r/colorpie

5.2K archived posts · Nov 2014 – Sep 2026

Color Pie Philosophy

r/colorpie

Fuck /u/spez! While we are not currently private, we might become private again, so the Discord link is discord.gg/CjrcSBE. This subreddit is about the philosophy of the MtG color pie, rather than anything mechanical about it. If you are taking that Human Values test, flair it Trend.

Created Nov 10, 2014

4.3KMembers (last snapshot)

5.2KArchived posts

What's the color identity of your favourite fictional character? Why are black and red allies, but not black and green? Why is head designer Mark Rosewater wrong about that aspect of blue? Who on earth thought that card was actually a white effect? What color are you?

The color pie system was created by Richard Garfield during his original design for Magic: the Gathering as a solution to a critical problem of the budding trading card game genre: how do you stop players from simply putting all of the best cards in their deck? Almost every spell in the game is tied to one of five colors (in their conventional cyclical order: white, blue, black, red, and green) and requires a correspondingly source of mana to cast. Using multiple colors in the same deck introduces the risk of drawing spells of one color, but only drawing land cards that produce mana of another color.

The color pie continues to play a huge role in Magic's gameplay and its status in popular culture. Though the driving philosophy behind each color has remained largely unchanged over the game's twenty years, their abilities and restrictions have continually been refined by the team behind Magic - particularly head designer and resident color pie guru Mark Rosewater, who has written (and spoken) many tens of thousands of words across his articles and podcasts on the topic.

Any posts and links related to genuine discussion of the color pie and its applications are welcome. That means no memes or macros. Please keep any discussion of Magic gameplay itself strictly related to the color pie - we have the wonderful r/magicTCG for everything else.

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