designed for a two-person, 20-life game. And in fact, one of the things about red, and white, not quite as much as red, but red and white were kind of the colors that had a plan that was agro, that was fast. Red especially. Red's all about short-term, you know, short-term gain, meaning I act in the moment.

Okay, well, that's really good for a fast strategy. But one of Red's inherent weaknesses was red will run out of steam. Because red's all about for now, it doesn't have a great long game. And so if it can't beat you quickly, it can get in trouble. Now it makes up a really fun dynamic in two-player game where some of the colors are more trying to get control and some are more about being agro and there's a nice tension there. But all of a sudden, you're playing not with one opponent but three opponents and not 20 life but 40 life. And all of a sudden, instead of having to do 20 damage, you have, you know, you have a hundred damage, not given other people are also attacking. but um and so red and white what basically happened was um the things that were naturally in blue

and green and black were more played into the format of commander you know green is all about uh you know your your man exploding and ramping and blues book card drawing and card drawing and ramping are really really good in a format that's slower um where a lot of reds tools like direct damage is a lot less effective when your opponent has more life. So we recognize that there was an imbalance in play. Like, you know, we could look at the dad and said, oh, way less red and white, you know, way less decks involve red and white. So we said, okay, our job as, you know, the council of colors, the people who are

monitoring the color pie is we need to adapt. Now, the philosophy is not changed. white is white, red is red. Our goal was not to make white or red act like another color. So when we were trying to figure how to do card drawing, the question we had, so we started with red. We did red first.

We said, okay, what is the core of Red's philosophy? Red's philosophy is about act in the now, right? It's no, there's not a lot of long-term planning for red. So we're like, okay, well, normal with card drawing, you look like traditional blue card drawing, it's like, I draw a whole bunch of cards and hold on to them And, you know, if I can control the game, at some point, I have all these, I have this card advantage because I keep drawing cards that I can then sort of win the game because I've controlled the game. We didn't really want Red to be all about controlling the game.

I mean, there are some elements of Red, you know, but Red's kind of control is more about blowing things up than it is about sort of long-term card advantage. So the question was, is there a way to let Red get more cards, but in a way that doesn't undermine, and once again, the other thing, which is interesting, is we still have two players. There are still people playing with, you know, two players in 20 life. That's still a thing that a lot of people do. So we don't want to create tools for Commander that undermines how it plays in two-player formats. And that was one of the big challenges, right?

That if we give card drawing to red agrodex, red-agrodex are pretty good in, you know, two-player games, 20-life, two-player games. So the goal is not to take something that already excels and give it more tools. So the thing we came up with, and we came up with a bunch of different things, but the biggest thing we came up with is what I call impulsive draw. Sometimes we call bottling. And that is the idea that what if Red could draw, but it had to use it right away.

That Red's card advantage came with it a very red condition. That it's all about, okay, yeah, you get it, but it's in the now. I have to use it now. And that felt both, it just felt very apropos for red, right? Red is all about being in the now. And that felt like a core red thing to do. White, we had a similar issue, which is we wanted to make sure that white had some means to get cards. We didn't really want to reward White Weenie too much.

White Weenie had a little bit of give where Agrored didn't quite have as much give. And white really, when you draw a whole bunch of cards at once, you draw a whole bunch of cards at once, we call that burst card drawing, right? I draw three cards or four cards. I draw a whole bunch of cards at once. Blue is good at that. White is supposed to be the least good at that. So what we said is, well, what if White's card advantage was more a long-term thing? We're not trying to reward fast white.

We're trying to reward slow-white, because White also can have a slow game. And the way White's slow game works is it sets up, White is the king of conditions, of structure. Well, what if I make a lot of things and I either enable myself or I make it harder for my opponent and then I have to live by the rules I set up? And usually the rules white sets up affects everybody or often affects everybody.

Some things are just one side or the other. And how do you live within the rules that you white set up? So the idea we liked is what if White's card drop is lawn? What that meant was, it's not that white drew a lot of cards at once. It didn't get card bursts. But the idea is if you follow the rules that white is set up, white can get rewarded with cards over time. And so we set the rule that no card that gives white card drawing

does more than one card a turn. And that is white has this long draw. And that was something we hadn't done before. In both cases, impulsive draw and long draw, we didn't just take things that existed and move it into red and white. And I'll get to a second. Sometimes we do add things, but in this particular case, it's like we're trying to stay true to the philosophy, but we know there's a mechanical need. And the idea is it's not that it's fundamentally anti-redder white two draw cards.

That's just a game action. But how you drew it and the means by which you drew it was important because there's a certain philosophical feel we have to have. And the other thing I should explain. and plainer chaos of all sets is the set that sort of experimented with this. It is possible if you're going to start magic all over again that you could distribute the mechanics in different places. For example, we use card drawing to represent knowledge.

The idea, and a lot of the metaphors we set up was the idea was your hand is your conscious thought and your deck is kind of your, all the stuff you know. And so, you know, I'm sort of, riffing with what I have in thought right now, but at some point, maybe I remember something and I can use that. So the idea of drawing cards were really tied into knowledge, but we could have gone another direction. For example, green is very about growth. What if getting cards represented growth? That's what harmonized was messing around with in Planner Chaos. Like,

there is a path we could have taken. Now, the danger of Planner Chaos was, but we didn't. Magic did make choices and did do things. And like one of the things about the mechanical cower pie is there's some decisions that are pretty locked that, you know, we've been making magic for 32 years and this has been a constant through line. It is hard to change that. And some of the things like card drawing, we sort of philosophically bent around it in a way where just in the way we think about it, we've played that flavor up. That if you look at all the card drawing cards, the flavor of them is I'm learning things, right? You know, I'm, and that is the idea that I'm, I'm gaining knowledge. So it's hard to go back and go, well, knowledge isn't card drawing, knowledge is

something else, because we've sort of ingrained that in. And so, as I talk about how the Philside, side can't change, the mechanical side, elements of it can change, but the vast majority of it, it's not as if we want to change most of it. Magic is magic. We want you to come, now, every once in a while, we will make a decision of, and we add things in and out. I'll start by adding in. One of the things that can happen is the play design or set design can come to us and say, we've noticed an inherent problem, something that we need to fix. For example, they're like, we are having trouble with blue in Limited. We need more creature combat-oriented things for Blue and Limited.

Hey, Color Pie, could you get us something that's reusable that could be an impactful combat ability that we can do, especially in low rarity cards, for Limited? So we went and we looked at what we had. And the first thing we did is we looked at the evergreen keywords.

When Magic first started in the early days, A, we didn't keyword a lot. It really wasn't, interesting. It was in future site that I really pushed that, say, here's things we do. all the time. Let's name Death Touch. Let's name Lifelink. Let's name Reach. Let's name these things. And in general, one of the things

is a lot of what happened in some of the early days of magic is just getting more terminology and getting things out there. Having more, okay, we want some number of every beam mechanics. We want you to learn them. And then, another big push we made is originally they tended to be in one color. Haste is a red thing.

We're like, well, you know what? It would be better for us if they ever green abilities showed up in more than one color. Just gives us more design. So we tended to push things into a second color. And so the idea of something being primary and seconded is kind of where that idea started. One of the things that we've realized in the last maybe, I don't know, five or so years is

we really can have our evergreen keyword show up in three colors. There are a few exceptions. Flying is so fundamental that it does show up in all the colors, although far less in green and just a little bit in red. And Flash is more utility than, I mean, it's a keyword technically, but it is, like, if I had my way and we redid magic, it would be a super type, it wouldn't even be a keyword, the instant. That's my, for those, they never heard me what I would do if I re-change magic. I would get rid of instant as a car type, make it a super type. And then we know now as instance would be instant sorceries.

And then Flash creature would be the instant creature. Anyway, so the idea is, I got off my attention to thought. And we like the idea that we could spread keywords a little more than we had. And so there are some keywords that were in two colors. And we kind of know that if we ever need to push you a third color, we can. So one of the things we looked at for Blue is to realize that Blue can untap. That we make one thing that we do all the time is Blue has the ability to untap itself. Well, that's not that far from vigilance.

I mean, vigilance is pretty much, you could almost think of vigilance as when I tap. to attack, untap me. It's not technically that, I get it, but you can think of it that way. So, blue saying I can attack, and after attack, I can untape myself is not that far from vigilance. And vigilance at the time was just in two colors, primary and white, secondary, and green. And we're like, oh, okay, we could add it to a third color. It makes sense in blue.

It's not really undermining anything. In fact, one of the things that we try to do a lot of times is differentiate colors just by making them work slightly differently. And I think in a lot of ways, instead of giving vigilance to blue, we had blue untapped. It tries to be a little bit different. But what we realize over time is sometimes the needs of keywords can say, okay, it's not crucial Blue untapped itself, or we can even let Blue do that occasionally, but we can bring in the Vigilin's keyword.

So we added that to Blue, and that's a good example where it's not messing with the philosophy. It is something Blue can almost do. And so, you know, it just was a smooth transition. We added something. Another example of this is Eric Lauer. came to me a while back and talked about how he realized that we had had an imbalance in black. That black

was the only color that couldn't destroy two different permanent types, because at the time it couldn't destroy artifacts or enchantments. And we had this weird thing where artifacts had three colors that could destroy it, but enchantments only had two. Red, white, and green could destroy artifacts, but only green and white could destroy enchantments. So his pitch

is, why don't we just let black destroy enchantments? We went to conscious of colors. They're like, okay, this is fundamentally a change. The reason we had not had black destroying enchantments was back in the day we made a lot more we called deal with the devil enchantments like necropotence being a classic

we're like okay you can now draw cards for life but you can't draw normally anymore like they come with a drawback the idea is the advantage you gain could be very powerful but there are times will come back to bite you and our thought process at the time was well okay we're not going to destroy

enchantments so that you you can't just easily get rid of these things but then over time a couple things One, we did way less of them. And two, we did a lot of creatures that had like the same kind of thing, but we let black sacrifice creatures. And we're like, okay, like maybe it's not a big deal of black and get rid of enchantments. So we said, okay, let's let black rid of enchantments.

We did want a hierarchy to it. We said white and green should be better. So we tested with like the levels of which black should do it. But we're like, okay, black can do it. Probably there's additional cost because it's kind of a black thing. It does it weaker than white and green. But it's like, and that was something where we did make a fundamental shift. We took something that was a weakness and took it away.

We don't do that very often. But when we do that, we sort of look largely like what support was it doing and why did we make the weakness? And we realized that the weakness, the need for the weakness wasn't really there anymore. Now, the reverse is also true. So back in the day, we used to do whenever we would do what I'll call a polymorph effect. But I'm blue and I'm changing a creature from one thing into another thing. Often we use polymorphic.

talking about you change it something off the top of the library. So I'll say transmutation. So transputation, I'm changing it from one thing into another thing. So one of the things we used to do is Blue would say, destroy a target creature, and then put a token in its place. You know, make a token. The problem was White also

did that, and White did it as like a consolation. Yeah, I destroyed the creature, but have this consolation prize. Blue, the flavor was, I'm not actually destroying it. I'm turning it from this into that. But the problem was the word destroy was sitting on the card. So it's very hard to say, well, Blue doesn't destroy creatures. well, this cart says destroyed a target creature.

And the idea of the flavor that this creature that destroyed becomes this other creature was in your graveyard now. You can reanimate it. You can raise dead. Like, that does feel like a separate creature from the token. And the fact that we had white doing consolation,

like those two things, it's hard to say no. Well, in white, this is the flavor. And blue, that's the flavor. People weren't getting it. So he said, you know what? Let's take that away. So we stopped doing, or we change how transmutation works in,

blue. The rule now is you can change something for the turn, so it could be until end of turn, until on turn, the creature has new stats and new abilities, or you can have an ability that changes it, but the thing that changes it can be undone. It's an aura. It's a creature that has to stay on the battlefield, that you can do something, but your opponent can answer that. And so the idea is, if something's transformed, the thing that is being transformed is still on the battlefield with something telling it that is different. But the creature doesn't die. It's not destroyed, it's not sitting in your graveyard, it's there. And that, for example, is us taking something away.

And usually, when we take things away, it is more often the council of colors realizing that something we've done, some move we've made is confusing or problematic or, you know, sometimes we try something and it doesn't work out, so we pull back a little bit. Another thing that we changed was Green's weakness had always been as overreliance on creatures. And at one point we were like, well, Green also cares about land. So maybe if we, like, normally we tie its card drawing to creatures. Well, what if we also tied it to land? Green's very much about land.

But it turned out that drawing cards off land, land was so predictable that it just was giving green straight up normal draw. It wasn't, it wasn't like, like, for example, we let you wipe the board. So it's possible I have no creatures, but we don't let you wipe lands anymore. We don't do Armageddon anymore. So the idea that I somehow was dependent on my lands, it just wasn't the same. So we pulled back. We said, okay, green can't do that anymore.

We say green's reliance on card drawing is on creatures. If it's going to draw something, it has to deal with creatures. It's not dealing with land. So we took that away. And that, like I said, that is one of the, one of the ongoing things in all these stories I'm talking about today is, we are never trying to change the essence of what the color pie is philosophically. I mean, the reason the color pie exists, and I have a whole podcast on this.

In fact, way back, one of the earliest podcasts I did, back in my first year of doing the podcast, I did podcasts on the Golden Trifecta, which are the three items, the genius items that Richard Garfield came up with when he made magic, which is the trading card game genre, the mana system, and the color pie. So I talk about each of them for a whole podcast, why they're so important. But just the very brief version of the Color Pie is the Color Pie does a couple really important things. Number one is it separates out elements of the game, that when you're making a trading card game if you can just put everything in the same deck that causes problems. So by divving up things, you know, oh, I want to do thing X. Well, that is in this color, but not that color. So if I want

to do it, I need to kind of play one of the colors that does it. And one of the things is the mana system shrinks colors. The mana system says the less colors you play, the better. The color pie does the reverse. It says the more colors you play, the access to more abilities you have. And that's one of the core tensions of the game. That less colors are more consistent, but more colors are more powerful because you have access to more things. And there's a fun tension. A lot of the core of the game is based on that tension. Another thing that it does, beside mechanically separating things, the other bigger thing, is it adds flavor. The colors each have a philosophy, they each mean something, and they each

represent something, and that the color pie really allows us to say, well, this thing exists in multiple colors mechanically, but it really means something different flavorfully in a way that adds context and just makes the game more textual and flavored and fun. So a lot of what we're trying to do today is, what I'm talking about today is when we talk about the mechanical color pie, we're really talking about how do we enable the game to do what the game needs to do while staying true to the philosophical color pie. We want white to feel white. And that, what's going to happen is as the game evolves, as new cards get added, as formats get changed, as people play magic differently, sort of the needs of the game will change and evolve. And we will change and evolve with them.

And that's kind of my core idea today about the color pie is the color pie itself is in flux. Not the philosophical part and not even a lot of the core mechanical part. We do not willy-nilly change mechanical elements of magic. admit there was an early point of magic back in the late 90s when I first, you know, 95, 9, 6, 9, 7, 98, around there when I first got a Wizards where I was like consolidating the color pie, there was a period of there where I was doing some major changing just because I was getting it into shape.

But beyond that, once it got to that normal state, you know, from the 2000s forward, we're very consistent. Things have inherent weaknesses. We're not going to let red to start destroying enchantments. Like I said, the shift on black and enchantments was very unique. is not something we do very often. It was us realizing that we had imbalanced something years ago.

That back when I was trying to balance everything, I had created a slight imbalance because I was justifying something in the end probably didn't need to be justified there. And I had made a slight imbalance. That was on me. Eric caught it, and we fixed it. But that is the essence of today. The color pie

is not the mechanical color pie is something that has some amount of flux to it. It is not infinite. flux. We don't, like, we want continuity. We want that blue is blue and black is black and green is green. Like, we want you to feel like the colors are the colors. So, when I say there's some flux of the mechanical color pie, we have to be careful. There's a lot of things that we will not change. We're really kind of changing things around the edges. The most common thing we will do

is add something new that wasn't there before. Impulsive drawing and white drawing and long drawing are examples of that. And that it wasn't that we took something away from another color. You know, we don't do a lot of shifting anymore. Every once in a while, like vigilance, we will add something to a color. That's more likely. And as I said, with sort of the green card drawing, sometimes we take elements away. So we, there is on the edges of us, they're a little bit expanding and restricting, and that us trying things and seeing what they work.

And sometimes we do things and realize, oh, that really wasn't a good idea. Let's stop doing that. But it's mostly us playing around the edges of trying to start to get the general sense of making the best version of the color pie. And because the game is in flux, the color pie is in flux. And that is why we make changes. That is why we do things. It is not because there's not continuity.

We want continuity. It's not because we don't want the color pie. If you play magic now and you go away and come back in 20 years, we want you to see the five colors and go, those are the five colors. We really do want magic to be a game than if you leave and come back, because historically speaking, people take breaks from magic. normal, that when you

return to magic, it's not that magic can't be doing new things, it can, but we want the core essence of what magic is to feel like magic. And, I mean, regular listeners know to this. I mean, the reason I love the color pie is I firmly believe the color pie is the absolute foundation of magic.

It is the thing that makes magic unlike every other game. It is the thing that give magic its flavor, that gives magic's mechanical identity. I believe the color... And the reason we have an entire council around it, the reason that exists, that is so important, is the ethos of the game, the living heart of the game, lives in the color pie.

And that's why we spend infinite amount of time. And once again, we are constantly solving problems. It is not as if we are done. It is like, okay, we like what the color pie is, but here are new problems. And let's solve them through the color pie, not violating the color pie, but using the color pie with respect for the color pie,

which we have great, great respect. You know, the fact that I have meetings, week where we spend good time arguing through what we want. And the other interesting thing, and the reason it's fun to have a whole team is, you know, there's different ways to interpret things. And a lot of times we have to walk through and figure out what we want. And, you know, that's one of the neat things about the console colors is that the color pie is so robust that it can evolve with time.

That is something that it's capable of doing. But as I explained today, it's not done willy-nilly. It's not done without great care. It's not done without creating continuity. You know, the color pie does a lot of things. We want them to do it carefully. And anytime we make a change, we do it with great thought. Like I said, there's a whole team that will argue for many hours

whenever we're trying to do something different. But we do it because of how important it is and how much it matters. So that is my point today. Yes, the color pie evolves, but it evolves very carefully. And certain aspects of it don't change, but other parts do. So that, my friends, is the evolution. of the color pie. So I hope this was interesting today to hear about it. I obviously love talking

color pie and I love talking philosophy, so I love podcasts like this. So anyway, guys, I'm now what works, so I don't 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 talk to y'all next time. Bye-bye.