3/13/15 Episode 208: Red/Green

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the parking lot! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work. And Mark had to do a little errand before we started Drive to Work today! So, I promise you, A. I’m very close to home, and B. if I need a few extra minutes, I will sit in the parking lot and make sure you get your full content today.

So today is number four in a ten-part series I’m doing on color pairs. So previously I have done white/blue, I’ve done blue/black, I’ve done black/red, and today we’re up to red/green. So what I do in these podcasts is I talk about each color, sort of what each one represents, and then I talk about the overlap between the two, and I also talk about where they differ from each other. So what does red and green do? Where are they similar, and where are they… what happens when red and green get together?

Okay. So to start, let’s talk a little bit about philosophy. It’s where I like to start these things. Okay, so red, red believes that you—within you, that you have a passion that speaks to you. That every person should know what to do because their body is telling them what to do. They have feelings and emotions. And that you should follow them. Follow your heart. Follow your passion. That each person has this hidden—not even hidden, this message that’s communicated to them, and all you’ve got to do—you want to be happy? Follow it. Your body is telling you what to do.

Now green, green believes that there is a natural order. And that the key to life is learning to accept what is. That the natural order is this thing of perfection, and that the key to happiness is, accept it. Realize your role and your part in it.

So the overlap, you’ll notice, if you look at red and green, is they’re both very inward. Both of them believe that inherently there’s something within that is telling you what you need to do. Now, red believes it is more emotional based, green believes it’s more instinctual based.

So the difference—people ask this a lot. What’s the difference between emotion and instinct? I use these terms a lot. So emotion is a little higher brain function. I have stimuli based on things. Things happen, I want to do things in response to them. So you make me mad, aah, I want to hit you. I have a great loss, I want to cry. Something is awesome going my way, I want to laugh and jump around. That whatever I’m feeling, emotions are more brain responses to the stimuli.

Instincts, on the other hand, go a little deeper. Instincts are almost biological form. They’re things like hunger and thirst. And drives that you have. They’re just—fight or flight. What are like, you just have these gut impulses.

So the difference between emotions and instinct is, if you take any animal in the animal kingdom, they have instincts. Every animal has instincts. But only the smarter animals have emotions. If you take a little field mouse, I’m not sure that the field mouse has a wide range of emotions, but it has a lot of instincts. Insects will have instincts. Anything that is capable of cognitive thought has instincts.

But impulses tend to come more from an emotional place. And so humans, and there’s other animals that clearly have demonstrated emotions. Emotions are more stemmed from things you want to do as a result of external things, where instincts are more like survival things. In order to get the food I need. In order to not die. Instincts are much more about base things. Where emotions are a little more nuanced.

But both colors. Both red and green say, “I… within me, there is something. I was born with stuff…” Green is very much about—the green/blue conflict is nature vs. nurture. Green believes that you are born the way you are.

Red, on the other hand, is all about emotion. The red/blue conflict is all about emotion vs. intellect. But the big difference I think between blue, and the two enemies, red and green, which are the shared enemies of blue, blue looks outward. Blue says, “I want to find answers.” So blue is looking elsewhere in the world. Blue isn’t so concerned with what’s within. Blue is like, “I want to find answers, and those answers are external.”

Red and green are like, “I have the answers, they’re already within me.” Red is like “I feel things.” Green is like, “I instinctually know things.” So that those two colors are not as much about exploring the world around them as satisfying the world within them.

Now, there’s differences between red and green. Red for example has a much more selfish streak. Red’s ally is black, green’s ally is white. Their other allies. Well, white is all about the group. Black is all about the self. Well, red’s a little bit more about the self than green is. Red is like, “What am I feeling? What should I be doing?” Where green really understands it’s part of a larger ecosystem. That it’s part of a web of life.

Now, it’s not that red doesn’t care about others. Because it does. But red cares about others that it has an emotional stake in. If it loves somebody, red is willing to sacrifice itself for ones it loves. Not like black. Red is not quite as selfish as black in that regard. But red will not, like, just go out of the way for someone that it doesn’t have an emotional attachment to.

Green, meanwhile, green feels very connected. Now, green has a—green believes that the web of life does not mean that there’s not predator and prey. Very much there’s predator and prey. Green has no problem going, “I’m the predator, you’re the prey, I’m going to eat you.” Green does not have white’s desire to keep the peace of keeping everybody out of harm’s way.

Green is like, “No no no, the nature of life is there’s harm that comes to people. But they shouldn’t unnaturally die.” That killing things that are not part of the natural state. It’s why green and black don’t get along.

Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about where red and green tend to overlap. So, mechanically, we’ll start with creatures. So red and green both have some pretty beefy creatures. Green gets a little bit bigger. Red tends to start a little bit smaller and not quite get as big. Where green has a little bit on the small end, but has more on the medium end and a lot more on the large end.

So green and red tend to overlap in the middle. They both have a lot of 3/3s and 4/4s and stuff like that. Green tends to get a little bigger stuff. Red because it’s a weenie color will get some smaller things. But because they have some girth to them, both of them have trample. That’s the mechanic that they share that both do. Green is primary in trample, red is secondary in trample. But both colors get it at common. It’s an ability that both colors get very frequently.

Now, red is primary in haste. Green is tertiary in haste. Which means that red gets it all the time at common. Green gets it, ehh, not at common, maybe once or twice a block, usually at Constructed-level cards, because the reason it’s in green is more for Constructed.

So from a Limited standpoint, you don’t see haste at common. Maybe you see it on one card, two at most. Usually no more than one per set. So haste doesn’t show up all that much in Limited. But in Constructed, where the better cards in green, it is used by the development team to help green in Constructed. So haste is much more of a Constructed thing.Also, red is secondary in intimidate, black is primary. And green is also like tertiary in intimidate. So black gets intimidate, green occasionally gets intimidate.

As far as abilities interacting with creatures, red and green both have power pumping, and they do it in two different ways. One, they both have spells that will pump their power. The difference between green and red is that green has Giant Growths. So green pumps power and toughness, so not just power, where red pumps power. Red usually is +N/+0. It doesn’t buff toughness. And if it buffs toughness, the power is higher than the toughness. Like, +2/+1. You will not see +N/+N very often in red in instants onto creatures.

The other thing is, the power pumping also will come on abilities. Red’s most popular ability is firebreathing, where you spend some mana, usualy a red mana, and it gives you +1/+0 or +N/+0 until end of turn.

Green, meanwhile, has what we call the Rootwalla ability. And what that is, is you spend some amount of mana, it gets a bonus, usually power and toughness bonus, but you can only do it once per turn. But it’s a larger bonus, like +2/+2 or +3/+3. The idea is, you have a creature that can sort of puff up.

Which is what a chuckwalla does. Rootwalla was originally named after—in Tempest, we made a card called Chuckwalla. And then when the art came back from the artist, they thought we had made up the name, and the art didn’t quite look like a chuckwalla, and so we changed it to a rootwalla, which is our version of a chuckwalla, I guess. Because they puff themselves up, which is (???). So red and green both do power pumping, just slightly different in how they do it.

Okay. Another thing that’s a creature-related thing is fighting appears in both red and green. It’s primary green, secondary red. So fighting is when you say, “This creature and that creature get into a fight. I do my power to them, they do their power to me, we’ll see who survives.” So the idea is, this kind of forces what I kind of like a creature combat, but outside of creature combat. It’s not exactly creature combat, because not all the abilities carry over, stuff like [removed because of inaccuracy] and first strike don’t matter.

But it is something in which the idea of things fighting… red and green are the two primal colors. Red definitely believes—they are violent in the sense that they accept violence. Red says, “Okay, one of the impulses of humans is to fight, that’s a natural thing, hey, if you feel like you should fight, you should fight.” Green is like, “Fighting is just instinctual, what beasts do. And so hey it’s just the way of life. It’s the way they interact.”

So red and green are the two colors that go, “You know what? Fights happen.” White is like, Mr. Peaceful, or… I mean, white’s the one that says, “I don’t want creatures fighting.” And blue and black might understand at times it’s necessary, but blue is not good at fighting, so blue really doesn’t want to get into the fight. And black fights when it absolutely has to, but it doesn’t want to fight unless it has to. And only red and green are the two that kind of embrace just combat in general.

Also, with creatures, both colors have different kinds of blocking restrictions. So red’s most common blocking restriction, other than intimidate, is what we call the Goblin War Drums ability. And what that is is it says, “I must be blocked by two or more creatures. I’m big, I’m intimidating. You want to block me? You must block me by two or more creatures. I’m not easy to block. You must team up to block me.”

And then green has what we call “stalking.” Neither of these, by the way, are… these are just nicknames. They are not keyworded things. Goblin War Drums comes from the card Goblin War Drums, and then stalking comes from the card Stalking Tiger.

So the stalking abiity says, “I can only be blocked by one creature. No more than one creature.” So red and green do something similar but are flip sides of the coin. Red are like, “I can’t be blocked by one,” and green is like, “I must be blocked by one. I can only be blocked by one.”

Usually the way it works that way is, green tends to have big creatures, and so is like, “It’s hard for you to block me, because I’m big enough that unless you have something big enough to deal with me, you can’t team up to block me.” Okay. Another overlap here—oh, I’m sorry. Let me finish creatures.

Another thing that deals with creatures is, red and green are both—they’re token making. All the colors make tokens, but in order, white makes the most number of tokens, then green, then red, then usually black, and then blue tends to be fifth, although there’s certain sets where blue makes more. All the sets can make tokens, it’s something we give every color.

But on a regularity, for example, I don’t think we’ve put out a set that doesn’t make a white or green token.  And most sets, especially large sets, will make a red token. And red tends to make a lot of little things. They often make goblin tokens. Green makes a little bit bigger. Green’s sort of given white the small tokens and now green tends to make the bigger tokens. So usually the small tokens these days are usually 2/2, and every once in a while green makes a 1/1. But usually a 2/2 or 3/3 or 4/4. Green tends to make a little bit bigger tokens.

The other thing that red and green, as far as creatures, is both of them care about the size of the creature. It was—we just recently, in Khans, there was the ferocious mechanic, that cares about things being a certain size. That played really well with red and green. It’s something that red and green both do. Red usually cares about power, where green can care about either power or toughness. But it’s something that both red and green both do, because they have a decent amount of size to them. That they can care about it.

Okay. What else can red and green do? So red and green are the two colors with the best access to mana. The difference is, green is more long-term in that green can both get land and can do things like Llanowar Elves, and things that tap to produce mana. Green’s mana production is permanent, meaning it tends to get things that will every turn produce mana. It gets lands, it gets creatures that produce mana.

Red has one-shot mana. So red is sort of like, “I cast a spell and get a whole bunch of mana that I can use right now.” Red gets rituals. Red gets creatures that can sacrifice themselves to produce mana. Red gets mana, but it one-shot (???) the mana. I get mana right now.

And that ties a little bit into that red is very—red’s the color most about the immediacy of right now. I want something right now. Red’s the least long-planning of the colors. Green is a little more long-planning. Green definitely is building itself up. Green gets its mana to build up and get some bigger creatures faster.

So red and green both have a speed quality to them, but it’s very different. Red is trying to get out small things as fast as it can, and just defeat you before you can stop it, where green is trying to quickly ramp up and get big creatures.

Okay. Also, red and green both have a pretty destructive quality to them. Red believes that—I mean, red is definitely the color that believes that like destruction is something you need to do. Red’s liability is that red can only destroy things that it can tangibly get its hands on. So red will destroy artifacts, red will destroy land. Red will destroy creatures with direct damage.

Green on the other hand, green also has a very destructive side, but green—one of green’s philosophies is that it uses its creatures to kill the other creatures. So green is allowed to kill fliers and artifact creatures because it can kill artifacts and has an anti-flying thing. We’ll get to the anti-flying thing in a sec.

So green can destroy anything but creatures. It’s allowed to destroy non-creature permanents. Which means, by the way, that green happens to be able to destroy planeswalkers. And red with direct damage happens to be good at destroying planeswalkers. Not directly but indirectly. When you redirect the damage to it. So red and green both have means to deal with lands and artifacts and planeswalkers. Green also can deal with enchantments, which red has a big problem with.

The reason, by the way, that green destroys artifacts also is, the blue/green conflict has a lot to do with artifice vs. nature. Natural things vs. artificial things. Blue believes that whatever it needs to do to get whatever it wants to get done, so blue is a big believer in technology. That blue is very much the idea of “Let’s adapt and make new things.” Green is like, “No no no, appreciate what we have.”

And so a lot of artifacts represent new technology that green’s not so fond of. So green’s more than happy to smash to bits the technology. Red smashes it to bits because red just kind of likes destroying things. Where green is more like, doesn’t particularly like artifacts.

Okay. Now let’s get to anti-flying. So red and green happen to be the colors that do the least amount of flying. Blue is the center of the flying, white does a lot of flying. Even black does a decent amount of flying. Red and green do very, very little flying. I mean, once in a blue moon they’ll have a little flier, red’s one big exception is, it gets dragons and it gets phoenixes. So at high rarities red will have some bigger fliers. But you don’t see it at lower rarities. So red and green in Limited especially tend to have problems with flying. But they each have some weapons to deal with it.

So green has reach. So it has the ability to block fliers. And it has a lot of anti-flying spells. Spells that directly hurt fliers. One of the places you’ll see direct damage in green is green can do direct damage to fliers. It can also do it to artifact creatures, because those are the two kinds of creatures it’s allowed to do damage to.

Red doesn’t—red every once in a while pulls out fliers. You can tell that red’s the second anti-flying color because every once in a while it’ll hammer extra hard on flying creatures. But mostly the reason it doesn’t do more—it did more in the beginning, Earthbind and Vertigo and early in Magic, there was more anti-flying, and then we just realized, “You know what’s really good against flying creatures? Direct damage is good against flying creatures.”

And so one of red’s most natural things just handles it really well anyway. So the decision was, “Okay, every once in a while we’ll mention it, a little anti-flying stuff so you get a sense that red doesn’t like it. Red, by the way, is very—red and green also overlap in their love of earth. Red loves the earth because red is very much about the elements of earth and fire, so red likes rock and dirt, and red appreciates the earth itself.

Green, meanwhile, is the color of nature. And so it appreciates the earth in a very tangible way. Just like blue is (???) sky, green is the ground. So red and green also overlap in sort of the love of the earth. Of the dirt. That they both have a tie to the land.

Okay. Also—what else to see? Red and green also, because they’re tied to the land, all the colors are allowed to care about the basic land type. And so you will see effects. We’ll do cycles every once in a while where everybody sort of counts up their basic land type. But red and green are two colors that do it outside of cycles. So they will do it normally.

And I think if you look in the core sets, you’ll often see green or red count up its basic land type, count up forests or count up mountains, and care about that. And that’s a very common thing for it to be doing.

I think that is the—so the thing to recap here is that red and green—oh, red and green, where are they different? That’s a fine question. Red for example is very into destruction. And red is very good at destroying creatures with damage. Green has a much harder time. Green—one of green’s issues is, green wants to deal with its creatures through other creatures. And so if red has no creatures on the board, it is fine dealing with creatures. It has tons of direct damage, it has lots of means to (???) creatures. If green has no creatures on the board, it has a horrible time dealing with creatures. Green does not directly get to effect creatures.

Now go to the flip side for enchantments. Green is very good at destroying enchantments. It’s the home of Naturalize. It’s got lots of answers to enchantments. Red, well, it’s not tangible. You can’t touch it. So red just has a real hard time with enchantments. It’s one of the things that red has the biggest problem with. And those are just very different.

Also, oh, here’s an overlap I forgot to mention, which is the Lure effect. So green will have Lure, which means that you must be blocked. Sometimes it does “everybody must block me,” and sometimes it does “somebody must block me.” Red just does the latter. Red just does, “somebody must block me.” Red doesn’t make everybody block, but red’s like, “Well, I want to get in a sight. Somebody’s got to fight me.” And so they overlap there.

Although red is more about the Panic effect, which is “you can’t block me,”  than about “you must block me.” Where green tends to more often have like, “You must block me” sort of things. So they do differ a little bit there. That green’s more about sort of provoking the fight, where red is often about avoiding the fight. I mean, red doesn’t mind fighting if it has to fight.

Other areas of difference is, I think that red and green, while they both have a speed quality of what they’re trying to do, the difference there is, red is not looking for long-term gain. Red is looking for short-term advantage. And kind of, it’s the color with the least amount of long sight.

Now, blue, its enemy has the most long sight. But green’s the color that while it’s trying to be fast, has much more of a long game. Much more so than red. And part of it is, green is drawing into bigger and bigger things, and so as the game progresses for green, it just makes things harder and harder to deal with.

Where red’s philosophy is one of, “I want to hit you fast before you can establish yourself.” So green is about establishing yourself, and green is about hitting you before you establish yourself. So in some ways they’re very different there.

The other thing that also is sort of philosophically different, like I said, one of the ways to understand how colors are different, for ally colors, is by looking at their shared enemy. Sorry, not their shared enemy. Their opposite allies. Their conflicting allies. So red’s ally is black, and green’s ally is white.

So black is the most self-centered color. Black is very much about, “Me me me, how do I advance myself?” Green—sorry, white is very much about the good of the community, how can I make sure the community will thrive? So white wants peace, black wants power.

You see that a little bit in how red and green—that red is a lot more—red wants to achieve things that personally help red. Now, red will want to help things that red is connected to. Red has ties to other things. And so it goes a little broader than black. Black is very much, “What benefits me, and everybody else can be damned.” Red is like, “Well, who do I care about? And I care about more than just me.” So red has a wider circle of what it cares about. But red is still very focused on things that it has a direct emotional tie to.

In some ways, that’s the big difference between red and green is, red—like, red’s circle if you will. If you’re talking about the circle of how much you care about the things around you, black is very, very tight around itself. Red is bigger than black, but the next smallest. You have to have an emotional tie to something that red cares about for red to care about you.

Meanwhile, white is the biggest. White cares about everything. White is trying to help everybody. Green is the second biggest. Green really has a sense of the community, and really is looking out for the community. That doesn’t mean that green is trying to save everybody, but it does mean that green will look out—like, if somebody is trying to harm the ecosystem in a way that green does not like, green does look out for others in a larger sense. “Oh, do not kill off these creatures because that will imbalance the system.” Green is very big on the system.

And that’s another difference where I think red and green differ, from black and white, is I think green leans more towards the spiritual side, because it connects to white, of there’s a greater purpose. There’s something that ties us all together. So while green definitely is following its instincts, green has a larger sense of its place in the world. Which I think ties very much into white. Where red is thinking about its own personal place in the world. And so it is much more thinking about how it advances. And doesn’t quite think like green does about the bigger picture.

But I think there’s a lot more in common. That when red and green get together, the kind of things you see are big, beefy creatures that like to fight. That have trample, or that are pumping their power. That green and red when they get together are very much focused on conflict.

That when you get to the Gruul, for example, which is red and green in Ravnica, that they’re all about living by what you’re able to accomplish. That red and green when they get together is very “survival of the fittest.” That whatever you can gather and take—not in a black way, not so much in a selfish way, but in a like, you need to be able to—the person in charge should be the biggest guy. Guy or gal. Or whoever’s the person who’s the most powerful.

And that a lot of the way the Gruul function, is who is the most powerful right now? Who’s the one that’s proven themselves? And that there really is this constant kind of fighting for power. And that there’s not as much a long-term quality to it. It’s “right now, who’s the person who’s able to be the biggest fighter?” The fact that Borborygmos was able to last as long as he did is a good testament to the Cyclops, because he’s big and bad.

The other thing that I think in general about red and green is that they are very much into the—they’re the ones that most forgo society, that most forgo any sort of sense of inherent structure. That they kind of believe that like there’s a natural rhythm that they need to follow. And that they need to follow that rhythm. And that they’re the most (???) of the color combinations. They’re the most ones that are sort of—when I say they fight, it’s kind of they do what needs to get done. They are very much about the bare basics.

I think you saw the Temur was red/green, I mean, it was blue as well. Because it very much was like “survival of the fittest” quality, of “We can brave the environment because we’re the toughest guys around!” And that red/green definitely have a lot of that quality to them.

I mean, designing is funny. When you combine color pairs, there tends to be some overlap which is where you’re drawn. If you put black and blue together, you kind of get pulled to the library. If you put black and green together, you kind of get pulled to the graveyard.

If you put red and green together, you gotta get pulled to combat. It very much, if you notice, the mechanics that deal with red and green, are very combat-oriented. Bloodthirst was combat-oriented. What was the one… the one where you discard cards, power/toughness pump… I’m blanking on the name of it. [NLH—Bloodrush.] You very much saw that like red and green is about doing damage and fighting other creatures, and there’s a very strong feel of that when you get to red/green. That’s where the center of red/green tends to be.

And, as I said before, that red and green definitely have a very destructive… as color combinations go, maybe black/red is more destructive than red/green, but red/green’s up there. Black/red and red/green are the two most destructive colors. I mean, obviously it’s red and red’s two allies are the most destructive, because red is a very destructive color.

So anyway, I got here. I left a little—I didn’t leave quite from my house, and I had good traffic. So we’re a little early. I’m trying to think of any wrap-up here, because I want to make sure you get your full content of Drive to Work.

Red/green is fun to design for, red/green creatures are a lot easier to make than red/green spells. Red/green spells tend to be combat-oriented spells. Or things that enhance creatures. Auras or—red/green is very creature centric and very combat centric. And so making creatures is just a little bit easier to do than making spells.

Which is funny, because different combinations are different. But in red and green, creatures and creature combat stuff is where it tends to be centered.

Anyway, I see I’ve hit my threshold. Usually I try not to go under 28 minutes. And so we hit 28 minutes. We hit the mark. And so hopefully, guys, like I said, next up will be green/white. I do these every once in a while.

By the way, I got some feedback that people really want to hear this series. So I’m trying to speed it up a little bit. It still will be every once in a while. But I’m trying to do them a little more regular so that I can get through them. I know there’s people that have color combinations they’re very fond of, like, “When are you doing this?” “When are you doing that?” So I’m getting there. I know people want the series so I’m definitely trying to make do.

But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed red and green. You’ve got to be Gruul to be kind. So I hope this was fun today. But I am parked in the parking spot. I’ve been here for a few minutes. But we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic… no, instead of… yes, instead of talking Magic, I’m going to be making Magic. One of these days I will get this. As I keep doing this, I will get better at it.

But anyway, thanks for listening, I’ll talk to you guys next time. Bye.