In Philip Stanton's articles on the Color Wheel Black, he makes reasonable arguments explaining why each color should have card drawing capabilities. Now I agree with his reasons for why each color should have card drawing from a flavor point of view - but ultimately, I seek to disprove this point.

Now, I know this is a massive undertaking considering he is a much more learned scholar than I am, and he has a more impressive amount of writing than I do, but he overlooked a vital point when discussing the color pie:

He left out the function of the cards.

As soon as you read the word "function," you probably thought of Mark Rosewater's articles describing how Wizards has to put function in front of flavor because flavor is more flexible. If you didn't remember the second part, it's okay because I had to look it up.

Before I formulate my own arguments for why each color should not have the card drawing as to serve the function of the game, let us examine the reasons they should - as quoted from Color Wheel: Black.

"It's not gonna sound like I'm talking about Black for the next few paragraphs - but Black is the primer for a well-conceived color, so bear with me. Over ten years, this card-drawing dominance has made Blue unbeatable more often than not. I find this especially odd in the face of how certain drawing mechanics would make more sense in other colors. Examine Timetwister. Doesn't it kinda make everything... more equal? Timetwister is a White mechanic! Garfield flavored it Blue by including the word "time" in the name. I found the same trick in Plagiarize; the name makes it sound knowledge-related and Blue, but the effect is the card-drawing equivalent of Reverse Damage. Plagiarize is a White-feeling card, too.

"Green's marquee card, Survival of the Fittest, is almost Black (tutoring), but it is Green for two reasons: it's obviously creature-based, and it's selective. Black's tutors are for one card in spell form; its draw enchantments are based on life conversion. Green's flavor niche here is to be selective. Green aims for nature, evolution, burgeoning, and growth. Doesn't "Impulse" sound rather un-Blue? Blue doesn't act on impulses; Red and Green do that. In the case of the Impulse mechanic, it's Green. Commune With Nature indicates that on some level, R&D knows this. "Frantic Search," on the other hand, is definitely Red. Red is reckless, but does every single card have to require random discard to represent that (e.g., Control of the Court)? Thirst for Knowledge and Careful Study are extreme misnomers, but should also be Red for this same reason....

"And it's why those draws should not be blue."

If this setup sounds strange to you, think of the mechanics as you go around the wheel and mix in some of Mark Rosewater's own statements about each color's style (see the end of this article for links to all of MaRo's color primers). Blue is supposed to be slow, studious, and painstaking; it should have to draw every card so as to consider all possibilities. ("With access to unlimited information, blue has all the answers. The problem is that this way of working is very slow and blue has a tendency to be passive when it needs to be taking action.")

Those are some very good reasons. Now it's about time I give you some justification for why those colors current card drawing capabilities suit them fine.

Red, in reality, probably possesses one of the strongest mechanics in the game: direct damage. Direct damage is a very simple concept, but carries with it the ability to usually target either players or creatures. Because it can point and click things with damage, it can open the way for its weenie swarms to rush through, or just send it to the dome later when it's time to win. If you gave Red card drawing, you create new and more powerful versions of Red Deck Wins in both Standard and Extended environments, and Vintage and Legacy are given good card draw to go in some new U/R deck.

This may not seem so bad - but consider playing a control deck against a Ponza deck that can draw as many cards as you can.

White is usually the color of weenie swarms or massive board control - and though it seems like it might be a good idea to give it symmetrical card drawing, it might not be as great as it appears. The reasoning behind this is because White already has some very powerful "symmetrical" effects such as Wrath of God, Armageddon, and Balance. Giving it this sort of symmetrical card draw would allow it to fuel its weenie decks when it would normally run dry of resources, and it now can maximize its controllish efficiency to Wrath when an opponent's own resources are taxed to the maximum.

The problem with this is that the draw engine would be no where near as effective as the suggested Timetwister effect, but more along the price of Temporal Cascade - and you can easily see that this won't help compensate for White's weaknesses.

Green is, admittedly, a very tough color to judge function-wise when it comes to card drawing, considering it has a very powerful card-drawing mechanic attached to creatures. (Like Seshiro the Anointed - and yes, green still has the ability. It just happens to share it with blue.) The problem isn't Green's card draw is that it isn't good, but lies instead in the fact that the permanents that it's tied to are weak, or the sorcery/enchantments they're on rely on other resources (namely, "creatures") or cost too much to consider viable.

Black's suggested card draw in the article is fine because it already possessed the kind of card draw Mr. Stanton was talking about, and it still works fine to this day.

I will not discuss Blue's drawing because it does have a lot, and because I'm trying to disprove the idea that those cards should be spread out amongst the colors.

Now it's time to test some of our theories with actual examples. I'll start with the "What if everyone color had cheap card drawing?" situation, and we actually had one recently in Standard by the name of...

Skullclamp.

(You knew it was coming.)

Now it's time to examine what happened during the age of clamp. Three decks emerged as winners: Affinity, Goblins (both Patriarch's Bidding and non-Bidding grouped), and Elf and Nail. So in exchange for creatures, Red and Green got huge boosts in card drawing, then made Wraths from white look pathetic.

NOTE: I'm not including White Weenie because of this all-too-common conversation:

White: I equip my Silver Knight with Skullclamp - I should win!
Red: I equip my goblins a whole bunch of times with Skullclamp, play more of them, and then trample you to death with a Clickslither.

White: I equip my White Knight with Skullclamp - I should win!
Green: I equip a bunch of elves with mine, Tooth and Nail for Double Darksteel Colossus and win.

It wasn't because White wasn't able to use Skullclamp - it was because its other cards just weren't as good in general, and drawing more crap doesn't help you answer the good cards your opponent is playing. (Blame Wizards and demand better white cards.)

Of course this is an extreme example, and for further purposes probably could be ignored, but it does show some aspect of allowing all colors to draw cards even for the cost of creatures.

Since Skullclamp is kind of a fluke, we will examine the "What if card name was <insert color>?" scenarios.

First off: Red. The cards nominated by Mr. Stanton were cards like Careful Study and Impulse, but for example purposes I will just use the "draw cards discard cards" mechanic.

We can easily imagine R/G Madness, can't we? Of course there would have to be some changes - like probably the exclusion of Wonder for the inclusion of Fires of Yavimaya/Anger and or Brawn - and since Strange Inversion and Turn About show us that Aquamoeba could potentially be a red creature, and that Merfolk Looter could have possibly been Goblin Looter.

We can imagine the pains this deck would have caused - and it probably wouldn't have been that different than the U/G variety we know. (I disagree, mostly because I tested R/G extensively back in the day and knew that Wonder was what blew the early matches open - but I agree it would have been troublesome - T.F.)

Now for some other examples: Non-blue Teen Titan and Reanimator in Extended. Some new version of Red Deck Wins that discards land to fuel Grim Lavamancers and supply a steady stream of threats. As for Red in Vintage, well... even with the changes like these, unless it receives something like Intuition or Gifts Ungiven, I don't see it changing the metagame dramatically.

Now I'm not going into details with White - because as I already stated before, either its draws would be broken (like Timetwister) or they would be too slow (like Temporal Cascade) - and even if they were the broken variety, I would venture to guess the only true way to break it is to team it up with some sort of Scepter Chant or a Storm deck because White by itself would have a hard time doing it.

Green with Impulse like-spells is okay, but it gives yet another color that should rely on its topdeck an easy out in Times of Need, or have to fight it out by Tooth and Nail. Besides, Green already has creature search, and since they aren't going to print anything on the power level of Impulse for the mana cost and ability. Instead, we get sub-par cards like Commune With Nature anyway, and that doesn't seem that much better than what Green already has.

So the only color that looks like it would be pushing the envelope a bit is Red, because it is given one of the few powers it really shouldn't have. (As stated earlier, could you imagine Ponza with draw cards? Ack!)

But why does Blue have cards like Impulse? It isn't the name, but the freedom of choice that you can select the best weapon in your arsenal for a given situation (in fact, Impulse should probably be called Foresight). And Careful Study and its like are flavorful of Blue because Blue discards worthless knowledge, and keeps only what is useful to it.

The function of why Blue has different ways to draw cards is because there are only so many different ways to draw cards before you start creating vastly inferior draw cards, or you create ones with broken potential rivaling Ancestral Recall. This is why Wizards throws "draw and discard" cards (and other weird things) onto Blue's draws to keep from having more broken draw cards.

In the department of White's flavor, we see that White is not so much concerned with drawing as it is concerned about leveling the playing field. So perhaps equal card drawing isn't the answer, so we can look toward older benchmarks of possible card advantage such as Land Tax and Tithe - or maybe a new way of equalizing the playing field, such as limiting card drawing, number of permanents in play, number of cards in hand...

In function, White doesn't get draw cards because it limits White's ability to plow over people with some very efficient creatures - and it wouldn't really boost a control deck featuring white because more often than not it is paired with blue for its drawing and counters. (Though a fast White/Red deck that was able to refuel after the initial blitz might be interesting... - The Ferrett)

The flavor of Red does point toward having some card drawing - but upon a second look the view of red most often portrayed in Magic is "burning stuff, and blowing stuff up." The other note I would like to make in the flavor of Red is that it cares about the now, not the future - and as far as I'm concerned, card drawing is kind of like peering into the future and Red isn't about formulating Long-Term Plans at all.

In function, Red doesn't get card draw because it would possibly become the best color in non-Vintage formats. There was a reason why Wheel of Fortune is played in casual burn decks - and that's because it fuels something that should have run out of gas a long time ago.

Now Green and Black both have flavorful card draw from dying/dead creatures, living creatures, and land search... so they already have a lot of flavorful abilities within them that are already fine at drawing cards.

Both colors, aside from having reasonable card drawing, get card advantage from other things such as efficient creatures, creature removal, and the ability to utilize their graveyards. The only problem function-wise for these two colors is that Green usually has weaker card drawing tied to permanents that tend to be vulnerable (a.k.a. creatures).

Now I considered leaving the flavor half off of each one of these categories because it was the half of the argument Mr. Stanton used - but I just wanted to also prove that you can make pretty much any kind of argument for or against abilities in a color using flavor, and that it is much more difficult to make the same arguments with function.

In conclusion I would like to say it's not that Mr. Stanton's system isn't correct flavorwise. Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing it happen - but because flavor has to bend around function because it's more flexible, we probably won't get to see these his interesting ideas put to use. (But I could be wrong.)

I am human, I make mistakes, I make opinions. If you respect me and my opinions, I will respect you and your opinions.

I would like to give special thanks, though, to Mr. Stanton; because even though I wrote this to disprove your writing I enjoyed it very much, and would like to thank you for such an interesting view of things.

Thank you for reading,
Andrew Lubich

References:

The Color Wheel Black

The Value of Pie

Bursting with Flavor