Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1310: Color Matters

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

In this podcast, I talk about a big theme from Lorwyn Eclipsed called "color matters." ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so everybody's enjoying Lorwyn Eclipse. So I thought I would do a Lorne Eclipse-themed podcast, talking specifically about one of the two major themes. Obviously, Lorwyn's core theme is Typle. I've done some podcasts on the history of Typle.
Starting point is 00:00:23 Shadowmore's main theme is Color Matters. And I realize I've not yet done a podcast on Color Matters. So that will be today's topic. Okay, so as this is sort of talking about the nature of it, I like to go back to the beginning and back to Alpha in Richard Garfield. Okay, so let's talk back to the very beginning. So the idea of color mechanically mattering goes all the way back to the very beginning, to Alpha.
Starting point is 00:00:51 And I would say that Alpha has a couple different ways that cares about colors. Let's sort of walk through those. first and foremost, or not foremost, but first, it has a lot of color hosers that a lot of the definition of color is every color, for example, has a card specifically aimed to deal with a deck of that color. Now, sometimes it specifically matters about color,
Starting point is 00:01:21 sometimes it talks about the basic land type rather than the color, like flash fire blows up all planes, which doesn't mention white by name, but if you're playing a white deck, you have lots of planes. So there's a little bit of intermixing of basic land type with color. But, so the idea is,
Starting point is 00:01:40 probably the most memorable things from Alpha is the color hosers. Like, you get stuff like elemental blast, blue, elemental blast and redimental blast. You know, there's just literally, every color has a hoser for its,
Starting point is 00:01:57 two enemy colors on two separate cards. And white in particular, by the way, he gets two cycles of hosers. It gets circles of protection, which always has one color, circle protection, red, for example. And then you can spend one mana to prevent damage from any color.
Starting point is 00:02:17 And because white is a protective color, not only does it get color hosers for its enemies, it gets color hosers for its allies. And not only does it get the circles of protection, it also gets wards, which are ores, you can put in your creatures, to grant your creature protection from that color. Now, circle protection, I should mention,
Starting point is 00:02:35 did not get a full cycle because Alpha forgot to put two cards on the sheet, one of which was circle protection black, the other was volcanic island, which was one of the dual ends. Beta fixed it, but... Anyway, so, okay, there definitely were I'm going to use
Starting point is 00:02:50 color as a way to mess with you. There are also some cards that encouraging that want you to play colors. There's a cycle of artifacts called the Lucky Charms. The Lucky Charms say whenever you play a particular color, names the color, you may pay one to gain a life. We later redid them, but without having to pay the one. There's stuff like Bad Moon or Crusade or Gauntlet of Might. Each one of those gives plus one plus one to black or white or red. There's a card called Aspect of Wolf, for example, that the creature
Starting point is 00:03:27 gets more powerful based on how many forests you have. So once again, there is a little bit of intermingling when we talk about colors. There's things that mechanically specifically care about color, and then there are things that encourage you to play a deck all of one color. And those blur a little bit. We talk about color matters. One of the earliest strategies of color matters, and you can see stuff like Bad Moon or Crusade or Gauntlet of Might.
Starting point is 00:03:53 I made a Gauntlet of Might deck back in the day. And a gauntlet of mite deck says, well, play a lot of red cards. Because a gauntlet of Mike lets all your mountains tap for an extra red, and all your red creatures get plus one plus one. So that card really says, you know, here's what you want to do. Play nothing but red spells. And play red creatures, because they all get booed. And so I had a gauntlet of mite deck where I would play lots of red creatures
Starting point is 00:04:18 and play a lot of direct damage spells. And, you know, I would, it very much said play a red deck. Much like Crusade said play a white deck or bad moon's said play a black deck. Or Aspect of Wolf said play a green deck. That the idea of, we're going to give you something that rewards you for concentrating in that color. So remember real quickly, just every time I talk about early magic. The core conflict built into magic structure is the mana system and the color wheel.
Starting point is 00:04:47 The mana system is built to say, hey, you are more consistent the less colors you play. The more you stretch colors, the harder it is to do, the more you can get colors could do, the more that you won't be able to play your spells. So the mana system says play less colors. In fact, the mana system loves when you play one color. But the color wheel is all about having strengths and weaknesses and spreading them amends five different colors, five subsections. And the color wheel says, well, the more colors you play, the more powerful you get because you get access to more spells. A simple way to think of it. I'm going to use limited.
Starting point is 00:05:23 be aware when Alpha came out, Limited really wasn't a thing. But let's say you're playing with a limited, and let's assume for ease of explanation, there's no colors. It's just 20% each of the colors. Which means if I want to play a mono-white deck, there's only 20% of the cards that I can choose from to make a mono-white deck.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Now, if I'm building, I'm constructing, okay, that's plenty of cards. So, like, like I said, Alpha really didn't do Limited yet, but the idea was, It gave you tools that you could go build decks. Also, remember when Alpha came out, it wasn't 60 cards, it was 40 cards, and you weren't limited to four. So a lot of these strategies, you had as many of the cards as you wanted. But something that Richard realized early on was he understood that there was some simplicity to doing monocolor decks, and that there is some desire to do monocolor decks.
Starting point is 00:06:17 And he also realized, so Magic is what is known as a dynamic game. And what that means is, let me give an example of a non-dynamic game. So, Tic Tic Toc Ttoe. So Tic Toc-Tow, when you first start playing Tick-Tac-Tow, you know, it seems like, oh, can I win? Can I not win? And as you start to sort of learn, you know, the choice decisions is not that deep. Meaning that you eventually, like, it doesn't take long before you're like, oh, I understand. If I know what I'm doing, nobody can win Tick-Tac-to.
Starting point is 00:06:50 or at least if I'm playing with my knowledge, I can't lose. Maybe my opponent messes up and I can win, but I can't lose. That if I understand, you know, the importance of the center square, like, if I can correctly make the right moves, I, there's, you know, the game fundamentally isn't dynamic because there's not an answer to everything. Even chess, by the way, chess, assuming you had a, I guess a computer smarter than we got right now,
Starting point is 00:07:18 But if you had something that could actually look at all the moves, you know, if you could say, okay, make this move, make this movement, you know, there is sort of a definitive answer there. So the idea of a dynamic game is that for any one strategy, there's a counter strategy. Rock paper scissors. In game design, we refer to this as rock paper scissors. The idea being, well, if your opponent plays rock and you know they're playing rock, well, you can play paper. Oh, but if they're playing paper, you can play scissors. but if they're playing scissors, you can play rock. And that one of the things Richard wanted when he made magic was he wanted a dynamic system.
Starting point is 00:07:54 That no matter what you did, there were answers to that system. And the idea basically what Richard wanted was he wanted flow in the gameplay. Meaning, if you keep playing the same deck all the time, at some point, I mean, even though there's randomization in the shuffling of the deck, at some point, you know, you're going to see play that you've seen before. But Richard's idea really early on was, and remember part of this was anti. Part of it was he had built into the game that you would be forced to lose cards through playing. But also, he made magic assuming it's being played at the kitchen table.
Starting point is 00:08:30 That is the game you're playing with your friends at home. And there the idea is, oh, Bob keeps playing his whatever deck, his mono black deck. Well, there are some easy cards to answer his mono black deck. You know, there are cards in Alpha that specifically say, oh, well, this is really, If I'm playing, you know, I'm playing this card that answers your black card, wow, I'm going to have a much better easy chance of winning. And so the reason the color hoses are there is part of trying to keep the dynamics is no matter what your opponent's doing, their answers for it. And part of it is they have to play colors. Now, he did want to, like, Richard was trying to, I mean, I argue he did, wanted a lot of variety in play.
Starting point is 00:09:12 So he wanted to encourage monocolor play. He wanted to color multi-color play. I think he wasn't perfectly trying to color really four-and-five color plays so much. I mean, he allowed splashing. I think in early magic you could splash extra colors. But the idea essentially was he wanted you to make choices, but it wanted a lot of options available. So there's a couple other things.
Starting point is 00:09:36 So we talked about the color hosers. We talked about sort of the color helpers, if you will. Oh, I didn't get to all the color hoses. There are a few other color hoses, by the way. I did talk about wards. Wards introduced protection. There are creatures like White Knight and Black Knight. White Knight is protection from black.
Starting point is 00:09:54 Blackness protection from white. There are a bunch of things. Like protection is an evergreen ability when Alpha starts, when the game begins. That just hoses you for playing a specific color. Also, there was Landwalk. Now, Landwalk doesn't name color specifically. But again,
Starting point is 00:10:10 If I, if my opponent, if I have a forest walk creature and my opponent is playing forests, wow, my creature is so much better. They just can't block my creature. Which then also gets into, there's a series of cards where colors had, for example, I'll use terror is my example. Terror said, Destroyed Target, non-black, non-art artifact creature. We'll get the artifact part for a second. Non-black just meant, oh, well, being black meant you were immune to.
Starting point is 00:10:40 to some part of, you know, like, if I'm playing black and my opponent is playing terror, well, I'm immune to that. So he also messed around a little bit with the idea that colors could add elements, like, oh, you know, terror, the example there is it's not that it's, quote, unquote, helping black, but it's hurting black less. You know, it's allowing color to have sort of mechanical relevance, which gets really, really important when we get into color matter, so I'll get there in a second. Um, finally, the other thing that Richard played around with is the very essence of color being a mutable thing. For example, there's a cycle of rairs called the laces.
Starting point is 00:11:21 And what laces let you do is turn something permanently into another color. There's five laces. Each laces turn something into that color. And the laces were not all that liked early on. They were rarers that didn't do a lot. I, as a Johnny play, I loved the Laces, just because I was always intrigued by, okay, what does it mean to turn a creature from one color to another color, and how can that matter? So there's another card that I really loved called Slight of Mind.
Starting point is 00:11:52 So Slight of Mind allowed you to take any of the five color words, white, blue, black, red, or green, and change, in rules text, and change it permanently to another color. So if my opponent is playing a circle protection blue against me, and I'm playing blue, I can play sleight of mind and change Circle Protection Blue to Circle Protection Red. Let's say I'm not playing red. And now I've sort of negated it not because it's not
Starting point is 00:12:17 there. I haven't destroyed it, but I change its functionality to, and because color is so specific, by changing its color, now it doesn't affect me. And so anyway, there was a lot of color. Like, if you just search for the color
Starting point is 00:12:33 words, you get a whole bunch of cards. You get, like, once again, some are hosers, some are helpers, some are stuff like Tara that's sort of giving some flavor identity. And so the idea is that early magic, so the interesting thing about color matters is there are sort of a couple different directions that color matter goes. The kind of lowest ebb of color matters is play a deck of one color. That's why a card like Guntlet of Might or Crusade or Bad Moon, or even Aspect of Wolf, they're like, okay, this card can be powerful if you build around it.
Starting point is 00:13:14 How do you build around it? We'll just play one color. And the idea of sets that sort of encouraged single color play, that's a common theme we hit from time. I mean, we don't do it a lot, but, you know, something like Throne of Eldrain had a whole sub-theme, you know, adamant where it was like, even a mechanic that was just encouraging you to play a single color. So when we talk about color matters, the low-hanging fruit of color matters is just reward you for playing cards of a certain color.
Starting point is 00:13:45 And one of the things we often do, it's not rare for us at, or not uncommon of us, oftentimes we'll do an uncommon cycle where we just sort of reward you for playing a monocolor deck. And it doesn't take a lot to reward a monocolor deck. It really doesn't. Oh, the other thing to be aware of, there's another thing to be aware of, there's another. tool that doesn't mention color by name, but it's really important in this adage, which is mana cost. So if I have a spell that costs, you know, four and a green, let's say, I need to be playing green. Maybe I even splashing green. I don't need green until I get to five mana.
Starting point is 00:14:25 But if I make a card that's green, green, green, green, green, green, green, so five green mana, that is almost unplayable anywhere but in a monogreen deck. So that kind of card also is kind of encouraged you to play a single-color deck. And so a lot of early magic, I think a lot of sort of color matters fell into two main camps. Camp number one is play all the things of the same color. Okay, I have my crusade, I have my white cards, okay, I'm, I have my rewards, I'm doing what I'm being told, I'm playing a deck of one color.
Starting point is 00:14:59 The other thing that early on, and this is stuff like the Johnny and me, the reason I love the laces and Sleight of Mind was, how can I take advantage of the fact that I can manipulate color? And that was super fun. You know, that was definitely like, oh, well, you know, one of the neat things about Slight of Mind is I can play cards that weren't designed to hose a particular deck or, sorry, we're designed to hose a particular deck,
Starting point is 00:15:25 but with Slead of Mind, I can adapt them and make them work against whatever my opponent is playing. So let's get a little bit into the challenge with color hosers. The main problem with color hosers is they're very high variance. Meaning if I run a card, if I run flashfires and I destroy all planes, that is devastating against a mono white deck. It is hurtful against a deck playing white, and it is useless against a deck not playing white.
Starting point is 00:15:56 And so the idea is the variance of color hosers is so high And what we've kind of learned over time Is at least for stuff that has a tournament Reminications For casual play Having a little bit higher variance can be fun But a lot of that is answered by the format itself
Starting point is 00:16:15 You know, Commander is a hundred-card singleton Well, you're going to have a lot of variety Just because, you know, your cards don't repeat And you have two and a half times as many car or sorry, not two and a half, but slightly less and double than the number of cards. So, variance can be affected there. So we have been a lot more careful about sort of color hosers or stuff in which how I affect you has that high of variance.
Starting point is 00:16:41 We don't do landwalk anymore. We do color hoses occasionally, but not at the scope. We used to do color hoses would just, like, decimate the opponent. Oh, you're playing a mono green deck? Well, you lose all your creatures. You're playing mono white. you lose all your land. It just was stuff that was really hard
Starting point is 00:16:57 to come back from. And then the other thing is the decks, like I said, that manipulated color. So, early on, when we wanted color to matter, the idea was, like, in order to make a theme work,
Starting point is 00:17:15 and I use typel, since typo is the other major theme of lower one eclipse. Typle really isn't about punishing your opponent's creatures. Yeah, we've made a few cards like that. and mostly regret them. Like, I made a card, what's it called? Extinction. Oh, no, no, it's...
Starting point is 00:17:34 Okay, I made a card where you name a creature type and it's minus one minus one to that creature type. I think extinction is you name a creature to destroy all creatures of that creature type. Both those cards are the idea that I'm anti a particular creature type. And what we found with those kind of cards is they're useless, except the one deck that... And then they're devastating.
Starting point is 00:17:51 Those also aren't particularly fun. And that what makes typel fun is not that you play cards to hurt your opponent's creature types, is you play cards to help your own. That the fun typel deck says, oh, I'm a squirrel deck, oh, I'm a goblin deck, elf deck, Murpho deck. I'm doing something in which I'm playing cards that enhance me and help me. And so as we played around the color matters, what we realized is really what we want to do is have fun and play around the space of color meaning something. Now, the other thing that happened, this wasn't an alpha, I don't think, but it came pretty early on,
Starting point is 00:18:28 was the idea that cars could change colors. You know, it's an ability we put in blue and green. And the idea was, blue could change the color of anything, and then green could change, had creatures that could change their own color. And the idea essentially is that, that maybe I can manipulate things and I could care about color in a way that goes beyond just play a deck of all one color. So we get to Shadowmore. So Shadowmore, probably the big technology that enable the color matters of Shadowmore.
Starting point is 00:19:08 In fact, the impetus for doing color matters was hybrid. I had created hybrid during Ravnika, the original Ravnika block, because I was exploring color. The interesting thing was I really was exploring the idea of utility of, you know, and not, you know, or not and. The idea of here's an effect that is not red and green. It's not a red effect and a green effect stable together, but an effect that either red or green could do. And hybrid really was designed as a manacro, like as a functionality for how you play it. But when we were making, originally we made hybrid, the way it worked. originally was the card became the color of the man that you spent to cast it.
Starting point is 00:19:54 So if I played a creature, for example, with hybrid, if I, just say it's a green, white creature. If I spent green on it, it's a green creature. If I spend white on it, it's a white creature. If I spend white and green on it, it's a white and green creature. Well, we realized pretty quickly, well, it definitely was fun and there were cool things. The memory of it wasn't worth it. It just wasn't worth remembering. What did I get to pay this thing again? I have green and white out, but, oh yeah, I think I use, yeah, that turn I think I used my for, like, just remembering it wasn't worth
Starting point is 00:20:21 it. And what we realized is a lot of the fun, really just being all colors was a lot of the fun of what we were trying to get to. When you want to interact with color, if you're trying to be positive, not negative, once again, we're trying to move away from color hosers and try to lean into color matters about
Starting point is 00:20:37 wanting to have certain colors. It's started to add this element that we liked a lot, which is now, I could have cards in a deck. For example, I could have swamps and mountains, but the cards of my deck could be of colors other than swamps and mountains. Or let's say I have islands and forest, for example.
Starting point is 00:20:59 I could have cards that are hybrid stuff that are other colors, or I have cards that can change their color. I have spells that turn things into other colors. I can start manipulating colors and caring about colors. And the main way, by the way, to care about color, there's a couple different ways as we start getting into color. The main things when you want color matters, number one is caring about something being in some zone of a certain color.
Starting point is 00:21:23 So first and foremost is the battlefield, stuff like Crusade and Bad Boon and Guntlet of Mite. Oh, I'm enhancing my creatures. Now, it could be a swath, like all my white creatures get plus one plus one, or I could have a sentence that I can target a white creature, or we also do what we call threshold. If I have at least one white creature in play, like I can do things in which I can about I having white creatures. It could be all my creatures, all my cards, it could be just one card, but the idea is I can have some sort of spectrum. And either I could have things that upgrade if I have something that's sort of a threshold, or I have things that can affect things. And either
Starting point is 00:22:00 it can affect one thing. I can do so like enchantments, I can chant a red creature. Well, I don't need lots of red creatures. I just need one red creature, so that's kind of a threshold one. Or sometimes we've upgrades, enchant creature. But if the enchanted creature is red, bonus. So we can do that, and that's in the battlefield. We can care about things in your graveyard. You can care about, you can get back things in your graveyard, you can exiles to cost things from your graveyard and care about color. You can have a threshold in your graveyard and care about color.
Starting point is 00:22:33 And in your hand, likewise. You can have stuff in your hand. You can discard stuff from your hand of a certain color. You can reveal cards from your hand of a certain color. Like in Earth's Destiny, I played around, I made two cycles where I was playing around with caring about how many cards
Starting point is 00:22:49 of a certain color in your hand. You know, I really like color and that's a good example where I guess, or is the destiny is a set that I designed by myself. And I start really playing around with like, oh, how about cards in your hand and having color and what does that mean?
Starting point is 00:23:03 Also, we can care about the stack. That's another place we care about color quite a bit. If you've cast a certain color spell or whenever you cast a certain color spell. And we can play. them on permanence that have repeatable effects, or we could put them on spells that just care once, when you cast them, for example. The one zone I didn't mention, you can care how many red cards, you have in exile. We don't do that a lot. We can. The other thing that you can do,
Starting point is 00:23:32 so you can care about how many things are, what the state of them is, or the other fun thing thing you can do is you can sort of grant things, like the next time I play a red one, you can red creature, something happens to it, or if some effect gets generated, or it enters with a counter. But then generally, the idea of color matters is you want to care about the color. But one of the fun things to do, and now we'll get to Loran Eclips. So Lorne Eclipse said, well, one of the neat things about color is it's a quality, right? It's a state of something.
Starting point is 00:24:10 And while we can care about having lots of one color, and we do. do. And one of the things real quickly about something like, so Shadowmore was basically 50% monocolor, 50% hybrid, and it was ally hybrid. So essentially 10% was each of the monoculars was 10%. Each of the alley color hybrid was 10%. So just for start, just so you wanted to play a monocolor deck in draft. Normally when you're drafting, you only have 20% of cards to choose from. That's discounting even Cullis. Cullis helps you a little bit. But you have about 20, percent to choose from. But in Shadowmore, you had 30 percent, because you had the 10 percent mono color and then the two, 10 percent of them in your color. So I'm playing white, or I want
Starting point is 00:24:54 to draft mono white. I have white cards. I have white blue hybrid cards. I have white green hybrid cards. And I can play any of those. So there's just more cards available to you. But, and this is something Shadowmore played around with, is what if I had cards that cared about color but cared about more than one color? Like normally a lot of the old guy's color matters was more about, well, play a lot of green cards. But now we could start saying, oh, well, I reward all your blue and green cards. I reward all your black and red cards. Or I can even say, whenever you play a black card, something happens.
Starting point is 00:25:28 Whenever you play a red card, something different happens. So now, here's a neat thing about that. That spell says, I reward you for playing black. And I reward you for playing red, but I reward you even more if they're playing black and red. because now playing a hybrid black-red spell or playing a black-red, you know, gold spell, it has extra meaning.
Starting point is 00:25:50 You know, we can start caring about more than just single colors. And Shadowmore really played a lot in there. You know, it would have enchantments that would grant you ability if you had one color and grant a different ability for the other color.
Starting point is 00:26:03 Or creatures, they got better if you had a certain color. So we start playing around with the idea of cards that are looking for color that are not just its own color. Not that some of that isn't there, it is, but we're starting to expand, meaning we want you to draft and care about color,
Starting point is 00:26:19 but we want to go beyond just monocolor, which is kind of a lot of the old-school ways of doing things. And Shadamore really leaned into that, really saying, okay, yeah, you can play monocolor, and we're going to enable monocolor in draft more so than we ever have. In fact, it's the one I like to draft monocolor. It's one of the things I enjoy doing. I don't always draft monocolor,
Starting point is 00:26:38 but I always test the waters to see if I can. And Shadamore was the one environment. where I could draft monolour almost every time if I wanted. There's times you didn't want to, and things you would draw that make you want to play a second color, as I'm explaining here. But if you want to play monolol color, Shadamore, Shadamore, Shadamor, Shadamor, that draft was really good for doing that.
Starting point is 00:26:57 But the other thing we try to do is we could start making cards of rewarded colors and playing more than one color. Oh, well, yeah, it's good if you're playing red, and it's good if you're playing black, and you can play black or red, and this card is good in a black or red deck. But it's even better. in a black and red deck. So Vivid
Starting point is 00:27:16 is sort of taking that idea and one-upping it. Vivid says color is a quality, and we have a lot of tools like hybrid that's helping you get extra colors. Plus, there always is splashing. That's another big thing. One of the things
Starting point is 00:27:32 that Magic does at the base case is because you get extra power through playing more colors, there's always this push to play additional colors. Because of the limitations of the mana system, oftentimes you do what we call splash, which is, yeah, I'm playing a third color or fourth color,
Starting point is 00:27:50 but I'm not playing as many basic lands of those colors. And the reason is, well, I'm only playing the best of the best of that last color. Oh, I got a direct damage spell, an X spell in red. So, okay, I'm not playing a lot of red, but this could win the game for me, and I only need one red or two red to play it, So I'm going to splash it, and then I don't need it to late game. And by then, hopefully, I will get the mountain I put in my deck.
Starting point is 00:28:17 Or I'll get a bird of paradise. Whatever it is in my colors that let me get access to another color. And green in particular, green and red are the two colors that have the easiest access to other colors. Green being king of it. So the idea we played around with Vivid is, Vivid was just basically a tweak on domain. Domain was a mechanic we used in invasion. Domain cared about having basic land types. The key with basic land types, though, is that's harder to cheat.
Starting point is 00:28:46 I mean, there are dual ends that are multiple types and stuff like that. But it's a little bit trickier. Not impossible. Like a dual ends help you some. So we were playing around that space and said, oh, well, one of the neat things about Vivid is there's two completely different routes to play Vivid. And you can mix and match them.
Starting point is 00:29:02 One is you splash, so you're playing other colors because you're splashing other collars. but the other is you're taking advantage of things like hybrid where I can play a black-red deck or a green-blue deck but have cards in it that aren't black and red or green and blue and take advantage of that. And that's the thing that is really, that is fun and obviously lower an eclipse plays into that.
Starting point is 00:29:26 So I'm at work to finish up here. So one of the challenges about color matters is that a lot of the... the elements of color mattering in magic have gone down over time. Like, for example, if we put sleight of mind into a set nowadays, it wouldn't do a lot. There's not all that many color words in cards. That a lot of us messing with color is stuff like hybrid things that are sort of not even written out with the words. And so I do like color matters as a theme.
Starting point is 00:30:06 In fact, lost Canvrons of Ixelon, the early version of it, before it was, when it was just an underground set, it wasn't Ixelon yet. We had a whole system where you were ex-siling cards in your graveyard to pay costs, and it mattered what color they were. So, like, it made color matter in a different way. Really, like what I'm trying to say is, color matters as the theme is trickier because a lot of the core elements that make color matters work are not as organic to the game as they once were. there's left color words thing on things and for example I talked about change in color blue and green can still do it
Starting point is 00:30:42 we just don't do it a lot and the reason we don't do it a lot is not a lot of ramifications for doing it you know back when all black spells had a non-black rider hey being able to turn black in response to being terror was actually really impactful
Starting point is 00:30:54 like wild mongrel for example it really really matter that wild mongrel become black nowadays because we have less of those riders we have less of those color words it doesn't matter as much. Changing color doesn't mean as much. And so we do have some tools.
Starting point is 00:31:10 I will say hybrid is the biggest one because we're starting to use hybrid more for limited reasons just because it's very valuable and limited. So it's not that we won't see color matters again, but it's just not a theme that's as easy to use as something like typel or other themes. So I was really excited that we've got to use it here. I mean, Shadowmore was a color matter set.
Starting point is 00:31:30 So it was important to us that we able to do that. And something like Vivid is pretty cool. I guess the real thing I'm trying to say is something like vivid, something like that there's a lot of support you need to make color matters work, so it's not something we can just throw in easily. With the one exception is we can do monocolor matters a little more easy. And we do, and from time to time we will see monololor matters. And that is color mattering in a way.
Starting point is 00:31:53 So that aspect of color mattering we can do. The more open-ended, I care what colors are, how many colors, that is something we knew more infrequently. And nothing will never do it. I do like it. But it's just not as easy to do as it once was. Because of the nature of how magic is, is color isn't quite as organic in the same way because of the variance it created.
Starting point is 00:32:13 So anyway, guys, that is color matter. So I hope you guys are enjoying playing lower one eclipse. And drafting, like I said, the way we designed the set was there's 10 archetypes. When we did play testing, we learned that the five type archetypes, people wanted to play more. So we ended up doing something for the very first time we'd never done before, which was we skewed a little bit in that direction.
Starting point is 00:32:36 I'm sure I will be doing more podcasts in Lormon Eclipse. I can get more into that. But anyway, a lot of the color matters on the secondary themes, and they're there. There's like both red-green and green blue play in vivid and fun ways. So if you like color matters, it is definitely their alone in clips. It's a little subtler than some of the type of stuff. But if you look and dig deep, there's a lot of fun stuff there to do with it. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoy.
Starting point is 00:33:00 enjoyed hearing me talk all about color matters, but I'm at work now. So we all know what that means means at 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 all next time. Bye-bye.

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