Shall we get started?
I’ve been playing this wonderful little game for the better part of 20 years. Through these years I’ve seen ups and downs of this game, from Fallen Empires, Homelands, and Champions of Kamigawa, to Invasion, Mirrodin, and Tempest (my personal vote for best all time set). Through this time I’ve played in many different formats but one hit home more than others, because it answered this one question every magic player has thought of at least once (if not you’re about to):
“Why do the colors have specific allies and enemies?”
I’m not talking about why design has set it up that way, or the theory of why great Richard Garfield deemed it so on the 5th day of creation. I’m talking about the simple truth we’ve all learned about this game:
Blue mages hate Red and Green mages.
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| In fairness, everyone hates Blue mages |
This is something I learned early on, and I learned why through Color War. An uncle of mine introduced the 5-way multiplayer format to me and it explained to me these color allegiances much like my body learned it needed oxygen to survive. This my friends (and Andrew’s readers) is what I’m here to give you! I’ll be explaining this in two parts: First, I’m going to discuss the basics and rules of the format, and then the decks that I've developed.
- Color War is a 5 player format, wherein each deck is a single color. (This is similar to Star, for those familiar with that format, this was just introduced to me prior to Star and I’m stubbornly keeping the name as Color War) [Editor's Note: Marshall is more stubborn than the Goat Tokens he loves so much.] All 5 players sit in the order of the colors on the back of the Magic card (Go look! we’ll wait). From here things begin to get complicated.
- Turn order: Now that everyone is seated in the correct order. You should be seated next to your two allies and across from your two enemies. Watch for dirty looks – they are EVIL. [Editor's Note: For example, Black is allied with Red and Blue, but enemies with Green and White. Think Alara shards, or the Core-Set-Dual-Lands to keep track of allies.] Unlike normal multiplayer matches, the actual turn order does not go in a circle, it follows a star pattern in clockwise order. This is designed to prevent two allies from having back to back turns (at least at the start of the game). My suggestion is to call out the next color when you’re done your turn. Try “Black, you're up!” instead of “Pass” when you first start playing this format. Turn order remains the same when a player dies, just skip over the eliminated position.
- You only win when your two enemy colors are dead. This may explain some of the targeting restrictions above. Because not only can you win when your two enemy colors are dead, the same applies to your two allies. Yes destroying their planeswalker or fogging when they go in for a kill, is something you can do as it will slow them down to allow YOU to win. To answer your inevitable next question, Yes you can tie. In fact it’s almost as common as normal solo wins.
- Targeting: I encourage some additional targeting restrictions to help balance the format and encourage the format to play as intended. Your mileage may vary on these, but I think they're a good baseline.
- a. You can only attack your enemies
- b. You can only do direct damage to enemy players (EXCEPTION: you can target allies to kill allied planeswalkers).
- c. You can target allied permanents.
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| Multiplayer Magic...right? Call a Judge? |
That’s it, the rest is normal fun multiplayer!
Right?
Andrew, I think I’m missing something here, because something tells me that left to their own devices people would make independent decks packed with color specific hate.
[Editor's Note: Muffled cries]
What’s that? You think so too? Hold on, let me take off the duct tape, I can’t understand what you’re telling me…..
The hard truth is in ever group of magic players there is at least one that takes the time and energy to find a card or two that gives them a significant edge over their friends. I'm sure you all know that guy – you may even BE that guy. Hey, this could be a good thing if it pushes everyone to continuously improve their decks and can provide a natural way to keep the group fresh with ideas. Unfortunately, this idealism doesn’t really hold true though when it comes to formats with distinct limitations like Color War (and one could argue it doesn’t hold true in normal free for all either, but that’s an argument for a latter day). The balance of Color War breaks down when cards like Mirran Crusader, Karma, Magnetic Mountain, Conversion, and even something as innocuous as Blue Elemental Blast (props to those that didn’t have to look up those cards.) It becomes harder to balance when you load up a Black deck with so much removal that it wipes Green and White off the map. So what is a multiplayer group to do?
The Color War was originally introduced to me with 5 premade 40-card decks, none were incredibly powerful, but they all contained some surprisingly strong iconic cards: Chain lighting and Vesuvan Doppleganger come to mind. They were built with the idea that any of the 5 could win on any given day. This was primarily controlled by the fact they were all built by the same person (my uncle.) After I moved away, and I found a new group of fellow Magic junkies, I decided I wanted to introduce the format to them. This was around the time of Invasion, and so I knew that I needed to build 5 decks of approximately the same strength. Since then I’ve been continually tweaking and adding new cards to the lists., keeping them recognizable but still fresh. This is a deceivingly hard thing to do, you want to maintain several things:
1) Each deck should keep the flavor of the color. When you play as the Green deck you should feel like a big old tree loving hippy with a really REALLY big stick to hit people with. This also means that even though removal exists in White and Red Black should still be king of the hill with creature removal – it's needed to help balance out White and Green.
2) Each deck should have cards that hearken back to the history of the color, Shivan Dragon isn’t the best dragon in the deck (that probably goes to Thundermaw Hellkite – a recent addition) but every Red mage sees Shivan Dragon and smiles. Feel free to adjust this based on your group. If all of you started within the last two years, 'the History of Magic' probably means very different for you than it does for my group, who still remember a time when the Stack didn't exist.
3) In the same vein I choose to update decks with new cards too, it keeps the circle of friends interested and enjoying the format long past when it would otherwise have started to get stale.
4) I maintain that each deck needs to have cards that surprise the player “You have Rofellos in here??” Due to the nature of the format resolving these cards or untapping with them isn’t necessarily guaranteed, but I feel that it’s important for players to look at their opening hands and be excited. It's hard to look at some of the best cards ever printed and not be thrilled to play a game with them - in this way, I try to maintain a feel much like Cube Drafting has.
5) Above ALL ELSE balance trumps card selection. I have been asked why certain cycles aren’t in the decks - and I'll admit some are due to availability (I’m looking at you, Primeval Titan), but 9 times out of 10 it’s because one member of the cycle is completely unbalancing in the format. In very few circumstances should one card completely win the game for a color, and at times sacrificing a partial or complete cycle is the cost necessary for the health of the format.
A bit more on balance: Over the years I’ve noticed how difficult it is to keep these decks tuned properly. When testing a deck individually it can seem the exact level of power you were shooting for, but it’s not until you see various global effects hit the field does the balance start to fall apart. Probably the occurrence that highlights this so nicely is when Red had Mana Flare (a great ramp spell to help it get to it’s dragons and X spells), and Blue had Palinchron (which by itself is a great fat blue creature that has a way to save itself, very Blue). Yeah for those that figured out the interaction of those two cards... whoops? Since then, I’ve had the benefit of being able to test more frequently with all 5 decks on the field. Below you’ll find the current incarnations of decks – recently updated to include some choice cards from Magic 2013.
When looking at them, keep in mind that these decks are not built to be tournament worthy, but instead to produce fun and exciting games that are difficult to predict. Even now I keep notes to every game for future edits and balance questions, for example:
1) Gideon might be too good.
2) Switch Cockatrice with another spider
3) Add Vampire Nighthawk
4) Boost Red a little
5) Hapless Researcher
Combined with those is a running list of wins (and allied victories). The thought is to collect sufficient data to warrant changes. “Boost Red a little” for instance seems pretty straightforward, except that the process of boosting Red’s strength leads to White performing poorly next time, meriting improvements to white, perhaps too far, which can cause Black to stumble. Yeah it’s not always that complicated and the occasional gift from a new set helps fill in the hole.
If you decide do go down this rabbit hole, learn from where I am, look at these decks, and use them. I understand that several of the cards are not easily obtainable, and none are strictly required to build a color war deck. That said, I hope when looking at them you’ll see the spirit of each and understand why:
Blue mages hate Red and Green mages.
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Hello everyone – Andrew here for an afterword. First, a great debt to Marshall for helping me with this post. Color War is one of the best formats I've ever played, and I think that it's a great way for a group of friends to get together and play multiplayer when their normal decks might not necessarily be on the same part of the power curve.
I'd also like to thank those of you who helped me out with the white commons in my post on Tuesday. While I didn't get quite the volume of specific feedback as I'd hoped, there was still a ton of great advice – so thanks again. I hope some of you are interested in the project, and will be hoping to play at GP Philadelphia in a couple months.
This weekend, I won't likely be playing much Magic, since I'll be moving to a new place with my lovely girlfriend. Nevertheless, this weekend also marks the PAX Magic party, and that's bound to be a blast for all of us F5'ing on our computers, waiting for spoilers. Personally, I can't wait. All three of the spoiled mechanics so far look to be good, innovative takes on the guilds, and I can't wait to see the rest of them. There's a good chance that I'll take a look at the mechanics on Tuesday's post, and talk about what I see each of them doing in the set.
Or hey, maybe I'll get an entirely different idea by morning – who knows! Check back in on Tuesday to see!
As Always, Sling Some Spells,
Andrew
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