Pattern Recognition #298 - Threads of Gold

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

28 September 2023

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

Hello everyone! Sorry for last week, it was bad over here in real life. But now I am back, and I have Magic, and everything is all better! So with this pleasantness in the way, what am I going to talk about?

Well, as you may have seen from the title, today's article is going to be a bit more on the abstract side. I'm going to be talking a bit about how Wizards supports Multicoloured decks in their set construction. This is going to be part theorycrafting, part demonstration and part doing some preemptive justification for when I finally get to the Uncommons with my own Set Design. Who says I can't multi-task?

So, let's start by laying out the basic principles behind the concept of Multicoloured cards. This is just a quick overview, and I won't get bogged down in the details. At their core, a Multicoloured or Gold card is a card that represents an ability or effect that is either part of the overlap of all the relevant colours and their section of the color pie; represent an internal synergy between them, or have an ability or effect that builds one over the other to create an effect that can only be done by all the colors together.

In addition, there are several different styles of multicolored card in the game. Three, with an honorable mention. The honorable mention is the case of Split Cards, like Wear / Tear, which are two cards of different colors, but are distinct in cost and ability. They don't really count for my purposes here, but I have to recognize their existence going forward.

The next style is the traditional one that most players know. From Lady Orca through to Sharae of Numbing Depths, these are cards that have multiple colors in their casting costs, and have a different coloured frame - a Gold colour - to show that they are not held to a single color with their frame. Their abilities and effects are a combination of the colours. These are classic and well understood.

The second demonstration is the concept of the Hybrid card. These are cards introduced with the Ravnica Block that have mana costs such as , which are two options for a color rather than one. Cards like Alert Heedbonder, which have an effect or ability that can be found in either color, or in both. I've sung the praises of this type of card before, and will do so again, so there is nothing odd about this.

The last type of multicoloured card is something that I can't quite track down where it began, but the earliest in my persona collection shows up in Alliances with Balduvian Dead. These are cards that have one color in their casting cost, but a different color in one or more of their activation abilities. It was the reveal of the new Hualti in the upcoming Lost Caverns of Ixalan set that got me thinking about this. No, not that she flips into a Saga, but rather that she is a creature with a cost of , yet has an activated ability that costs . For formats that are concerned with colour identity, that means she's all three, but at the same time, in formats with less restrictions she can fit into a or a deck perfectly fine. Because Hybrid Mana is awesome, especially in the text box.

Anyway, from here, we get back to how these are used by Wizards in their set construction paradigm, and to do that, I introduce to you the concept of the Signpost Uncommon. This is Wizards ... new...ish design philosophy where each set has ten multicoloured Uncommon cards in it, and these represent all ten color pairings. Not only in terms of the colours themselves, but as Draft Archetypes. To elaborate, the Signpost Uncommons act as keystones for the set, an easily accessible means of determining how the set plays out in a deck with those two colors in it.

Take, for example, my Wilds of Eldraine example above;

This Unncommon Signpost demonstrates how plays out in Wilds draft. You tap your opponents creatures - something does more than , but you also gain an advantage for doing so - drawing cards, which is very . She rewards you for playing into the themes of the set, and unlike other cards I could name - you know who you are - she is open-ended enough to allow for use outside her home set. Which is good!

So, here is the first line of Multicoloured cards in a deck. Cards that are intended to show up in packs with relative ease and help keep the set cohesive. They guide and respond to how the mono-colored commons act and can be played, while at the same time provide key support pieces and payoffs for the more powerful rares. Bad Signposts limit, good ones enable.

And from there, we get the Rares. Here we see a lot of effort made to create card that draw attention to themselves, for good or for ill, and are the capstones of their respective colour combinations in the set. In theory. Sometimes Uncommons just blow Rares out of the water. Regardless of that though, the Rares tend towards not being as cyclical as the Uncommons, their colours not as evenly spread out. This is something I'm keeping in mind for my set, legendofa, as I do have notes about your comments about such a thing from the Blue Commons article.

But how does this all actually work?

For me, the theory goes that as you respect the current New World Order of design - that the higher the rarity, the more complicated a card can be, multi-coloured support in a set comes in many layers. The biggest and most important hurdle in such a thing isn't actually the card design itself, but rather in the colours involved. It's easy to slap more mana symbols into a casting cost (yes, I know, card design and balance is a thing), but how do you pay for it?

The first issue with enabling everything that I have talked about before is your mana fixing. To be more precise, your ability to ensure that you have all the relevant mana symbols for a card while on curve. It's easier to play a card that has a cost of than it is to play a card that is and how the set is designed to enable or disable that can affect how prevalent multicolored cards can get, and how intense their required mana symbols can be.

There are three ways to solve this. Lands, Rocks and Dorks. I've talked about them all individually in the past, but here is where they start to merge and make more sense. Lands are the first and primary means of color fixing. The ubiquity of dual lands (and triple in relevant sets) helps set the tone for the set, and there are often two sets of these in the set. The first is the common Lifelands, the lands that tap to produce one of two colors of mana, but are forced to come into play tapped. On the other hand, they also give you a point of life when they do. These are intended for the draft and sealed setting, and while they don't show up in every pack, the more aggressive multicoloured sets will have them in place of the Basic lands on occasion. This is reinforced with sets with certain gimmicks to them that are supported by the lands, such as the Ravnican Gates for that block, or the Snow Duals for Kaldheim.

In addition, Fetch lands, from Evolving Wilds through Fabled Passage and Scalding Tarn can also help enable multicoloured decks by ensuring at least one source of the correct color of mana is in your hand or on the battlefield.

On the other side of the pack - or actually right beside it if you're cracking a pack - are the Rare Lands. These tend to come five in a set, though not always as in current Standard, Kamigawa and March of the Machines did not, and they represent a cycle of allied or enemy dual lands with a unified gimmick or theme. Dominaria United and the Brother's War gave us a reprinting of all 10 Pain Lands (and I finally got an Adarkar Wastes!), and Innistrad had a reprinting of the 10 Check Lands between the two sets. New Capenna finished the Tri-Cycle Lands of Ikoria (and are still causing problems thanks to Domain) and Wilds of Eldraine have enemy colour Man Lands, and as of the time of this writing, we don't know if/what the cycle from Caverns will be like. The presence of these cards in a set are often completely irrelevant to the theme or mechanics of the set, and are a legacy fill from the old days when these sorts of things were supposed to be hard.

The next fixer are Rocks. These artifacts, like Sultai Banner or Talisman of Ingenuity are colourless in nature, meaning that, like lands, you don't need perquisite colour sources on the battlefield to play them, but you do need some sources of mana in general to play them. Artifact based ramp such as this can occur at all rarities in a set, and because of their nature, can also provide colour(s) that you don't have access to otherwise. At Common, these rocks tend to just add mana in the relevant colours, but can also provide some minor effect, like sacrificing itself to draw a card, or whose mana had a conditional effect attached to it, such as Carnelian Orb of Dragonkind and its effect on Dragons. At Uncommon, they start to gain static effects, or other activated abilities that don't worry about the mana production, like Paradise Plume or Phyrexian Totem. And finally at Rare, these rocks tend to have massive effects, and the mana fixing or acceleration is almost an afterthought. Things like Chromatic Lantern, or Gauntlet of Power.

Your last fixers are Dorks - and to a lesser extent Instants or Sorceries. I've covered these in detail in the past, but for the purposes of this discussion, this is an aspect of that needs to be carefully watched when you are looking at how to incorporate multicoloured cards. There is a huge difference between a Llanowar Elves producing and a Birds of Paradise producing any color for you on turn 2.

In fact, I went diving into cards, and I found that of all the cards in the game, it is that will get cards that will have more of that mana symbol in their casting cost than anything else, barring cycles of cards from older sets. You won't get cards like Gigantosaurus or Rushwood Elemental in other colours. The closest you'll get are things like Dawn Elemental or Phyrexian Obliterator. In fact, as an aside, this is one of the reasons why Green Devotion decks can be as powerful as they are - there is no shortage of those mana symbols.

I really should do Devotion one of these days. But that is literally the exact opposite of multicoloured decks and thus there is very little overlap!

So backing up here, while mana dorks tend to reinforce their pre-existing colour(s), they can splash out into other colours. But at the end of the day, you are going to depend a lot more on multi-coloured lands, Rocks, and the ability to fetch either of them in order to allow players to actually cast the spells they want. So these need to be in the set in some form or another.

Lastly, let's talk mono-coloured cards. Now, you may be confused as to why I want to do this when I just shelved Devotion, but there is logic! And Reason! And Sanity!

Because even some of the most heavily multicolored decks will still run a lot of mono-colored cards. And in the ancient days of yore before a good chunk of you were even born, multi coloured decks were basically two partial mono-colored decks stapled together. So when yo are designing your multi-colored creatures, especially your signposts, you need to see how they interact or support with their relevant colours. One of my favorite examples of this was with Zendikar Resurgent through the latest Innistrad sets and that Standard format. I started with the Signpost Uncommon of Cleric of Life's Bond, and supplemented it with Marauding Blight-Priest and Lunarch Veteran  ^Flip. No matter how you come or go, I was gaining life and you were losing it. Yes, I know, cards from different sets are involved, but inside that set, you had Kor Celebrant and Expedition Healer and Skyclave Cleric  ^Flip. Plenty of ways to gain life and then punish the opponent for it.

A good, solid support in terms of mono-colored cards are the base on which the multi-colored cards work, and you can't ignore them in favor of gold shinieness. At all. Or else things implode. Which is why I've been making such an effort to incorporate my mechanics into my set at the common level and building support for them at that same level. Because I know that when I get to my signpost Uncommons, they need to be able to work, and that the Rares need to cap these off with the final payoffs. Mono-colored do not exist to take space away from multi coloured cards, but to support them.

Integrating Gold cards into a set is not simply just making a card with many keywords and slapping multiple mana symbols on it. That way lay bad card design. Don't go that way. Get interesting! But yet, as I hope I have pointed out, it's not just about putting those cards into the set. It's about the integrated support for them, from other gold cards to mana fixing to the other cards in their mutual colors. They don't exist in a vacuum.

Gold cards are like a thread that stitches together the five colours of magic, they join things together without drowning everything else out. Respect them, but don't over use it. Unless your name is Ravnica. In which case go all in. You deserve it. And remember to support them properly. Don't assume that another set in Standard will save you - though you should be talking to the people in front and behind to smooth things out.

I hope I have explained well enough the hows and whys of Gold cards, and you have a better appreciation for them in the future. Or at least less annoyance when you look at a card and go "WHY!?!" Because the question is still "Why?" and not the more exaggerated version.

Thank you all, and join me next week when I talk about something else - I have an idea, so we'll see how that goes.

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!