Magic 2010 Brings Subtle Shifts to the Color Pie
If your army has felt a little drab lately, try adding a spectacular light show.
The new Magic 2010 core set brought some seismic changes to Magic players, from new cards in a core set to the biggest rules revision in years. Some of the changes are a bit more subtle, though. Today, we’ll analyze how Magic’s five colors aren’t quite what they used to be.
In looking over the card list for M10, it quickly became evident that the abilities conceptually assigned to each color have changed. In some cases, the actual cards have been changed to more closely resemble what those color concepts were in the first place. Examining the new core set seems like a good bellwether for where the developers plan to take the game in the next few years.
Blue
Blue in M10 looks a lot like blue in Alpha, except all the broken cards have been adjusted to have more balanced casting costs. If you want to play heavy counterspell control, blue still forces you to invest seriously in the color; the double blue mana in the casting cost of Cancel makes it hard to splash blue. On the other hand, in a creature-heavy environment like Standard format, you could get a lot of mileage out of Essence Scatter with just a little mana fixing for blue. Blue’s biggest is probably that the developer’s seem intent on making decking (winning by running your opponent’s library out of cards) a viable strategy. Jace Beleren’s costliest ability instantly drops a third of your opponent’s deck into her library. Tome Scour is a one casting cost sorcery that mills five cards off your opponent’s library. I’m not sure it’s actually a workable deck idea yet, but we’re getting closer.
White
White is in for some major changes. Foremost is the loss of Wrath of God (not to say I told you so or anything, but…). It’s replaced by Planar Cleansing, which can wipe more things off of the battlefield, but will take a lot longer to hit. I like this, since it gives interesting decks a few extra turns to set up before having to worry about a board wipe. With a bunch of new damage reduction, creature tapping, exiling, life gain and flat out shut down spells, white is probably a better control color than blue at the moment. Another interesting shift is the Mesa Enchantress. She’s a direct replacement for the old Verduran Enchantress, simply in a different color. Since green has always been the best color at destroying enchantments, it never really made that much sense for it have such a card in the first place. This is more of a realignment than anything else. Of course, white is pretty good at destroying enchantments too. Solemn Offering is the new Disenchant, cost adjusted and with a little life gain thrown in for good measure.
Green
Green finally has some creature control! Entangling Vines is to Pacifism as Unyaro Bee Sting was to Shock; gets the job done, but you could do it cheaper and better with another color. Beyond that, green hasn’t changed a whole lot. It still has trouble dealing with creatures directly, still destroys artifacts and enchantments, still has lots of big vanilla creatures and is still really good at searching libraries for land. Two other slight changes – a smattering of deathtouch, and a slightly higher number of cards that target green’s opposed colors, blue and black.
Red
Red hasn’t really changed much, but it seems to have become even faster. As we mentioned before, the Jackal Familiar is pretty quick. It follows a basic red pattern: creatures that are very cheap for their size, but have some kind of drawback. The return of Lightning Bolt and Ball Lightning will make for a lot of pure aggro decks showing up at your local Friday Night Magic. It’s really difficult to defend against Ball Lightning, let me tell you. If anything, red has simply become redder.
Black
This color seems to have changed the most. Black used to be the color with the most power, but with the greatest price to pay for it. You could draw tons of cards, destroy lots of creatures or have big nasty creatures of your own, but you’d end up gouging your own life total and sacrificing armloads of your own creatures to do it. That role seems greatly diminished. There are a few exceptions, of course, like Xathrid Demon and Sign In Blood. But for the most part, black seems more content to sit back and let its opponent destroy himself. Combine a bit of lifelink with cards like Sanguine Bond, Soul Bleed and Megrim, and you have a pretty diabolical way to win games. Now, black seems like the passive-aggressive color. And that seems right, somehow. Too bad they didn’t give us enough vampires to make Vampire Nocturnus truly awesome.
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July 17th, 2009 5:12 PM
I’m not sure that you can call the core sets a good indicator of color pie. Historically Blue is less than playable in the core set because the fun things it can do aren’t Core Set Safe. Black’s pay life for power thing rarely shows up in the core set save for a few cards that are marginally better than the comparative cards in other colors. A Hill Giant that hurts me is Not A Good Thing. A 1/1 flier for 2 is worse than White, and Blue is supposed to be the flying color. Black and blue have always been the hardest for new players to get, aside from the creature kill in black. The rest come fairly quick.