Colorless as a Sixth Color

By Splitmoon and crushcastles23

Velencium: City of Smog - Colorless Fails as a Sixth Color

Velencium: City of Smog is my second attempt at a steampunk set. You may have read Cool Beens' Wacky Faction Guide from the June 2023 issue of the Custom Magazine. The original draft of the article did not mention that you had to have exactly 5 colors in the set, so just to spite Cool Beens' stating that three faction sets were impossible, I was inspired to create a three faction set using six colors. I created the three primary factions, black/red Soldiers, green/white Citizens, and blue/colorless Homunculi and built the world from there. The set is overly complicated, way behind schedule, and a failure. Why?

Incidental Colorless Permanents

Colorless is the default state of tokens, artifacts, and things that are supposed to be generic. In attempting to create a token for Velencium, I devised a mechanic that allows you to either create a 1/1 token of the recruited type or put a +1/+1 counter on each creature of the recruited type. However, I quickly encountered a problem. I wanted to use this mechanic for each of the three factions, which led me to three equally not great options. I could either have soldiers naturally be black and red with the citizens being green and white. This leaves the humunculi stuck as just blue since it cannot be both blue and colorless. The second option I had was to use the technology provided in War of the Spark's Planewide Celebration to create a citizen token that is all colors. However, this still leaves out C, something you would not have with a true sixth color. The third option, which is what I went for, was making all of the tokens colorless. While not a huge issue, I had to be careful not to create colorless specific anthem and lord effects because splashing a third color for it would pump all of your recruited tokens. 

Velencium uses weapon tokens in small amount, treasure tokens in moderate amounts, and food tokens in large amounts as artifact tokens and the average set uses two artifact tokens, which are all colorless. This makes it harder to balance cards that count or trigger on enter/leave for colorless cards. Either you need to pull back on their power level due to the prevalence of artifact tokens or you cut out those. While a rarer issue, face down cards are also colorless, which became a detriment for Velencium. Triggers for casting colorless spells seem to be the way to go.

Warping the Framework of Magic: the Gathering

Introducing a sixth color in a Magic project creates a unique problem, as it demands a total reevaluation of the fundamental principles of the Magic: The Gathering color pie. This is difficult to do whether using C or a true color like purple. With Velencium, it over doubled the amount of time it took me to finish the set because it was so time consuming, not to mention mentally taxing. With each small decision reverberating throughout the entire color pie, you have to consider every card both individually and as part of a greater whole, which is something that is easier to think about when you are using the regular five colors of Magic.

To accommodate the inclusion of a sixth color, you must remove mechanics from the established colors. Trimming mechanics from each color and consolidating them into C weakens the individual colors' identities. Each color embodies distinct ideals, with mechanics tailored to suit their flavor and strengths. Removing these signature mechanics and shifting them to colorless could easily dilute the flavor identity or mechanical suite of each color. The diversity of Magic comes from the unique strengths and weaknesses of each color, encouraging players to explore different strategies and adapt to varying playstyles. Tampering this much with the established color pie risks undermining the depth that Magic: The Gathering has cultivated over decades of gameplay. 

Cybaros - Colorless Succeeds as a Sixth Color

The second example set in this article is Cybaros, a science-fantasy world visited by mysteriously shapeshifting aliens known as Vukoroq (constituting much of C's flavor in the set). Cybaros manages to balance an equal representation of C to create a unique and fun draft experience, but it took a lot of iteration and lessons learned to get there. Let us take a look at some of the hurdles that were experienced and how they were overcome.

The decision to create the two factions in this way meant that the common 10-archetype drafting structure had to go. Faction sets do not go out of their way to heavily support color combinations outside faction lines, and I was not going to do it here. I settled on every color combination within each faction and a sub-theme for drafters wanting to draft all three colors of the faction, making for 8 total supported strategies. Enough for 8 drafters, if they all happened to choose different lanes. 

It worked well enough, but something was off. Drafting decks felt homogenized, with many cards being the same in certain colors. This problem would lead to the next solution.

Increase Each Color's Unique Card Access

The problem with squeezing an entire 6th color into a set is that you only have so much space to work with. You have about 280ish cards to work with if you want to stay within the realm of experience that canon sets have been following for the past decade or so (the recent Play Booster structure has changed this a lot, but that was not around during this set's development). 

Now, because Crush covered it, I am gonna skip over a lot of the nitty-gritty numbers and just say that you have about 20%-ish less cards to work with when you add a 6th color to the mix. If your card pool for each color is smaller, the same cards start coming up, leading to the deck homogenization described above. So what were the solutions to this?

1. Hybrid Mana
   If a card can be picked up by multiple colors, you are expanding the total number of options that each color has, regardless of color combinations. Using hybrid instead of multicolor, especially at common, also helped prevent the faction structure from further cannibalizing the precious card slots available for each color.

2. Dedicated Land Slot
   Seeing lands in draft means you see less cards of each color, limiting the total number of cards that you can see and pick up. Thankfully, draft boosters have an additional slot that can be used as needed. I decided to use this slot for the set's nonbasic lands, and the extra slot does wonders for increasing the total card count that players get to see.

3. Less Colorless Artifacts
   This may seem counter-intuitive, since colorless artifacts are able to be picked up by any color. But the amount of things that a colorless artifact can do is far more restricted compared to what a card of a single color can do, which can hurt the variety of effects that you see when you are actually playing with your cards. I think you could be successful by taking an opposite approach (more artifact slots and less cards in each color) but that felt less fun to me personally.

There is no one way to resolve this problem, and I am sure there are plenty of strategies that I did not even think of, but the above was enough to solve the issue of draft decks all turning out the same.

Treat Colorless Like a Color. No, Really.

If you are trying to approach a set that using colorless like a 6th color, you have to go all in. For example, Wastes: C's basic land. In Oath of the Gatewatch, you had to draft these or other sources of colorless mana in order to play your C cards. In Cybaros, Wastes are explicitly able to be added to draft decks in any number just as a rule of drafting the set (there is a reminder card in packs telling players this.)

You should be re-evaluating every effect in your set with the context that it should work with C cards. A mana producing card that would normally add mana of any color instead adds mana of any type (which is the same thing, but also lets you produce C!) Avoid effects that care about certain colors or basic land types, as C cards do not have a color and Wastes do not have their own type. These are just a couple of things to consider, and you may encounter totally different situations when designing your own projects, but as long as you are being considerate of your decisions and how they include colorless in their context, you will run into less issues. 

And finally, you should have a rough idea on what you want C to be doing mechanically. For this, I truly think there are no right answers. There are not enough canon C cards to really create much of a "color pie," though there are some ideas that I found useful to extrapolate from (working in odd zones like exile or the top of the library, +N/-N effects). By and large, though, you will need to just find some effects and stick with them. You will do better if you try and focus on a smaller number of themes and exploring those more in-depth, as that will make C feel more cohesive as a "color," so go in with a rough plan. An example for Cybaros is C utilizing copy effects. This is a relatively niche effect mostly seen in blue that could easily be moved within an in-set context to add some personality to C. 

Conclusion

The effects that C had on the world of Magic: The Gathering may not have been as monumental as some had expected, but it did succeed in creating a sense of wonder and curiosity for many. Hopefully, the case studies above helped provide some valuable insight, whether you are looking to design with C yourself or you're just an interested reader.