Colorless Legality in Commander
Asked by dagan94 9 years ago
So in my deck deck:INSANE-TERROR, I've recently added the new Eldrazi to the deck. Here's the question though, is it legal?
With the change in colorless now being a cost and 
just indicating generic mana, does that mean that I am not permitted to use these creatures? I reason its similar to the land and how we're not removing colorless land from what we're allowed, but what about these new creatures themselves?
Regardless of what the current answer is, what do you guys think it should be? It would certainly add new flavor if only colorless decks could use these creatures, or even if it was just Kozilek himself as the commander giving you access to these creatures. Seems interesting either way you look at it.
Think of it like this, lands cannot produce generic mana. They produce colourless mana. The difference between Kozilek, the Great Distortion and Karn, Silver Golem is that with Kozilek, you have to use colourless mana to pay for part of his cost. The rest of the cost can be payed with mana of any colour/colourless mana. But he is still a colourless creature.
Now lay the rule where you can't run cards outside your colour identity down and this means you can only run lands that produce colourless or lands that produce mana of any colour (thanks to rule 4 being removed). So now you have a creature whose cost must be paid with at least 2 colourless mana, but then the rest can be payer however except that your deck only produces colourless mana so you just pay the whole thing that way.
All that WotC have done with the new mana symbols is made it so that specifics costs are required to be payed by colourless only mana. Its kind of like Consume Spirit but for colourless instead of black.
January 20, 2016 5:21 p.m.
Raging_Squiggle says... #3
The key difference here is color identity, which is defined as:
the colored mana symbols found in the mana cost on the top right corner Elvish Mystic
a color indicator by the super type, Pact of Negation
- a characteristic defining ability that names 1 or more colors Intervention Pact
- and colored mana symbols in the text. Memnarch
Some new colorless creatures have no colored mana symbols or identifiers, so there is no restriction for what color deck they can go in. The only restriction is that for some, they have the new Colorless symbol: 
which must be paid with mana, like you would pay for Brainstorm with a 
mana.
January 20, 2016 6:37 p.m.
TheRedMage says... #4
@ Raging_Squiggle: Worth mentioning that no card currently exist with a color-defining characteristic-defining ability that names colors. Cards like Intervention Pact have been errata'd in the Oracle card reference text so that they now have a color indicator. As of now, the only characteristic-defining abilities that affect color are Devoid and the ability on Ghostfire (which, while doing basically the same thing, doesn't actually mean Ghostfire has devoid and can't be cast off of the colored mana from Corrupted Crossroads for example).
So basically your third criterion ("characteristic defining abilities that name 1 or more colors") selects no cards.
January 21, 2016 4:36 p.m.
Raging_Squiggle says... #5
It is worth mentioning, but it was an example of the card. Lol. The reason I added that in there was because of the debacles going around regarding devoid.
perrin515 says... #1
The answer is yes, it can go in. As Wizards said, colorless is not a 6th color, it just now requires true colorless mana. This is also why they got rid of rule 4 in commander.
January 20, 2016 5:05 p.m.