Today's is the last card in a series of fifteen consecutive days where my own submissions followed a pattern according to their colors. I was inspired to do so by Rithaniel's submissions, where he plays a lot with color combinations and the concept he himself has called color "asymmetry", which by now has entered my own inner Magic technical vocabulary. It's very easy to see whether a card is color symmetric or not: check the colors in the color wheel, which you can find on the back of any Magic card if you don't know it by heart, and note the axis of symmetry of the shape defined by the card's color identity. Is what you care about on that axis of symmetry or anyway symmetric in respect to that axis? If yes, then you've got a symmetric card. If not, you've got an asymmetric one. Examples:
A Mardu card centered in W is symmetric. For example, a mono-W card with a BR activated ability.
A Mardu card centered in R is
asymmetric. For example, a mono-R card with a WB activated ability.
A Mardu card centered in RB goes back to be symmetric. For example, a RB (Rakdos) card with a W activated ability.
It also works with four colors. Let's say I have a world with four-colored factions (I do and it's called Kolyfar). If I want to make a card for the non-W faction, there are several options:
A BR card with a GU activated ability is symmetric. Both the pair of B with R and that of U with G are symmetric in respect to the axis of symmetry defined by the whole four-colored color identity (the vertical red line in these images).
If I move one of the center colors, I can make the card asymmetric. For example, I can move B to U:
A UR card with a BG activated ability is asymmetric. If I also move the other center color I can go back to symmetry. Say I'm moving R to G:
A GU card with a RB activated ability is again symmetric. I can also exploit the axis to separate the colors:
A RG card with a UB activated ability is again asymmetric. I can also use this reasoning with three-color groups within that four-colored color identity:
A Temur-colored card with a mono-B activated ability is also asymmetric, as would be a Jund-colored card with a U activated ability, and so on...
@Rithaniel This is how I've understood it, let me know if any of the above is wrong.
I am embracing this concept which I had never thought of before Rithaniel came up with it. I really, really like it. He's totally right that so much of real Magic is symmetrical that there is a whole lot of unexplored space in color asymmetry. So I wanted to play with it too (and I will keep doing it). The day I came up with this idea I had posted this card, with the only intention of making a single asymmetric card:
Mardu Flesheater - August 3rd.
It's a red card with white and black on it. I wanted to do another asymmetric card without red for the following day as I had already used red as the previous day's main color. So I had the idea of taking R out of the color wheel and see what remained. It was a square:
For those who can't see images, it's something like this:
W---U
| ---- |
G----B
I could get all the three-color combinations that didn't contain R from that square by taking away one color and then going clockwise on that square:
If I take away W, I get Sultai.
If I take away U, I get Abzan.
If I take away B, I get Bant.
If I take away G, I get Esper.
Then I took these four three-color combos and decided the base color such that the resulting card was asymmetric. I decided to start with the Sultai one (the first one in the list above) and center it in the color that came first in the square (U). I started going around along the square one step at a time starting at U, with the convention that the first one listed was the center color:
UBG = Sultai centered in U
BGW = Abzan centered in B (symmetric)
GWU = Bant centered in G
WUB = Esper centered in W
The we go back to UBG, so I moved the center color to be the second one:
UBG = Sultai centered in B
BGW = Abzan centered in G
GWU = Bant centered in W (symmetric)
WUB = Esper centered in U (symmetric)
And then again making the third color the center:
UBG = Sultai centered in G (symmetric)
BGW = Abzan centered in W
GWU = Bant centered in U
WUB = Esper centered in B
I wanted this cycle to focus on asymmetry, so I took away the symmetric combos, which I noted above, and made cards in the order that I wrote here. In fact, if I copy here what remains when you take away the symmetric combos in the same order that I have just generated them with the "algorithm" above, if you want to call it like that, this is what you get:
UBG = Sultai centered in U
GWU = Bant centered in G
WUB = Esper centered in W
UBG = Sultai centered in B
BGW = Abzan centered in G
BGW = Abzan centered in W
GWU = Bant centered in U
WUB = Esper centered in B
It's a sequence of eight asymmetric cards in a specific order, and I followed exactly this sequence every day. But then I thought going eight days in a row with no red at all wasn't the best thing, so instead of every day, I made it every other day, with the intention to just make monored cards in between, and I did so for the first red card. It was meant to be just a monored card in between two consecutive steps of the sequence. But then it dawned on me: those red cards could be a cycle too. So I took the original color wheel, the one with all five colors, and I started with R going clockwise, pairing R with each other color it meets. The intent was to make a monored card with the other color in its rules text:
RG = R with G in the text box
RW = R with W in the text box
RU = R with U in the text box
RB = R with B in the text box
And so I intertwined the two cycles, and my plan for the following two weeks or so became this:
UBG = Sultai centered in U
mono-R (it had already happened)
GWU = Bant centered in G
RG = R with G in the text box
WUB = Esper centered in W
RW = R with W in the text box
UBG = Sultai centered in B
RU = R with U in the text box
BGW = Abzan centered in G
RB = R with B in the text box
BGW = Abzan centered in W
Random mono-R card
GWU = Bant centered in U
Random mono-R card
WUB = Esper centered in B
Then I made the first of the two random R cards at the end a colored artifact to make it different from the rest, and that's how we get to the final sequence that I actually did use in my submissions from the last two weeks or so:
UBG = Sultai centered in U (
Hungry Shark - August 4th)
mono-R (
Rageful Substitution - August 5th)
GWU = Bant centered in G (
Questing Monkey - August 6th)
RG = R with G in the text box (
Goblin Hitman - August 7th)
WUB = Esper centered in W (
Thopter Fleethead - August 8th)
RW = R with W in the text box (
Khenra Undertaker - August 9th)
UBG = Sultai centered in B (
Darkwood Exploration - August 10th)
RU = R with U in the text box (
Nostalgic Thoughts - August 11th)
BGW = Abzan centered in G (
Steadfast Ash - August 12th)
RB = R with B in the text box (
Banquet of Blood - August 13th)
BGW = Abzan centered in W (
Unstable Field - August 14th)
mono-R colored artifact (
Hot Firestone - August 15th)
GWU = Bant centered in U (
Mutatooze - August 16th)
mono-R non-artifact (
Leonin Firstmate - August 17th)
WUB = Esper centered in B (
Macabre Tactics - August 18th)
And that's exactly what I did. You can check it for yourself if you go back and look each day's own thread. Today's the final one, so I thought I could tell the whole story. Tomorrow another cycle will begin.