Should Colored Artifacts be the Norm, or the Exception?
General forum
Posted on Aug. 31, 2025, 8:40 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
I saw this post on Mark Rosewater's Tumblr account, in which a user expressed displeasure over the frequency of colored artifacts, in recent years, so I would like to ask the other users here about it.
I have been playing this game since 2003, well before colored artifacts were introduced, so I personally believe that artifacts should be colorless by default, with colored artifacts being an exception, because artifacts were colorless for the game's early history, and being colorless is what makes them so great, in my mind.
What does everyone else say, about this? Do you believe that colored artifacts should be the exception, or the norm? I certainly am interested to hear your thoughts, on this matter.
As long as colorless artifacts stay, I'm okay with it. At first I thought it was completely diluting the Esper (Alara, not Final Fantasy) gimmick, but as time went on I made my peace with it. I'm going to be very interested to see what happens when Alara comes back.
August 31, 2025 10:12 p.m.
The way that I see it, artifacts first started out as a flavour thing. When the identities and mechanics of the colours were first being worked out flavour had a major impact on card design and it didn't make much sense for an object like a sword to be aligned with a colour. Anyone could pick up a sword after all. So objects, devices, and constructs were made artifacts.
Later on, artifacts allowed some colours access to mechanics that were normally seen in other colours, but in a far less efficient manner. An example would be a flying artifact creature that was far over-costed for the body it provided, but it at least gave green access to a flier in a limited environment. To serve that roll, it makes sense for artifacts to be colourless so that any colour can use them.
Wizards wanting to provide gameplay altering effects found an outlet with artifacts, such as with cards like Winter Orb. Enchantments also filled the role of providing continuous game-altering effects but the flavour of enchantments was more in line with a colour trying to impose its own rules on the game, thus they were coloured. If WotC wanted an effect to be accessible to any colour then it got put on an artifact due to them being colourless. Chalice of the Void comes to mind in that regard.
In a similar vein, colourless artifacts are also a way for WotC to provide answers to game issues and make those answers available to all colours. Mana fixing, graveyard removal, various stax type effects, etc. Colourless artifacts can be potential quick fixes to meta issues that can be inserted into a set as a sort of emergency game patch.
Moving on to the more modern environment of the game, things are now clearly different from the game's early years. The colour pie of mechanics for the game is relatively settled and archetypes within the game have become more established and expanded upon. Artifact-themed sets have required each colour to develop signature interactions with artifacts, and artifacts in turn have been designed to match with the ways that a particular colour may interact with them. Some effects that have been printed on artifacts are just too tied to a particular colour for the effect to be made freely accessible to the other colours. This was first expressed with artifact activated abilities requiring coloured mana to use and then moved on to coloured mana being required to cast the artifact at all. Flavourwise, it's an acknowledgement that the ideologies that drive each colour would lead to particular artifacts aligned with those ideologies to be developed.
I think that there is a clear place for both colourless and coloured artifacts within the game. The development of artifacts with coloured mana costs strikes me as a necessary development to both support artifact themes while maintaining the mechanical boundaries of the colour pie. I certainly wouldn't like to see colourless artifacts stop being printed but coloured artifacts also clearly have a place within the game now.
August 31, 2025 10:49 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #5
The commenters have hit the bullseye on basically everything, so I don’t feel like anything’s been missed. Having said that, I’ll still chime in lol. I do love the idea of ramping up the flavor of cards by making them color specific. Artifacts had always been playing the part of “universal tools” for decks. Worried about walls? Throw in a Battering Ram. Want some damage prevention, but your colors don’t allow for it? Get yourself a Pentagram of the Ages. There have been problems, though, when you get into seriously strong and more specialized abilities, like life gain or trample, and then continue to ramp it up, like with Shadowspear, you run into pretty crazy problems. I think adding colors helps mitigate that nicely. I definitely want to keep most artifacts in the “universal tool” category… especially when it’s weird interesting things like Currency Converter. I do love those things the most.
Crow_Umbra says... #2
I think having color specific artifacts is fine, and introduces a new means of power regulation for them. Although being colorless is a key feature of their original identity in the game, I think both flavor and "safety valves" for power are both valid reasons to include color when possible.
Being colorless can run the risk of making certain artifacts ubiquitous if they are powerful enough. Looking at The One RingGC as a kind of more recent example, one means of "toning down" this card would have been to include as part of its casting cost. Having Black as part of its casting identity would still be flavorful regarding the greed and corrupting nature of The One Ring.
Another case to look at would be Crucible of Worlds and Conduit of Worlds as more direct side by side comparisons. By making Conduit a Green card (and more expensive), it adds some wiggle room to give it a bit more utility than what Crucible has, but safety valves that additional utility behind a specific color identity, additional mana cost, and conditional sorcery speed activation. Imagine if Conduit was instead colorless and cost , this would give other colors access to the nonland permanent recursion that typically don't have access to it.
August 31, 2025 8:56 p.m.