Producing mana outside of color identity
Asked by Lurac 8 years ago
In my local EDH group, it is popular to use the opponents' decks in one way or another. There is a Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius deck that likes to copy and redirect others' spells, a Teneb, the Harvester deck that uses the opponent's graveyard, a Lazav, Dimir Mastermind deck that clones everything, and my latest addition: Yasova Dragonclaw, who steals all she can.
Anyway, every now and then it happens that you might want to use an activated ability of a stolen guildmage or cast some card that your Nightveil Specter found, and I quite recently found out that you can't produce off-color mana, which made me sad.
My question is: Is there a simple way around this rule. I'm thinking of cards like Fellwar Stone and Exotic Orchard (I guess Mycosynth Lattice would work, but it's a card that I despise in general, because of all the degenerate combos of turning lands into 0/0 creatures and such)
Also: Is it common to use house rules within playgroups to allow players to produce all five colors from cards like Darksteel Ingot and City of Brass?
Epochalyptik says... Accepted answer #2
When an effect tells you to produce a mana of any color, you actually choose the color you're producing. "Mana of any color" is not a kind of mana; this effect produces 
, 
, 
, 
, or 
. If you attempt to produce mana of a color outside of your commander's color identity, you produce colorless mana instead.
However, effects that allow you to spend mana as though it were mana of any color (see: Daxos of Meletis) do work because they don't actually change the mana in your mana pool to mana of another color. They just change how you may spend it.
November 12, 2015 6:58 a.m.
About two months after your question was made this rule was changed. Now you make any color you can, so if it says any color you can make any color.
BlueScope says... #1
The exact EDH rules is that if a source would produces mana outside the color identity of the respective commander, that produces colorless mana instead. Long story short, you will never, under any circumstances, be able to produce mana outside the color identity of your commander.
November 12, 2015 4:37 a.m.