I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay, so today is a topic suggested for my blog. I'm going to talk about the design of colors.

So we're going to talk a bit about the history of colorless, and then I'll get into the philosophy of how we design for it.

Okay, so uh, colorless starts and then I'll get into the philosophy of how we design for it.

Okay, so, colorless starts with alpha.

So when Richard Garfield makes alpha, he makes five colors, and he makes callus.

Now, in alpha, colors one for one went with artifacts.

The idea being behind it is that artifacts were magical items and that any, any mage could make use of the magical items.

Now, I do want to point out, from the very beginning, artifacts definitely had leaned toward colors. Not that, not that in alpha you had to pay colors to use them,

but you know, gauntlet of might made your red creatures have plus one plus one and your swamps tap,

or not swamps, your mountains tap for an extra red. A very red-feeling artifact. Cormus Bell turned your swamps into one-ones.

So there definitely were things that sort of leaned in a certain direction.

But early on, the idea was kind of what made artifacts stand apart.

They're sort of defining quality.

I mean, creatively, they were magical objects.

But mechanically, they were colorless.

They had generic mana.

They were colorless.

They had no color, and they had a generic mana cost.

I should point out, by the way, that LANDs, also in Alpha, for the whole point of the game,

lands have been colorless.

I'm not really going to get into designing Lans today.

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