Magic: The Gathering/Analysis: Difference between revisions

* BLUE: White and Blue are allies because they both believe in the common good and in creating improvements in the world, Blue through science and White by focusing on the public good. Having said that, White accomplishes this by implementing laws and regulations, whereas Blue uses technology to improve individuals; one offers police officers, the other plastic surgeons. White and Blue tends to have a lot of "answers;" almost any spell you can play, White and Blue can interfere with somehow. Having said that, Blue tends to strike pre-emptively with [[Anti-Magic|counterspells]] whereas White uses [[Power Nullifier|Power Nullifiers]] after the fact. Plus, counterspells are ''expensive''; White's answers are cheaper but, like most Power Nullifiers, can be removed again, or [[Balance Between Good and Evil|give you something to compensate for your loss]] if it results in a permanent change.

** White/Blue are also the colors of community and society. The laws of white united with the rationality of blue. However Blue/White is the color of [[Lawful Neutral]] and [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]], examples the Azorius in Dissension and the Vogons from ''~The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy~''.

** Ozymandias in [[Watchmen]]. He mixes Blue rationality, {{spoiler|deception}} and praticality with White altruism {{spoiler|and [[Knight Templar]] thinking}}.

** Zeus in [[God of War (series)|God of War]] is a perfect White/Blue villain; much like the kithkin from the Shadowmoor setting and the Azorius (and specially Augustin IV) from [[Magic: The Gathering/Ravnica Cycle|Ravnica]], he is duplicious, [[Light Is Not Good|taking the guise of a benevolent, noble ruler while being a paranoid, obsessive]] [[Complete Monster|monster]] on the inside.

* GREEN: White and Green are both concerned with community. Green is all about keeping everything strong, but also encourages [[The Social Darwinist|Social Darwinism]], which is why it has a [[Badass Army]] and single-target [[Status Buff|Status Buffs]] which make individual creatures stronger. In comparison, White cares about the [[Littlest Cancer Patient]]; it has a [[Redshirt Army]] and use large global buffs to make them ''all'' stronger. What with all the pumping, though, white/green tends to have a ''scary'' ever-growing army when it's done.

** The human resistance in Innistrad is a good example. The humans are fighting for survival against the monsters, and where Green has all the general buffs, White has more cards that get stronger with more humans, along with more cards that incapacitate creatures.

** The Body Snatchers in ''[[Invasion of the Body Snatchers]]'' are, as [[Word of God|Mark Rosewater]] put it, "aliens on a mission". They operate as a collective if not an outright [[Hive Mind]], they're communist allegories, and they look like plants.

** '''[[Friedrich Nietzsche]]''' personifies the worst attributes of Green and White in the Last Man, combining Whites emphasis on conformism and lack of any personal ambition with Greens dislike of thinking and creating to create a being devoid of the will or vision to imrpove or stand out.

** Innistrad's zombies are Blue/Black; the Blue zombies are Frankenstein's-monster-type skaab, and they tend to be stronger at the cost of discarding cards or requiring certain cards in the graveyard. Black has the more standard [[Zombie Apocalypse]] cards, which tend to be slower but inexorable. Where Blue can pull out 6/9 zombies, Black can get four 2/2s.

** [[Harry Potter|Serverus Snape]] is a [[Dark Is Not Evil|sympathetic]] example: he is what you get when you add Blue methods to a [[Byronic Hero]].

**** Mark Rosewater has listed [[Superman|Lex Luthor]], [[Star Trek|The Borg]], [[Harry Potter|Rita Skeeter]] and [[Family Guy|Stewie]] as examples of blue-black colored characters.

* RED: Blue and Red fall on opposite sides of the [[Emotions vs. Stoicism]] spectrum. One's passionate, one's logical; one uses fire, the other uses ice; one's-- Look, do we really need to spell this out? Blue has all the poker-face spells, the ones that win games but only if you have the skill to use them; Red, on the other hand, has all the spells that involve the [[Random Number God]].

*** Notably, Ravnica's Golgari Swarm is one of the few Black guilds to produce a hero - [[Papa Wolf|and a damn caring one at that.]]

*** As someone who identifies strongly with Black/Green, I'd like to chime in here. This intersection of colors is the fullness of the cycle of nature and all of it's complexities. It embodies both life and death, all living things die, but from that death new life comes. It also embraces the entirety of nature...not simply strong beasts, but the worms, the parasites, the bacteria, the mold and fungus. Every form of life is accepted by Black/Green. And for the treatment/consideration of others... Black cares for the self, Green cares for the group. Black/Green cares for both...Black/Green doesn't think about "Me" and "My team": It thinks about "Me and my team." It does what's good for itself and for it's Nakama, it betters itself, but tries to do that in ways that help it's allies. Another bit of harmony between black/green is that it doesn't waste anything. Black sees everything as a resource, and so everything can be used. With Green mixed in, everything can be used then re-used. A creature can be played, then sacrificed, then recovered, only to be played and even sacrificed again, only to be recovered again later. The other half of [[Soylent Green]] is Black.

 

'''RED'''