A Deep Dive into MTG Colour Combinations and Their Unique Identities

Magic: The Gathering’s success is often chalked up to its invention of the trading card game genre, its decades of releases, and its gorgeous worlds and fascinating characters. However, one of the most interesting and underrated aspects of it is the five colours that underpin the entire game.

Every card in Magic is split between white, blue, black, red, and green. With just five colours, Magic’s managed to make a whole ‘colour pie’ of mechanics, entire settings based on what happens when those colours meet, and endless debates on the colour identities of various characters. Understanding every colour is key to understanding Magic itself, so make sure you brush up on the whopping 32 colour combinations.

Introduction to MTG Colour Philosophy

As mentioned, Magic: The Gathering splits its cards between five different colours. White, blue, black, red, and green can all be found on the back of every single card, and the way these colours interact with each other and what they represent is a core part of Magic’s design.

Each colour has its own philosophy. What is represents, both in terms of what the characters and settings that primarily use it stand for, and in how it plays in the game itself.

White is all about order and control. The survival of the collective is more important then the wellbeing of the individual, which means white often likes making lots of dispensable creature tokens and is the best colour for removal. Don’t mistake white for inherently being good, as while healers and clerics are often found in white, taken to the extremes white’s ideals can look scarily similar to fascism.

Blue focuses on perfection through knowledge. It doesn’t have the moral element of white, and instead only cares about gaining as much knowledge and experience as possible. While blue struggles with removal, it is the best for drawing cards and countering spells. Mill, spellslinging, and proliferate decks often rely on blue.

Black is the most self-centred of the colours, caring about power at any cost. Sacrifice any permanents you have, discarding cards, or cutting in to your own life total are all fair game for black if it gives you the edge. Ruthless but not necessarily evil, black is often associated with Zombie decks, hand destruction, creature removal, and graveyard strategies.

Red is all about passion. Go hard, go fast, don’t care about the consequences. Red loves aggro decks, direct damage, and exiling cards off the top of your library, and philosophically it is an incredibly impulsive and emotional colour. Its also the best colour for direct damage, making burn decks a staple of red.

Finally, green, like blue, cares about perfection and growth. However, green cares about the natural order, and believes that the way things are is the way things were always meant to be. Nature and growth are key themes of green, and by using its many ramping tools to get as many lands as possible out, green players often love to drop big, stompy creatures to get the job done.

Depending on how you like to play Magic, you’ll sometimes find yourself swaying towards some colours and away from others. For instance, my favourite colours are white, blue, and green. It’s important you learn to harness all five colours, though, as even the colours you’re less familiar with might come into their own in an unexpected colour combination.

The Significance Of Colour Combinations In Gameplay

Your deck isn’t limited to just one colour. In fact, by combining colours you can account for one colour’s weaknesses while shoring up its strengths. There’s no “best” colour pair, but being able to balance two or three can help make your deck so much stronger.

For instance, blue is awful at removing things once they’re on the battlefield. Meanwhile, white struggles with drawing cards. By combining the two, you have the strongest colour pair for control decks in the game, thanks to blue’s ample draw and white’s hefty removal. Meanwhile, red can provide green decks with an added bit of speed for the perfect aggro combo.

Though it’s tempting to stuff as many colours as possible into your deck, it’s usually recommended that you stick to two or perhaps three colours at most. This means you can build up your deck’s strategy so much easier, and you can also balance your deck’s land amounts better to make sure you’re not caught short on the mana you need.

Exploring Two-Colour Pairs And Their Guild Associations

The first time Magic really explored the potential of two colours was in the plane of Ravnica. The city of Ravnica is controlled by ten guilds, who all represent a colour pair that defines their orle in the city and helps give the two colours a mechanical identity of their own. Because of this, we often describe colour pairs by their guild name, rather than just by the colours they are.

The Azorius Senate is the white/blue guild of lawers and judges. As mentioned before, white and blue combine to make a killer control pair, and Azorius decks usually like to counter spells, draw cards, and control the pace of the game.

House Dimir is the only recently uncovered blue/black guild of Ravnica. Full of spies and cutthroats, it’s a sneaky colour pair that likes to combine the control aspect of blue with the easier creature removal and graveyard synergies of black. Expect lots of self-mill and drawing cards here.

The Cult of Rakdos are the stalwart entertainers of Ravnica. But this black/red guild are fiery, unpredictable, violent, and sadistic. Their performances are often topped off with a bloodbath, and Rakdos decks love sacrificing their own things for any kind of an advantage.

The Gruul Clans are less of an official guild and more a loose collection of the feral outsiders of Ravnica. Seeking to tear the city to the ground and return it to the wilds, this red/green clan loves big creatures hitting fast more than anything else.

The Selesnya Conclave are a cult-like collective of people who, like the Gruul, seek to protect the nature of Ravnica. However, they do this through bringing as many people into the fold as possible with a highly collectivistic attitude that loves going wide with tokens and buffing things with +1/+1 counters.

The Orzhov Syndicate are both the church and bank of Ravnica. Combining white’s love of order with black’s love of individual power, the Orzhov are simultaneously clerics and crooks, putting taxes on your opponent’s spells and using the graveyard and Spirit tokens as a means to an end.

The Izzet League is the red/blue guild of inventors, tinkerers, and municipal workers of Ravnica. They focus on generating energy for the city and keeping its infrastructure chugging, but behind the scenes their wacky and impulsive experiences can cause massive damage. Spellslinging and artifacts are often closely tied with Izzet decks.

The Golgari Swarm is the black/green guild that works as the city’s sewage workers, gravediggers, and, worryingly, farmers. Golgari is very heavily tied with the graveyard, with lots of creature reanimation, death triggers, and other ways to benefit from a heaving pile of dead creatures.

Red/white is the home of the Boros Legion, Ravnica’s army and law enforcement. Soldier tokens, Equipment, and Combat-matters decks are often found in Boros colours, although depending on the setting it’s also bene tied with artifacts and Spirit tokens as well.

Finally, the Simic Combine are theblue/green scientists of Ravnica. They care about perfecting evolution through horrific biological experiments. In practice, this means Simic is incredible at ramping out lands, playing big creatures, and turning things into other things at the trop of a hat. Never underestimate a Simic player, and “Simic doing Simic things” is a meme in the community for a reason.

The Dynamics Of Three-Colour Combinations

Three-colour combinations in Magic are grouped together into Shards and Wedges. Look at the back of a Magic card, and you’ll find all five colours in a circle. A shard is three colours that are directly next to each other, while a wedge is two colours next to each other, and the colour directly opposite them.

Shards are named after the five shards of the plane known as Alara: Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund, and Naya.

Bant is white, blue, and green. It’s mostly a peaceful plane, with the order of white, the knowledge of blue, and the nature of green all coming together to make a world of valiant knights and strong, towering castles. There’s no impulsivity or self-centeredness here, with Bant often loving lifegain and enchantment decks as you build up a nice, tranquil advantage.

Like Bant, Esper is “perfect”. However, with the loss of green’s nature, the white, blue, and black world is a lot colder and more regimented. Nothing unplanned happens on Esper, making the wedge excellent for ant kind of artifact deck.

Grixis is the closest thing to actual Hell Magic: The Gathering will ever see. Devoid of life and crawling with the undead, the blue, black, and red decks are absolutely brutal in how they cast away cards, sacrifice creatures, and control the game through any means necessary.

Jund is an untamed wild where might makes right. Only the strong survive on Jund, meaning it’s home to all sorts of black, red, and green decks focused on big, stompy creatures and hitting your opponent in the face very, very hard.

The final shard is Naya. Full of pasion and growth like Jund, Naya’s white, red, and green colours give Naya a harmonious relationship to the wilds that gives it the edge for go-wide asggro decks full of creature token ready to rock.

Wedges, meanwhile, are named after the five tribes of Tarkir, before Sarkhan Vol changed the past. These are the Abzan, Mardu, Temur, Sultai, and Sultai.

Abzan is white, black, and green, and cares on the growth of the famuly above all else. Going wide with tokens, but also having ways to sacrifice them for the greater good, expect plenty of +1/+1 counters decks and sacrifice-heavy Aristocrats decks when playing this wedge.

The red, white, and blue Jeskai are a clan of spiritual martial artists. On top of having the three colours most associated with flying, Jeskai decks also love slinging spells and casting combat tricks to sneak in extra damage.

The Sultai Brood are the black, green, and blue clan of Tarkir. Selfish and ruthless, they combine blue’s thirst for knowledge with black’s self-centeredness, but with the addition of green to enforce its desires even deeper. Sultai decks can range creatly, from Snow-matters decks in Kaldheim, to -1/-1 counters in Tarkir.

Like Ravnica’s Boros Legion, the Mardu love combat. Extra combat, buffing it with equipment, and anything else that perpetuates violence is in Mardu’s wheelhouse, and the addition of black lets you more ruthlessly keep blockers out the way as well.

Finally, the Temur Frontier is a wild and difficult to tame colour triad. They represent the savagery of Tarkir, and are usually known for having decks focused on big, stompy creatures. Temur decks often have ways of putting extra things onto the battlefield to flood the board, like Beluna Grandsquall’s cost reduction, Malestrom Wanderer’s double cascade, or Xyris, the Writhing Storm’s token generation.

The Rarity And Lore Of Four-Colour Combinations

Perhaps the least common colour groupings are the four-colours. These are incredibly rare – for instance, there’s only one commander with black, red, green, and white colours, but no blue.

These colours are named after the Nephilim, a group of creatures from Ravnica. However, this slang is much less common than the likes of Golgari or Temur, and so you’ll just as often run into people explaining their colours as what they lack, such as “not-blue” or “not-red”.

Yore-Tiller is white, blue, black, and red. The only commander with these colours is a popular one, with Breya, Etherium Shaper’s artifact-heavy strategy.

Blue, black, red, and green is known as Glint-Eye. Again, there’s only one commander with these colours in Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder having a heavy cascade theme to really power up Temur decks with the extra black colour.

The aforementioned not-blue commander is the black, red, green, and white Saskia the Unyielding, who lets you pick on a specific opponent by having all your creatures deal extra damage to them as well regardless of who they hit.

Ink-Treader is red, green, white, and blue, and is by far the most common four-colour group for commander with a whole four cards. Two of those are found in Universes Beyond, with Aragorn the Unifier serving as a good general Good Stuff toolbox deck for the four colours, while The Fourteenth Doctor ties together Time Lords and lets you play every incarnation of The Doctor in a single deck.

Finally, Witch-Maw might not have many cards associated with it, but the green, white, blue, and black colour group is home to the most popular commander in all of Magic, with Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice. Both it and Atraxa, Grand Unifier are incredibly powerful and swingy cards, with the former being the go-to proliferate commander, and the latter being one of the best reanimation targets in the entire game.

The Ultimate Five-Colour Combination And Its Implications

At last, we’re at the five-colour combo, also known as WUBRG (the U comes from the third letter in blue).

WUBRG decks are a curious bunch. On the one hand, they can be incredibly powerful, as having all five colours available keeps your options as open as possible. Take Kenrith, the Returned King – all five colours give you a toolbox better than anything else. If you want flexibility, WUBRG is the way to go.

On the other hand, though, WUBRG is also the most difficult colour combo torun, as you need to be much more efficient in your mana base. You need all five colours of mana, and you need them consistently, which can push you into playing rarer, more expensive lands like shocks, triomes, or even dual lands. It’s heavily recommended you avoid WUBRG in limited environments like sealed and draft for this very reason.

How To Choose The Right Colour Combinations For Your Deck

One of the easiest mistakes a new Magic: The Gathering player can make is feeling the need to commit to specific colours. “I am a green player, and so must only play green decks.”

Instead, it’s easier to think about your deck in terms of what you would like it to do, and then determine the best colours to do it. If you like reanimating creatures and playing with your graveyard, Golgari would be the way to go. If you wsnt to control the board, Azorius is better.

Over time, you’ll find colour combinations you like more naturally. I love white, blue, and green, and most of my decks are in those colours. But I’m not averse to playing red and black, because I gave myself time to learn and play them.

The Art Of Mastering MTG Colour Combinations

Magic wouldn’t be Magic without its colours. Pokémon may have its types, Yu-Gi-Oh! may have its elements, and Lorcana may have its inks, but none of them tie their mechanics or their identity into them anywhere near as much as Magic.

Experiment. Try as many different decks as possible, and find what you like. Whether it’s the simplicity of a mono-coloured deck or the flexibility of WUBRG, finding your groove and building your knowledge of how colours relate to each other will improve every aspect of your game!