MTGNexus

Article + changes only.

Mark Rosewater has put out an article cataloging the current state of the Color Pie - which colors have access to which effects, and whether they are primary / secondary / tertiary at those effects. We've already seen most of these changes, but still nice to have confirmation.

There are some pretty interesting changes. Overall, White appears to be the biggest winner - it has an actual definition for its card draw, and it has gained explicit 'friendly to planeswalker/legendary/low mana value cards', plus it has gained in areas like reanimation, creature destruction, and artifact destruction. Meanwhile, land destruction has been pulled back a bit from Black and Green (going to tertiary), and Blue has lost Pongify effects.

Also worth noting, Blue is gonna start getting Vigilance! Hooray! (and yes I know blue has kind of already had it with creatures that untap themselves, but now it's gonna get the real deal going forward.) I like this change quite a bit, for several reasons.

1. Play design requested it for limited. This makes sense considering that blue has felt like a weak color a lot of recent limited formats, with MID being the big exception.

2. Its so much nicer for custom card designers (IMHO) to be able to just make some blue creatures with vigilance then to have some weird untapping effect.

3. Flavorfully I think that vigilance makes a ton of sense in blue, as blue is literally the color of awareness/sight/clarity/knowledge etc etc, as well as just being a defensive keyword for a defensive color. I also love the flavor of vigilance being in all three Bant colors, and Rakdos wanting nothing to do with it.

4. Vigilance is a less powerful keyword, so it synergizes nicely with blue's other keywords, which are generally quite strong, such as flying, hexproof, and flash. It also brings blue more in line with other colors in terms of having a suite of keywords that can be used every set for creatures. I understand blue is the weakest creature color, but now Blue will have four keywords for creatures instead of just three. (ignoring ones that come up once in a blue moon like trample and indestructible for big creatures and special cycles)

5. It gives Blue-white another draft archetype.

I wonder what the "various reasons" for deprecating multiblocking are. It's not like it was used all that often anyway and I've never found it to play poorly, nor have I ever heard that it did.

void_nothing wrote: ↑

2 years ago

I wonder what the "various reasons" for deprecating multiblocking are. It's not like it was used all that often anyway and I've never found it to play poorly, nor have I ever heard that it did.

Probably the same reasons that they don't like first strike on defensive creatures and have moved more towards "First Strike when attacking". It disincentives attacking. From what I can see from Maro's various responses over the past few years (and in particular why decay has the "can't block" clause), WotC is very aware about games being bogged down and players not wanting to attack. Due to this, they seem to be moving partially away from mechanics that do this. Multiblocking was probably a low hanging fruit in that it was not used that often to begin with.

Mookie wrote: ↑

2 years ago

Blue has lost Pongify effects.

This is one of the changes that caught my eye the most, and I'm glad they're going in this direction. Destroying/exiling creatures as a form of transformation never felt right to me, because the creature, effectively, is never actually destroyed. Transforming/polymorphing a creature should be done in two ways only: with auras or with effects like Oko, Thief of Crowns that change a creature's abilities, stats, and types to another. You could also exile a creature and search for a replacement from the library. But this fits the "chaos" theme of red more than blue, which has more control over what object it wants its target to transform to.

Maluko wrote: ↑

2 years ago

But this fits the "chaos" theme of red more than blue, which has more control over what object it wants its target to transform to.

Its not gonna be red, its now a white ability as apart of white removal of destroying something and giving something to the opponent as compensation.