Each of the colors, and even colorless, in Magic have their own strengths, weaknesses, tribes, and other perks to choose them over another color. Unfortunately, sometimes a color just isn’t that powerful, or is too powerful. Blue and White are often considered too powerful, Green for a while was considered weak in non-multiplayer formats (although there are still some people out there that have themselves convinced Green is bad at Commander… hilariously wrong), and Red actually does tend to do worse in multiplayer.

Now, I don’t consider Red to be as bad as a lot of people seem to think. I used to, until I saw a very good and fun mono-Red Commander deck played at my last local card shop. And then there’s the popular Ib Hallfheart deck begun on Commandercast.

Well, despite those decks, some people still think (whether correctly or not, I can’t say) Red is bad in multiplayer. Earlier this summer this became a huge topic of questions and answers posted by Mark Rosewater on his tumblr. MaRo demonstrated then one of the great things about Wizards of the Coast when he admitted that R&D agrees it can be a problem and that they’re working on it, and then asked players what they’d suggest to fix it. There were a lot of suggestions that don’t really fit Red, some which I think do but MaRo disagreed (namely recursion, as I believe Red should get more effects like Charmbreaker Devils). Among those was that cards could fit the flavor of love, which MaRo has admitted fits under Red since it’s intense emotion. Love fits multiplayer more since you can love one player while attacking another, but it’s hard to have effects flavored to love another player make sense in one-on-one since that’s the only player you’re fighting.

I thought this was a great idea, but wasn’t sure how it’d be implemented (MaRo didn’t seem sure either, but I sure hope R&D went to the drawing board to crack the question themselves for the next set they still have time to design cards for). So to see how R&D might do it, I tried my own hand at designing some cards. Along with a few previous Commander-specific cards I’ve designed previously, what follows are possible ways to make Red stronger in the formats it’s weakest in.

Read across the jump if you’re interested!

Commander-centric Cards

I think I’ve posted these cards before, but since they’re relevant to the more recent cards I designed I thought I’d showcase them again.

Like with Command Tower, Red can be made more powerful in Commander without making it overpowered in other formats by specifically mentioning what makes Commander different in the rules: The commander. This is basically a double Lightning Bolt, since the life totals are double in Commander. I felt {1}{R} was more acceptable than just {R} despite the hoop of needing a commander that can tap for the effect.

Note that this isn’t necessarily a rare effect, but if it were to be printed in a booster set (such as a Core Set or expansion, as opposed to a box set such as the Commander decks), it would have to be rare to make sure a dead card for limited was drawn to often. This is a theme for all of the cards in this post actually.

I also thought that Red should be able to sacrifice its commander as a cost for a huge payout, like 10 damage. I originally had this at 4 CMC, but that seemed too low. 5 CMC isn’t bad I think.

Flavor of Love

These next cards are designed to show how the emotion love could work in Magic, a game about fighting. I think it could be used as a design technique to push Red in multiplayer. Since I do this just as a hobby, it wouldn’t surprise me if R&D members like Mark Rosewater could do this better. Hopefully in the future we’ll see something like the next two cards as an attempt to pick Red up for multiplayer.

The flavor text I wrote kind of explains it, but if you didn’t catch it, the passing of a loyal friend under the control of another player is stirring your creatures into a rage. How does love fit in here? Your creatures would have to love the fallen creature to be so upset over the creature’s passing. This could probably be done with you sacrificing your own creature, but I liked making it only work in multiplayer to make sure it didn’t make Red too good in other formats. If it were to work for yourself, it would probably cost {3}{R}{R}, more akin to Overrun and Cleaver Riot. But then it wouldn’t just push Red in multiplayer, but in any format, and that isn’t the point of these designs.

Anyway, on to the next one.

This card represents marrying off your creature, the princess, to the creature controlled by another player. Doing so joins your two armies so that each are stronger as long as you stand side-by-side. Marrying off women might be controversial, but it was a common practice in the times that fantasy settings emulate, and is certainly common in fantasy stories as well; so while I don’t condone the practice, it’s fitting in Magic due to the fantasy setting. I would be just as okay with having the card be a prince, but that would be less truthful to what most players know.

I hope it’s not a bad sign that the text makes it hard to show how it’s flavorful here. At first the creature targeted a player, and the idea was that you were joining the player instead of two of your creatures. The creature idea better fits with fantasy (princesses tend to get married off, not kings and queens), plus requires the use of a counter that can be named “marriage” counters to show off the flavor better than the rest of text could (flavor text is great for that, but there’s just not a lot of room left on the card for it). And then if the other creature dies, the marriage is off and so is your truce; makes sense.

And the last card:

This is my favorite, even though it has the most lengthy text. As with the last one, I hope that the wall of texts aren’t a bad sign for the use of the flavor of love on text.

The idea here is that you are making a vow to another player, as two people would in marriage. As long as you stick to that vow, you receive benefits, just as someone in a healthy marriage certainly would. If you break your vow and double-cross that player, you dissolve that agreement and lose your benefits. I originally wanted the last ability to give the enchanted opponent a copy of the spell to be able to punish you with, but that required even more text than this did.

As is, I think that, this card does the best at showing how love could be flavored in a way that focuses on multiplayer. I had come up with another 3-4 designs, but while they were great in multiplayer, they didn’t fit the love concept, and that was the whole point, so I scrapped them. In addition to fitting the flavor, it’d just be a fun card to run.

Conclusion

I’ve come to the conclusion that three colors should be the best at politics in this order: White because it values community, Red because it values passion (and a lot of rabble-rousing goes on in politics - just watch the news going on right now for the November election going on in the United States), and Blue because it values intellect (rated last because, come on, how much intelligence is really going on in politics?).  Black only works in politics when it comes to corruption, but when we’re talking about politics in multiplayer, corruption flavored in cards doesn’t work for this well. Green values nature and natural order more than order imposed by community and its politics, and thus doesn’t fit as well, so I don’t see Green being the best color for political cards either. The whole point of this is explaining that while these political “flavor of love” cards might look weird in Red, they really do fit.

If cards that tap into the flavor of the emotion of love can be made to help push Red in mulktiplayer games, I love the idea. The reason is that love is an emotion, and thus a part of Red, and it isn’t touched on often (if ever), so fixing Red’s multiplayer problems by touching on flavor not really covered is kind of like getting a couple of aves with a single solid aggregate of mineral.

Just because touching upon the full emotional spectrum for Red is a good idea doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for it’s multiplayer problems; and even if it was the best solution for that problem, that doesn’t mean the cards I designed are the best result of that. Let me know what you think by reblogging, replying, using the Disqus comments, or sending me a private message. As always, feel free to tell me what you don’t like, just as long as you provide constructive criticism that actually helps me get better at my hobby.

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed these cards!