An Attempt at Redesigning Bicolour Terminology in Magic The Gathering

The only background you need for this is that MTG has five types of colours cards come in: white, blue, black, red and green - abbreviated to WUBRG (woo-berg). If you look at the back design of an MTG card, you'll see this is the clock-wise order of the coloured pips starting from the top. This order acts as a standard for sorting colours (a red and green card will always put red before green). It's a little more complicated than that - which is why you see red before white in RW pairings for instance - but the takeaway is that order also matters.

Recently, I've been getting back into Magic: The Gathering. Relearning some of the terminology (as well as teaching it to new players) had me thinking about the rather confusing terms people use to describe multicoloured objects:

Why These Terms?

These terms are derived from a region in the MTG universe called Ravnica. The lore of this plane involves ten factions who are each associated with a different pair of colours. Since it's somewhat useful to have terms for dual colours in general conversation, and this was the first time all ten pairs were officially given names, players started using the guilds for these terms. In a similar way, there exist three and four colour terms, but we'll save that for now.

The Problem

This terminology is fun for players who are familiar with it, but they're unintuitive to newcomers. Even I still struggle with them, coming back to the game with some familiarity. Hearing someone talk about Magic and naturally incorporating these terms gives me pause. I lose focus because I'm trying to remember what colours Azorius represents.

Is my solution going to be massively influential and change the way Magic players communicate forever? No. By and large, it's still easy enough just to say "white-blue", and that's my preferred way to describe dual colours. However, I like the idea of having fun little names for everything, and it seems like the community does as well. I thought it would be an interesting design challenge to come up with some alternatives that might be a little more clear in what they represent, just by their names.

A Solution

Hopefully it speaks for itself, since that's part of the aim of this design, but it may be a little confusing because it's hard to choose the right words. The consonants at the start of each colour name in a pair represent the consonants at the start and end of the word. A couple of the blue words finish with an L, but I think it still makes sense. Some of the words were chosen because they're related to one of the colours: bubble for a blue pair, burn for red, grow for green. Though, a "burn deck" is already a term, so maybe it's better to go with one of the alternatives. Also, manga is in black and white, which is why I went for weeb. A little tongue in cheek perhaps, but it makes it easier to remember, right? However, there's still the issue of blue and black being represented by the same letter. Some ideas I had for this (seen in some of the alternatives given) are:

• Make black P for purple (black in MTG is often represented with purple)
• Make either blue or black always use the "BL" consonant pair
• Blue words have U in them (or an OO sound), reminiscent of WUBRG

I am also willing to admit that the guild names are much cooler than boop, wobble and weeb but I like the silly names all the same.

Three and Four

Uploaded: 08 APR 2025
Last Edited: 08 APR 2025