The Magic Color Series - Blue Bloods

Hey everyone! I apologize for the hiatus last week - as of now, my plan for this blog is to update every Friday. But I was visiting a friend for the weekend and didn't have the time to put together this post, so it's going up this Friday instead. In any case, welcome back!

Three weeks ago, I wrote the first article in this series, on the color white. As I mentioned then, I would like to devote one article to each color in the Magic: the Gathering "color pie," so today, I want to talk about the second color in our sequence - blue!

You can see the color pie on the back of any Magic card,

 by the way. We started at the top with white, and we're

going clockwise from there.

So just as a refresher, in Magic, cards are assigned one of five colors - white, blue, black, red, or green. Each color represents mana, the magical power used in the game to cast spells, and corresponds to a certain type of land - so plains provide white mana, islands provide blue, swamps provide black, mountains provide red, and forests provide green. But what I really like about the color pie is that each color represents certain values and principles, which tend to be reflected in the cards themselves. (This also makes Magic colors a pretty decent personality test - my friends and I have often sat around assigning people colors for fun.) Plus, the system is really what makes Magic, Magic. By mixing and matching which colors you use, you can create a huge variety of deck styles and gameplay patterns.

Alright, let's dive into blue!

What does blue represent?

Blue is, generally speaking, the color of logic and knowledge and reason. That being said, it's also the color of manipulation and control, in several different ways. Oftentimes, it feels like knowledge in an arrogant sense - like, "I'm smarter than you, so watch as I manipulate you to my heart's content." But that's not really the core of blue. If white is concerned with the greater good (between order, and purity, and morality, and all that fun stuff), then blue is just concerned with omniscience. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Colors in Magic don't strictly correspond with the four classical elements - air, earth, fire, and water - but there are definitely trends here. Blue (as the symbol suggests) is mostly closely related to water, as well as air in many cases. White, by contrast, doesn't really have an element to correspond to. There's some overlap between white and blue for air, but other than that, white is more often related to light (yes, I know that's not one of the four elements, but you'll have to bear with me on that one.)

What does this mean for gameplay?

As the color of knowledge and reason, blue is where you find most of the artificers and scientists and wizards in Magic, as well as their constructs (like illusions and artifact-related effects). If there's a blue creature that's just a typical animal, it tends to be something like a bird or an aquatic animal, and these creatures often have bonus effects that help manipulate the battlefield in some way, shape, or form. Usually, blue creatures are fairly weak, especially offensively, but they often have other effects or abilities that make them useful.

"Usually" being the key word in that last sentence.

One idea that was presented to me a while ago (I don't remember where I read this) was the idea that, in Magic, your deck of cards represents all the different things that you know, whereas your current hand of cards represents what you are currently thinking. For those who are unaware, in Magic, the player is an entity within the game (a type of wizard called a planeswalker, to be more specific), so this kinda makes sense - you're currently thinking of the spells you have in your hand, and thus those are the ones you can cast. Given this framework, it's pretty easy to see why blue, as the color of knowledge, would be the color that most often draws cards for the sake of drawing cards, as well as manipulating the deck in other ways. Blue is going to be the color that says "hey, let's just take a look at the top four cards of the deck, rearrange them as we see fit, and then draw two of them!" Or something like that. I don't know if that's an actual card; I made that up on the spot.

The other thing with blue, though, is that since blue tries to be clever and manipulative, very rarely will you see any cards that say "destroy target creature." More often than not, you will be returning things to their owners' hands, tapping creatures (essentially making them useless for a turn, for those who don't know what it means to tap something), or countering spells (which you can think of as "I know more about magic than you, so I'm just going to prevent you from casting that spell"). Blue will almost always rely more on trickery and outthinking an opponent, rather than brute force solutions.

Or, you know, you can just turn their creatures into frogs. 

That works too.

My opinions on the color:

Blue is an interesting color, because it can be both very interesting and very bland, depending on how it is played. In many ways, it can be considered the most powerful color, since you'll often have more cards than your opponents - a huge advantage that sometimes goes overlooked. The green player can drop all of her big stompy creatures onto the field, but then she's got no cards in hand and is playing with the one card she draws each turn; meanwhile, you'll be sitting pretty with six cards in your hand and three more coming each turn, giggling at the fact that you'll be turning the tides soon enough.

However, to me, blue is most boring when played on its own. A mono-blue deck just sits back and draws cards, counters spells, and is often more of a nuisance - a very frustrating nuisance - than any real threat. I find that blue often lacks teeth, so to speak. It can be tough to balance out the need for card advantage and control with the need to, you know, actually drop the other player's life total to zero. (Yes, I know mill decks are a thing, but we're going to ignore that on sheer principle for now.)

That being said, blue is absolutely my favorite color to splash into multicolored decks, my favorite color combination being green/blue. You'll be hearing more about green when I get to that article, but basically green just plays a lot of very large, very scary creatures, like bears and hydras and the occasional unusually-large lizard. But again, green can be boring on its own, so when you combine green's stampede tactics with blue's manipulation, you often end up with a very interesting deck that can adapt to different situations pretty decently while still having the means to actually finish off an opponent.

Plus, when you combine green and blue, you get cool stuff

like human insect wizards. How very exciting!

So to sum up, I think blue can be a really cool color, and it's often great to throw into a deck to add some flair and to keep opponents on their toes. But it does suffer a bit when used on its own, at least in my opinion.

Stay tuned - in two weeks, I will be posting up the next article in this series! To read more about blue's place in the color pie, a series of articles was written by Mark Rosewater, Magic's current head designer, on the subject of the color pie. Which is really where I got a lot of my information about the colors anyway. You can find his article about blue by clicking here.