Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #456: Mechanical Color Pie

Episode Date: July 28, 2017

A few months ago, I wrote an article where I spelled out what colors did what in the color pie. In this podcast, I talk all about the making of this article and why the mechanical color pie is so important.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot, so you all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped Rachel off at her internship. Okay, so today I want to talk about something I did on the website. I want to sort of explain the story behind how it came to be and talk about why it's a very important tool for all you amateur designers out there. So the item I'm talking about is the Mechanical Color Pie. So let me talk about

what exactly the Mechanical Color Pie is and talk about how it came about to actually be an article. So what I did was I went through on every ability I could think of and now I missed a few and people are sending in to me

and the plan is I'm going to update it. I'll get to that. But anyway, I wrote down every single ability in magic that I can remember. And for each ability, I said what the primary color was, and then secondary or tertiary.

I'll get to those definitions. And then what I did is, basically for every ability in magic, I explained what color gets them and how. And then I put them on a list. And then down below below I talk about them and I talk about examples and those are exceptions and certain rules for how it gets used. But I laid out in one 12,000 word article sort of exactly what colors do what. I, for the first

time ever, laid out the mechanical color pie. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about why did it take 20-some years for me to do that. So here's the story behind the article, which is the magic color pie, and I did a whole podcast on why the color pie is important. Today is more about how it works, not why it's an important thing, but more of the technical things behind it. One of the things that's very important in magic is obviously magic has five colors and that we want each color to feel distinct. And to do that, we've spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what colors can do what. You know, what colors are, if you want to do a certain task, what color does that?

And one of the things to keep the colors distinct is, mostly for any one ability, only certain colors will do it. If it's a smaller ability, sometimes just one color does it. If it's a bigger ability, there can be more colors that do it. And there's even some abilities that every color has some access to, but even then I sort of go into detail with who has it more. access to, but even then I started going into detail with who has it more. And so what happened was, I've been reluctant to write this down only because

the color pie is always in flux. It's always changing. And my concern was, once I write it down, the people are like, hey, you said this. And I go, well, that was true, you know, four years ago. And so what I did is I finally decided, I'm going to write it down. I'm going to date it. It's not just the color pie. It's the mechanical color pie 2017. You know, June 5th, 2017, which the article came out, it was written for then.

That's when that is. And my plan is every couple of years I'll update it and then I'll put changes in it and go, oh, well, here's the mechanical color by such and such. And what I would do is I'll annotate the changes so that you can, for the people that don't want to read the whole thing again, they can just see what has changed. And anyway, I finally decided that it was time to do it. People have been asking me to write it forever. I mean, it's something that people, because on my blog, for example, people will ask individual questions.

Oh, what color does this? And I'd say this. What color does that? And I finally decided, you know what, I'd rather have the resource out there and have it, you know, slowly be inaccurate over time that I can fix, you know, I can put this out

multiple times over time. But anyway, the core, the crux of the color doesn't change that much you know I do think there are changes in individual things and we add things

and I'm not saying there's not some flux so there is but most of the color pie is not that much different than it was five years ago or ten years ago

there's certain areas and like I said I'll part of what I want to talk about today is kind of what I don't know to talk about today is kind of what, I don't know, to talk about relationship with the color pie.

But let me first, the major focus today is the article. So, okay. So I decide I'm going to write this article. And like I said, it took me years to decide to do it. I finally said I'm going to do it. So I sit down and I start writing. And we had material on, like the, R&D has wiki, and some of this was on the wiki. And there was some section on the color pie.

There was some development had done some stuff. And anyway, I collected a bunch of material from various wiki things from work. And then I realized that, wow, there are giant gaps missing. So I ended up going through a whole bunch of recent sets and saying, okay, what is here that I'm not seeing? And then I sort of went back and said, okay, what are slightly older effects that I'm not remembering? And I didn't hit all the effects. I'm sure I missed, and in fact, I know I missed a few things. People have been sending me notes, but I got most of it. I'd say I probably hit like

98% of things. I did pretty good. And so here's how I did it. Let me walk through sort of the explanation. So here's what you need to know to use it, to use the tool. Okay, first off, I designated primary, secondary, and tertiary. So what does that mean in context of this thing? So what primary means is, if anybody does this effect, this color does it the most. Now be aware, I listed all kinds of effects. Some effects are things we do constantly. Some effects are things we do maybe every once in five years. So primary doesn't necessarily mean it's done a lot.

Primary means it's the one that's done the most of the colors that do it. So it's more than possible that something primary, well, that's what primary means. Secondary means that this color also does it. It's something that does it on, you know, some regularity given the regularity of the effects being used. But secondary usually means not done as often in quantity and usually not done as often in quantity and usually

not done as low as in rarity. Tertiary means, well, every once in a while we'll do this. It's not done very often. It usually has very specific places and ways we use it. And the other important thing about tertiary is when we do multicolor cards, we, one of the rules is we use effects of different colors on them. Like if I make a red-green multicolor card, well, there has to be some red qualities and

some green qualities. That's why it's a red-green card. We don't use tertiary on multicolor cards, meaning the effect is small enough in that color that you wouldn't use it as reflecting that color if it's tertiary. So if some color does something tertiary, when we're color defining in a multicolor card, we won't use the tertiary abilities. We'll use primary and secondary. Now, the interesting thing is

primary and secondary kind of mean different things. Like when I talk about evergreen mechanics, you know, those show up all the time. So a secondary evergreen mechanic often shows up in most sets, sometimes even a common, depending on how often the ability is used. For example, red is secondary in trample.

Well, there's common trample creatures in most sets. Versus the idea that, what is primary, take an extra turn? We don't do that all the time. Maybe we do it once a block, and it's primary in red, but the point is, red has more trample cards than it has take an extra turn cards. Even though one is primary in red, one is secondary in red. That just has to do with primary, secondary, and tertiary have to do with how often the ability happens. I was trying to give scope for like, okay, this ability, where does it happen? The thing I did not do, and because there's a lot of vectors to do,

I did not talk about how often, like, there's no scale for how often things happen against one another. Meaning there are primary things that happen less often than secondary things, but I didn't, that's a whole separate ball of wax. I did not try to do that. What I mostly talked about is who does what. The main emphasis of this document is to sort of make it clear, okay, this effect, who does this effect? Now, one of the things that can be complex in doing something like this is I did the

color pie as it currently exists. Not as it once existed, but as it currently existed. So, for example, one of the comments I'm getting is people will look at something like, hey, white with flash, there's just more creatures that have flash in white than creatures in green that have flash. But I put flash secondary in green and tertiary in white. And the answer is white used to have flash.

White used to be secondary in flash. And in fact, there was a period in time where white was primary in flash. In fact, the very first color to get Flash on creatures was... I mean, it wasn't called Flash at the time, but it was white. White was the first color to even do it. But over time, what we realized was blue and green needed it more than white needed it. And white had other things going on, so we slowly pulled it out white. Now, white is tertiary in the ability, and whenever we do enter the battlefield that's reactionary,

we tend to put it, we let white have flash when that is true. And we do those kind of effects on somewhat regularity. So, when I say white is tertiary, like, well, comparative to the other colors that do this, white does it a little bit less. But if you take any window in time,

that's the other issue, is white is also tertiary in the sense that it's really limited. White doesn't just get a vanilla creature or French vanilla creature with flash. It only gets it in very specific circumstances where it's doing a reactionary enter the battlefield effect. Now, yeah, we do those in some regularity, so white shows up. But the tertiarness of it also shows that it's more narrow. Now, the plan for this thing was... Oh, sorry, let me keep playing.

So, I explained those. I also explained that plus n, or n. For some effects, the effects can have different numbers, but I didn't want to have to worry about the numbers. So I use N, which is what we use in R&D to mean it's a number. So for example, let's say we're making a cycle and we don't know the balance of the cycle just yet. I might say, you know, N, N, M.

N means it's a locked color. N means it's an unknown mana. So when I say, for example, plus N, plus N effects, N means it's a locked color. N means it's an unknown mana. So when I say, for example, plus N plus N effects, that means plus some number plus some number. They don't even have to be the same numbers. Not X. They're not variables. It just means that that represents a number to be named later.

And once again, the two Ns don't have to be the same number. Plus N plus N can mean plus 2 plus 2, plus 1 plus 1, plus 1 plus 2, plus 2 plus 1, plus 3 plus 0. It can mean, although actually most of the plus n plus n meant they're numbers. I use plus n plus 0 actually as a slightly separate thing. So I use n to sort of talk about that. The other thing that I do when I'm talking about stuff there is I kind of list where they go and then I go into detail to explain how. There are a lot of limitations on things. For example, let's take white and green, you know, giant group thing. Target creature gets, you know, plus and plus

end of turn. So for example, white and green can both do that, but we've carved out space to separate white from green. So for example, green can get any bonus it wants, but it often gets bigger bonuses. It can get plus three, plus three, sometimes plus four, plus four. It can even higher rarities get higher than that. And it sometimes grants trample, but usually green is just boosting creatures. White, on the other hand, we top off at plus two plus two. White doesn't get more than plus two plus two. You can get plus one plus one, you can get

plus two plus two, you can get variants, but it usually grants an ability. So usually when white, you know, sometimes it'll do plus one plus oh, but when white does a giant growth ability, it usually is a combat trick and it gets something else in addition to being the boost. Where green, for example, tends to have larger boosts, but other than trample doesn't often add other abilities onto it. And that's spelled out because one of the things I want to understand is, and this is where the

nuance is tricky where I in this document is one of the things that we want to do is we want to be clear sort of who does what and how and we want each color to be very distinct we want each color to sort of do something different now why does the color why do colors change like well once we figure this out and we spend this time setting it up, why would colors ever change? And the answer is twofold. One is, my first example will be a black-red example. So black and red as colors are very close to each other.

I think the only two colors closer are white and green. So one of the things we've tried really hard is to make sure we differentiate between white and green effects and red and black effects because we want the colors to feel distinct. So one of the things we came up with a while back was that there's a difference between must attack each turn and can't block. Both of them encourage attacking because if I can't block, well, the value of my creature is in the attack.

And must attack, obviously must attack. So what we did is, to separate red from black, we put must attack in red and can't block in black. The idea at the time was, okay, we did sort of a flavor divide. Well, red's the impulsive color

that can't control itself, so okay, must attack, it can't control itself. And black is kind it must attack. It can't control itself. And black is kind of the selfish one. Like, I'm not protecting you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe I'll attack for you, but I'm not going to take damage for you, you know. And so we put those in those colors. And so red must attack and black can't block.

And for many years, we really kept it a clean line just to separate the two. But eventually development came to us one day and said, you know, we are doing a lot less of must attack and a lot more of can't block because can't block, the game plays a little bit better, it doesn't force forward a bad attack,

and a little bit of must attack is fun, but it's hard to do that in number. And so they're like, could we do some can't block in red? Now, obviously, the reason we originally set it up was a color definition issue. But what happened was we were having concrete information that the play pattern was suffering,

that they weren't able to make the cards they needed to make. And the color pie is not meant to get in the way of gameplay. So one of the reasons we'll change is that we want to move to where the best gameplay is. In this case, like, you know what? Red occasionally having can't block is going to provide better gameplay. Okay, you know what? Well, we'll find other places to give definition to black and red. This is one place where we'll let red have a little access to this, even though it doesn't delineate as much. Other places that we'll move, so another example I'll use is polymorph.

So polymorph, the very first polymorph was in blue, called polymorph. And what it did was it took a creature in play, and then you flip cards so you get to another creature, and then it makes the first creature go away and the second creature come into play. So it sort of turns the creature into a different creature. But because you're flipping off the top of your library, you know, barring

deck shenanigans where you only have one other creature in your deck, you don't know what's going to happen, right? And we were looking for more things to do in red. One of the things that often happens, the Council of Colors does this now, I used to do this before, is we will figure out areas that need some help. Red, for example, with the popularity of the Commander format,

a lot of red's play is a little more short-term. And while that works great on one-on-one, red's had some issues in Commander. So we've been trying to find more Red-ish things for Red to do that might make sense in Commander. And so it came up that Red has a very chaotic quality that maybe transforming things where you don't know the outcome of the transformation should be Red.

That like Blue's a card that says, I'm going to turn you into this thing. I know what it is. I'm turning you into it. And Red is like, you become, who knows? And so we moved polymorph into red. And the idea, the sort of separation we said is, okay, we're going to give blue a more controlled transformation. Blue still does transformation. But blue does it in a way where it knows what's going to happen.

And the ones where it sort of has more random factors, that could be red. Red is chaotic. Red is tricky. Okay, we'll give red some transformation, but only in the context where you don't quite know the outcome. And then we gave a tool for red to have that something red could do that is more a long game thing. It's more answering problems thing. And it's a little bit less of a beat you down quickly tool and more of a fun multiplayer tool. So we added that in red.

So those are the kind of things that can shift things. Oh, the other way that sometimes colors will shift is, I'll use an example, the Keldon Warlord ability. So there's a card in alpha called Keldon Warlord. It's a red card. And it's power and toughness were equal to the number of creatures you have.

I don't know why Richard made Kelden Warlord in red. I'm not sure. I don't really know the rationale per se. Maybe he just wanted to make a cool creature and maybe the flavor,

maybe he just liked the flavor. The idea is here's a warlord for his people and the more people he has the stronger he becomes. So at some point we said, you know what? This isn't a great red fit. I mean, red does have weenies, but

really, red isn't the give-you-strength-for-having-lots-of-weenies sort of color. And at the time we said, you know what? Green's the creature color. Let's put it in green. Green cares about creatures. And then eventually we said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Green cares about big creatures, and yeah, this is a creature that gets big's put in green. Green cares about creatures. And then eventually we said, whoa, green cares about big creatures. And yeah, this is a creature that gets big. That's green.

But the idea of caring about having lots of little creatures all around you, wow, that's a white thing. That's really what white does. And so we ended up, so over the years we moved it. First it was red, then it was green, now it was white. Another good example where we moved things was fog had long been a green ability and one day we were sort of adjusting color pipe stuff and we were like, why is green preventing damage? Shouldn't white be preventing damage? Like white's the color that prevents damage. White's the protective color.

Isn't fog a protective thing? And so we moved it from green into white and what we found was white didn't need it. White had 8,000 ways to protect itself and green really did need it. Green did need a way to sort of protect from the swing back with giant creatures. And so we ended up moving fog back into green. So that's an example where fog was in green, then fog was in white, then fog was in green.

Fog also, by the way, definitely showed up in other colors. Not only is there fog and, what was the way fog called? Holy day, I think. There's a spell in black called Darkness that was exactly fog. And both blue and red have had fog-ish cards, although neither one were exactly fog. White, green, and black literally had the exact same card

with different names. So I knew the guy, having worked on the color pie for years, I see the flux. And by the way, I know we are constantly talking about things that we can change. We're constantly talking about, okay, does that make sense? One of the big things in general, though, for the color pie is, my big thing is I want to make sure that when we expand the color pie, we are not sacrificing sort of the philosophy of what the colors can do. A good example is if you say to me okay red has trouble late game in in in commander type formats so red doesn't have as strong a late game

as other colors because in two one one it's more about winning quickly. So yeah, it doesn't link in. It's kind of Red's thing. So we're like, okay, is there some way to give... But the answer is not to fundamentally go against what Red is. When we try to solve these problems, it's like, is there a way for Red to do something that is Red? Like, for example,

there was a question about card advantage, that Red is particularly bad at card advantage. So we were looking, is there some way for late game to give red card advantage that doesn't give it card advantage early game? Or less advantage early game? The idea being, if I'm fighting in one-on-one player and I'm doing a really aggressive fast red strategy, I want to create something that's less card advantage-y

than something maybe that's a late game. So that's how we came up with impulsive draw. The idea is red's not supposed to be really good at card drawing, but we allow it to exile cards and then cast those cards to underturn. So it's kind of like card drawing, but it's immediate card drawing. I have to immediately use it. I can't save it. I can't, you know, it is not card drawing how other colors use it, but it was a neat way to do a red card drawing. And the cool thing about it is it's something

that becomes more powerful over time. Meaning if I'm attacking and you know, on turn three, like, ah, it's okay. And not that you won't play a little bit impulsive drawing in an aggro deck, but it's not nearly as strong as, oh, I'm playing a long drawn out game. You know, I now have lots of mana, and this allows me late in the game to draw and get a bunch of cards. So like Impulsive Draw, like I just talked about the polymorph thing.

You know, we're always looking at how to fix problems in a way that is endemic to those colors. And in general, we do move abilities around from time to time. But the other thing we also look for is to carve out new abilities. Like one of the things that we've done recently with red as an example is the idea of red looking at abilities but temporarily.

Like impulsive draw is draw, but you have to use it right away. And we've been looking at other places for red to sort of do things that other colors do, but very short term. So for example, and here's a little history, originally stealing creatures was a blue thing, both permanently stealing creatures and temporarily stealing creatures. And back when

we were trying to sort of carve out space, we realized that blue was a little too heavy in abilities, and red was a little light. We said, oh, maybe the trickster element of red, red could do the stealing if it's immediate and so we gave red the temporary stealing the threatens of the world that used to be a blue the brave command stuff with blue now also notice when we shifted it blue used to do it at instant speed and we moved it red to sorcery speed because we didn't want red to be about um defensive things For example, the most common way

to use Ray of Command is somebody attacks, you grab one of their attackers and block the other attacker with it, ideally setting it up so they kill each other. With Threadn, it's more about stealing your creatures to attack you with it. It's not about using it defensively. So most of the time, for example, Threadn's are sorcery. Oh, that's another thing I did. If you look through, I try to talk about restrictions and stuff when we use them. So, for example, if I talk about temporary stealing in red, I will point out that, oh, we usually do this as a sorcery because we want to encourage attacking and not being defensive because red's more about offense and defense.

So really what today's podcast, other than, you know, talking a little bit about the color pie, which is always fun to talk about, is if you have any real interest in sort of how

the color pie works, it's a long document, 12,000 words is a lot. Oh, I didn't tell the story. So, here's the quick story about me writing this article. So, I decided, I finally decided

I'm going to write it. And so, I sit down and it turns out I have a week. I'm like, oh, okay, I got a week. I didn't have another topic. I'm like, okay, I didn't mean to do this. I'm going to do this. So I start writing and really early on I didn't get very far into it. I'm an hour into it and I'm like,

oh boy, this is way bigger than I thought it was. This is way bigger. In fact, it ended up being even bigger than I thought it was. But I'm like, I normally for an article write 3,000 words. That's my average word count. So I'm like, okay, this is going to be, I'm an hour in, I'm like, this is going to be way over 3,000 words. So I call Blake, who's my editor.

So here's the problem. The week after was Metamorphosis 2.0, which you guys have read. Wow, we're making major changes in magic. I wrote a whole article about it. That was a big deal. I'd written way ahead of time. That wasn't moving. I knew exactly when that was happening.

And then the week after that, or the two or three weeks after that, were Hour of Devastation previews. So I'm like, oh, okay. A lot of times when I have an article that runs long, I'll break it into multiple parts. The other thing I realized as I was writing it is, this is a weird article to break into multiple parts. How do you break it up exactly? On some level

it's a resource article. It's kind of like a dictionary or a thesaurus. Not that you can't read it through, but it is as much for a tool to use and it's really weird to break a tool in half. Like here's a dictionary and this is A through G. It's a little weird. So I said okay, I talked to Blake and Blake said we'll make it work. So I keep writing this

and the more I write, I have a long list of things I have to cover and then I realize I've forgotten some stuff and then I realize I had forgotten some stuff. And then I realized I had forgotten some more stuff. And it just went on and on. Normally I write my article just on Friday. This one spilled over onto Saturday. I think I spent about two and a half times a normal article.

The actual article is four times a normal article. The reason that I didn't spend as much time per word is it's a I know really well and this is something I use day in day out. The other thing that's really difficult about writing this article was that I try to be inclusive and use a lot of abilities including abilities we don't use that often. And so one thing that's tricky is trying to figure out, I know whether we've done something or not, but trying to figure out whether, well we did it once and that was a rare exception. Or, yeah, we were willing to do it then, but we wouldn't do it now.

Trying to figure out when things were tertiary and when they weren't tertiary. When we hadn't done it for a while. Like, for example, if you ask me the evergreen things, I know exactly what those are. I know what's primary, what's secondary, what's tertiary. We use them all the time. I have very clear ideas where they're at. But, for example, the one that's giving me trouble is what I call the Maru ability,

which is your power and strength is equal to the number of cards in your hand. Now, I knew that was primary in blue and green. It originally was in green on Maru. We eventually started also doing it in blue because it has a knowledge theme. Blue and green are the colors of knowledge and wisdom, respectively. So it makes sense

there. We did do a cycle in Champs of Kamig wisdom, respectively. So it makes sense there. We did do a cycle in Champs-Élysées-Kamagawa where we cycled it through all five colors. So the question is, is it tertiary in white, black, and red? We one time did it. Is that something we would do again? You know, and so like, and that was the hard part. It's like, well, we once did it, but is that, you know, was it a rare exception? Was it a special cycle? Like, like trying to figure out when things, where things are and some of the stuff I, I, so once

I wrote the article, I then sent it to the council of color people to give me feedback on. Um, and they gave me some notes and I did some tweaking off that. Um, you know, and then the other thing I knew I would do was I would get feedback from the audience. I knew I forgot something, just that it's too much not to forget something. And I knew there'd be typos and things. My poor editor, Chris is my editor. Blake's the editor-in-chief of the site. Chris does all the copy editing stuff.

Chris is used to editing a 3,000-word article, and I gave him a 12,000- more article that had all sorts of layout issues. Although, if you see the article, that was all Chris and Blake's doing, the way they laid it out and they shortened it and they tabbed it. Because originally when I wrote it, it just was this long running article and they created it so that you could tab it. We all were kind of aware when I made this that it would be something that would be as much a resource. You know, we were kind of making something that people would come back to all the time.

The other thing, by the way, that I wanted to do this was, while I'm not allowed to look at outside submissions, I do know there's a very healthy card creation. You know, there's places where people, for fun, make their own magic cards. And I talk to these people all the time and there's a lot of time spent on blogger talk with people resigning cards and go, okay, this ability, where can I put this ability? What is it this color? Can I put in that color? And I wanted to make something that sort of helped people do that. Now, one of the things is people will still come to me, people will still say, really? Has that changed? Or did you forget this? And by the way, people will still come to me, people will still say, really? Has that changed?

Or did you forget this? And by the way, if you're listening to this, if you read that, please send me an email. You find any mistakes, something you go, oh, you forgot this thing. Or you listed that thing, but wow, you haven't done that in a long while. Really?

Or hey, you listed this primary, but this other color clearly does the secondary. It does it from time to time. You didn't list that. Why didn't you list that? Like one of the ones I know I forgot was I listed black as can't lose the game and we recently made a white card with Gideon that you can't lose the game. So hey,

isn't that at least secondary white? And I just forgot. I forgot Gideon. A lot of what I did when I was making this is I used Gazza for some of it but a lot of this was sort of off my head. And so it is easy to, you know, while I generally know how we do things, it's easy to forget. Like, oh, once we did this one thing. And one of the things about the Color Pie in general, by the way, is people come all the time.

Designers and developers will be making cards, and they'll come to me and say, okay, we made a card, is this acceptable? And we do what I call bends and breaks. We're trying not to do breaks. What a bend is, is something where well, the color doesn't normally do this, but in a certain context, with a certain theme, like it's not that the color it doesn't fundamentally, like a certain theme. Like, it's not that the color... It doesn't fundamentally... Like, a break is when

the color is doing something that's undermining the color. That it's strengthening a weakness that's supposed to be a weakness. Sorry, a little traffic there. And it's okay to have bends, you know. But bends don't necessarily change the color pie.

Just because we one time allowed somebody to do something because it sort of fits. There are things in which we bend a little bit, but just because you bend it once does not forever mean the color pie is changing. It just means that we allow a little bit of give. So part of the reason also for doing this document is people can kind of look and go,

oh, that must have been a bend that's not listed. That's not something you normally do. And so there are things, and that's the tricky thing also about doing this document is what's actually a bend versus what is, no, no, no, the color does that. That wasn't us pushing. And anyway, I'm very proud of this article. It took a lot of time. And like I said, the plan, so here's the plan with the article. A, people can give me notes. Like I said, you have anything you see. Now, you might send me stuff I disagree with you and I won't change it.

But if you see something, please send it to me. Oh, the other caveat I said is this is 2017 Color Pie. This is where we are right now. And this is where we are making things two years in the future. What I mean by that is,

you might see things on cards, even on relatively recent cards, that doesn't necessarily mean that is true. We might have shifted away from it, but I wrote the color pie as I know the color pie, which is sort of where we're currently at. So sometimes I'll write things that seem a little bit which is sort of where we're currently at. So sometimes I'll write things that seem a little bit off because it's where we're going. So there's actually

a few hints to the future, by the way, in this document. There's a few things that I say, hey, and like, I don't remember you doing this. And well, it's something we're moving toward. Some of them are things that we want to do that we haven't got to yet. I just took, because I can't like, what was the color by me two years ago? It's hard for me to mentally get to that place. So I just did the current color by what we're working on. And that obviously will have

some impact on sort of, there'll be a little bit of wonkiness, but we'll catch up. But the, if you have not taken the thing, please look at it. Like I said, oh, I'm going to update this. So if you find mistakes taken the thing please look at it like I said oh I'm going to update this

so if you find mistakes let me know I'm going to right now if I find simple mistakes oh you left out blah blah there's a few things

that people have written me that I've left out or there's some typos I did some copy pasting where I know green

I'm talking about liking land but I mentioned creatures or something and I know green, I'm talking about liking lands, but I mentioned creatures or something. And I know white, I mentioned white being secondary and artifact destruction in the alphabetical layout, but I did list it in the short color list. So if you find stuff like that,

whether they're typos or whether they're I forgot something or something's in the wrong place or I clearly know to do this because I put it in one spot, but I didn't put it in the corresponding spot. Let me know. I'm going to fix all that stuff. The plan is I'm going to do the quick fixing right now and sort of clean up, do a little bit of cleanup. Chris was going to edit it for me, so the document is sort of up to date.

And then what will happen is in some amount of time, when I'm like, you know what, enough has changed, I will make a new document. The plan isn't necessarily to be every year. I don't know if the color wheel changes enough per year. It depends on the year. Like, sometimes we've had periods of major flux. There's a period back in the late 90s where R&D sat down and really, like, carved up stuff and made some major changes.

So if one of those things happen, maybe I'll do it a year later. I'm going to wait and do it until I think that enough has changed and makes sense to update it. So there will be other mechanical color pies, whether it's 2018, 2019, 2020, I don't know. I don't quite know when I'll do the next one. And the plan is when I update it, what I will do is I will take the existing color pie I'll reprint it except I'll change the things that have changed

and I'll annotate the things that have changed so that you can see the new things so you can see what's different so the people that just want to see the different stuff can see that but anyway it's a new resource so I'm hoping people enjoy this like I said I was really hesitant for years to make this

I'm hoping this won't be a mistake that I did. People have been very positive. The response has been very positive so far. So I'm glad you guys are enjoying it. But anyway, that, my friends, is the Mechanical Color Pie. So it's, once again, it's the June 5th of my articles. It's called Mechanical Color Pie 2017. Definitely give me some notes. And if you guys liked the Color Pie stories today, I probably could do more podcasts on Color Pie stories

if you like them. We've made a lot of changes over the years. And so that, I don't know. Today wasn't really about color change stories, but I have to hit some because I was explaining things. But if you like that, that's another thing that I could do more of. I'm always in the lookout to figure out how to improve the podcast and what topics people like. So I will offer that up there.

If you like that, let me know. We've done a lot of changing over the years, so there's lots of stories. But anyway, I'm now driving into the parking lot. I'm actually going to work. My drive to work to work. I don't do that as much these days. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end'm actually going to work. My drive to work to work. I don't do that as much these days. So we all know what that means. It means this is 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.