Pattern Recognition #158 - Colour Shift

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 July 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Today, we talk about a subject that started life in the game as something that occurred well before it gained the name by which we know it today and still happens today, long after it started. That subject being Colourshifting.

Those of you who still take a shot when I make an obligatory Time Spiral reference, please stop as I don't want to see you dead of alcohol poisoning. Seriously.

Colourshifting has its roots in the nature of the colour pie and how each of the colours waxes and wanes over time. Cards that are fringe or even core in one colour can be moved wholesale into another colour, adding to the new while sometimes being removed from the old or staying there as something the two colours share.

The reasoning for this move can range from the easy question of "Why was this even in this colour in the first place?" to "This is an effect that is already shared by the two colours in question, but one of the colours doesn't have it as directly as the other, so we're going to fix it." to "We are experimenting with this effect in this new colour at this time to see how it works." And sometimes the players will nod along with the logic, accepting it without question, while on the other hand, sometimes the players will express confusion as to why this should have been done.

In origin, the phrase comes to us from Planar Chaos, the middle set of the Time Spiral block. One of the larger themes of the block was that of time. On a certain meta level, Time Spiral focused on the past, reprinting cards from the old days of Magic. Future Sight on the other hand, looked to the future, including the Future Shifted cards - cards meant to represent the idea of what might yet be in Magic.

But Planar Chaos focused instead on the now. And instead of reprints, or making cards that could come from future sets, Planar Chaos chose to examine the nature of the colour pie, and asked itself "What if...?"

What if the five colours of Magic had been expressed in a slightly different form? What if some design decisions that had taken place had gone in a different way? What IF?

I will sing the praises of Time Spiral block's design to high heaven. It, and Ravnica: City of Guilds represented a High Tide mark in Magic design, a magical (pun intended) era where Wizards could do no wrong in the eyes of the playing public. But even then, I admit to many of the flaws. This was also one of the most mechanically complex times in Magic's history, and critical success does not always translate into financial success. And for Wizards, like any other company, it's the bottom line that matters.

Planar Chaos, looked at the lens of the one of This is Spinal Tap's most memetic scenes, took the complexity dial of the game, saw that the current complexity of the game was sitting at 10/10, with the dial having a mark for 11/10.

Then, with the colour shifted cards, rolled that dial so hard past 11 that it broke. I may be exaggerating just a little bit here, but this block is rightly the reason why the New World Order came into being, an understanding of just what degree of complexity is allowed at each rarity in order to make the game run smoother.

"But berryjon!" I hear you cry out, "surely the cards weren't that bad!"

Yeah. No. Trust me, there were some questionable decisions in those 45 cards, including ones that Mark Rosewater himself has regretted and wished he could undo. And I agree with him.

So let's rewind the clock a bit and talk about colour shifting before the term became vogue. I want to clarify and define what it means for a card to be a colour shift and not something else entirely.

At its core, a colour shifted card is a card that is perfectly identical to another, previously printed card, except that it is changed in one or two ways. The first way is that the, surprise surprise, the Colour of the card is changed. From to or from to . The card that is being printed needs to be perfectly identical in text (save for the name of the card) to the card that came before, save for the colours involved. Secondly, and by necessity, optionally, if a shifted card is a Creature, then the creature type(s) can change.

I want to also make clear that there are cases where it may appear that a card is a colour shift, but isn't. If you see Falkenrath Reaver, it is most certainly not a Colourshift of Grizzly Bears. There are some aspects of the game that are so basic that they can go into any colour and be at home there, including, well, a 2/2 for .

No, despite this last line, the first real Colourshifts were creature based. Not to say that all of them were, but in my research, I found a lot of early instances where a creature in one colour would be shifted into a different colour in a later set. Balduvian Barbarians and Python for example, but it doesn't end there.

The vast majority of these creature shifts were for vanilla creatures, something that I can understand because changing colour basically doesn't change anything. But past that, there were also a few that would be considered French Vanilla - creatures who only possessed evergreen Keywords.

The one I would like to hold up here as a demonstration article is how Elvish Archers, originally from Limited Edition Alpha, was shifted into Youthful Knight, a card printed in Stronghold.

I also find it hilarious that the card, at the same time, went from a RARE to a COMMON.

The reason for this shift, like so many others in the early days of Magic, was that Wizards was tightening up the colour pie and laying down the divisions between the colours that persist mostly to this day. Things like which abilities would appear on creatures in certain colours and not in others. So lost First Strike, while lost Trample.

Yes, had Trample. Iron Tusk Elephant, and Elder Land Wurm existed. Now, yes, can get Trample on very rare occasion, even into the modern era, but usually when combined with a card that has a case of Keyword Soup, like Zetalpa, Primal Dawn. But these are exceptions now.

But this, I hope, highlights what those early shifts were all about. They were fixes to the game, putting errant pieces into a more appropriate place, rather than scattered about the colour pie.

By the same token, there were cards that were shifted to help reinforce that same degree of internal divisions. Scryb Sprites for example, became both Flying Men and Suntail Hawk, each of which has seen more printings in the days since the changeover. This is because, again, certain things were being removed from certain colours and added or reinforced in others all in the name of building a game system where each of the five colours would be more distinct from each other.

But I've dodged the subject you all really want me to talk about.

Let's talk about the 45 Colour shifted cards from Planar Chaos.

Now, I'm not going to examine all these cards, that would be a waste of my time and of yours. But there are some highlight cards that I think showed what went right and what went wrong with the idea.

So let's start with the right. The one card that I have said before and said again, generated so much hype for the set, so much love for what we could be seeing, that it's effects as a card and what was promised still reverberate today.

Let's talk
Damnation

Damnation was the highlight card for Planar Chaos, the one printed in HUGE versions in magazines (you know, like Duelist?) the one on which Wizards sold the idea and the presentation of the colour shifted cards in that set. This card was the same, yet the opposite of Wrath of God, and everything clicked with this card. First was the glorious artwork where the artist Ken Walker took his bright explosive and destructive sphere of the board wipe and inverted it into a Blacker than sphere of equal destructive flavor that sucked in everything around it that was just top notch.

Second, it was that the card read and played exactly the same as Wrath of God in all ways, except that the two pips in the casting cost were changed to , meaning that this was a real Colour shift, and not a functional reprint or a tweak on the card to show how it would be in the new colour.

No, Damnation was perfect for what it did, and there's a reason why it's only been reprinted twice. Once in a Modern Masters set, and once as an Amonkhet Invocation, where Nicol Bolas' presence only ruins the card. Because Nicky B deserves to be dunked on forever.

But the reason is something that I'm going to get to in a moment after I talk about the most successful colour shift. Certainly not the most iconic, or the most powerful, but the one that made the shift work because it was a natural fix.

I'm talking about Prodigal Pyromancer and how it was a shift from Prodigal Sorcerer.

having direct damage options has always been something of a sore spot in early Magic's design. From Pirate Ship to Zuran Spellcaster to Psionic Blast, if you wanted reliable an repeatable direct damage options, you didn't go to , you went to . Thus, when Prodigal Pyromancer was revealed, it was seen then by myself and others that it was one of the great 'corrections' that this whole Colourshifting thing could have one. Yes, Damnation was awesome, but the Pyromancer was right.

But what makes this example so successful was that of all the colourshifted cards from Planar Chaos, Prodigal Pyromancer was printed in the next three Core Sets - 10th Edition, M10 and M11. And when a card is printed in a Core Set, and repeatedly at that, you know that it's something that's been done right.

Alas, Wizards has decided that things like Prodigal Pyromancer and his buddy, Samite Healer make the game too complicated, so they have been phased out, success be damned.

But there were also cards that came out as a colur shifted that weren't so well received. And I don't mean how Serra Angel was recast as Serra Sphinx. No, let's talk about the great mistake of the colour shifting in Planar Chaos.

Harmonize

Oh, Harmonize. I have no idea how you got printed, or why. But MaRo has gone on record as admitting that giving a pure card draw spell that wasn't contingent on creatures to be a huge mistake. I mean, sure, Concentrate isn't a bad card on its own, but one of 's weaknesses is supposed to be it's card draw.

Yeah. Right. Not anymore.

Sorry, I digress. The problem with Harmonize wasn't that it was made into , but rather that, because it was a Colour Shift, that it was still costed as a spell. That casting cost of in the hands of a player is an actual investment at sorcery speed, a card and mana that could be better served by cheaper options like Divination or for reactive spells like Counterspell.

But turn that cost into ? A player with a mana base, one whose definition is that of "MORE!" would gladly pay that to get more cards. And easily. Because to , that cost is cheap.

Yet, the vast majority of colour shifted cards lay between these two extremes, and here is where I turn my eyes back to Damnation. You see, for all its flavour and Vorthos-y love that I can give to it, it's not right for . When it comes to removing creatures, loves to delete single targets, from Terror to Murder, if wants a creature dead, it's dead.

How it deals with multiple creatures, however, is less a global destroy effect, such as Damnation or even Bontu's Last Reckoning. No, these effects can happen, but rarely. No, what has in it's tool kit are cards like Languish, Massacre Girl, Massacre Wurm and Pestilent Haze. Cards that deliver -X/-X to everything and work from there. This is 's flavour of global removal, not unbridled destruction. It leaves that for when wants to remind people that it's not as weak as it appears to be.

Colorshifting still happens today. Just not as obvious, nor as grand. The last time I saw cards so shifted that really struck me was back in Amonkhet, when we got Consuming Fervor, moving Unstable Mutation from to - a good example of a colour fix. And how Parallel Lives went from to with Anointed Procession, both fitting the flavour of the plane and its Zombies, but also in reminding people that both colours can care about tokens.

I have no doubt that as more sets are released, we're going to see the occasional color changing reprint. I don't mind them for the most part as Wizards has learned from the past that they've done most of the hard work already. It's just the details that need to be sorted out as they keep evolving what each colour means and has.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll join me next week when I talk about something else. What, I don't know yet. I can't exactly Peek at the top of my library now, can I?

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!