12/19/14 Episode 185: Blue/Black

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today, I’m going to continue with a series I’ve started on color pairs! So the last time I did blue/white, or white/blue. But this time I’m going to the next color pair in order, blue/black. Okay. So what I’m doing with this series is I’m explaining the two colors and how they relate to each other. What they have in common, what they don’t like about each other. And sort of—I explain the relationship between them.

I’m not specifically explaining the guild, although a lot of what the guild is comes up from what I’m talking about. So if I occasionally use the term “Dimir,” I just mean to represent blue and black. Note that the guilds specifically are not 100% of the overlap between the colors. They’re a particular interpretation on the colors. The most obvious one, usually, but... okay. So blue and black. So to understand blue and black, and how they interact, let’s talk a little bit about blue and a little bit about black.

So blue is the color that seeks perfection through knowledge. So blue, blue believes that anybody can be anything, and the whole point of life is to figure out what you want to be and become it. Blue believes that what you need to become something is just the knowledge and the training, the experience. That anybody can become anything.

And because of that, blue highly, highly values knowledge, because if you want to become the best, you have to understand what the best is. That part of being able to seek perfection is understanding what the perfection is.

Black, on the other hand, seeks power, and seeks it through opportunity. Black believes that the goal of life is to be able to do whatever you want to do, because you have the power to do it. And black believes the way you get there is by taking opportunities.

And what black believes is that what separates the strong from the weak is the strong are willing to take advantage of whatever opportunity they can. There’s no off-limits to black. And a lot of the stuff that black uses, other colors sort of shun away from. That that’s wrong. And black is like, oh, your taboos just make it easier for me. That I’m willing to do whatever I need to do, and I have no qualms. There’s nothing stopping me from doing the things I want to do.

Okay. So what happens when the perfection of blue gets together with the power-seeking of black? And the answer is that each one—I mean, they’re allies, and each one sees within the other one a common bond. So blue seeks to be the best it can be. Black seeks to have power. Well, there’s an overlap there. That blue is seeking out—blue thinks information is important, because to blue, information is the key to perfection. Black also feels information is important because information can be the key to power.

So both blue and black very much make use of information. It’s a little more blue’s area than black, but black definitely understands the value of information, and that black looks at any tool and sees the value of how the tool can be used.

Blue also understands that black is, in its own way, trying to seek a kind of perfection. Blue looks at black and thinks that black is a little tilted in the direction it’s going, meaning sometimes perfection doesn’t require power. But blue looks at black and goes, “Well, black is trying to perfect itself in its own way.” Kind of self-restricts itself, that black only seems to want power and there’s other ways to perfect yourself other than power, but blue understands why you might want to seek out power. Blue does get that.

So when blue and black get together, both of them definitely understand the value of secrets. They understand the value of not always being straightforward what you’re up to. Like, the Dimir guild obviously in Ravnica  is all about subterfuge. It’s all about they don’t want people to understand what they’re up to.

For example, like in Ravnica, one of the big things was, the public-facing Dimir is that Dimir was a guild that once long ago used to do some stuff, and it’s kind of fallen apart, and is just a shell of its former self. A lot of people falsely believe the Dimir guild, no one thought it existed. They knew it existed. But people believed it was kind of—it’s the weakest of the ten guilds. It’s the guild that way back in the day maybe did something, but kind of has really fallen on hard times.

And that’s the image the Dimir want. The Dimir want to be underestimated. The Dimir doesn’t want people to think of them as being this sneaky underhanded guild, because it’s hard to be sneaky and underhanded when people think you’re sneaky and underhanded.

So Dimir definitely sort of downplays a lot of its attributes. Anyway, my point though is that both of them understand the value of being careful about who knows what. And both of them are fine with misleading information. Both of them see knowledge as a weapon.

And that sometimes the way you fight with knowledge is you make the opponent or the other people have the wrong knowledge or get false assumptions or learn something that’s not true. That knowledge can be used to guide and control people. And both blue and black understand that.

Okay, so let’s… well, okay. Let’s talk about the mechanics. Let’s get to where blue and black overlap mechanically. And of all the ally colors, blue and black are the least overlapped. Designing blue/black cards, especially at hybrid where they have to overlap in what they do, is really, really hard in blue/black.

In fact, the other hard color used to be blue/red, but we’ve done a bunch of things in the last couple years to add a few things to overlap blue/red. So black/blue might actually be, not just the hardest ally, but the hardest to overlap of any of the color combinations.

Okay. So let’s talk about what they do do. So number one is, just focus on the mental. Both black and blue understand the value that the mind brings to the puzzle. So for starters, both of them understand that sometimes attacking the mind is how you do it. Now, blue and black—the way it works is, blue and black attack the mind a little bit differently. But each one of them has access to the other means of attack.

So blue mills. And what that means is, blue is like, if you forget the information then you’re not going to be able to use it against me. Black is like, if I surgically remove it with magic, if I pluck it out of your head, then you’re not going to be able to use it against me.

So blue makes use of milling. And black makes use of discard. Also, one could argue that blue also uses counterspells, which in some ways is also making you kind of not be able to cast your spells. So blue both sort of makes you forget your spells, and has learned magic to stop your spells. Where black, it just learned the most efficient way is just make you forget them but more aggressively. Blue is kind of like, “Well,” you know, “I’m slowly forgetting things,” and black is like, “No, I go in and I pluck out the exact thing I need.”

So, let’s walk through those mechanics. So milling is primary in blue, secondary in black. I mean, black does it from time to time. Normal sets, you most often see black doing milling in sets where milling matters. Like in a graveyard set or something where milling is key, we up a little bit and give black more access to milling.

Normally in a default set, blue mills and black doesn’t tend to mill. Now, what black tends to do is discard, right? It goes after the brain. And this is another example of black doing something that most colors think is kind of wrong. Like, black is like, “Well, I’m fighting you, and the things that are hurting me are spells that are in your head. And if I take them out of your head before you cast them, they can’t hurt me. Sounds good to me.” And everyone else is like, “Well, you’re messing with their brain.” And black’s like, “I don’t… does it work? Yeah, it works.”

So blue for example—notice that blue’s willing to counter things you throw at it, blue will make you forget through milling, but blue isn’t quite as aggressive as black. Now, not only will black by the way do discard—and I should mention, blue does have kind of backwards discard. Blue has what we call filtering. So filtering is target player draws some number of cards and discards some number of cards.

So there’s definitely times where blue will use its targeted filtering as a means to make people discard stuff. Usually—and blue has a little bit of history of discard. Blue’s like, tertiary in discard. It doesn’t do it very often. But there’s a little bit of blue. Usually blue does counterspelling rather than discard, but they’re definitely playing in similar space.

The other thing that black does that blue does a little tiny bit is what we call lobotomies in R&D. Or extracting. Where it is where you go into your opponent’s library and remove threats. Now, what happened is, black used to permanently remove them exile, and blue would go steal them. But the stealing was so brutal that we sort of backed off on it. That we didn’t like the idea of, “Don’t play the big things because your opponent will just go into your deck and take them.” Bribery and such.

But anyway, blue and black definitely play in the space of messing with the mind. Now, similarly, on a more positive end, you get to tutoring. Where blue and black both can tutor. Black traditionally tutors for anything, blue sometimes can tutor for anything, more often than not it’s tutoring for spells—for instants and sorceries.

The Dimir mechanic, the first time out, transmute, was clearly playing into tutoring space. Biggest problem is, R&D’s just not super fond of doing lots of tutoring because it lessons the variance of a game. That if you always get a tutor, the game just keeps playing the same. Because you keep getting the same cards.

And then cipher was us playing around in similar space of trying to—so another aspect of blue/black is the idea of evasion. That blue/black is sneaky. That blue/black are the colors that try to… for example, blue has unblockability. It has flying. It has islandwalk. It has a bunch of different ways to sneak by. Black doesn’t have quite as many. Obviously it has flying. And it has intimidate. So I mean, blue and black definitely want means to sort of sneak by.

Cipher, which was the Return to Ravnica Dimir mechanic—it was in Gatecrash, but Return to Ravnica block. Tied in a little bit into the idea of… blue and black are definitely the two colors that like what we call “saboteur” effects. So saboteur effects are, when I hit you, I get to do something.

And so one of the overlaps between blue and black is a creature type called rogues. And rogues are kind of the thieves and the underhanded ones of the Magic universe. Rogues are the ones that do what they gotta do. And that rogues are blue and black, and that rogues often will do saboteur things.

Ninjas, for example, which are essentially rogues in a more narrow sense, also had ninjitsu, which likewise was a mechanic that kind of had to do with I attack, he misunderstood what I am, boom, and I turn out to be something other than what you think I am and I hit you for more. Most of the ninjas had saboteur effects. So… and the saboteur effects vary between blue and black. But they’re the two colors that have the most saboteur effects.

So blue and black, also because they care about knowledge, are also the two colors that—well, two of the three colors that do a lot of card drawing. Green also does card drawing. But blue and black do—green’s card-drawing is tied to creatures, usually, blue and black just do straight-up draw cards.

The difference is, blue is focused on knowledge as being its key thing, so its card drawing is just one of its major things. Black’s card drawing comes at a cost, because in order to diversify and do more things, black’s realized that in order to get the things you want, sometimes you need to pay the cost. And so black only draws cards through some payment. Usually it’s life payment, sometimes it’s sacrifice. But blue and black both do card drawing.

Also, blue and black also do shrinking of power. The difference is, blue tends to do –N/-0, where black tends to do –N… I’ll say /-N, it doesn’t always have to be exactly the same. But black will also—while black lowers power, often lowers toughness as well. While blue only will lower the power, it won’t lower the toughness.

Blue, one of blue’s weaknesses is blue is not very good at killing. Blue can counter things, it can bounce things, it can steal things, it can lock things down, but it doesn’t really kill them. Where black, black has no qualms with killing things. Black’s the number one creature kill color.

So it’s interesting that one of the difference between black and blue is, black is number one in creature kill, and blue is number five in creature kill. One is the first, one is the last. There are a few other minor things where blue and black overlap, for example, blue and black are the two colors that will most often look at the opponent’s hand.

Now, why they’re looking at the opponent’s hand is very different. Blue does it to seek out knowledge. Blue has a Peek effect, where it’s just looking so it can learn from it. Black only looks because it has discard effects, and sometimes it gets to go into your brain and pick the thing it wants. So black will actually go after particular spells, where blue sort of is just aware what you have and it can counter them.

Okay. So, there’s where blue and black are alike. Let’s talk a little bit about how blue and black are different. How do blue and black differ from each other? So the way to do this, I always say, is take the allies of each color, look at the other ally. And then see the conflict between their other allies.

So blue’s other ally other than black is white, black’s ally other than blue is red. So what is the white/red conflict? The white/red conflict is order vs. chaos. Is the fact that white believes that things need to be structured, that there needs to be rules in place. That people, if left to their own devices, will just create chaos.

Red believes in freedom. Red believes that people should be able to do what they want to do and shouldn’t be tied down and restricted. So white looks at red and sees anarchy, red looks at white and sees fascism.

So the conflict there is how much control you need over things. And that blue and black definitely share that. That blue wants control, but blue very much wants control through a more structured order. Black understands the value of letting things—I mean, blue is the one who will team up with white and make a very orderly, lawful world. Where black will team up with red and make a very chaotic… so in D&D terms, there is two spectrums. So there is lawful and chaotic, and the other spectrum is good and evil.

And so white/blue, often, will be lawful good. Which means they believe in having the law, and they believe in—they’ll uphold the law, but they will, they are trying to do good, but they’re also, they’re both lawful and trying to do good. Where black/red is pretty chaotic evil. It’s like, we’re not trying to be lawful, nor are we trying to be good.

You can, for example—lawful evil means you’re doing evil things but within the context of the law. And chaotic good means that you’re trying to do good, but you’re not following the law. So for example, red/white, which is Boros, red/white is chaotic good. It is trying to do good. It wants to do good. You see a lot of vigilantes showing up in red/white, because they’re trying to do good, but you know what? The system doesn’t work for them. They have to break the system.

Where lawful evil, for example, probably… I mean white/black is a good example of lawful evil. The Orzhov. The Orzhov want to work within the law. To them, the law can be a weapon. And that in some ways—sometimes you can argue Azorius sometimes is lawful evil. But it’s usually that you’re using the law and structure—I mean, definitely Orzhov uses structure as a weapon to punish the people that it wants to punish.

Anyway, so the difference here is, white/blue leans more toward lawful good and black/red leans more toward chaotic evil. So the idea is, blue wants the change that it wants, it’s trying to seek out perfection. But it doesn’t want to do it at the cost of the world. That blue does understand—I mean, not that blue can’t be selfish, because it’s allies with black and it has its selfish times, but blue kind of understands the need for some set of structure to reach the thing it needs.

And black, while black will use structure if it needs it, doesn’t quite see the value of it. That what black realizes is, there are lots of creatures willing to act—like, black looks at emotions, blue for example is all about—the blue/red conflict is all about emotion vs. intellect. And the white/black conflict is about the community vs. the individual.

So what happens is, as you get to the colors, black understands the value of emotion, blue understands the value of community. And you start pulling on the edges. And that so it’s—actually, it’s more complex, I guess. So clearly the white/red conflict exists between blue and black. But also, the blue/red and the white/black conflict, each one’s skewing the other way.

So blue and black, blue really wants to do what it wants to do, but it is not trying to create chaos in the process. Blue does not see value in—blue’s like, “I want to perfect myself. So I’m focused on myself. I will do what’s right for me.” And sometimes helping yourself is helping the community around you. Blue understands that sometimes, the way that I thrive is by helping others thrive.

Where black is like, “I’m going to do what I need to do. If the emotional needs of others can be manipulated by me, more to me. I don’t care if the world burns around me as long as I’m getting the things I need.” And so blue and black definitely have a conflict there, where blue says, “I want to reach perfection, and I understand some of the tools that black will use.” But blue doesn’t always agree with black using those tools.

And black looks at blue and goes, hey, blue has the idea of some of the tools how to get power, but man. Blue is not really completely focused on power. Blue will often make itself better, and for what? For… why? If changing is not helping you get more power, what’s the point of changing?

And so black and blue, where they differ is, they don’t quite 100% understand what the other one is up to. And mostly, this is true of all the colors, by the way, most of the colors don’t completely understand the other colors because the other colors prioritize things that those colors just don’t prioritize.

It’s funny that a lot of the conflicts in the color pie in general are just things that are diametrically opposed, and trying to understand just why… that’s why the enemy pairs at least, they’re fundamentally at odds. Now, when you get to allies, the reason they disagree is just there’s subtleties of what the difference is between them.

Okay. So now that we’ve talked about sort of what blue does mechanically, and sort of where they agree and disagree, let me talk a bit about designing for blue and black. So I mentioned earlier, blue and black by far, by far by far by far by far, is probably the hardest color combination to design for. Especially when you’re doing overlap.

So for example, hybrid, when you’re doing a hybrid spell, it can be cast by either color. So you have to be doing spells that can work for either color. And that is like pulling teeth in blue/black. In fact, one of the limitations for how much hybrid we can do is how many blue/black spells can we make. That is the biggest limitation for hybrid.

Now, when you’re doing gold spells, what you’ll find is, blue and black actually blend interestingly. They don’t overlap well, but they blend interestingly because they do a lot of neat things. For example, one of my favorite spells of all time is a blue/black multicolor spell called Recoil. So Recoil was in Invasion.

So Recoil’s a perfect example of getting two colors to mix together to do something neither color can do individually, but together by using their abilities they can. Which is kind of a cool multicolor card. So what Recoil is is, I think it’s one blue and a black? I believe it’s three mana. So it’s unsummon target permanent, or you know, return target permanent to its owner’s hand. And then, that player must discard a card.

So the cool thing about this spell is, blue cannot destroy anything. Black can destroy creatures and destroy lands. And planeswalkers. Sorry. Can destroy lands, creatures, and planeswalkers. It cannot destroy artifacts, it cannot destroy enchantments.

But if there happens to be an enchantment or an artifact in play, and your opponent does not have any cards in their hand, which might be the result of black making them discard cards, if you cast Recoil, they pick it up, and since it it’s the only card they have, they must discard it.

And so if your opponent has an empty hand, Recoil becomes a “destroy target permanent.” Which is not something blue/black normally gets. But it’s using two abilities, in fact two iconic abilities, one of blue, one of black, that when combined, does something pretty interesting.

Now, that card probably is too cheap. I keep talking about development and bringing it back, and it’s just a little too good. But I like the—that’s more of a development issue. But I like the design of it in that blue and black are pretty interesting.

So when we were designing blue/black for Ravnica and Return to Ravnica, the shtick of blue/black when you played them together in a deck is that they tend to win… the way I usually describe it is, when a blue/black deck beats you, at the end of the game you’re like, “How did I lose that?”

Like, because what happens is, blue and black keeps getting incremental advantage on you, but in a way that in the moment, none of the incremental advantage seems that big. I mean, it’s incremental, obviously. It’s sort of like, “Oh, well they kept nibbling me and having small things. But how exactly did I lose?”

And that the thing I like is, blue and black is the tricky color combination, and part of them being tricky is they manage to slowly grind out through card advantage and through just a little bit of tempo sometimes, and that before you know what’s going on, they’ve managed to put you at a disadvantage. But you don’t quite understand why or how.

And that is the strength when blue and black get together is that because, in some ways, blue and black are the colors that have spent the most time understanding the nature of magic itself. Because discard and counterspelling are interesting when you look at it. Every other color says, “Well, you’re going to cast your spells. And then I’ll deal with it.” I mean, there’s a little bit of land destruction I guess, I guess that was a preemptive thing for red and green at some point.

But blue and black, right now, blue is like, “I have to understand the nature of how you’re going to function, so when you cast this spell, if I know it’s a spell that’s going to be damaging to me, I will stop it.” And black is like, “I’ll go in your head and I’ll just rip it out. That’s a problem, I’ll rip it out.”

And so blue and black definitely are the two colors that have spent some time and energy understanding the way magic works. And a lot of their strategy of their spells deals with interacting with that.

Likewise, they’re the colors, like I said, that do tutoring, so they’re the colors that also can find ways to maximize how magic gets used. That they can speed up, “I need a certain spell, how can I make that happen? Oh, well, there’s some tools to be able to do that.”

I mean, the thing that’s fun about blue/black is that I think when you look at some other color combinations, and what they’re doing is a little more blunt. Blue and black has this nice synergy, but it’s a synergy that comes—it’s a very subtle synergy, and that’s kind of what—one of the things that’s really interesting when you do design is that there’s certain things that are true in the color pie that you don’t think are actively in the game until you start messing around with them and you’re like, oh, wow.

Blue and black, when you mix together, actually act philosophically like blue and black. They’re subtle in what they’re up to, they’re sneaky. They try to beat you without you being aware what’s going on. Where you take something like red/green and like they’re not remotely subtle. Those aren’t subtle colors. They’re just doing their thing. And Gruul’s a cool color, but it’s just not about subtlety.

And it’s just kind of neat that the colors that are more about subtlety actually have subtle gameplay. And the colors that aren’t about subtlety have a much less subtle gameplay. That’s one of the things I—I mean, I obviously love the color pie, if you can’t… don’t tell my wife, but I’ve been having a love affair with the color pie for twenty years! Twenty-one years.

And the thing that is really, really cool is that the color pie does such a great job of both being the center of the flavor and being the center of the mechanics. And that’s one of the things that I think Magic does so well is that it’s all woven together. The mechanics and the flavor aren’t separate from each other. That the mechanics are just as flavorful as the flavor of the game itself.

And blue/black, like I said, the thing that is really, really neat about blue/black for me is, the feel of them when you play them together really captures the essence of what the two colors are. Actually, I think I’m almost to work.

I think that, finally, when you talk philosophically, that blue and black also have a lot of… I think they’re the ones that have the easiest ability to put aside—I mean, blue has the ability to intellectually sort of remove emotion from the picture, because it goes, “Okay, I’m not going to let emotion cloud my judgment. I’m solely going to think intellectually.” And black has this ability to say, “I’m going to think about what’s right and not think about the morality of it. I have no morality issues. There’s nothing that can’t be done.”

So when you definitely mix those together—blue/black combining has one of the greatest potentials for malevolent behavior, let’s say. Because blue can detach emotionally, and black can detach morally. So when you have someone who’s not driven by morals or by emotion, black/blue definitely has the ability to be sociopathic if you will. And sort of just do what needs to get done without consequence of what it means. That definitely has a very strong essence of blue/black to it.

On the flip side, I do believe that blue and black are definitely the colors that kind of are the most free-will-ish, if you will. Their shared enemy is green, and green is all about determination. Green is about destiny. Green is about you are the way you are. And that blue and black definitely fight against that because blue believes that you can become anything you want to be, and black really believes in free will, that people are free to do whatever they’re able to do.

And you put those together, I mean, the dark side of blue/black is kind of the sociopath and the super-sneaky rogue. The positive part of blue/black is the idea of the person that says, I’m going to carve my own future. I—the power to decide who I am and what I’m going to do is up to me.” That nobody can tell me who I am and what I must do. There’s no role prewritten for me. That I have the ability to craft my own character, to craft my own destiny, to choose what I want to be.

And that’s very blue/black too. And one of the things that people love to get into is the idea that something’s inherently good or inherently bad. And every color has the ability for both. So blue/black can be the sociopathic rogue, or it can be the person really trying to carve out their place in the world. And both those images are really blue/black.

So anyway, the plan is, I’m going to be doing these podcasts every once in a while. Next up will be black/red. I gave a little tease of it today when I was talking about it, but next time I’ll be talking about black/red. The plan, by the way, is I’ll be going through all the ally colors in WUBRG order, and then I’ll do all the enemies in WUBRG order. So after black/red it will be red/green, then green/white, and then I’ll get to the enemy colors which will be white/black, blue/red, red/white, and green/blue.

I hope you guys are enjoying these. One thing I just want to end up with is, I say this all the time in my column, but I don’t always say it in my podcast is, I really enjoy feedback. The podcasts are ahead by a bit, I’m ahead by seven, eight weeks I think. So it might take a while for your feedback to hit me so that I can react to it. But very, very much I care what you guys are saying, so I want to hear feedback. Hopefully this series, you guys haven’t even heard the blue/white one yet, so I do not know… I’m anticipating you’ll like this series, but I would love to have any feedback.

So anyway, I have now parked my car. Which means that this is the end of my drive to work. And I have to go be making Magic. So thanks for listening, guys, and I’ll talk to you next time.