Magic The Gathering / Color Tropes

Each color of magic in Magic: The Gathering is associated with a whole philosophy about life, particular goals, and a particular set of magical strategies for winning the game. They're often informally talked about as though they were individual characters. Generally, each color is also associated with an "iconic creature" — a creature type that shows up once each set as a very large rare creature — and a "characteristic creature" — a creature type that shows up multiple times each set as several smaller common creatures.

Each color has two "allies" and two "enemies", producing a five-way balance - White is allied with Green and Blue and opposed to Black and Red, Green is allied with Red and White and opposed to Blue and Black, Red is allied with Black and Green and opposed to White and Blue, Black is allied with Blue and Red and opposed to Green and White, and Blue is allied with White and Black and opposed to Red and Green.

Despite this, cards sometimes have effects that work with their enemy colors or against their ally colors, and there's no rule that actual characters must always be allies or enemies in-story based on their color alignment, or be allies within their own color for that matter.

Shared tropes

• Black-and-White Insanity: Played straight, despite the presence of three other colors. Fundamentally, each color is an ideology — a single unified philosophy that sees the world in a certain way, and is simply incapable of comprehending that there are other ways of looking at the world. Each color is a double-edged blade: it leans hard into what it can do, but there are also things it could never contemplate because they contrast with the color's ideology. As a really simple example, White is a Martial Pacifist: it never attacks without a very good reason, even when doing so is in its best interest. Or, if it does, it uses Equivalent Exchange to give benefit to the owner of the erstwhile threat, even when doing so is against its best interest. Why? Because White is about fairness — no matter what.
• Cast Calculus: Each color's role in the color pie can be easily visualized by comparing it to the role of a character of that color in various cast dynamics, as can be seen through the other examples in this section.
• Cast of Personifications: In some of Mark Rosewater's editorials, in which he interviews the colors, they get this treatment.
• Elemental Powers: Besides philosophy and personality, the colors and their magic tend to be associated with elements as well. Generally, White gets control over light; Blue has air, ice and water; Black has darkness; Red has earth, lava, fire and lightning; Green has wood and plants; poison is shared between Black and Green; and petrification is shared between Green and White. However, these aren't necessarily set in stone, such as Red getting access to ice-related spells during the Kamigawa arc and Green generally getting a good number of wind spells for the purpose of knocking flying creatures from the air.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: White is an Optimist (with a focus on order), Blue is a Cynic/Realist, Black is a Cynic/Apathetic, Red is another Optimist (with a focus on freedom), and Green is an Apathetic/Realist.
• Freudian Excuse: Each color has a particular thing that it values, and which forms the foundation of its identity both in terms of flavor and mechanics.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality:
  • While individual characters and conflicts may be good and evil outright, on a cosmic scale the colors of mana all have different valid points and horrible habits alike and their conflict is a truly ideological one rather than a moral one. While White and Green are easy to stereotype as "good" and Black (and sometimes Red, especially in earlier sets) as "evil", all five colors can produce both heroes and villains. Though this is Downplayed in that even in modern sets, usually the majority of White cards will depict pleasant and benevolent things and the majority of Black cards will depict unpleasant and malevolent things.
  • The difference is that the concept of defined morality itself is associated with White and disbelief in it is associated with Black, so White villains tend to be Knights Templar and White heroes Ideal Heroes, while Black villains tend to be Card-Carrying Villains and Black heroes Knights in Sour Armor.
• Graying Morality: While Wizards of the Coast has struggled to make the conflict between Black and White not too... well, black and white, they have had no such problem adding nuance to the conflict between Red and White. Early cards tended to portray it as Knights in Shining Armor vs The Horde, with Red rarely getting to showcase its traits of empathy and imagination. Nowadays, the dynamic has shifted, with the canon now also containing a number of tyrannical White-aligned villains fighting against Red-aligned revolutionaries.
• Mirroring Factions: As diametrically opposed as enemy colors may be, there is more overlap between them than any would like to admit. And bear in mind that cards don't have to be mono-colored; they can also be any combination of two or more. Enemy-pair two-colored cards are almost as common as ally-pair ones, and any more complex combinations will include some enemy colors by definition. (Three-colored cards are the most common multi-colors after two-colored ones, followed by the extra special five-colored cards. There are only a handful of four-colored cards, since it's hard for Creative to come up with a theme for them.)
  • White and Black both frequently engage in Realpolitik, and have a firm belief that the ends justify the means and that strict hierarchy is a desirable state of affairs. Tribalism is a nasty habit associated with the White/Black combination, as the communalism of White meets the self-interest of Black. Both are associated with finance and commerce, and share the Cleric and Knight classes, along with Vampires on many worlds.
  • Blue and Red are both focused on new ideas and revel in change for change's sake. They both have an intense curiosity and a propensity for obsession. This is reflected in their making the most use of Discard and Draw mechanics out of the five colors, although Blue will usually pick-and-choose more carefully than Red. They are also the two colors most heavily associated with technological innovation and tinkering, as well as artwork and performance. They tend to share the Wizard, Artificer, and Pirate classes, as well as the djinn and efreet.
  • Black and Green share a sense of ruthlessness, as Black is the color of amorality and Green is the color of natural instinct. Both are willing to deal with threats immediately, and share a "survival of the fittest" mentality. Of all the enemy colors, they probably share the most creature types, including Treefolk, Fungi, Insects, Spiders, Trolls, Worms, and Gorgons. Black-aligned Elves have even increasingly become a thing.
  • Red and White both have an intense sense of justice and tend to see the world in moral absolutes. They are both quick to act out against a perceived injustice and are likely to do so via The Power of Friendship. They're also the two colors most associated with the Soldier and Warrior classes, as well as Dwarves.
  • Green and Blue prefer to look at the big picture when considering their options. Both also tend to act cautiously, with measured and deliberate actions, up to and including implementing an Alien Non-Interference Clause. Recently, Green has also been borrowing some of Blue's water theming, leading to them sharing creature types like Merfolk and Crocodiles.
  • Allied colors, however, do have their differences:
    • White is more genuinely concerned with community and rigidity than Blue is. Blue sees more value in the individual, and is more comfortable with secrecy and deceit.
    • Blue often sees Black as a viciously distrusting color that favors the ends over the means. Black also dislikes Blue's excess subtlety, as well as learning and transmission of knowledge for its own sake.
    • Black views Red as a bit too chaotic and emotional, compared to Black not letting such impede its pursuit of its goals. Red dislikes Black's aversion to having close-knit bonds with others to the point of favoring loved ones over oneself.
    • Red puts more value than Green in proactivity and favors loved ones over life it barely knows of. Green distrusts Red's shortsightedness and acceptance of sudden change.
    • Green doesn't like White's values of civilization, namely potential for dogmatic thought and notable bureaucracy. White doesn't value Green's potential brashness and use of instinct, things that heed to no ethics.
• Recurring Element: Each color is associated with an "iconic creature" — a creature type that shows up once each set as a very large, rare creature — and with a "characteristic creature" — a creature type that shows up multiple times each set as several smaller common creatures — which tend to appear rarely or not at all in other colors. Though sometimes the exact creatures will be changed due to block constraints, with archons being White's iconic creature in the Theros block, where angels are absent.
  • Iconic creatures:
    • White: Angels.^note Kirin are used in Asian-themed planes where angels wouldn't fit in thematically, and Archons more sporadically in settings like Eldraine and Theros. Lammasu are also officially an alternative, but not used due to fan unpopularity.
    • Blue: Sphinxes.
    • Black: Demons.
    • Red: Dragons.
    • Green: Hydras.
  • Characteristic races:
    • White: Humans, Leonin, and Kor. ^note This one is still, according to Word of God, subject to change, given that humans are only slightly more common in White than they are in the other colors, and Kor and Leonin are not Standard Fantasy Races that new players are likely to be familiar with.invoked
    • Blue: Merfolk and Vedalken.
    • Black: Vampires and Zombies.
    • Red: Goblins, Viashino, and Dwarves
    • Green: Elves.
  • Characteristic spellcasters:^note Considerably more flexible than the others, as Wizards maintain a consistent presence in all colors, and Shamans have appeared in Green and Clerics in Black. The idea of sorting spellcaster creature types this way is relatively recent, and Warlock only started being a type in Throne of Eldraine.
    • White: Clerics
    • Blue: Wizards
    • Black: Warlocks
    • Red: Shamans
    • Green: Druids
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The two eponymous colors tend to fall pretty cleanly along these lines, while White, Black and Green are more varied:
  • White makes an effort to keep a Stiff Upper Lip, but makes no bones about going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when its sensibilities are offended.
  • Black is more than happy to play The Hedonist and enjoy life's pleasures to the fullest, but when the chips are down and its Manipulative Bastard side comes out, that same emotion is rarely anywhere to be found.
  • Green is In Harmony with Nature, but that doesn't mean it won't get emotional when given the chance to enact Gaia's Vengeance.
• Terraforming: Pretty much every color has some cards that do this, as gameplay requires players to draw land cards, which are the source of the mana needed to pay for summoning creatures, playing sorceries, etc.

White

White's philosophy can be summarized as "peace through structure". It seeks to create a Utopia free of poverty and suffering... and will destroy The Evils of Free Will if it needs to. White mana is drawn from plains.

White is the color of light, law, and holy magic. It specializes in various forms of healing and protection (such as gaining life, preventing damage, and boosting creatures' toughness scores), efficient small creatures that reinforce each other, and abilities that dictate the flow of combat. White is chivalrous: rather than kill directly, it prefers to disable non-combative foes with spells like Arrest, Pacifism, and Oblivion Ring, but has no qualms about killing creatures that have struck first, as seen in cards like Divine Verdict and Ballista Squad. When pushed, White engages in Mutual Disadvantage, giving you something in return for taking something away, or resorts to mass destruction to wipe the slate clean equally. Learn more about White here and here.

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• Absolute Xenophobe: White can become this in theory. See Fantastic Racism and All The Other Reindeer below.
• Action Initiative: One of the keywords that White is known for is First Strike which represents the creature having enough speed or skill to hit the target it is battling (whether it is blocking or being blocked) before they have a chance to strike back: if the creature's power is higher than the target's toughness, the creature takes no damage whatsoever...if it isn't, then the creature they were battling kills them. Fittingly enough, White also has the Double Strike keyword which applies First Strike and then regular damage to the target it's battling (or it can hit your opponent twice if not blocked).
• All-Loving Hero: White, in spite of all the ways its philosophy can go horribly wrong, still manages to produce more than its fair share of these.
• All the Other Reindeer: White is the color of conformity, and doesn't care for those that are different unless they try to fit in.
• Anti-Hero Substitute: The Archons, essentially. They function as White's iconic creatures when Angels don't seem appropriate, and emphasize White's more negative aspects.
• Anti-Magic: Is tied with Green for second-most creatures with the Ward Keyword after Blue.
• Apocalypse How: Armageddon, Wrath of God, Balance, Final Judgment. While such outright killing is generally outside White's philosophy, these effects are acceptable because they create order by forcing the whole battlefield to restart from a blank (or relatively even) state.
• Apocalypse Wow: Wrath Of God is one of the most iconic cards in Magic, partially because of its effect ("Destroy all creatures. They can't be regenerated.") and partially because of its artwork (a giant white sun crashing into the earth and obliterating EVERYTHING).
• Arcadia: White's basic land cards are plains, which often depict expansive grasslands and sometime cities and towns surrounded by farmlands.
• Art Evolution: The original White mana symbol was rather asymmetrical and unrefined (the one on the right)◊. Compare it to the current version, which appeared circa the Mirage block.
• Awesomeness Is a Force: Shown on Awe Strike. Like Blue's Awesome Presence, it's a serious take on the idea of Pure Awesomeness.
• Back from the Dead: It doesn't get it as much as Green or Black, but resurrection is a minor part of White's arsenal.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Being the color of order, it is no surprise that a lot of creatures with the Advisor class will be White.
• Badass Bystander: White is currently tied with Green for having the most Citizen-class creatures^note 24.2% out of 33 cards single-color, and 12.1% having both colors as of this writing.
• Badass Preacher: White currently has the highest number of Cleric-class creatures.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: A lot of creatures with the Monk class will be White.
• Bird People: White is the colour with the highest amount of birds, and as such nearly all sapient avian races in the game's history are oriented towards White. They're usually called aven, and most are six-limbed with separate wings and arms (although the aven of Tarkir use the same limbs as both arms and wings). Most look like generic hawks or eagles, but other White aven have resembled owls or ravens instead.
• Black-and-White Insanity: Why White characters sometimes go Knight Templar. It's the colour that least recognizes moral complexity.
• Call to Agriculture: Most of white's land-retrieving spells are flavored as being agriculture related, as well as many cards that create Food tokens.
  • In addition, cards like the infamous Swords to Plowshares weaponizes this trope, calling an enemy creature to agriculture so strongly that they leave the fight entirely.invoked
• Cats Are Mean: Cats as a creature type have appeared in all five colors, but primarily in White, and secondarily in Green.
• Combat Medic: White is both the color of healing and armies, so this is a very common variety of creature for it.
• Cool Horse: Tied with Green for having the second-most Horse-type creatures in the game, next to both Blue and Black.
• Creative Sterility: More severely than any other color. White is the color of rigid dogmatism, and has little use for randomness, gambles, or idle pondering. Mechanically, it is the weakest color in terms of card drawing by a lot, opting instead to re-use smaller creatures after they die or repeatedly pump out wave after wave of nondescript but numerous token creatures to scale into the late game.
• Deader than Dead: Some rare White abilities can exile creatures making them impossible to be resurrected.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Not as much as Red and Green, but it's still there. White's version uses dust, sand, salt, marble, or petrification.
• Elemental Powers: This isn't as prominent as with other colors, but White magic is generally associated with controlling stone (often through petrification) and light.
• The Evils of Free Will: White’s two enemy colors, Red and Black, are strongly associated with individual freedom and self determination. They are also associated with demons and dragons. White draws a direct line between the two.
• Flight: Shared with blue. White gets a lot of fliers in the form of regular birds, as well as getting the majority of aven (bird-people) and griffin creatures.
• Feathered Fiend: A common archetype for White’s many bird creatures, either as mindless raptors or actual villains and including large flocks of smaller birds, colossal rocs and villainous bird people such as Lieutenant Kirtar.
• The Fettered: Comes with the territory of law and order.
• For Great Justice: White does occasionally single out targets instead of killing everyone, but usually only against those who are guilty (for example, by dealing damage or getting into combat).
• The Fundamentalist: Along with the Knight Templar, this is one of White's negative aspects. The flavor text on True Believer exemplifies this aspect of White:
  So great is his certainty that mere facts cannot shake it.
• Great Detective: Given its emphasis on order and justice, White is currently the color with the second-most Detective-class creatures in the game.
• Healing Hands: As does Green, White gets a number of healing abilities. White tends to focus more on using these abilities to keep its creatures alive or to gain life for itself, while Green leans more towards protecting its creatures while also pumping the said creatures. Fittingly enough, next to Black, White has creatures with the Lifelink keyword in significant numbers.
• Heroic Sacrifice: White's focus on community over individuals makes it a fan of this trope.
• Holy Hand Grenade: Pretty much all direct damage or removal spells White gets are flavored this way, especially the ones that do mass removal.
• Humanoid Abomination: Opposed to Black's own eldritch things, as part of their motif of opposition. Angels, especially in later settings like Zendikar and Bant, are portrayed as alien to mortal races and quite detached (being manifestations of pure White mana). Archons are essentially Nazgûl that are extremist instead of immoral.
• Ideal Hero: When white is a hero, it fits the traditional archetype of the upstanding, admirable and moral hero fairly well.
• The Juggernaut: As a whole, White has the most creatures with the Indestructible keyword^note 36.1% out of 206 cards as of this writing; these creatures can be extremely difficult to put down as soon as they hit the field because they cannot be killed as the result of battle, and they cannot be killed using 'destroy' effects...they'll even shrug off death by Deathtouch. There are ways to get them off the field; they can still be affected by -1/-1 counters, and they can still be affected by effects that do not outright say 'destroy' (being sacrificed or banished does not count as being destroyed).
• Kirin: Kirins are used in planes inspired by Asian cultures — such as Kamigawa, Tarkir and Shenmeng — as a replacement for angels in the "large, rare mono-colored creature" spot; they always have flying and tend to be depicted as omens and messengers who herald the birth, death or arrival of important people.
• Knight Templar: Along with Knight in Shining Armor.
• Knight in Shining Armor: While the class has come in a variety of colors, particularly in Throne of Eldraine, a lot of Knights will be white. This includes similar creature classes like Paladins, Crusaders, or Cavalry that were ultimately folded into Knights.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Enforced. White has numerous enchantments that prevent interference or otherwise limit opponents' options in combat.
• Light Is Good: Although lately its more negative aspects have been more prevalent, in order to keep the balance with the number of protagonists/villains in other colours, White used to be portrayed as the go-to heroic color for a while, and is still often perceived as this. The primary planeswalker of white, Gideon Jura, seems to be this trope incarnate.
• Light Is Not Good: While White is pretty consistent in regards to Order vs. Chaos (Order, of course), it's fallen on different ends of the Black-and-White Morality divide through Magic's history. It's probably the second most common color for villains behind black. On the other hand, when White characters are good they are really good.
• Light 'em Up: White gets a lot of spells centered on manipulating light, often as blinding bursts or burning beams.
• Lunacy: White uses moonlight from time to time, with the most prominent being Innistrad's church of Avacyn, who was explicitly said to derive her power from the plane's mysterious moon.
• Moral Sociopathy: At its worst; White is always moral, but being an enemy of Red, the colour of emotions, and an ally of Blue, the color of logic, means that, at its purest, White has little empathy. Indeed, some pure White creatures, like Angels, sometimes appear rather robotic, following their duties at the expense of everything else.
• Mr. Fixit: Despite being behind both blue and red in terms of general artifact synergies, white has the honor of being the color that's best at specifically protecting artifacts or retrieving them from the graveyard.
• Mummy: Despite all prior "mummy-esque" creatures being Black, the Anointed of Amonkhet are associated with White mana, due to their servile nature and central place in local religion.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: White, being the colour of order, can be this at its worst.
• The Needs of the Many: White will often ask one or few to sacrifice a great deal for even a small improvement for many more.
• Nice Mice: While rats are associated with Black, mice are associated with White.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted with White characters that are evil, although curiously most White villains so far didn't have an explicit specialization in healing magic.
• No-Sell: The Circle of Protection cards basically block all damage from a particular color.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The infamous Wrath effect spells, of which the vast majority are White. Several cards like Magus of the Disk show that this goes deep in White's ideology as well; ultimate order is death, after all.
• Our Angels Are Different: They are medium-sized to large flying creatures, almost always female, are generally treated as living manifestations of their home planes' white mana, and have been White's iconic large creature since Serra Angel in Alpha. They are almost always considered divine in some form or another, and in some planes (most notably Innistrad and the Alaran shard of Bant) are outright worshipped by mortals.
• Our Archons Are Different: Archons are one of White's iconic races, usually showing up whenever angels can't, like in the Greek-inspired Theros block. Usually taking the form of mysterious humanoid figures riding winged steeds, they represent White's more malevolent traits, such as vicious justice and oppression. Indeed, in the aforementioned Theros they are the last remnants of a tyrannical empire that sprawled the entire plane.
• Our Gargoyles Rock: White is the color most associated with the Gargoyle creature type. Many gargoyles have a mechanic that renders them unable to attack until a certain condition is met, alluding to their protective natures.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: While the creature type has run the gamut of every color, White currently has the most Spirit-type creatures in the game.
• The Paladin: Up until the creature class was absorbed into the Knight class for simplicity's sake, White would've had a lot of Paladins.
• Pegasus: An uncommon White creature type. They became especially prominent in the Greek mythology-inspired Theros block, where they're prized as steeds by soldiers and heroes.
• The Power of Friendship: With Green and, sometimes, Red.
• The Power of the Sun: The Sun serves as White’s mana symbol. Some cards use it more literally, with the light the spell is manipulating being explicitly sunlight. Sun deities across the multiverse are almost always at least partly White.
• Pride: One of this color's main issues. It is the color of zealotry, and White can have a hard time accepting it is wrong.
• Purple Is the New Black: Inverted in a couple of ways. Many White spells and their artwork are shown as light yellow. However, some White cards have artwork that shows their spells as purple (most notable with the Zubera cycle of Kamigawa, where the White-aligned Zubera has purple mana orbs around it while the Black aligned-Zubera has white ones), which makes sense since violet light is the most intense light in the visible spectrum.invoked
• Ranger: White has the second-most creatures with the Ranger class next to Green.
• Rocks Fall Everybody Dies: White prefers to delay any threat, but when it decides to kill something, then it kills everything.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: While secondary to Black in this regard, White has the second-largest number of Noble-class creatures in the game; the entire class runs the gamut of everyone in the monarchy, including kings and queens.
• Rules Lawyer: White is the color of bureaucracy, so of course White has the most bureaucracy. A number of white cards restrict what players can and can't do, like Rule of Law and Moat.
• Quantity vs. Quality: White has this sentiment in its relationship to Green, being the Quantity side of the equation. White prefers the Zerg Rush of hundreds of weaker creatures.
• Salt Solution: As a mineral with a sparkling white color and holy connotations, salt appears in some white spells like Saltblast.
• Sand Blaster: When White manifests earth-related powers, it tends to revolve around sand and deserts.
• Samurai: In any given Kamigawa block, the Samurai creature class will often take the place of Knights. In the Bushido-era (the Kamigawa of millennia past), Samurai would have had the Bushido keyword in which they get a stat-boost whenever they block or are blocked^note For calculation purposes, a samurai with Bushido 1 gets +1/+1 until the end of the turn if they block a creature or they get blocked. Nowadays, and as of the Neon Dynasty era (the Kamigawa of the present), the Samurai give buffs to allies that attack alone.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: White is the color of Law, so it likes there to be rules, but it has no problem applying its rule magic unevenly. For instance, Authority of the Consuls exempts your creatures from coming in tapped.
• Shedu and Lammasu: Lammasu is an exceptionally rare (at time of writing only two have been printed) creature type found exclusively in white.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Looked at from an outsider's perspective, the conflict between White and Black could be said to boil down to this.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The Soldier to Red and Green's Warrior, especially considering that the Soldier creature class is heavily associated with White.
• Soul Power: The White Magic variety, focusing on Einherjar-like manifest of (at least benevolent-looking) spirits and ancestor worship. Tarkir's Jeskai actually refer to it as "soulfire".
• Star Power: Occasionally, White’s light spells use starlight as their power source.
• Stone Wall: White has a long history of tough creatures with low power. In general, White's playstyle also falls into this trope — White has a lot of token generation, and its theme of teamwork manifests through White stalling out the opponent, amassing a huge army, and crushing them in a Zerg Rush or winning through attrition.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Manifests somewhat in that a large number of White creatures have the Vigilance keyword, which means that they do not tap after attacking; this means that they're still capable of blocking after they attack.
• Technical Pacifist: White prefers to disable enemies non-lethally. Unless you really piss it off.
• Teleportation: Besides Blue, White has a number of cards with the Phase Out keyword.
• Unicorn: An uncommon White creature type, although a minority is green. Most are the standard horse-with-a-horn type, although a zebra unicorn has also been printed. In-lore they’re generally associated with purity and good, and are often hunted for their horns.
• White Magic: Very much so. White's desire to protect means it has a lot of defensive and healing magic.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: White currently has the most Rebel-type creatures in the game^note 77.2% out of 57 cards as of this writing.
• Zerg Rush: A favored tactic for White, especially if you managed to get a lot of Soldier or Rebel-type creatures on the field.

Blue

Blue believes in "perfection through knowledge". It believes in the Blank Slate, and employs education and technology to create a world where everyone can keep growing and adapting. However, when the stakes are high, it can be indecisive. Blue mana is drawn from islands.

Blue is the color of knowledge, illusion, and mental magic. Its specialties are counterspells, Eureka Moments via drawing cards, and delaying your opponent by forcing them to replay or redraw the same cards, or skipping phases or whole turns. Because of its careful, analytical approach, blue is often reactive, and rarely rushes directly into the fray. Accordingly, its creatures tend to sacrifice brute force in favor of abilities like flying that allow them to gain an advantage in other ways. Because blue has traditionally had many of the most powerful cards, it has gained an unfavorable reputation in some circles, as satirized by this set of comic strips. Learn more about Blue here and here.

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• Above Good and Evil: Being Blue often involves ignoring conventional morality in pursuit of perfection.
• An Ice Person: Not quite as common as water, but Blue regularly gets ice spells. The said ice spells tend to involve Harmless Freezing that locks down target permanent(s).
• Anti-Magic: Blue has the most ways to counter spells, and to make something immune to being affected by opponents' spells. Fittingly enough, they also have a lot of cards with the Hexproof and Ward keywords; the former allows creatures to outright No-Sell effects, the latter forces your opponent to pay a cost (usually either with mana or a card in hand) to affect that creature or else it gets negated.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: While the class has run through every spectrum of the Color Pie, you're very likely to find creatures of the Rogue class in Blue, thanks to their emphasis on stealth. Blue also currently has the most creatures of the Pirate class, which is fitting for a color associated with the seas.
• Awesomeness Is a Force: Awesome Presence seems to display this.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Considering the amount of smarts needed to be one, it is no surprise that a lot of Advisor-class creatures will be blue, second only to White in the number of Advisors.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: While the class is more heavily associated with Green and White, a good number of Monks will also be blue, especially among the Jeskai on Tarkir (and to a lesser extent during Adventures in the Forgotten Realms).
• Blank Slate: Blue believes everyone is born as this.
• Blow You Away: Together with Green, Blue gets a lot of air-manipulating spells. However, Blue uses wind and air for a greater variety of purposes, and has access to effects that specifically buff airborne (i.e., flying) creatures, while Green, for the most part, uses wind only for Anti-Air spells.
• Blue Means Cold: Most of the spells associated with ice are blue.
• Blue Means Smart One: The blue mana is seen as using wit and intelligence - whether that's as a Guile Hero, Information Broker, using Anti-Magic to negate critical pieces of an opponent's plan, being a Science Hero, or just generally attacking where an opponent cannot defend.
• Clever Crows: The other most common type of bird to find on blue cards. Corvid Aven are less common than owl-like ones, but when they appear they tend to also be Blue.
• Cool Horse: Currently tied with Black in having the most Horse-type creatures in the game.
• Crazy-Prepared: A Blue deck with a focus on counterspells and/or draw power almost has to be this by design.
• Creative Sterility: One of Blue's weaknesses is that it may find the answer to any situation via research, but it lacks the ability to imagine new solutions and, in extreme cases, is incapable of strategizing.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Blue's countermagic is known to be difficult to grasp by new players, as they lack sufficient Meta Game knowledge to understand what threats are worth expending the counterspell on, and is often their first introduction to the concept of the stack. Mastering this is usually key to successfully using a blue deck, since otherwise its creatures and removal are relatively unimpressive.
• Ditto Fighter: Blue has access to shape-shifters that function as this.
• Elemental Powers: Contrary to Red, who uses elements in explosive, destructive ways, Blue tends to favor "colder" or "slower" elements, mainly to hinder its opponents and/or stall the battle. It's particularly associated with water, ice and air.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Blue is, alongside Red, the default color of Magitek, after all. It’s no surprise that Blue gets a lot of metal-related magic. Such magic is usually reflected as some form of artifact support.
• Enlightenment Superpower: Being the color of thought, willpower and introspection, Blue gets more than its fair share of this.
• Evil Genius: A blue villain is generally this.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Blue at its worst, especially when mixed with Green.
• Feathered Serpent: While snakes as a whole are generally green, Ixalan and Alara are both home to mystical Blue-aligned coatls.
• Fish People: How merfolk are portrayed in recent sets, to avoid the “how can they fight land-based enemies when they don’t have legs” issue.
• Flight: Shared with white. Blue's flying creatures tend to be air elementals, owls, drakes and sphinxes.
• For Science!: Progress for progress' sake is often the only motivation Blue needs or wants.
• Fragile Speedster: Blue creatures, if they aren't a Squishy Wizard or Stone Wall, tend to have low toughness for their cost but have some sort of evasive advantage like flying or being straight-up unblockable.
• Frankenstein's Monster: While zombies have traditionally been in Black's portion of the color pie, Innistrad introduced this kind of zombie for Blue, which fits because those zombies are created by Mad Scientists.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Blue is the color that interacts with artifacts the most.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Because many Blue creatures are aquatic, in the early days, many of them had the keyword islandhome, which meant they couldn't attack the defending player unless he or she controlled an island, and died if its controller didn't. It was very unpopular (to the point of even losing its status as a keyword), and development has since put more emphasis onto fun than logic.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The Crab creature type is exclusively Blue, as is typical for large sea monster-type creatures.
• Great Detective: While the creature type has run the gamut of all five colors since the crossover with Dr. Who, and especially as of Murders at Karlov Manor, you'll find a lot of Detective-class creatures in Blue. This is a given considering that detective work often requires a lot of brain power to solve cases.
• Guile Hero: While the other colors focus on neutralizing threats, Blue has a number of ways to take them for itself. The simplest example is the mere existence of counterspells. If a Blue opponent has left mana untapped at the end of their turn, the wise player knows their next spell can be blown away and must figure out how to trick the Blue player into wasting their counterspell on something unimportant. (Meanwhile, the Blue player is just bluffing and has only land in their hand.)
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: Blue is #1 at stealing opponents' creatures, and this is how it's usually achieved.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Blue has far-and-away the largest number of colored artifacts, which are usually flavored this way.
• I Shall Taunt You: Given the tactical uses of taunting an enemy, it would be fitting that Blue has the second-most cards with the Goad effect.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Blue gets some efficient creatures at the high end of the scale, but it isn't known for its mana acceleration, and leviathans in particular typically come with very inconvenient disadvantages.
  • Krakens and Leviathans are distinct creatures types: Leviathans are huge whale- and serpent-like beasts (and not limited to water — nearly a third are airborne), and Krakens are much more varied in appearance, resembling cephalopods but often blending in crustacean and vertebrate limbs and body plans.
  • An interesting note is that the krakens of Zendikar are stated to embody willpower and self-determination, most living in isolation and spending their lives exploring, pondering and contemplating the world, which generally fits Blue's philosophy better than "mindless destructive monstrosity".
  • Outside of the actual Kraken and Leviathan creature types, Blue also gets things like absolutely gigantic whales and the legendary octopus Lorthos, the Tidemaker. Also, while most serpent creatures (mixes in various amounts of snakes and long-bodied fish) are fairly sedate in size, some are easily as big as true krakens and leviathans.
• Lack of Empathy: The darker side of Blue can be sociopathic; while other colors can at least grasp sadism or extremist insanity, Blue at its worst just doesn't give a damn about anyone.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Blue's freezing is not always harmless; some cards like Frozen Solid can get the frozen creature killed if something hits them.
• Mad Scientist: What happens when Blue goes off the rails.
• Making a Splash: Water is the element most associated with Blue, whose mana symbol is a water droplet. Blue gets a lot of water-based spells, in addition to a great many water elementals and aquatic monsters. Increasingly, this is shared with Green, though the latter tends to focus more on water's life-sustaining properties and is based more on freshwater.
• Magitek: Blue is the color of technology and, given the nature of the multiverse, this pretty much comes with the territory.
• Master of Illusion: Being associated with mind and the elements of water and air (which can distort light and create all sorts of illusions, like mirage), Blue naturally has a lot of effects flavored as illusions. Illusion creatures are often very powerful, but have drawbacks that reflect their unreality. Some return to their owner's hand after each fight, and some die instantly if any spell or ability even targets them.
• Mind Probe: One of Blue's specialties is looking at the opponent's hand (which is flavored as this).
• Mind Rape: Blue's milling ability is often flavored as erasing memories. But, because it goes for the deck rather than the hand, it's gentler than Black's Mind Rape.
• The Mole: This combo.
• Mr. Imagination: While Blue characters often have issues engaging in genuinely creative and original thought, imagination is also a theme that Blue likes to explore in some settings, particularly when it's paired with Red.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Blue is the only color that can consistently interact with spells on the stack. It's a bit jarring to many players, as most interactions happen with permanents already on the battlefield.
• Ninja: Besides Black, Blue has the most creatures with the Ninja class among them.
• No-Sell: Counterspell and its legacy. When a player's spell is countered, throwing the card away is a common response.
• Nurture over Nature: As far as Blue is concerned, you can be anything you want.
• Ocean Awe: Blue's basic land cards are Islands where it mostly depicts islands surrounded by water, Cities on the Water, Floating Continents with waterfalls, harbors, and the likes.
• Our Dragons Are Different: While true dragons are chiefly Red-aligned, Blue gets the majority of the Drakes, smaller and less powerful relatives of dragons with animalistic intellects and two legs and two wings rather than four and two. Wyverns appear as a rare subset of the drake creature type, with the distinction seeming to be that wyverns walk on their hindlegs like birds, rather than walking batlike on all fours.
• Our Genies Are Different: Djinn are traditionally a blue creature type, although they do show up in other colors. On most planes they are supernatural beings and spirits of the air, and may or may not come with Fog Feet. They featured most prominently on the planes of Rabiah (where they were inspired by the original myths more than by modern depictions) and Tarkir (where they are mortal flesh-and-blood beings resembling humanoids with horns and light blue skin, although they can still fly).
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Blue has the second-most Spirit-type creatures in the game.
• Our Homunculi Are Different: Homunculi are a creature type found almost exclusively in blue. They are diminutive alchemically-created humanoids with one eye. They tend to be fragile and have mechanics that encourage you to play fast and loose with their survival.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Blue's characteristic small creature. Used to be the regular, fish-tailed kind, but due to confusion as to how they were supposed to fight on land they were changed in later sets to humanoid Fish People.
• Our Sirens Are Different: Sirens are an blue-aligned avian humanoid creature type found on Theros and Ixalan. Many of them use Mind Manipulation or Forced Sleep-themed mechanics.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In the Innistrad blocks, Blue gets zombie creatures in the form of stitched-together Frankenstein-style abominations.
  • While rarer, other worlds such as Grixis are also home to blue-aligned liches.
• The Owl-Knowing One:
  • Owls are almost exclusively associated with Blue, and have card effects relating to drawing and looking at cards (in flavor, the card deck is meant to represent the player's mind) and to casting spells (generally by making it cheaper for you to do so, by rewarding you for doing so, or by impairing your opponent's ability to do so).
  • Aven, the game's Bird People, normally resemble generic humanoid raptors. Blue aven, however — and in particular ones associated with magic or wisdom in some form — tend to resemble owls instead.
• The Perfectionist: Blue's philosophy considers personal perfection to be the ultimate goal, so this is a major theme.
• The Philosopher: Blue is constantly seeking new information and is willing to go great lengths to find the answer for any question.
• Power of the Void: Unlike Black, Blue's void tends to be the "actual vacuum" variety. It usually involves aether in some way and is reflected on card as returning stuffs to their owners' hands or libraries.
• Proud Scholar Race: The overriding theme of most Blue's sentient creature types, with the Vedalken being the clearest example (their hat is being hyper-meticulous Wizards, Artificers, and Advisors.)
• Psychic Powers: Many of Blue’s effects are flavored with telepathy or telekinesis. Most of these effects mess with (either the caster's or the opponents') hands and/or libraries.
• Riddling Sphinx: Blue's iconic creature, showing up as rare, powerful cards once per set. Many get mechanics thematically related to riddles and guessing. Petra Sphinx and Conundrum Sphinx, for instance, have players guess the top card of their libraries, putting it in their hand if they guess right and in their graveyard if they guess wrong, while Isperia the Inscrutable rewards you if you can correctly guess a card in your opponent's hand.
• Rousseau Was Right: Its philosophy is based on tabula rasa.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Blue currently trails behind White in third place with regards to having the most Noble-class creatures in the game.
• Science Hero: At its best, contrasting green's Nature Hero.
• Sea Monster: Blue gets a lot of large, sea-going monsters — the Kraken, Leviathan, Serpent and Whale creature types are overwhelmingly Blue — largely due to its basic land being islands making it the color most associated with the sea. Notably, they tend to be absurdly huge and little more than ravening predators, despite Blue being based on anything but brute force.
• Sea Serpents: Serpents are a creature type dedicated to this sort of beasts, and distinct from regular snakes. The vast majority are marine, but they can be found in swamps, lakes or rivers, typically in planes were seas aren't present — the Egyptian Mythology-inspired plane of Amonkhet, for instance, has serpents living in the mighty Luxa River. Notable examples of serpents include the lionfish-like Frilled Sea Serpent, the classic Sea Serpent and Serpent of the Endless Sea, which gets bigger and stronger the more Island lands you control.
• Shock and Awe: Blue occasionally gets electricity-related effects (though obviously not as often as red), often dealing specifically with brain activity (Brainstorm), weather manipulation (Aether Storm), or electronics (Short Circuit).
• Sloth: In the sense of Lack of Empathy.
• The Sociopath: At its worst. Blue is more prone to this due to being the color least concerned with emotions.
• The Spock: Blue's focus on rationality, logic, and emotional detachment frequently leads blue characters to play this role. The primary blue planeswalker Jace Beleren is this, probably more so than any other.
• Smug Snake: Blue villains tend to hit this way harder than other colors, from Ambassador Laquatus to the Soratami to Zomaj Hauc...
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Thanks to the above-mentioned Enlightenment Superpowers.
• Technician Versus Performer: Blue and Red share an affinity for both art and technology. However, while Blue prefers to plan its projects in advance, Red generally executes ideas as soon as it gets them.
• Technopath: Same as Extra-ore-dinary above.
• Time Master: Blue has more power over time than any other color, and is the king of taking extra turns.
• Teleportation: Blue has a lot of cards with the Phase Out keyword; cards with this ability are exiled temporarily, and then re-summoned to the field.
• The Unfettered: Actually more so than any other color: even Black tends to have empathy (even if twisted into sadism), but Blue is completely divorced from such "petty" emotions.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: Since Blue is the color that deals most heavily with artifacts, it barely edges out Red in the number of Artificers it has.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Shapeshifters are, outside of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, almost exclusively Blue.
• Weak, but Skilled: Even with the help of its beloved artifacts, Blue has way less raw damage potential than any other color. It has also, in the past, bordered on a Game-Breaker.invoked

Black

Black's concerns are best summed up as as "power through opportunity". Black sees itself as the only realist, The Anti-Nihilist in a world full of Silly Idealists, and makes itself The Social Darwinist both to get ahead and simply to keep itself safe. Black's idea of hierarchy is that whoever has the most power makes the rules. Black mana is drawn from swamps.

Black is the color of death, ambition, and ruthlessness. Its goal is power, no matter the cost — Black will do anything to win, even if it means sacrificing its own creatures or Hit Points to power its spells. Black specializes in death and decay; its power over death makes it excellent at both killing creatures and raising them from the dead to fight again. It's also the best color at attacking the opponent's hand through Mind Rape-styled discard effects, and offers Faustian bargains of powerful creatures and effects that match or exceed other colors' specialties, if you don't mind paying for the difference with something other than mana. Learn more about Black here and here.

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• Above Good and Evil: Being Black means abandoning morality in the pursuit of power. This leads to amorality and moral relativism, putting it into conflict with White's moral absolutism.
• The Anti-Nihilist: In contrast to the other colors, Black doesn't concern itself with changing the world for the better, but rather it encourages people to make the best out of their lives in a world that can't be improved.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: A lot of black creature removal will destroy a creature, but only if it isn't black. Not that black actually cares about its own — it's just that black creatures are often impervious to the insanity, horror and disease it uses to do its work. Alternatively, the black mages who devise such spells take steps to ensure nobody will be able to use the spell against them.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Subverted in that Black is not necessarily evil by itself; it does however, have the most creatures with the Noble class.
• Badass Preacher: May also overlap a bit with Corrupt Church, but Black currently has the second-largest number of Cleric-class creatures.
• Bat Out of Hell: Unlike most natural animals, which fall under the domain of green, bats are exclusively black. They also tend to be huge and monstrous creatures of the Dire Bat type, such as Blind Hunter or Gloomhunter.
• The Berserker: Black trails behind Red in second place with regards to having Berserker-class creatures.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Shares the insect creature type with Green. Black's bugs tend to become stronger as creatures die out, fitting with Black's domain of decay.
• Black Knight: As a foil to White's Knight in Shining Armor, Black currently ranks second behind White for having the most Knight-class creatures in the game.
• Black Magic: Utilizes this very often, naturally.
• Blood Magic: In keeping with Black's Cast from Hit Points shtick. When your iconic race is Vampires, it's kind of a given, really.
• Body Horror: Anything with "Pay X life..." in it, anything Yawgmoth does, a lot of the black auras.
• Brainwashed: Originally an artifact ability, Black gained the ability to control an opponent's entire turn.
• Byronic Hero: What black may be when it steps into the light.
• Came Back Wrong: Stealing creatures from other players graveyards, often with some extra toys to play with, is a favorite trick of Black.
• Cast from Hit Points: Every color gets some, but it's Black's specialty.
• Casting a Shadow: Shadow magic is one of the mainstays of Black spells, alongside necromancy and mind control. Black uses darkness and shadows for all sorts of purposes — removal, evasion, buffing creatures, etc.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Black is more than willing to use this, usually taking the form of discard effects.
• Combat Pragmatist: A more mundane application of Black's philosophy, there are more than a few effects that temporarily reduce power or toughness that are flavored as simple "hit below the belt" type maneuvers.
• Cool Horse: Overlaps with Hellish Horse, but Black is tied with Blue in having the Horse-type creatures in the game.
• Curse: As of the first Innistrad block, Curses are a specific type of Enchantment that inflicts detrimental effects upon a player. While the card type has run the gamut of all the colors to varying degrees, and they reappear from time to time in different blocks, Black currently has the largest number of Curse-type Enchantments in the game.
• Dark Is Evil: Downplayed. While Black is not always evil, it is the color most commonly associated with dark magic.
• Dark Is Not Evil: While Black has many villains in its name, and is inherently ruthless, it has also some positive traits and several characters to embody them such as Xantcha, Chainer, Toshiro Umezawa, Vraska, Yahenni, Nashi et cetera.
• Deal with the Devil: Yawgmoth's Bargain, Necropotence, Greed, Contract From Below, and so on.
• Dem Bones: A type of Black undead not quite as common as zombies, and likewise not limited to humans.
• Determinator: Ambition plus willingness to do anything it takes to win plus Screw Destiny results in a colour that will probably rip the universe to pieces before it ever gives up. Fittingly, the virtue of the Black-aligned court in Eldraine is Persistence.
• Discard and Draw: While not always literal (and some cards do allow you to draw), but being that Black is not afraid to pay any price for power, sometimes the price in question requires you to discard a card from your own hand.
• Dysfunction Junction: Black-aligned leaders and organizations are almost always willing to overlook a sordid past, for better or for worse.
• Eldritch Abomination: Usually under the creature type "Horror" and "Nightmare".
• Elemental Powers: Perhaps less so than any other color, but Black nevertheless maintains an association with poison, and occasionally metals such as gold.
• Equivalent Exchange: Shown on many cards, in particular those like Sign In Blood. Black as a whole tends to recycle resources, such as making zombies out of deceased creatures. The cost is usually paid using your own life points, by discarding a card from your hand, or by sacrificing a particular thing on the field (usually creatures).
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: An arguable example, but "personifying" Black in certain Wizards articles suggests that Black honestly cannot believe that anyone thinks differently than it does, defending its amorality with At Least I Admit It. White seems especially hypocritical to Black because Black is certain that nothing could really be that dedicated to altruism.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Black's habit of summoning big creatures with big drawbacks can cost inexperienced players a game.
• Evil Is Sterile: Black is rather inept at creating things out of nothing, fitting its view of life as a zero-sum game.
• Evil Twin: With White. Which is which tends to vary between decks and stories but Black is more often the evil one.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: If there are multiple villain factions of different colors in a given block, Black will usually be the one that falls closest to "Oblivion". Conversely, Black tends to like opposing particularly nihilistic or deranged White-aligned beings.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Black occasionally manifests some power over gold, especially in Ravnica and Theros. This is rather fitting since Black is also associated with Greed.
• The Fair Folk: Many Faerie cards are Black-aligned, representing stories of fae who are mischievous to the point of being dangerous and malicious.
• Festering Fungus: Black is the second most common color for the Fungus creature type (behind Green), and has many more noncreature cards representing parasitic infections.
• Friendly Enemy: Black and Green have the most overlap of any of the enemy colors, both mechanically and flavorfully. Together they represent the circle of life and death, so it makes sense they'd be closely intertwined.
• Greed: Greed is in fact a card, and Black’s philosophy is very conductive to desiring more of the tangible and intangible. Also, Black is the second color after Red to have the most cards that generate Treasure tokens.
• The Grotesque: Black is a color associated with outcasts and surviving against the odds. Sympathetic black characters and factions (like Old Tarkir's orcish Krumar and Kamigawa's Nezumi) tend to emphasize this part, along with strong Family of Choice vibes.
• Heel–Face Turn: If a coalition of differently-colored characters is present, the Black one is the likeliest to have pulled one off to join the good guys.
• Hellfire: Often shows up as blue or purple flames on Black cards.
• Healing Factor: Up until the keyword was removed from the evergreen status, Black had the most creatures with the Regenerate keyword, which basically made it such that if the creature were to die the next turn, it would instead survive. This keyword has long since been retired in favor of an effect that basically reads: "This creature is Indestructible until the end of the turn."
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Black's willingness to use things other than mana (most often life) to pay for its spells can easily come back to bite it.
• Human Resources: Quite literally, as black has many cards that convert creatures into Treasure tokens.
• Immortality Seeker: Ironically, many Black-aligned characters are terrified of their own mortality and will use any means necessary to stave off death... or at least remain active and conscious indefinitely.
• It's All About Me: Black at its purest focuses on self-empowerment at the expense of all else.
• Jack of All Stats: While White and Green have the best creatures and Red and Blue have the best spells, Black is the most balanced color in both aspects, though this also has its price. In fact, Black is probably the most versatile color in the game, with access to efficient creatures of all sizes, card draw, mana acceleration, and removal (both targeted and mass). The only thing Black can be said to be explicitly bad at (as opposed to merely not the best or only good at conditionally) is destroying non-creature artifacts, which it can't do at all.
• Legacy Seeker: Of all the colors, black is the one most fixated on being remembered and leaving its mark on the world. Contrast to green, which loves to remind it that We All Die Someday, and so too will our achievements.
• Life Drain: Going with Black's knack for vampiric creatures, it sports several sources of Lifelink to keep its health up so it almost always has some life to pay. Many of Black's healing spells and abilities also come at the expense of the opponent's creatures or life total.
• Living Dream: Black is the traditional home of the Nightmare creature type, representing horrors and monsters generated by the fears and subconscious of intelligent beings.
• Living Shadow: Black is the home of the Shade creature type (although if you want to get pedantic, as a type of The Undead the "living" part is less than accurate.)
• Lobotomy: Black's ability to look through a library and exile specific cards gets this flavor, being usually depicted as Black unsubtly and damagingly rooting through an opponent’s mind for information. Though as described in Mind Rape, Black normally does this to cards in the hand, as demonstrated with cards like Duress.
• Make Them Rot: Quite a few black characters have this power, perhaps unsurprisingly. It is usually manifested in cards as Deathtouch or similar abilities. Another way to interpret this is that Black has a number of cards that force opponents to sacrifice their own creatures.
• Master of None: Black can play just about any role in a deck, but it doesn't really specialize in much aside from having the best creature removal. The additional costs for some of its more powerful cards can add up and lead to untimely defeats if not worked around carefully.
• Mind Rape: Any "discard" card or "cap" effect. Flavored as being far harsher than Blue's Laser-Guided Amnesia because it goes for the hand rather than the library.
• Murder, Inc.: Black currently has the most creatures with the Rogue class in the game. They also currently have the most creatures with the Assassin class (in fact, non-black Assassins are quite rare). It also has the third-highest number of creatures with the Pirate class, and is the primary color for the now rarely-used Mercenary class.
• Necromancer: Besides a number of necromancers as creatures, Black itself is heavily based on necromancy, with many of its spells and creatures being based on reanimating corpses and summoning the dead. This includes black planeswalker Liliana Vess.
• Ninja: Besides Rogues and Assassins, a lot of Ninjas in Kamigawa will be Black. They'll usually come with their own trademark skill Ninjutsu wherein if a creature you control is able to make an attack without getting blocked, you can pay a mana cost to return it to your hand to summon a Ninja in its place and attacking.
• Nominal Hero: Black may help you, if you make it worth its while.
• Non-Human Undead: Black is rife with undead creatures, and not all of them are human, such as zombie dwarves, skeletal lizardmen and elementals, and insect shades.
• No-Sell: Black is the color of death, corruption, and fear, so its abilities usually fail against other black creatures who are already dead or corrupt, or artifact creatures who were never alive to begin with. These quirks are typically observed on older cards — more recent black removal abilities are more indiscriminate.
• Nurture over Nature: Like Blue, Black believes in the tabula rasa, and that anyone can become anything they choose. At its noblest, it promotes the ideal of self-sufficiency, with power being a means towards that goal.
• One-Hit Kill: Black has the highest number of "destroy target creature" cards, such as the recurring favorites Murder, Doom Blade and Bone Splinters.
• Our Demons Are Different: Black's iconic large creature, in gameplay they require a cost to maintain or they will impose a downside to their player. In-lore, they are generally considered to be living manifestations of their home planes' black mana, and are almost always male.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Among it various undead creature types, Black has access to a number of noncorporeal ones, including wraiths (the rarest type, seemingly associated with swamplands), shades (generally represented as living shadows) and specters (almost always hooded and mounted, usually on giant flying serpents but occasionally on things like giant hornets or giant flying skulls). In addition, Black is currently third in the number of Spirit-type creatures it has, beaten out by Blue in second place, followed by White.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: They're nowadays typed as zombies, but maintain a semi-stable identity as Zombie cards that require you to or reward you for sending creatures to the graveyard or removing them from there, symbolizing ghouls feeding upon the dead.
• Our Liches Are Different: Liches in Magic are always at least partially black (usually black/blue) and fall under the Zombie creature type. How and where they fit into the lore depends on the plane, but they tend to cleave pretty close to the classic model regardless.
• Our Orcs Are Different: On worlds like Tarkir and Ixalan, orcs appear more in black than in red. For what it's worth, they lean toward the Blizzard end of the presentation scale; their association with black mana reflects more their nature as hardscrabble Combat Pragmatists than any kind of metaphysical corruption.
• Our Vampires Are Different: One of Black’s two characteristic creatures, they get bonuses when creatures are sent to the graveyard, representing their thirst for blood and death. Nonhuman vampires have been known to exist.
• Our Zombies Are Different: One of Black’s two characteristic creatures, they are mindless undead used as minions by powerful Black creatures. Theoretically, any creature can become a zombie.
• Poisonous Person: Shared with Green. Black's poisons tend to be of the "assassin" or "vile pollution" flavors. They manifest as giving -1/-1 counters or a temporary stat reduction, which, if strong enough, can cause even Indestructible creatures to die. Black also currently has the most cards that can inflict Poison Counters upon your enemy - as soon as a player has 10 Poison Counters on them, they instantly lose the game regardless of how many life points they still have.
• Power of the Void: See the cards Damnation and Doom Blade. In contrast to Blue's, Black's void tends to be of the Unrealistic Black Hole variety.
• Polluted Wasteland: When Black gets land destruction, it's usually this.
• Power at a Price: Black's signature trait is strong cards with an additional cost, whether it be discarding cards, paying life, or sacrificing creatures.
• Pragmatic Hero: Given that Black is always pragmatic, its heroic characters fall into this trope.
• Psychic Powers: Mostly used for Mind Rape.
• Raising the Steaks: The ever-pragmatic Black does not limit itself to raising intelligent beings as undead when animals will do just as well. Skeletal wurms, snakes and griffins, zombie crocodiles, vultures and cats, vampiric dragons...
• Rat Men: An occasional variation on Black’s rats. The most notable example would be Kamigawa’s Nezumi, a race of rat man ninjas who usually live in swamps or on the outskirts of human cities, which they often raid, and some of whose shamans can summon and control swarms of insects, tying into this trope's association with vermin. Other cards, such as Dirty Wererat, have also been printed showing humanoid rats.
• Religion of Evil: Many black cards, while not always evil, certainly look the part.
• The Sacred Darkness: While Black is often about corruption, it also represents death and decay, the end of the natural cycle responsible for getting rid of the old and making room for the new. This makes it necessary to make a natural plane stable (Alara could afford its absence in some shards due to the unique nature of the plane).
• Samurai: Not as prominent as White and Red, but Black is no slouch with regards to having Samurai-class creatures in that it is the third-most abundant color for Samurai.
• Scary Scorpions: Unlike most "regular" animals, which tend to be Green, scorpions are almost exclusively Black. They usually get Deathtouch (meaning they always destroy any creature they deal any damage to, so long as they are not Indestructible) or some way to weaken enemy creatures.
• Screw Destiny: Its primary conflict with Green, which believes You Can't Fight Fate.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Black, being the color of Greed and Ambition, has a clear association with commerce and capitalism. Fittingly enough, Black has a lot of cards that generate Treasure tokens.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Black, being the color of death, as well as a Poisonous Person, has the second-largest number of Snake-type creatures after Green, followed closely by Blue in third place.
• Soul Power: The Black Magic variety, focusing on ghosts, haunting and summoning the spirits of the dead. Black is pretty much the king of returning creatures from the graveyard.
• Swamps Are Evil: Black draws power from the festering decay of swampland, and while in theory Black — and its lands and creatures — is not actively evil so much as amoral, in practice Black's swamps remain festering pits of fungus and disease, crawling with oversized insects and the undead, and generally very unfriendly places to outsiders.
• Swarm of Rats: Many Black rat cards play to this trope, with their power determined by how many other rat cards are in play, whether other copies of their own card or rats in general. There’s also the card Relentless Rats, which breaks Magic’s normal four-card maximum for creature cards and allows you to have any number of copies of it in play.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Once again, while not always "evil" as such, Black tends to have this kind of relationship with the other colors, particularly White.
• Terror Hero: Black is particularly known for the Menace keyword, an evasion ability that makes it such that the creature holding it can only be blocked by two or more creatures.
• Touch of Death: The Deathtouch keyword is very heavily associated with Black; creatures with this keyword always do enough damage to kill whatever creature they do battle with...given that many of them have low power and toughness, it could very easily result in a mutual kill (assuming of course they aren't Indestructible).
• The Unfettered: As part of the opposite of white, where white establishes concepts of "right" and "wrong", black rejects those notions in its quest for power.
• Uriah Gambit: "Sacrifice a creature" effects, along with creatures with disabilities that hurt you.
• What Is Evil?: Black is the color mostly inclined towards moral relativism.
• Witch Classic: Black is the color most associated with the Hag and Warlock creature types.
• You Dirty Rat!: Unlike most natural animals that fall under Green, rats are an exclusively Black creature type. Flavor-wise they tend to be associated with disease, filth, infiltration and coming in swarms. Many have their strength determined by the number of rat cards you have in play.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Black has the second most Rebel-type creatures in the game^note 10.5% out of 57 cards as of this writing.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Black's standard creature tokens are 2/2 Zombies. While relatively small, Black has a number of ways to flood the board with large numbers of them. Exemplified with its namesake card.

Red

Red cares about "freedom through action". The Unfettered and The McCoy, Red is not intrinsically malicious; mostly it wants to be left alone to do whatever it wants, and is the color of love and creativity. But since Magic: The Gathering is a game about fighting, its violent and fiery side frequently comes to the fore. Red mana is drawn from mountains.

Red is the color of chaos, passion, and emotion. It's aligned with the elements of fire, earth, and lightning, and it specializes in direct damage and the destruction of all things material. Red lives in the moment and rarely considers the future consequences of its actions; this theme is frequently shown through powerful but temporary advantages such as Threaten and Ball Lightning, with creatures that aren't always quite controllable once they hit the field, and with excessive bursts of mana or effects that destroy your lands in return for immediate power. Red is designed to play aggressively and win quickly, and is in danger of stalling out if it can't keep tempo. Red's reliance on spells that deal with fire and lightning have lead to the perception that red is not as diverse as the other colors, as satirized here. Learn more about Red here and here.

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• Action Initiative: Being a fervent believer that The Red Ones Go Faster, Red is the only other color than White that has the First Strike and Double Strike keywords in large numbers; although in this case, it likely represents hitting the enemy first through speed alone than with Super-Reflexes.
• All-Loving Hero: Red is just as capable of creating this kind of character as White, given its direct association with empathy and love.
• An Ice Person: While this element is often more associated with Blue, Red gets some ice spells, for the purpose of freezing things to death, to be more specific.
• Apocalypse How: Obliterate, Decree Of Annihilation, Disaster Radius. Also, Apocalypse, which removes everything on the field from the game.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: While the mechanic is more associated with green, red has been getting a growing number of creatures with the Trample keyword.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Red has the majority of creatures with the "cannot block" and "attacks each turn if able" abilities, and a variety of other effects like Lust for War that force creatures to charge recklessly into battle. Mono-red decks also have a tendency to "race" with the opponent — attacking with their creatures to reduce their opponent's life faster than their opponent can do to them, without concern for blocking.
• Badass Bystander: While the class is more closely associated with White and Green, Red has the second-most Citizen-class creatures.
• Barbarian Hero: Red currently has the most creatures with the Barbarian class in their type.
• The Bard: Red currently has the second-most Bard-class creatures, beaten out only by Green.
• Be Yourself: Red is the color of unbridled self-expression.
• The Berserker: Being the color of passion and rage, it should be no surprise that a lot of Berserkers will be Red.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Red is the primary home of the Yeti creature type.
• Blood Magic: Used in various ways in flavour, though in the cards almost exclusively to deal damage or to control creatures (or both).
• Breath Weapon: "Firebreathing" is a common ability where you spend red mana to temporarily pump up a creature's power. Naturally, red dragons are the most fire-prone.
• Casting a Shadow: Red is the color with the most (read: practically all) darkness-related spells after Black, such as Vicious Shadows, Shadowstorm and Shifting Shadows.
• Confusion Fu: Red's chaotic aspect makes it fairly unpredictable and quite handy for an Indy Ploy.
• Curse: Being a color associated with Wrath, Red has the second-most Curse-type Enchantments in the game after black.
• Discard and Draw: Red cards that allow the player to draw more cards tend to have the cost of discarding cards in the player's hand. While Blue has this ability as well, they also go in different order: Red discards first and then draws, while Blue does the opposite. (Additionally, Blue also has a ton of plain old "Draw more cards", which Red never has.)
• Dishing Out Dirt: Along with Green, Red has lots of earth- and stone-based magic. Red tends to focus more on the destructive and geological aspects of the earth, often utilizing the "crushing rocks and earthquake" variety of earth power to deal damage or destroy lands. More recently, Red's "crushing rocks and earthquake" kind of earth power has become associated with making creatures unable to block.
• Dragon Rider: Many of Red's warriors and knights are depicted riding dragons.
• Don't Think, Feel: Part of its opposition to Blue. In fact, over-thinking and second-guessing yourself can be a serious flaw when playing Red.
• Elemental Personalities: Red Mana is associated with both the element of fire and with strong emotions. Regardless of whether the emotion of the moment is anger, hilarity, love or grief, Red characters feel it strongly, vividly and suddenly, but will be quick to shift to another as the situation changes.
• Elemental Powers: Red is by far the color most invested in them, as the aggressive manipulation of raw elements — especially earth, magma, fire and lightning — fits quite nicely with its blunt, direct philosophy.
• Elemental Embodiment: While you're just as likely to find them in all the colors, Red currently has the most Elemental-type creatures.
• The Empath: As the color of emotions and sensations, many red characters are deeply empathetic. On the flipside, this also makes red the color of the Agony Beam.
• Energy Weapon: Although White has domain over light, some red spells involve piercing the enemies with beams of light, most notably Cleansing Beam.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Being the color of chaos and random destruction, Red gets a lot of this.
• Eternal Engine: Red has a lot of aesthetic focus on industry and manufacturing (particularly metallurgy), particularly on worlds like Capenna and Kaladesh.
• Equivalent Exchange: Not as bad as Black, but sometimes Red has cards that require you to discard a card from your hand as an extra cost to play the spell...sometimes to draw more cards, or to create Treasure tokens.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Red also has a love for artifacts, especially equipment. Blue and Red are, together, widely viewed as the artifact colors. Naturally, Red gets a lot of artifact support effects flavored as manipulation of metals. This comes to the fore as of the Ixalan block, when Red consistently has the most cards that generate Treasure tokens, artifact tokens that act as single-use lands that generate any mana in exchange for sacrificing it.
• Fire Is Red: Though, to be fair, as in most other spells, red spells don't necessarily have the same color as the color itself, and some fire spell artwork has apropriate orange or gold flames.
• For the Evulz: Red doesn't tend to do plans, so at its worst it often produces motiveless evil. Red villains are more likely to be evil, destructive, or sadistic just because it's fun than black ones.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Oddly, Red has been sharing this trope with Blue for a while now. Unlike Green, Red sees technology as one more way to express its creative vision and, as a result, is actually just behind Blue for number of cards that (positively) interact with artifacts, though it has more of a theme around rockets, demolitions, explosions, weapons, armor and furnaces than Blue. These themes are particularly prominent with the renegades of Kaladesh and the Izzet League.
• Glass Cannon: In contrast to White's Stone Wall tactics, Red creatures either have high power and low toughness or ways to buff only their power to make creatures this. Mono-red decks generally focus on putting down early hard-hitting creatures or creatures with Haste (so they can attack right away) and attacking away at the opponent into submission before they can set up their defenses or field their bigger creatures, and finishing the game with direct damage. The moment they run out of steam, have their army taken out, and/or can't reliably damage the opponent any more is often the moment they lose.
• Great Balls of Fire!: Blaze and Fireball are the best examples.
• Griping About Gremlins: The gremlins of Kaladesh are overwhelmingly Red in color. Resembling six-legged aardvarks with blue-tipped snouts, they're essentially animals and feed off of aether, with their feeding being an important part of Kaladesh's natural cycles. Problem is, most of Kaladesh's technology runs on aether, which combined with the gremlins' tendency to use their acidic saliva to bore a way to their meals has made them the scourge of the plane. Reflecting this, they tend to have artifact-destruction abilities or be empowered by energy counters. Their young are called grubs, and are very cute.
• Having a Blast: Red is very fond of making things blow up, and its magic reflects this.
• Hellfire: In a sense. Red, and sometimes Black, has the ability to turn its spells and creatures colorless. This allows it to get around White's protection ability, and is flavored as a sort of ghostly flame.
• The Horde: In early sets especially, Red was the go-to color for typically barbaric and monstrous fantasy races like Orcs, Goblins, Ogres, Giants, Cyclopes and Trolls in addition to human bandits and barbarians, with Dwarves being the only typically good fantasy characters associated with Red in this era. All of these types except Trolls (who are now associated with Green) are still primarily red, but tend to have more nuance now.
• Hot-Blooded: Red characters are frequently this, due to Red being the color of emotion, feeling, and acting now and thinking never.
• I Shall Taunt You: Red currently has the most cards with the Goad keyword, which basically forces creatures to attack something other than the player.
• Kill It with Fire: Cards such as Incinerate, Disintegrate, and Scorching Lava prevent the burnt creature from regenerating, representing the flavor of burning the body to prevent it from healing. Some go the extra mile and exile the creature instead of putting it in the graveyard, making it so burnt that necromancy cannot reform it.
• Kill It with Ice: Snow cards notwithstanding, Red does have access to ice-themed spells like Frost Bite and Frostwielder.
• La Résistance: Red is associated with revolutions and the Rebel creature type.
• Light 'em Up: Kind of. Red does have access to light-based spells... which usually involves dealing damage using a laser-like beam.
• Lizard Folk: A lot of Viashino tend to be Red, or at least use red mana; they're descended from Dragons and very well-known for being Lean and Mean.
• Luck-Based Mission: A lot of red effects are random, be it based on coin flips, choosing targets at random, or being reliant on the top few cards of the library.
• Mad Artist: Red is the color of imagination and unrestricted self-expression. That often results in characters going completely off the deep end while following their muse.
• Magma Man: Red already has fire and the geological aspect of earth under its belt, so it's quite natural that effects flavored as control over lava are also Red. Somewhat strangely, these effects don't tend to deal more damage than just plain fire.
• Make Some Noise: It's not touched on terribly often, but Red holds the vast majority of sound-based spells and abilities, from battle-cries to honest-to-goodness sonic attacks.
• Making a Splash: Very rarely, in the form of a torrential flood.
• The McCoy: A common part for Red characters. Red is very much centered on following your gut and doing what feels right. If something’s the right thing to do, then never you mind conventions and potential consequences, that’s what you should do.
• Mr. Imagination: You may note that red is the only color not listed as suffering from some form of Creative Sterility. Red never lacks for new ideas; not necessarily good ones (that's what blue is for), but in terms of raw frenetic creativity, no color can even approach red.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Officially Red’s large iconic creature, although they have been known to show up in other colors, so it’s not a perfect fit.
• Our Genies Are Different: Those genies themed specifically around the efreet of Arabic folklore have usually gone to Red rather than Blue. Besides Rabiah’s Emberwilde djinn (who had also set up their own caliphate in Wildfire, a plane dominated by flames and molten lava), there is also a dedicated Efreet creature type. Efreet are generally depicted as spirits of fire, although the efreet of Tarkir are instead depicted as tall, flesh-and-blood humanoids with black and red skin and three horns on their heads.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Red currently boasts the most Giant-type creatures in the game.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Every set brings a new take on goblins, though you can usually count on them being self-destructively insane little buggers.
  • One thing goblins are pointedly not, however, is Always Chaotic Evil. Indeed, many of Magic's most beloved heroes have been goblins.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are an extremely rare Red creature type, distinguished by frequently being free to summon, but have little to no inherent utility once you've done so. They are native to only one plane (Dominaria) and can be found only in Kher Ridge near Yavimaya.
• Our Manticores Are Spinier: Manticores are a predominantly Red creature type, generally resembling lions with human faces, batlike wings (birdlike for the Mercadian manticores), scorpion tails and mouths with far too many teeth. The manticores of the Egyptian Mythology-inspired plane of Amonkhet break from the pattern, instead resembling tigers with scorpion tails and with their lower legs covered with black, spiked natural armor.
• Our Orcs Are Different: While they are commonly black in certain Planes like Tarkir, you're much more likely to find Orcs in Red as they are more commonly found in this color overall.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: While the creature type is slightly more aligned with Green, Red has roughly equal numbers of werewolf-type creatures.
• The Phoenix: Phoenixes — represented both as red-gold eagle-like birds with a fire motif and as birds made of living flame — have appeared in numerous sets as midsized Red creatures, always with ability to return to your hand or the battlefield from the graveyard either for free, for a mana cost or when certain conditions are met.
• Pirate: Red has the second-most number of creatures of this class.
• Playing with Fire: Red’s most iconic element, with Red's mana symbol being a fireball and all. Fire-based magic is a mainstay of Red cards, involving both fire elementals and fire-based spells, usually centered on indiscriminately burning Red’s problems until they aren’t problems anymore. This is what red planeswalker Chandra Nalaar is most known for.
• The Power of Hate: Hate, like all emotions, is Red in nature. Since it's a lot easier to fit in hate in a game based around creatures fighting, it shows a lot more often than, say, The Power of Love.
• The Power of Love: Love, like all emotions, is Red in nature. Unfortunately, given that love is nigh impossible to mechanically manifest in a game about combat, such cases are almost exclusive to flavor. WotC staff considered it a lovely change of pace when they managed to hammer out such a card.
• Random Effect Spell: Red's cards have the largest amount of random chance associated with them, usually in the form of random discards, or basing its effects from cards off the top of your deck. Some cards even involve coin flips and die rolls to determine outcomes.
• Raptor Attack: Even before the onset of dinosaurs as a dedicated creature type, raptors have had a tendency to align to Red before other colors, with a minority in Green. Early (pre-Ixalan) raptors have been of the common, featherless Jurassic Park type, while Ixalan raptors, like all Ixalan dinosaurs, have extensive feathery dots (not necessarily accurate feathers, but feathers nonetheless). Regardless of skin covering, raptors have been consistently portrayed as hyperaggressive, dangerous and ferocious predators, appearing as both solitary and pack hunters. Most have mechanics allowing them to attack as soon as they enter the battlefield, while many Ixalan raptors have the Enrage mechanic, which activates bonus actions when opponents deal them damage.
• Red Is Heroic: Downplayed originally, but increasingly Played Straight. While the earliest cards mostly characterizes Red as openly sadistic and almost mindlessly violent, decades of Character Development have showcased the color's more likeable qualities, like spontaneity, sociability, and independence. Today, many of the game's flagship heroes are aligned primarily to Red mana.
• Red Ones Go Faster: Red cards and decks tend to move quickly and are generally faster than the other colors, laying on the aggression with cheap followers while the other colors are still setting up their board. Red also has Haste as its most familiar keyword.
• Salt the Earth: Red has the most spells invested in land destruction, up to and including Sowing Salt.
• Samurai: While the class in the Kamigawa block is more heavily associated with White, Red currently has the second-most Samurai-class creatures in the game.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Since Red never respects laws, its heroic characters fall into this trope.
• Seven Deadly Sins: As should be obvious by now, Red's is Wrath, with its tendency to produce bloodthirsty zealots, not to mention plenty of Curse-type Enchantments which can be inflicted upon enemies.
• Shock and Awe: Red gets a lot of lightning-based spells (and some creatures, like Ball Lightning). Again, this is, for the most part, straightforward direct damage.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The Warrior to White's Soldier. While you do get a number of them in White, Red has the most Warrior-class creatures thus far.
• Star Power: Most notably in the infamous Starstorm◊. Goes well with Light 'em Up.
• Smarter Than You Look: Red is often stereotyped as Dumb Muscle, with a tendency to not think things through and a playstyle that lends itself to Attack! Attack! Attack! type strategies. However, it is also the color associated with Indy Ploys and The Spark of Genius and, in the hands of a particularly creative player, can be quite tricky.
• Stuff Blowing Up: If it's not creatures being burned to a crisp, a lot of Red's spells do damage depicted by a large explosion. Red's many artifact destruction abilities also depict objects being destroyed in dramatic fashion.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Common in Red's flavor text, particularly with goblins.
• Super-Speed: Follows from Red's emphasis on freedom. Seen on cards such as Burst Of Speed and Accelerate. This manifests somewhat in having creatures having the Haste, First Strike, and Double Strike keywords in large numbers.
• Taking You with Me: Red has quite a few creatures that deal damage to themselves or their controller to get rid of something else. Sometimes, it involves self-sacrifice on the part of that creature; such creatures tend to be goblins, which in-universe aren't exactly known for their intelligence.
• Technician Versus Performer: An iconic Blue-Red conflict. The two colors share a love of creativity, be it artistic or technological. How they choose to implement it tends to be the bone of contention.
• Terror Hero: Besides Black, Red has the most creatures with the Menace keyword.
• Thirsty Desert: Especially in Arabian Nights.
• The Trickster: A theme that has been seeing more and more focus recently, Red has a number of off-beat combat tricks that correspond to its pronounced sense of humor.
• Technopath: Same as Extra-ore-dinary above.
• Time Master: Used to enable a Desperation Attack, when you need just one more shot at hitting the enemy. Red has had a few spells that manipulate time, ending foes' turns early or taking another turn at the cost of losing the game when the end of the next turn rolls around. If taking an extra turn at a certain cost is too powerful for Blue alone, then the spell is part Red, often with some additional Red element like coin-flipping.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: Red deals a lot with artifacts, and so it trails slightly behind Blue in the number of Artificers it has.
• The Unfettered: Red will feel what it wants to feel and act how it wants to act.
• Volcano Lair: Red's basic land cards are often depicted as erupting volcanos or red mountains.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Red runs at two settings: "hit it fast" and "hit it faster".
• Zerg Rush: Being Red creatures themselves, Goblins tend to be weak, but very cheap, and so it's very possible to build a Goblin deck with this on mind.

Green

Green is concerned with "acceptance through growth". It believes that all living things have a place and a path; You Can't Fight Fate, and trying to do so is the height of folly. This results in an opposition to technology and anything else "unnatural". Green mana is drawn from forests.

Green is the color of life, nature, and tradition. Thanks to its mastery of life and growth, Green is the best color at creating swarms of token creatures, and its creatures tend to be bigger than those of other colors for the same cost, especially at the higher end of the scale: for the first year of the game, it had the biggest creature in existence, though that office has mostly gone to blue or colorless creatures since. Green also has the ability to boost the size of its creatures, both temporarily and permanently, and is the best color at generating extra mana in the long term, often by playing additional lands. It has become the second-best color at card drawing, representing a growth of the mind to match the body. Green magic is rarely subtle and often relies on brute force — while it's perfectly willing to destroy the opponent's artifacts, enchantments, and lands, Green's preferred means of dealing with opposing creatures is to outmatch them in combat as nature intended. Learn more about Green here and here.

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• Anti-Air: Many. Very many. Air denial is one of Green's signature traits. Good examples include cards that deal damage to flying creatures alone (like Hurricane), creatures with the keyword reach, which can block flyers without themselves having flying (like Giant Spider), creature removals that only attack flyers (like Plummet), cards that damage players with flying creatures (like Wing Storm), cards that remove the flying keyword from creatures (like Canopy Claws), and cards that do a combination of these things at once (like Whiptongue Hydra).
• Anti-Cavalry: Appears on Trip Wire. Antiquated by the static ability Horsemanship disappearing.
• Anti-Magic: A lot of enchantment removal appears on green cards. Hexproof, which protects from targeting effects, is also seen most commonly on green creatures. Fittingly enough, Green is also tied with White for second most creatures with the Ward keyword.
• Appeal to Tradition: Basically the gist of Green's rhetoric outside of "nature". Green is the colour most focused on the past, most focused on retaining the status quo, and as such it can get pretty damn obsessed over tradition, as many characters have learned the hard way.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: One of the keywords that Green is particularly known for is Trample, which makes it such that whenever a creature with high power deals more damage than the blocking creature's toughness, the difference is inflicted upon the enemy's life. Fittingly enough, creatures with this keyword tend to be pretty powerful to begin with.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: One of Green's trademarks is the absurdly large creature, whether large to begin with or magically pumped up that way.
• Badass Bystander: Green is currently tied with White for having the most Citizen-class creatures^note 24.2% out of 33 cards single-color, and 12.1% having both colors as of this writing.
• The Bard: As of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, Bards are a recent addition and are classified as Green creatures.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: They were made a legit creature type as of the first Kamigawa block, and have long since been outstripped by White, but there's still a lot of Monks that are Green.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: They are separate creature types, with basilisks being more strongly aligned to Green and also more common. Faithfully to their original mythological portrayal, cockatrices are depicted as birdlike creatures with snakelike tails and necks, while basilisks are shown as many-legged lizards or snakes, sometimes with horns. They all have the keyword Deathtouch, meaning they instantly destroy any creature they deal damage to, or the ability to destroy any creature that they block or that blocks them, representing their deadly petrifying gaze.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Shared with Black. Green is very fond of absurdly large monsters (see Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever) and arthropods are not excluded.
• The Beastmaster: One of Green's iconic powers, though the kind of beasts in question may vary. Examples include Master of the Wild Hunt, Wren's Run Packmaster, and Wolf-Skull Shaman. Mechanically, Green is hands-down the best color when it comes to buffing or otherwise supporting creatures.
• Blow You Away: Although air is more Blue's domain, Green wind spells like Hurricane, Windstorm and Shredding Winds are common. Green, in general, uses wind only to knock flying things out of the sky, though.
• Born Unlucky: This and Born Lucky are how Green justifies Social Darwinism — if you’ve been born with bad genes, then your bad luck and/or death is just natural selection.
• Cats Are Mean: Cats as a creature type have appeared in all five colors, but primarily in White, and secondarily in Green.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Enhancing a creature's "natural" powers is firmly in Green's wheelhouse.
• Cool Horse: Tied with White for having the second-most Horse-type creatures in the game, next to both Blue and Black.
• Creative Sterility: Sometimes shared with White and (more rarely) Blue, Green genuinely cannot fathom something it has not experienced first-hand in the past.
• Death World: What evil Green powers, such as the Green Phyrexians, ultimately seek to turn the lands they take over into—savage wildernesses full of ferocious monsters constantly preying on one another, where there is no law but the law of the jungle and no order but the food chain.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Used to create more lands, or animate the ones Green already has. Compared to Red's, Green's earth-based spells and effects are far more likely to be of the "life-bearing, motherly Earth" flavor.
• Don't Think, Feel: Part of its opposition to Blue; Green strategies are often about pure smashing, with little in the way of trickery or manipulation.
• Dumb Is Good: Taken to an extreme, Green opposes the concept of sapience itself.
• Elemental Powers: Green typically focuses on organic natural elements — plants, earth and poison all show up in its roster, and air and wind play a major role in its propensity for Anti-Air.
• Elemental Embodiment: Unsurprisingly for a color representing nature, Green has the second-most Elemental-type creatures.
• Enchanted Forest: The basic Green land is forests, and coupled with Green's love of giant monsters and the untamed wilderness, this trope is definitely in play.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Green is the domain of dangerous, hostile places like forests and jungles.
• Evil Luddite: Green is opposed to advanced science, technology, industry and any altering of the world from its natural state on general principles, and this tends to move it into villainous territory when it takes it too far. In the more recent artifact-focused Kaladesh block, however, Green-aligned characters went the "let's make technology work in harmony with nature" route instead, with elvish "lifecrafters" designing their creations to mimic plants and animals.
• Evil Reactionary: Green can be this when its focus on tradition and on shunning change is taken too far.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Green at its worst and most obsessed with survival of the fittest can become this, especially when mixed with Blue.
• The Fair Folk: The first published Faerie cards were green, but now there are more of them in Black and (especially) in Blue than in Green. Green does still get the majority of the mischievous woodland-dwelling Ouphes (the creature type for wingless fey creatures such as brownies and green men).
• The Fatalist: As the color of natural order, Green can be too focused on predestination at its worst.
• Festering Fungus: Fungus creature cards are almost always green, and tend to have abilities focusing on growth, regeneration and the creation of hordes of smaller fungus creatures. Some of them reward you in some manner for putting creatures in the graveyard, representing fungi feeding off of death and decay.
• Fragile Speedster: The classic "green weenie" deck involves getting as many creatures out on the field as possible as quickly as possible. It's important to win quickly, because if your opponent manages to stave off your Zerg Rush, you're in for a world of hurt.
• Friendly Enemy: Green and Black have the most overlap of any of the enemy colors, both mechanically and flavorfully. Together they represent the circle of life and death, so it makes sense they'd be closely intertwined.
• Gaia's Lament: Green's gripes with Blue and Black are often visually represented by pristine wilderness being overtaken by technology or decay.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Green's specialty, since its philosophy makes it opposed to anything artificial, and it tends to be quite good at destroying what it perceives as unnatural, such as artifacts or enchantments.
  • Numerous Green spells and instants are themed around the destruction of unnatural artifice, such as Bramblecrush and Rootgrapple (which destroy any noncreature permanent) and the classic card Naturalize (which can destroy any artifact or enchantment in play), symbolizing the destruction of encroaching civilization.
  • The Gaea's Avenger variant also comes into play fairly often, such as with the planeswalker Garruk Wildspeaker or with the card Gaea's Avenger.
• Gathering Steam: Overlapping with its status as a Mighty Glacier, Green tends to be slower but its creatures tend to be more powerful; however, given enough time and lands, and Green can overwhelm most opponents.
• Genetic Memory: A frequent concept in Green cards, most notably Descendant's Path.
• Giant Spider: Spiders are, like most animals, overwhelmingly Green. They almost always get Reach — the ability to block other creatures as if they had Flying — symbolizing flying creatures (which here can be anything from birds to griffins and dragons) getting caught in their webs (or the spider just pulling them from the sky). Notable spiders include the often-reprinted Giant Spider, as well as the gigantic gloomwidows of Shadowmoor and Innistrad.
• Good Old Ways: Tradition is one of the things that Green represents.
• Great Detective: Of all five colors, Green is third in place for the most number of Detective-class creatures in the game.
• Green Means Natural: The colour green is tied to nature. Its mana is drawn from the power of forests, it is the colour with the most efficient creatures, and it's hostile to artifacts and enchantments because they're seen as unnatural. Philosophically, it values letting nature take its course, survival of the fittest, and instinct.
• Green Thumb: Druids always have abilities that either generate mana or improve the use and number of your lands. Common Green spells pull lands right out of your deck and into your hand or onto the field. These are often flavored as the manipulation of plants.
• Healing Factor: Up until it was retired, Green was the runner-up for most creatures with the Regenerate keyword.
• Healing Hands: Green shares the ability to gain life with White. Green tends more to use such abilities to protect its creatures and pump them, while White leans more towards gaining life for itself.
• Hungry Jungle: A common tropical spin on Green’s forests, as a natural result of Green’s love of untamed wilds, its profusion of ravenous monsters and gigantic insects, and its hatred of technology and skill in breaking it down.
• In Harmony with Nature:
  • Many Green healing and card-drawing spells are depicted this way. Green believes that enlightenment doesn’t come from trying to impress your philosophy on the world, but on accepting that the world works fine as it is and learning to listen to it.
  • In the Cast of Personifications blog entries, Green points out that it's the only color who wouldn't wave its hands and make its enemy colors disappear completely if it were able to, since it recognizes that all five colors have a part to play in the balance of nature, even if the others, especially Blue and Black, need to be reined in from time to time.
• The Juggernaut: After White, Green has a lot of creatures with the Indestructible keyword...and being that Green is the king of giant monsters...
• Ludd Was Right: Green has a lot of cards for destroying artifacts and enchantments.
• Make My Monster Grow: One of Green's favorite abilities is to increase the power and toughness of its creatures.
• Making a Splash: Green seems to be gaining more water-based spells lately, such as the ability to control fog (which is technically composed of water droplets) and its newfound association with merfolk in Ixalan. This makes sense, as water is vital for life (which is Green's domain). To contrast Green against Blue, Blue's water-related effects tend to focus on saltwater, while Green's tend to focus on freshwater and water's life-sustaining properties.
• Master Archer: While the creature class has run the gamut of every color, the Archer class is heavily associated with Green; these creatures are Anti-Air specialists often having either Reach or some other effect that targets creatures with Flying.
• Mighty Glacier: The general playstyle of mono-green decks, if not focused on "green weenies" detailed above, are "ramp decks" which often involve devoting their first few turns to getting as many lands into play as possible so they can summon their big creatures a few turns earlier than normal. They may be vulnerable and lack defenses in the early game, but once they fully utilize their wealth of mana later on, there is little stopping them.
• Might Makes Right: A common Green-associated philosophy. This also ties into Green's unique method of creature removal — fight effects forcibly cause creatures to do damage to each other without needing to go into combat or declare a block, and green creatures are often strong and tough enough to emerge victorious.
• Mother Nature: In its more positive, nurturing depictions.
• Mushroom Man: The Fungus creature type is a strongly Green-aligned one, and as such the game’s various humanoid and intelligent mushroom creatures, such as the Thallids, have been exclusively Green.
• Nature Equals Plants: Green is strongly associated with Nature, but mostly as forests and plants as opposed to the other elements of nature represented by the other colors.
• Nature Hero: In contrast to Blue's Science Hero.
• Nature Is Not Nice: There are many cards that reflect the life-giving and nurturing face of Mother Nature. There are also many cards that reflect Mother Nature's brutality. Green planeswalker Nissa Revane, anyone?
• Nature vs. Nurture: Takes nature's side, obviously. Green believes your nature and destiny are dictated by your genes/fate/God/whatever.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted. Like in White, some Green characters with healing powers can be evil.
• No-Sell: More recent Green creatures like Carnage Tyrant have been printed with the "can't be countered" ability, letting them comfortably play their big beaters without need to worry about Blue having a response.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Centaurs are a traditionally green creature type, and while mostly fairly standard there are some unusual variations. Gruul centaurs from Ravnica, for instance, have large antlers, as did some Dominarian centaurs from the Ice Age, while other Dominarian centaurs have the heads and lower bodies of antelopes. They’re also a major race in Theros, where they’re divided between the civilized Lagonna Band and the barbaric, aggressive Pheres Band, and where they chiefly worship Nylea, the God of the hunt, and Pharika, the God of poisons and medicine.
• Our Elves Are Different: Green’s characteristic humanoid creature, they usually fit the High Elves (if mixed with White) or Wood Elves types pretty well, but the horned, goat-hooved and extremely xenophobic elves of Lorwyn are much closer to The Fair Folk.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Giants are more associated with Red, but given Green belief in Might Makes Right, it currently has the second-most Giant-type creatures in the game.
• Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are Green's iconic creatures. Most are quadrupedal, but some have only two limbs. Many have mechanics themed around increasing their strength when they're dealt damage, symbolizing new heads growing from the stumps of severed ones.
  • The hydras native to Dominaria and Rath are Red- rather than Green-aligned, and live in mountains and volcanic badlands; as these were the first hydra cards printed in real life, this is an artifact from before the Hydra creature type settled into its current identity.
  • Several hydras, such as those from Tarkir and those from Amonkhet, are snakelike to the point of explicitly having cobra hoods and heads, and are typed as both Snakes and Hydras.
  • Ravnica is home to phytohydras, serpentine carnivorous plants that only grow back more and more energetically the more they're cut back.
  • In the Theros block, the planeswalker Elspeth Tirel has to fight Polukranos, a hydra that is dubbed the World Eater with very little apparent hyperbole, which used to lair in the realm of the gods before literally falling to earth as a result of a battle between two deities.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: Dryads are reclusive forest dwellers and wardens of nature, usually appearing as humanoid women with pointed ears and sometimes green skin and hair. Other times they're out-and-out Plant Persons. Some believe them to be the dreams of trees.
  • On Ravnica they're strongly associated with the Selesnya Conclave, the guild responsible for maintaining the plane's green spaces. The founder of the Conclave, Mat'Selesnya, was formed from the fusion of multiple dryads, and the guild's current leader, Trostani, is a group of three conjoined dryads acting as Mat'Selesnya's "face".
  • On Theros, nymphs exist as a separate creature type and are divinely-created servants of the gods. All dryads found on Theros, notably, are typed as both nymphs and dryads and serve Nylea, the goddess of the hunt and the wilderness. Theros is the only plane so far to feature other types of nymphs for the other colors — alseids for White, naiads for Blue, lampads for Black and oreads for Red.
• Our Trolls Are Different: Most cards of the Troll type will be green. Before it was eventually removed, all Trolls had the Regenerate keyword.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Green currently has the most creatures of the Werewolf type in the game, many of them playing around with the Day/Night cycle as per the legend, transforming depending on whether it is currently day or night on the field.
• Plant Person: Both Dryads and Treefolk are Green creature types.
• Poisonous Person: Delivered by all sorts of venomous critters. Green, in contrast to Black, favors naturally occurring venom over the unnatural pollution that characterizes Black poisons. It is also has the second-most cards that generate Poison Counters.
• The Power of Friendship: Along with White and Red, Green is quite focused on interpersonal connections and bonds.
• Prehistoric Monster: Green currently has the most Dinosaur-type creatures in the game, followed in second place by Red.
• Puny Earthlings: Green is big on the idea that no one person, civilization, or species can be truly significant in the grand scheme of things, and green characters have been known to make Breaking Speeches about the futility of trying to be remembered in the face of the grand Time Abyss of history.
• Ranger: Just as with archers, a lot of Ranger-class creatures will be Green.
• Rhino Rampage: Rhinos are a predominantly Green creature type. Rhino cards often get the Trample keyword, and occasionally an ability limiting the other player's ability to block them.
• Quantity vs. Quality: Green has this sentiment in its relationship to White, being the Quality side of the equation, which shows in its penchant for unleashing the Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever upon enemies.
• Scary Scorpions: While scorpions are more heavily aligned with black, you're just as likely to get scorpions in Green too...sometimes in Green and Black.
• Science Is Bad: Green's philosophy, leading to Green getting a lot of anti-artifact spells.
• Screwball Squirrel: Squirrels are a green creature type, and tend to be portrayed rather humorously (although they become more and more of a genuine threat as they get more cards.)
• Snakes Are Sinister: Snakes tend to be heavily aligned with Green, but given Green's propensity for the Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, expect to see giant snakes too.
• The Social Darwinist: At its worst.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: While the dynamic is mostly with Red, Green can also be the Warrior to White, especially since it has the second-largest number of Warrior-class creatures.
• Super-Strength: Green has many terrifyingly large creatures, following from its emphasis on growth. It also has a lot of spells that boost power and toughness, often to a greater degree than other colors.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Besides White, Green has a lot of creatures with Vigilance in large numbers.
• Terraforming: Every other color does this to a limited extent, but Green is particularly known for this as it has a lot of cards that revolve around putting out more lands, whether it's allowing you to play a second land on your turn, or straight-up searching them out from your deck and putting them into your hand or the field (the latter of which will usually have those lands tapped), but this helps in the long run given that Green's propensity for bringing out the Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever requires you to have a lot of lands.
• The Great Serpent: Given Green's propensity for the Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, it's no surprise that you'd be seeing giant snakes...but Green is a color heavily associated with Wurms, a gigantic species of reptile with a serpentine body and a dragon's head.
• Training from Hell: It's not unusual for Green creatures to be permanently toughened up by getting hurt first.
• Treants:
  • Treefolk are a staple type of large Green creatures. For the most part fairly standard examples, they usually appear as reclusive forest dwellers and wardens of the wild, often on good terms with the local elves. Some planes have their own variations:
    • In Lorwyn, the treefolk are the most ancient and long-lived of the intelligent races, and are viewed with great respect by their younger neighbors. They reproduce by spreading large amounts of seeds that grow into regular trees, some of which eventually awaken into new treefolk. They differ in size, physical and magical abilities and role in treefolk society based on the species of tree they resemble — for instance, oak treefolk are the largest and strongest of their kind, black poplars are healers and rowans are magicians. They're also the only species on the plane to be on generally decent terms with Lorwyn's highly xenophobic elves.
    • In Lorwyn's dark mirror Shadowmoor, the treefolk become warped, skeletal mockeries of their old selves, often only barely humanoid and highly aggressive towards other beings.
    • In the Gothic Horror-inspired plane of Innistrad, most treefolk creatures are nothing like humanoid, appearing as little more than aggressive, mobile trees with woody, fanged slashes for mouths, but traditionally humanoid treefolk show up the Shadows over Innistrad block. Regardless of their form, some bits of flavor imply they're technically trees possessed by spirits. Innistrad is also home to the only spirit treefolk in the game so far, Yew Spirit.
    • In the underworld of Theros, the Black Oak of Odunos — despite its typing as a Treefolk — is less "a zombified tree" and more "a tree made of zombies".
  • Outside of true treefolk, Green-aligned elementals such as Conifer Strider and Verdant Force commonly appear as towering humanoid trees or agglomerations of plant matter. They often exist as protectors of forests and other wild places against advancing civilization, whether they arise spontaneously for this role or are purposefully created out of preexisting plantlife by powerful entities.
• That's No Moon: Green is in love with the idea of land animation.
• Touch of Death: Being that Green is a Poisonous Person, it is the only other color than Black that has creatures with Deathtouch in significant numbers.
• Villainous Glutton: One of Green's greatest sins is its tendency to overindulge. After all, Green follows instinct, and indulgence is nothing if not instinctual. Particularly prominent with Green Phyrexians.
• When Trees Attack: Aggressive plants of various types are a staple of Green.
  • The Treefolk, Dryad and Plant creature types, while not inherently hostile or homicidal in the lore, are usually represented this way due to the game's focus on battling. Some elementals also end up in this area.
  • There are various creatures and spells — such as Awakener Druid, Rude Awakening and Liege of the Tangle^note  the Tangle is the forest part of Mirrodin, full of living copper trees — that, while not walking trees themselves, can turn lands you control into vengeful armies of creatures that can curbstomp dragons and eldritch abominations. While any land can be turned into this, the Green nature of these cards generally implies the animation of forests.
  • Stirring Wildwood, in which the entire frakking forest snatches your pteranodon rider out of the air and smashes it into the dirt. Unlike other such cards, it does not need an outside trigger to do this, but can "awaken" itself of its own accord.
• You Can't Fight Fate: The belief that we all have a destiny to follow and a set place in the natural order is a core tenet of Green's philosophy and, as such, a major point of contention for both Blue and Black, which firmly believe you can become anything you want.
• Zerg Rush: Gets in on this with Elves, with quite a few cards that either buff Elves or make Elf Tokens. Thallids too, given that a good number of them are capable of creating Saprolings.

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