Hello folks, and welcome to another week here at the Kitchen Table. Today I want to talk about what the relative power levels of the colors are in multiplayer Magic, and which I think are the strongest.
Everybody has a different card pool that they use for Magic. Some have every card ever made, and some have a handful of booster packs and some extra commons given to them by other players. It’s important to understand that not everybody has access to the same cards.
I have placed the colors in order from worst to best in terms of overall power in multiplayer. I looked at creatures, spells, and enchantments to see who had the most power. I even took a quick looksee at the Planeswalkers.
In evaluating the colors, I cannot consider lands, artifacts without color and colorless or multicolor cards. Cards like Fire/Ice and Spiritmonger do not count in their color. However, there is an exception. When an artifact or land must be played with a color to work (Volrath’s Stronghold for Black, Crystal Shard for Blue, etc), I counted it.
Any color’s weaknesses can be shorn up by playing other colors, but this gives you an idea of where the power is at.
Want to know my personal rankings, and what you can do about the color to give yourself a fighting chance? Let’s take a look!
5. Red
Anyone who read my article from a few weeks ago should hardly be surprised that Red is the weakest color in multiplayer to my mind. And it’s not just me. Many of the comments to that article were from EDH players who were never able to find much in Red to recommend it beyond burn.
Red’s major ability to destroy land still has value in multiplayer where it can hit trouble lands. However, as a way of forcing tempo, it has no value at all, beside the occasional expensive Armageddon variant like Epicenter. Armageddon is not multiplayer friendly, so I wouldn’t concentrate on that.
Where Red rules is dealing damage, and it can deal damage in anything from Earthquake to Slide and Dice to Arc Lightning to Fireball. Burn gives you early creature kill, and much of it can yield some card advantage, like Rolling Thunder. It also gives you the potent X spell to just kill players. Red has a powerful array of spells to kill multiple creatures with burn, and to kill players with an X spell to the head.
After that, Red’s spells begin to get a little thin. There is a rare spell, like Wheel of Fortune, that can help. There just aren’t many rare cards like that.
There are cards you can build around like Goblin Welder, however. Red has a love-hate relationship with artifacts. It has a lot of ways of blowing them up, and some are great for multiplayer, like Viashino Heretic and Shattering Pulse. Everybody loves the Heretic because not only is it a good blocker, but it can deal a significant amount of damage to a player. It can deal 11 damage to a Darksteel Colossus’s master each turn, and that’s pretty cool. There are a lot of ways to hose and destroy artifacts at the multiplayer table for Red, so it’s ready to smash.
However, Red has cards like Trash for Treasure; Slobad, Goblin Tinker; and Godo, Bandit Warlord that help artifacts. All of these, plus that Goblin Welder and a few others you can find, can make for a powerful pro-artifact deck from the Red side of the spectrum.
Red has a few ways of messing with the multiplayer table with these janky enchantments, like Grand Melee and Bedlam. Make sure you take a look at rare Red enchantments in order to find the tools for a cool Red deck. There certainly are not enough, but you can find always some really nifty tricks out there for building around, and throwing the table into havoc.
Red’s cards tend to want to trade one-for-one, which sucks in multiplayer, where opponents are outdrawing you by droves . Thus, remember to focus on cards that get you card advantage, like Viashino Heretic or Rolling Thunder.
In terms of creatures, Red has several powerful ways it can typically go. Dragons are great in multiplayer because the skies are often quite crowded, and Red can hold its own there. There are also some non-Dragon flyers that rock too, like Avatar of Fury or Akroma, Angel of Fury. You can easily pack enough Red flyers in a deck in order to challenge the other king of flying (White), and frankly, you have the second best flyers, so that shores up some of your weaknesses. Multiplayer often comes down to a battle of the skies, and you have the second most powerful air game, so don’t deny it when you build decks.
Another way to go is to play creatures that kill other creatures, typically through damage. Ghitu Slinger; Flametongue Kavu; Kamahl, Pit Fighter; Kumano, Master Yamabushi — all are good examples of this sort of creature. You can gain some card advantage by killing the weenies.
You can play some good walls, but yours are weaker. Defense is really not Red’s suit. In multiplayer, offense is not as powerful as it is in duels, and defense is better than it is in duels. Thus, Red’s power diminishes.
If you are going to play Red, understand its weaknesses and embrace its few strengths. Good luck!
4. Green
I love Green in many of my decks, because it works so well with other colors. However, in multiplayer, Green does not play well alone.
Like Red, Green has a lot of cards that are not card advantage. This is especially true in land searching. Sure, you have the more expensive spells like Explosive Vegetation, but Green often has things like Rampant Growth which merely accelerate one’s mana development. This is why I like cards like Krosan Tusker and Kodama’s Reach for my mana smoothing, because they are card advantage.
Many of Green’s mechanics are not great in multiplayer. Fogs just stop one attack, and you can get attacked three or four more times before you get to untap. Giant Growths just don’t play well here. Auras are usually poor except for a few all stars like Rancor and perhaps the totem armor ones from the newest set.
The one good thing about Green now is that you can take out artifacts and enchantments with ease. There are great cards, such as Krosan Grip, out there and ready to be used. Lots of strong stuff for multiplayer is rocking the emerald border.
Where Green has strength is in its creature tutor theme. Sure, Worldly Tutor is not much, but Defense of the Heart and Tooth and Nail are among the most powerful effects you can have in multiplayer.
Another strength Green has is recursion. With cards like Genesis and Eternal Witness, you have some serious power that can impact the board for a while. Even stuff like Masked Admirers have a role to play in keeping the pressure on.
Green is much better than Red in playing defense. It has a lot of classic walls for two and three mana that can really add to your defense, and it even has Traproot Kami as a one drop. Here are some great two drops: Wall of Blossoms, Wall of Roots, Wall of Mulch, Thallid-Shell Dweller, Vine Trellis, and the new Overgrown Battlement. All of these add power to your team, whether it’s the production of mana, production of creatures, or drawing cards, and all are cheap and effective.
Green loves to smash flyers, and it has the best flying sweeper of all time in Whirlwind. There are tons of other sweepers from Needle Storm to Hurricane, plus cards like Wing Snare. Remember how I said that multiplayer games often have a large air force? Green can really fight this tendency, but only by destroying them. Green is just lousy at flyers. You might as well ignore stuff like Canopy Dragon and Jugan.
Another issue with Green is that typically, Green needs to swarm you in order to win, by having lots of elves or weenies or bigger fatties. All of these strategies walk right into mass removal. Smart Green players get around this by playing tokens, or creatures that recur like Weatherseed Treefolk. A Centaur Glade and its 10 3/3 centaur tokens might not like that Rout getting cast, but you can reload without losing cards and power.
Green needs to focus on what it has — great ground creatures. From Acidic Ooze to Essence Warden to Silvos, Green has great creatures in every casting cost on the curve, and that power can add up to a win. Just remember to avoid the overplaying of creatures to avoid a devastating Wrath, or play counter measures like Cauldron of Souls.
3. Blue
I want you to listen to me for a second as I give you an important piece of information. If Blue did not have so many great ways to gain card advantage through raw card drawing, it would be the worst color in multiplayer, without question.
I peg Red for having too much one for one card trades, but no mechanic is focused more on them than countermagic. Counterspells are important in stopping the really, really bad stuff from happening, but they are innately card disadvantage. No deck wins with a lot of counters. Even the best counters from duels are subject to this weakness. Only a handful, like Draining Whelk and Dismiss can get you some card advantage.
A worse mechanic is bounce, and Blue has a ton of bounce. This is usually card disadvantage and the tempo gain is worthless in multiplayer. When I play bounce, I like to focus on the handful of cards that are card equilibrium like Repulse or multicolored ones like Jilt, Recoil and Aether Mutation. Even reusable bounce like Tradewind Rider and Capsize are not super, uber powerful like other mechanics.
Blue does have a very strong multiplayer friendly mechanic in stealing, especially creature stealing. Taking someone else’s creature permanently and beating down with it is a time tested way of getting some extra damage in. From Control Magic and Dominate through Chromeshell Crab and Confiscate — the ability to grab a creature and swing with it is great. A Control Magic always gets you the best creature on the board for four mana, so you know it will be something valuable. Sure, it’s vulnerable to enchantment removal, but you can run methods like the aforementioned Dominate. This is one of the more valuable abilities of Blue in multiplayer, so I’d try to play it often.
Blue is a lot more artifact friendly than Red, and you have a ton more cards, from Tinker to Master of Etherium to March of the Machines to roll out. There are scads of decks you could build around Blue and artifacts.
There are also a large variety of great cards to build around in Blue. Blue often gets the zany cards that don’t fit anywhere else. You can build around them with a lot of fun. And ease!
Blue has some powerful multiplayer cards, like Propaganda and Pendrell Mists. There’s definitely some serious value in some of these cards that really can dominate a table. This helps gives Blue some staying power, defense, and control for the board.
You might think that Blue has these great flyers that compete in the sky, but it really doesn’t. It has some great cards in multiple colors, like Simic Sky Swallower. Every color has that though. It does not have many by itself that truly match the power elsewhere. The few that are great, like Keiga or Meloku, need to be accentuated. Recently, a few Blue Sphinxes have had some solid power, and I’d not be afraid to roll out Goliath Sphinx or the new Sphinx of Magosi, but for the most part, you are really running behind the rest of the pack in terms of flyers with power, good casting cost and great abilities.
Blue does not have as many good defensive creatures as many other colors, despite what you might think. Sure, you have a few good cards like Fog Bank and Guard Gomazoa. You also have cards that have higher toughnesses as nice wallish creatures but with the power to swing later. What you do not have are these top defensive creatures for the color and the cost. I’d much rather be dropping Beloved Chaplain or Wall of Blossoms than Fog Bank.
Blue has the best utility creatures though — guys like Trinket Mage and Man-o’-War and Draining Whelk and Prodigal Sorcerer and even stuff like Pestermite and Crookclaw Transmuter do a lot of things for your decks. No one has as many creatures that play havoc with the board.
Blue lacks the ability to destroy enchantments, artifacts, and creatures usually (but it does have some cards like Ovinize, Pongify and Psionic Blast to help with that), so you have to rely on stealing, countermagic, and overpowering. This weakens it, especially when you look at the traditional weaknesses of many of the color’s core abilities.
Just two left.
2. Black
Where Black shines is the ability to do a lot of things that other colors can do. Red destroys lands. So does Black. Red deals X damage to creatures and players. Black deals X damage and gains X life too. White destroys creatures. Black destroys creatures, but not as well. Blue draws cards. Black draws cards, usually at the loss of life.
Like Red, Black cannot harm enchantments, and like Blue, Black really can’t do much about artifacts outside of Gate to Phyrexia and Phyrexian Tribute. However, within that limit, Black can do a lot.
Black gets discard. Discard is generally worse in multiplayer than in duels, so you don’t want as much of it. I’d rather draw three cards than force a discard of three cards, for example. Both might be the same advantage, but one makes an enemy and the other doesn’t . There are a few cards that hit everybody, like Syphon Mind — which is a great card drawing spell in multiplayer, or Cackling Fiend. Usually, discard does not scale well in multiplayer. For example, Hymn to Tourach still leaves you down in the card count game if there are four or more players.
Black is usually known for killing creatures. Although Black has a ton of spells and abilities that kill, they usually have some weakness or other. Usually it can’t kill Black creatures, but sometimes, it can’t kill an Elf, or a Spirit, an artifact creature, or a Snow creature. Adding these sorts of cards your deck can cover for each other. Sometimes it kills with an Edict, which can hit untargetables if they are the only creatures out. Sometimes it kills with —x/-x’ing and that can take out small to mid range creatures. No matter what, it has issues taking out any creature.
Black has a smattering of sweeping removal here and there with cards like Massacre, Decree of Pain, Plague Wind, Hellfire, Overwhelming Forces, Rain of Daggers, and of course, Damnation. Adding a nice sweeping removal adjunct to an already successful suite of removal can really ruin someone’s day. Terror, Rend Flesh, and Diabolic Edict like being played alongside a card like Massacre or Damnation. It makes them happy.
Black’s strengths move towards reanimation of creatures. It loves to spend a bit if mana and bring a guy back out of someone’s graveyard and either into your hand or into play on your behalf. Many of these cards are easily to build around and we’ve seen tons of decks throughout the game of Magic built around Black’s reanimation. From Zombify to Animate Dead to Recover and more, Black owns the reanimation of its own creatures. It can work pretty well in multiplayer, where mass removal is quite common. Even Volrath’s Stronghold provides recursion, sorta.
Black has a ton of great utility creatures, just like Blue. Its CIP creatures include discard (Ravenous Rats, Cackling Fiend), creature kill (Nekrataal, Shriekmaw), drawing cards (Phyrexian Rager), reanimation (Gravedigger, Crypt Angel), and tons of other things (Skeletal Vampire, Spike Cannibal, Highway Robber, etc).
Black also has a ton of utility creatures like Royal Assassin, Sorceress Queen, Abyssal Hunter, Coffin Queen, and others. It can do a lot, and just about any deck idea can use some Black creatures to assist.
Black has one of the best first turn defensive creature drops ever in Will-o’-the-Wisp. It requires mana to regenerate, and it won’t keep two Savannah Lions from attacking, but otherwise, it will stay out there, survive some mass removal, and be a pest for the game, threatening to block much that goes around. Although Black certainly has a few walls and defensive creatures, they aren’t cheap, or they aren’t good. Black pays for good defense. In fact, Black’s view of a good defense is to probably just kill the creatures that offends, rather than block.
Like Green and Red, Black does aggro very well, and can walk into mass removal if not planned well. Unlike Green or Red (and even White), Black can follow up with something like Twilight’s Call or Patriarch’s Bidding and bring back their whole army.
In terms of flyers, Black takes a step back. They are about on par with Blue’s, and tied for 3 on the list because I think they are a bit better. There are some obvious winners, like Kokusho, Visara and a variety of vampires, but the vampires are usually outclasses by angels and/or dragons in the 1 and 2 spot.
There are a small but helpful number of engine cards and other things in Black to build around, but it spends a lot of space on discard, flyers, aggressive creatures, etc.
As mentioned above, Black does a lot of things other colors can do. In a mono-Black deck, Consume Spirit is better than Blaze, and Profane Prayers works in a non-mono-Black environment (or Swallowing Plague on creatures). Black also has land removal is everything from Sinkhole to Befoul and Demonic Hordes to Rain of Tears. You can find the way to off a problematic land or two.
You can also draw cards with things like Necrologia, Ancient Craving, Phyrexian Rager, and Sign in Blood. This gives you a nice way to draw some cards. Other ways include sacrificing things, such as Infernal Tribute or Skulltap.
Black is also the best, and often the only way, to hose graveyards. With cards from the new Suffer the Past going back to stuff like Haunting Echoes, there are lots of ways to hose a graveyard and make sure something dead stays dead.
1. White
Alright, let’s talk about why White rocks the multiplayer roost.
First of all, let’s point out that White is the best color for removal, period. White can exile the creatures that other colors destroy or deal damage to. Cards like Path to Exile and Swords to Plowshares make Terror and Lightning Bolt look like the little kids on the block. Even lesser removal spells, from Chastise to Wing Shards, have some serious strength. Wing Shards makes Rend Flesh cry.
White just doesn’t rule the creature removal roost in terms of pinpoint power, but also loves the sweepers. For every sweeper Black has, White has probably 50 more (exaggeration for emphasis). They are cheap, and many are situational ones you can build around — such as Winds of Rath. Rout, Wrath of God, Day of Judgment, Winds of Rath, Kirtar’s Wrath, Catastrophe — the list goes on and on. You can combine sweepers to off enchantments are artifacts too — Akroma’s Vengeance. There are even cards that can take out the un-take-out-able — Final Judgment and Hallowed Burial. You can even take out non-White creatures (Mass Calcify).
White doesn’t just take out creatures, oh no. We’ve got plenty of cards that destroy artifacts and enchantments here as well. We have sweepers here too, like Purify, and then pinpoint removal. From the old classics like Disenchant all the way through Aura Blast and Artifact Blast, we’ve got a lot. Several ways to get you card advantage exist, such as Dust to Dust or Return to Dust. You’ve got plenty of ways of taking out enchantments and artifacts.
Just like Blue and Red have love themes with artifacts, White has one with enchantments. Whether talking about Academy Rector or Replenish, Nomad Mythmaker or Auramancer — White loves you. You can easily rock a deck that loves the enchantments. White also loves equipment, and there are numerous creatures that get better with equipment and you can always find a way to build around a deck or two.
White’s special mechanics are much better in multiplayer than some others. Giant Growth and Bounce and LD aren’t all that, but White gets protection and life gain. Protection cards like Prismatic Strands can keep you alive, keep your creatures alive, or both. White wants to save its team, and it has a lot of ways to protect its creatures – whether great or small. From Akroma to Savannah Lions, everything is willing to take an Otherworldly Journey. Glory in particular is one of my faves.
You also have the only life gaining spells worth playing with ridiculous life gain like Invincible Hymn. You can even play creatures or spells that give you life while also doing other things, so you constantly make yourself a harder target while not setting back your agenda. Examples include Terashi’s Grasp, Exile, and Baneslayer Angel.
White is the best color, by far, in terms of flying beaters. Akroma is just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of amazing White flyers that kick the pants off other colors — from Prismatic Angel to Deathless Angel, Exalted Angel to Yosei, and Eternal Dragon to Baneslayer Angel, you have a lot of high quality creatures for the red zone.
You also have the best color, by far, for defense. Whether we are talking walls (Wall of Omens, Angelic Wall, etc) or defensive creatures like Commander Eesha and Dawn Elemental and Cho-Manno, Revolutionary, White has them all. White has Kor Haven and Safeguard, Trap Runner and Spirit Mirror — and all will stop creatures from dealing you damage.
White is also another good aggro color, but subject to Wraths, so you might not want to over commit your cards. White can rock the early, mid or late games, all with dangerous creatures that will take you down.
You have great utility creatures, from Soul Warden to Mother of Runes, from Reveillark to Windborn Muse, and from Devout Witness to Stonecloaker. White also has weird creatures, and you can usually find something for your team, such as Vigilant Martyr.
When White got taxing from Blue, it gained a lot of power in multiplayer, with cards like Ghostly Prison and Magus of the Tabernacle. White always had some strong ways to shut down decks or cards like Moat and Aurification, but now it has even more tools.
When you start playing White, you are playing the most powerful pinpoint removal spells, the most powerful sweeping removal spells, among the most powerful artifact and enchantment removal spells, the best flying beaters, the best defense, and some of the best multiplayer effects. You can save your creatures, keep yourself from dying to damage, and hide behind a wall of enchantments from Ivory Mask to Ghostly Prison. You have combo elements in enchantments that are easily found. You can play aggro or control with ease. You have finishers like Decree of Justice and 50 thousand creatures. You get things like Jareth, Leonine Titan. Jareth can block and kill Eldrazi sized threats while swinging through any defense that has colors for four damage.
White is just a color that overpowers all of the others in multiplayer. You can play an all-White deck, and except for LD, you really don’t even notice you are missing the other colors.
…
Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s little tromp through the colors in terms of multiplayer. Note that opinions may vary, and Magic has thousands and thousands of cards, so I may not have mentioned your favorite card or strategy in today’s 4000 word article. Talk about them in the forum if you want, and tell me what’s missing.
Until later…