Alternate MtG Style Color Wheels

[DrPraetor]

That was a productive discussion but it seems to have played itself out, so back to color wheels.

First, a summary post; I was going to dig back for specific Frank quotes, but it's too much work.

On Newton and Seven:
Since this is a mysto-magical grenre, seven being a mysto-magical number that Newton liked is the best reason to have seven colors.
More than that, Newton used the words Blue and Indigo, but what he meant was:
Blue-the-color-of-the-sky (the part at the top):

Indigo-the-color-that-indigo-dye-is-on-paper:

and not

which has a bit of a violet hue and so is called "Indigo" today.

So, what he actually meant by "indigo and blue" was what we today would call "blue and cyan."

Now, it depends a lot on how you render the spectrum on your monitor, but when I look at the spectrum:


I do see six stripes. Violet, Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow, and Red. So if we were going to go six colors, the color I'd drop would be Orange. Adding brown (which is, in fact, dark orange):
RGB = (128, 064, 000) for Brown

RGB = (255, 128, 0) for Orange

why doesn't bb-code recognize that as a URL? Do I need to escape the )(s or something?

Just doubles down on the crazy. Now, if you want to have Brown instead of Orange, and make red a brighter red - yeah, that would improve contrast.

So:
(Bright) Red, (Dark) Brown, (Bright) Yellow, (Dark) Green, (Bright) Cyan, (Dark) BlueIndigo, (Bright) Purple/Violet
would work fine since Violet and Red are pretty easy to distinguish even if they are both bright colors.

Blackwatch Plaid

On having something like WH40K or Shadowfist and not a color wheel at all:
It is absolutely true that you are enemies with your opponents deck. Wing Commander and Netrunner both failed critically on this point.
So, red decks have to be able to play against other red decks, that's a given.
But at that rate, what Frank is really saying is: why have a color wheel at all? Why not just have a bunch of factions and all animosity table, like Shadowfist or WH40K?
To which I say: the purpose of having a color wheel, instead of some arbitrary animosity table, is the shared enemies pattern. So Blue and Green are allies because they both hate Brown, that sort of thing. In order for this to work, you need an odd number of colors.
This has all sorts of advantages. When Brown is ascendant, Green and BlueCyan are buddies and Yellow and Indigo have to take a backseat. So shared enemies automatically give you shifting alliances, which is good.

Blackwatch Plaid

So, wait, are you still saying more colors isn't harder?
So Frank did a reasonable job setting up six factions, but that doesn't mean three factions wouldn't be easier or easier-to-balance, or that seven factions wouldn't have been harder.

for a color-wheel to work well, you'd want:
[*] An absolute minimum of explicit color-hate cards.
[*] Synergistic strategies for adjacent colors that exploit weaknesses of opposing colors.
which imposes an additional design challenge.

Blackwatch Plaid

[DrPraetor]

So each of the colors is a mystical force that you can channel. (Insert color) magic flows through you, makes you glow, and so on, when you use it. That's pretty basic stuff.

Other than that, we want different cultures to share color-coded magical warriors with animal totems. You can be a red samurai or a red ninja or a red knight or a red brave, and you have the same totem and energy force thing going.

Therefore, I think this works best to start by picking totems. Some of them we'll pick late, and they'll be handed associations that don't make a lot of sense. You keep plugging away at it until the random content generator spits out something cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... es_by_type

Phoenix
Sphinx
Behemoth*
Dragon
Ki-Rin
Unicorn
Cerberus

* depicted as a wooly mammoth with golden fur.

So:
Red = fire, rebirth
Brown = cunning, amibition
Yellow = might, glory
Green = avarice, abundance
Cyan = good fortune, serenity
Indigo = purity, wildness
Violet = death, binding

That sorta works.

The next thing is, what are you channeling? So in MtG, it was pretty clear that green was awesome-forest power - and yes, forests are awesome. So for each color, you need some awe-inspiring natural phenomena, which is the background of the movie that plays when you do your limit break and summon your totem, Final Fantasy style.

You also do "Forest Bathing" (in a terrain or otherwise, depending on your color). I'm explaining these are RPG elements but of course they could be on cards or Master of Magic spells or whatever:
Red = Awesome pillars of fire. This has the advantage that you can set it up yourself, and the drawback that you need fuel.

Brown = Awesome emptiness: deserts and barren places.

Yellow = Awesome glare: the sun at full noon, especially with an unobstructed view, in a plaza or with snow.

Green = The Ocean. Forests are going to end up Indigo which is weird.

Cyan = Fresh water, rivers, swamps, waterfalls. Not as awe-inspiring as the others, may be weak as a theme.

Indigo = The forest, especially deep dark forests (like the black forest in Germany) kind of thing, or jungles. Should possibly trade with Green.

Violet = Twilight. Strange things peer out of the shifting shadows, and so on.

Some thoughts:
[*] Unicorn and Dragon may want to switch colors. Unicorn has to be forests, Dragon could easily be fresh water instead of ocean (but Ocean is a better awe-inspiring channel thing, IMO.)
[*] Is a Ki-Rin too much like a Unicorn?
[*] Cerberus is a cool monster, but it really doesn't have the conceptual space of a Dragon; except in so far as it's also Magic-Wolf.
[*] The Golden Mammoth thing is obviously filler. I'd rather pull something from folklore but I don't want to reuse a family of mammals - and right now, I'm missing a cat (although the Sphinx sorta counts as a cat.)

[Username17]

I do see six stripes. Violet, Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow, and Red.

I can see where you'd call out to a specific Cyan stripe, but I can't describe in words what Cyan is or how it would be different from Blue. From the standpoint of pigments on a card, you basically make Cyan by mixing Blue and White or just printing Blue more lightly on white cardstock. Also, I definitely see an Orange stripe. What I don't see is a clear division between Yellow and Green, although I have no problem conceptualizing or describing the two as distinct. The entire chartreuse region in between seems like a completely smooth transition and I cannot draw a line where it is green on one side and yellow on the other.

As far as color vision goes, people don't all see the same bands. And that's even before we get into color blind people. If you hold a prism up to white light, you will get a rainbow that extends from infrared to ultraviolet. If you have people mark on the wall where the bands they can see begin and end, they will usually mark different places. But very importantly, most people can see a lot farther into the Red end of the spectrum than they can into the Violet end. When people look at prism generated rainbows, usually the purple is very narrow and goes to black quite quickly - which is to say that there is a lot of violet that is ultraviolet to most people.

The bottom line is that while Cyan light is visually distinct from Blue light and Green light, actually describing them verbally is impossible and differentiating them in printed form is a god damn joke.



Three of these are literally the same printing plate. And all of them use the same border segment. And yet, where they lie on the Cyan versus Blue spectrum is quite different in all four cases. And that's the exact same image printed at various levels of darkness on cardstock from different print runs.

Therefore, I think this works best to start by picking totems. Some of them we'll pick late, and they'll be handed associations that don't make a lot of sense. You keep plugging away at it until the random content generator spits out something cool.

I broadly agree with this. Each color faction is going to be associated with their signature big cards. It's the way it works in every game. Sure, people actually play more Student of the Bear and Friends of the Dragon than they do Dracos and Ting Tings, but in Shadowfist the factions are associated with the big named characters and not the foundation characters that people pack multiple copies of. Same with Magic, where Lord of the Pit was the spokescard for Black for years even though it was rarely played. You should plan for that happening, and settle yourself in for each of the factions to have "tribes" of high end monsters. This also allows you to create bridges for color alliance by having some of the signature tribal cards be multicolored. If the signature Demons are Purple, but some of the Demons are Purple and Blue or even just Blue, then people will consider Blue and Purple to be related colors based on that Tribal overlap.

In an abstract sense it of course doesn't matter very much. Game mechanically, the biggest card in a faction could just be called the Nine of Swords or the Ace of Cups or whatever. But it's good worldbuilding and good marketing for there to be signature monsters in each color and for those signature monsters to be related to other similar monsters in the color and in allied colors.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

While true, the same exact thing can be said - was said, earlier on the thread, about red and orange!

So if you only want colors that are distinct (both in their cultural connotations and the ink process used to make them), it has to be 5 colors: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet.
and, even then, you'd need texture differences and logos for the color blind.

So like Blue/Cyan, Red/Orange are difficult to distinguish depending on how the process is done, and furthermore you can describe few things which are orange-as-opposed-to-red. Both tones occupy a headspace of simply being "fire colored".

Brown and dark-blue solve this to a considerable extent.

So Brown is technically a shade of orange, but in headspace (and printing) it's not Red.

Likewise, dark-blue is "twilight" color as opposed to "day sky" color. I admit it's not quite as well distinguished as Brown and Red; often as not, dark-blue will inherit the cultural connotations of being "black" while cyan will inherit the cultural connotations of being "white". But since black and white have plenty of cultural connotations (unrelated to their position on the magic wheel) that would otherwise be orphaned, I don't see that as a problem.


If anything, it's dark-green and dark-brown that look too similar, and I'm not even color blind.

I had:
Fire
Barrens
*Noon*
Ocean
Fresh Water + Agriculture
Forest
Twilight

I think Forest, Sea, Fresh Water + Agriculture, Barrens, Fire, Noon and Twilight + Shadows which work fairly well as factions/cosmic forces. But the way the wheel fits together is less than ideal.

This might work better:
Fire
Barrens
*Noon*
Forest
Fresh Water + Agriculture
Twilight
Chaos
this has the advantage that Fire and Forest are enemies (duh), but you really want forest and agriculture to switch places, so that forest is allied with twilight and agriculture is allied with day...
In fact, although it messes up the strict spectral ordering, I think that's actually better:
Fire
Barrens
*Noon*
Fresh Water + Agriculture
Forest
Twilight
Chaos

So, yeah, cyan is allied with yellow even though it's spectral angle is closer to blue, and forest is allied with twilight/shadow even though it's spectral angle is closer to noon; but the alliances among the forces makes a lot more sense, at least to me.



Phoenix -> Other Birds, Salamanders
Sphinx -> Other Felids, Scorpions
*Mammoth -> Pachyderms, ???*
Ki-Rin -> Bulls (agricultural animals), ???
Unicorn -> Deer?, Bears
Cerberus -> Wolves, Snakes
Dragon -> Lizards, Spiders

This implies that China and the Roman Empire are fused into one empire, in which the emperor is both tutored by dragons and wears purple.

[deaddmwalking]

I am not colorblind. Reading yellow text on anything other than a black background is unpleasant. These boards use a light gray and I need to highlight to read '???' Easily. Those kinds of things should be considerationd for card design as well.

[DrPraetor]

Better? I can't seem to set background colors for text on the den.

[bgcolor=white]That's no moon! #Yourmom[/bgcolor]

[deaddmwalking]

Honestly, I think the spectrum colors are the wrong way to go, especially if you're abandoning their order to set up reasonably opposed forces.

The reason you want to drop black is because there are so many negative associations with it, but if you're doing your game, you can use the color and give it a completely different theme that hasn't been done before dropping any connection to 'evil'.

"We stand in the darkness so you don't have to."

If the color had a 'self-sacrifice' theme (giving up a unit to save another) it wouldn't feel 'evil'.

[DrPraetor]

That would work for keeping white - but how exactly are you going to "glow black"? In the first few MtG themed books that I read, I recall white mana was actually gold and black mana was actually violet.

So in the set-up I have above, blue and cyan will get a lot of black and white iconography respectively. But Blue mana is blue and not Black because you glow blue when you use it.

[deaddmwalking]

Being surrounded by tendrils of inky darkness isn't necessarily worse from an iconography point of view than glowing blue. Being 'shadowed' isn't even a problem compared to 'glowing'. It's a visual that is going to appeal to a huge demographic that you're targeting anyway.

[Username17]

One thing that I don't think is commented on enough is how terrible an idea it was for one of Magic's colors to be associated with Water. You have skull islands, volcanic islands, desert planets, jungle islands, undersea chasms, water worlds, and so on and so on. It's just a bad form to have one of the factions be defined by being close to the water and have all the other factions be based on what is physically in the place they are standing. You're gonna want to have pirate sets and desert sets where everything or nothing is coastal, and you don't want to declare that one of the factions can't or must be involved in every part of that.

It's not like you're so desperately short on terrain types that you actually need to have "Coastlines" as one of them. The conceptually strongest terrains are Mountain, Forest, and Plains. But you also have Hills, Swamps, Deserts, Tundra, Moors, Valleys, Jungles, Rivers, Lakes, Canyons, Shrublands, and so on. Now personally I would stay away from things like Jungles and Tundra that imply specific levels of heat as regional expansions may be in ice ages or heat waves. And I'd stay away from Rivers and Lakes because it has similar problems to coastlines. Hills are a conceptually strong terrain, but it's hard to explain how their mana should be different from Plains or Mountains.

Anyway, the six I'd go with are Plains, Forest, Mountain, Swamp, Waste, and Moor. That last one obviously is the weakest of the lot, and I could easily see being "Dales" or "Hills" or "Shrub." I'd also have land types that aren't associated with any kind of color in particular (City and Fortress, for example), as well as a few "modifier" subtypes that only exist because some cards care or might care in the future. So things might be "Coastal," "Frozen," or "Haunted" in addition to being a Swamp or Fortress.

While true, the same exact thing can be said - was said, earlier on the thread, about red and orange!

This is true. However, as you've noted it's easy to differentiate Red, Orange, and Yellow if one of those three is darker and kind of brown and the other two are kind of bright. It doesn't really matter which of the three you make brownish, since any two bright warm colors are easy to distinguish. I would actually suggest making Yellow be a darker burnished gold while Orange and Red are both vibrant. Because honestly, bright yellow can be hard to tell from White because it's smack in the middle of the visible spectrum.

The same goes for the cool colors as well. Light Green is quite hard to distinguish from Light Blue (or Cyan if you insist), while Dark Blue is basically indistinguishable from Dark Purple. Doing it symmetrically to the warm colors, where Green is a dark Pine Green and Blue and Purple are light would be the most visibly distinct way to do it.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

For what it's worth, I can distinguish Frank's red/orange/light green/dark green/gray/blue, which is pretty rare for a game that has more than three colors.

[Grek]

I'd actually go with Red Hills, Orange Wastes, Yellow Plains, Green Forests, Blue Valleys and Purple Mountains. What's flat like a waste but full of plants like a forest? A plain. What's an intermediate amount of tallness between a waste and a mountain? A hill. And so on and so forth. You can easily imagine adjacent colours being next to each other.

[momothefiddler]

I'd actually go with Red Hills, Orange Wastes, Yellow Plains, Green Forests, Blue Valleys and Purple Mountains. What's flat like a waste but full of plants like a forest? A plain. What's an intermediate amount of tallness between a waste and a mountain? A hill. And so on and so forth. You can easily imagine adjacent colours being next to each other.

I can't actually justify any of those except the two you mentioned. Why are wastes between hills and plains? Why are forests between plains and valleys? Why are mountains between valleys and hills?

[Grek]

Wastes are kinda like plains (in that they're flat) and kinda like hills (in that they're hard to travel through). Forests are between plains and valleys because they have plants like plains, but are shady like valleys. Mountains are between valleys and hills because they are all defined around changes in altitude.

[NoDot]

I'm going to be the annoying guy and say that in the context of a TCG I don't think red and orange will be sufficiently distinct.

I'm also going to say that I don't think it's necessary. You don't need an even number of colors to have designated targets, you just need to specify only one color to be the "answer."

Given the following five color loop:
Red -> Green -> Blue -> Purple -> Yellow -> Red -> ...

You can simply designate a color to (in abstract) benefit from splashing the previous color and be the answer to the second previous color.

(For example, Blue is the answer to Red and abstractly is supposed to benefit from splashing Green. Yellow benefits, in theory, from splashing Purple and is the answer to Blue. Etc., etc.)

Otherwise, I feel Brown is more visually distinct if you need six colors.

[Grek]

So this isn't visually distinct enough for you?

[Username17]

While I agree that Brown is easier to distinguish from any warm colors than any other warm colors are, I don't think that replacing orange with Brown helps all that much. The sad reality is that there isn't 100% agreement on where colors begin and end.

The problem is that for any two colors on the spectrum, it is difficult to choose a color that is unambiguously different from the red shifted color that is also unambiguously different from the blue shifted color. So you can make an Orange that is unambiguously different from your Red, but doing so will make it hard to tell your Orange from your Yellow. You can make a Yellow that's unambiguously different from your Orange, but doing so will make it harder to tell the Yellow from the Green. You can make the Green clearly different from Yellow, but only by making it sorta Bluish. And you can make the Blue really different from Green, but doing so makes it look kinda Purple.

What you can do is to make one or more colors dark or brownish. That frees up the color adjacent to intrude on its color space. So if you made Blue dark, then you could have Green be kinda cyanish and easily distinguish it from Yellow. From a functional standpoint, you still need two dark colors though - there's no way to cordon off all four internal rainbow hues with only one. So while Dark Blue lets you make Green and Yellow be easy to distinguish, Yellow and Orange are still in danger unless you make your Orange red enough to make it hard to distinguish from Red.

My suggestion was simply to make a dark Green and a brownish Yellow. This allows you to make a cyanic Blue and a vibrant Orange that are easily distinguishable from Purple and Red respectively, while having Green and Yellow distinguishable from each other and from Blue and Orange. There are other ways to divide the rainbow, but that's the cleanest.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Why even have colours?

The system is all about creating factions; you could just as easily go with "North Star" & "Southron Cross" (i.e. the northern/southern hemispheres respective orientation constellations); or as complicated as a 16-point Rosicrusian star with (N; NNE, NE, ENE; E; ESE, SE, SSE; S; SSW, SW, WSW; W; WNW, NW, NNW) where the Cardinal points are considered "extremist"; the Primary InterCardinal points are considered "moderations" between; and the Half-Winds represent leanings towards one extreme or an other.

From this thread, what seems to matters first is that players can identify different playstyles with different "factions" of playable card type. Post after post has proven that "colours" aren't iconic enough to form any sort of consensus.

[Username17]

Why even have colours?

I considered answering this only with an image macro, but decided to treat it as serious instead of retarded.

In a card game it is important to convey information with every part of the card because the player will sometimes see only part of the card. Giving each faction distinct borders is fucking obvious. It conveys a lot of information and gives each faction a visual aesthetic.

-Username17

[NoDot]

I'd like to avoid sounding like a broken record, but I'll reiterate: why six colors? If all you need to be designate a faction with "answers,", then you can just not designate two to be their enemies.

Don't the five eastern elements have something like that?

[DrPraetor]

I think there is a good reason to have seven, but five isn't enough because you only have two relationship states, which limits the narrative in an undesirable way.

With either six or seven factions, and with some symmetrical relationship defining their relations (that is, with a color wheel), pairs of colors can be:
* friendly
* neutral
* hostile

Where as with only four or five colors, you only have two relationships - hostile and whatever-else (which might be neutral or allied).

All of this goes for strategy games and RPGs such as much (or more) than card games. A master of magic heartbreaker, for example, benefits from procedurally-generated political relationships among whatever mystical forces you decide to have in the game.

The blood war in AD&D was built on the deeply-lame AD&D alignment system but still ended up being pretty cool, because it utilized a color-wheel conceit to procedurally generate a range of political postures. So if you wanted to do a color-coded yellow-face fantasy heartbreaker, arranging seven totems on a color wheel would be a good way to procedurally generate interlocking clan alliances and rivalries (with the usual caveat that Pink Elephants and Blue Raspberries have to be able to function in the same party.)

[Judging__Eagle]

In a card game it is important to convey information with every part of the card because the player will sometimes see only part of the card. Giving each faction distinct borders is fucking obvious. It conveys a lot of information and gives each faction a visual aesthetic.

-Username17

Colour-coded borders are one method. The much older "corner icon" method from playing cards could also be used. It doesn't take a lot of colours to provide players with a variety of playstyles, but the cards for said playstyles need to be easily distinguishable, even if there's only two colour palette choices.

The french 4-suit system has variants that go at least as high as 8-suits. While the Latin/Mameluke card systems that the French is based on has variant suits. All of these are still little different from the Chinese "tiered suits" playing cards that they are derived from.

Clear icons printed at the corners of a card; with a minimum variation in inks; has been able to create 4 card types that aren't easily confused by humans for thousands of years. Humans can certainly get by without borders.

The fact that the earliest Chinese playing card games evolved from abstractions of combat where cards can successfully opposed by playing the correct "type" are meant to represent the players manipulating various factions into opposing their opponents supporting factions. Unlike Mameluke/Latin/French cards; Chinese cards suits are meant to represent tiers, specifically tiers of currency (cash; string; myriads; tens of myriads). while card position/colour of markings represent factions (civilization/barbarians; bureaucracy/military) that the player has to manage).

Indicates that in a fundamental manner the origins of playing card games differ very little from the essential "resource disparity" nature of M:tG gameplay. The relationship of "tiers" could translate into 4 types of magical action/resource a zcience phantasy planesdrifter may seek.

Hearts: personel, ready to die
Clubs: arms, abstractly lethal
Diamonds: the fuel of sorcerous destruction
Spades: the tool for dungeoning down

Conceptually it's based on the combat interactions from SAME, but applied to this idea. Interactions between the cards would be one step towards increasing the complexity of choices to players.

A competitive card game designed around playing cards; with the possibility of tarot cards, feels like a practical goal than trying to decide on a colour palette for the factions before the narrative/win-style for the factions is even determined.

[NoDot]

I think there is a good reason to have seven, but five isn't enough because you only have two relationship states, which limits the narrative in an undesirable way.

With either six or seven factions, and with some symmetrical relationship defining their relations (that is, with a color wheel), pairs of colors can be:
* friendly
* neutral
* hostile

Where as with only four or five colors, you only have two relationships - hostile and whatever-else (which might be neutral or allied).

Pulling directly from the Wu Xing and the generating and overcoming cycles:

• Wood feeds Fire: therefore Fire is friendly towords Wood. (Splash Wood into a Fire deck?)
• Water quenches Fire: therefore Fire doesn't like Water. (Water is where counters to Fire should be found.)
• Earth ??? Fire: Fire is neutral towards Earth.
• Metal ??? Fire: See previous entry.

You are wrong. QED.

(Now, I don't recommend copying the Wu Xing directly unless the game is weeaboo focused, but it makes a good example.)

[DrPraetor]

with some symmetrical relationship

Emphasis added. From a game-mechanical standpoint, yes, you could have a situation where:
Spock defeats scissors
Spock is-countered-by paper
Spock counters rock
Spock is-defeated-by lizard

and thus each color would have four different relationship categories but they wouldn't be symmetrical (okay, there would be rotational symmetry around the color-wheel.)

Again, that's fine game-mechanically, but there are pretty limited situations where that makes any sense as a backstory to generate politics or narrative among your (otherwise, frankly, pretty bland) cosmic forces that are hashing things out by way of color-coded samurai riding magical animals and suchnot.

[NoDot]

Given Frank's earlier comments, I doubt the focus is going to be of Mono-Red versus Mono-Yellow. He said the you should focus on the groups that pick two different colors to follow, or you should focus on groups that pick three different colors to follow. (I don't care to look up the names he used. Clans and... guilds?)

That leaves you with ten groups each block to hash out the politics of. (If I did the math right, yes that is the same number of combinations whether it's two picks or three.)