What do four-color cards do?

Scott_AndersonScott_Anderson
edited March 2020 in Custom Card Discussion
I have not ever made a four-color card until today. It has me thinking: what do the four-color tribes like? What do they want? How do they get it? What do they dislike? How do they stop it?

With stuff like Dimir or Temur I have a pretty good idea. Not so with the four-color guys.

What do you think?

Comments

  • HeroKPHeroKP
    edited February 2020
    While Wizards of the Coast's flirt with four-colour was... experimental, *eyes nephilim nervously*, an accepted rule in the community is that four-colour cards should embody the colour that they are NOT.

    So Glint has to be aggressively NON-WHITE,
    Dune has to be aggressively NON-BLUE,
    Ink has to be aggressively NON-BLACK,
    Witch has to be aggressively NON-RED, and
    Yore has to be aggressively NON-GREEN.

    What that actually means is up to your imagination.
  • HeroKPHeroKP
    edited February 2020
    For example, white is the colour with the least elementals, so the other day I made a Glint pan-elemental card.

    image

    I also further justify this being four-colour with the four keywords required to set it off being common in green, red, black and blue respectively, and it being a big creature (with small creatures kind of being white's thing).

    In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have made it an artifact, but I wanted to show that some elementals are constructs of other elementals (elemental diversity, and all that jazz)
  • Scott_AndersonScott_Anderson
    @herokp that’s such a fun card too!
  • HeroKPHeroKP
    @Scott_Anderson

    Thanks :)
  • OrzhovaOrzhova
    I've made a cycle of four-colour creatures and their followers and I've defined those factions as:

    WUBR - Supremacy: The desire to upend the natural order and constantly strive to push every higher (to better yourself and your community) instead of accepting your role.
    UBRG - Chaos: Embracing entropy and a desire for no laws/restrictions to halt personal progress or evolution.
    BRGW - Violence: Achieving your goals through force and instinct, disregarding science and embracing the purity of combat.
    RGWU - Charity: The many is greater than the few. A perfect society can only be built without selfishness - through sharing and compassion.
    GWUB - Patience: The man who waits longest catches the biggest fish. Acting without deliberation will be your downfall.

    I could post some cards I made if you'd like?
  • Scott_AndersonScott_Anderson
    @Orzhova These are wonderful adjectives to describe the groups. And you don’t need permission to share.
  • OrzhovaOrzhova
    Thanks. I just don't want to spam this chat with my ideas. I've made a few cycles (1 titular legend, 2 cycles of 2 colour legends with the other two colours as an activated ability, charms and an uncommon creature cycle) so I'll post one card for each faction:

    image image image image image
  • Scott_AndersonScott_Anderson
    Oh I see what you mean. And Saitan is nice. I like them all.

    IDK if you care: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=3434
  • RohanDragoonRohanDragoon
    Another thing that might help is the Wizards' archetypes for them. With the printing of the four color commanders (Atraxa being the most memorable), the four color combinations got secondary names that correspond to the archetype that those commanders helped builds:
    WUBR: Artifice (featuring Breya)
    UBRG: Chaos (featuring Yidris)
    BRGW: Aggression (featruing Saska)
    RGWU: Altruism (featuring Kynaios and Tiro)
    GWUB: Growth (featuring Atraxa)

    Obviously, these aren't all encompassing (especially artifice being wubr), but they're absolutely good starting points because they often bring together what those four colors do have in common (For example, you can find cards in red, green, white, and blue that can generally be played to help everyone, but that's not really something you'd find in black.) Regardless of that framework, here are some cards that I've made that hopefully give some ideas. I hope that they'll help spark some ideas for y'all.

    imageimageimageimageimageimageimageimage

    For a quick few final notes:
    -Four color cards can be a little bit more powerful than a card with fewer colors in virtue of it being less versatile. But not by enormous amounts.
    -A card that has each color in its mana cost not as a hybrid (i.e. wubr not as hybrid mana) can do anything any one of those colors could do. A hybrid mana card can only do something that both colors can do. That being said, it's okay if four color cards don't fit "every color", especially as rarity decreases.

    Hope this helps!
  • Scott_AndersonScott_Anderson
    Thank you @RohanDragoon and everyone. This has been quite instructive.
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