It's the Magic: Blue/Red is the Best Color

This Week's Best Thing Ever

Blue/Red is the best color in Magic. Blue is the naquadah of the color pie--the term that describes the philosophy behind allocating abilities to each of the game's five colors--in that it goes with just about anything. It initially seems obvious that in a game where power comes from cards the color that draws more cards might be a bit complimentary, but Blue is more than card draw.

It's that of course, but much more.

You get more spells with cards like Hivemind. You can figuratively steal creatures with cards like Clone. You can literally steal artifacts and enchantments. That is, when your own cards can just drop stupid creatures with artifact synergy.  

Seven of the top twenty-four community-rated cards in Modern are artifacts. Considering that eight of those are lands---

Chart!

But I'm not here to argue power. Power is the refuge of people without the mental flexibility to step outside of socially-mandated objectives to have fun. That's the explanation for why I love Red so fucking much; red cards come in two flavors: 

1) Edgy cards with the sole purpose of moving your opponent's life total towards 0.

2) Random shit. 

Burning Inquiry forces every player to draw three cards, then discard three cards at random. It can take a first turn hand and turn it into rubbish as a player suddenly sees their starting lands looking up at them from their graveyard in what can only be called a Turn One Fuck-Mulligan. More importantly, it takes anything approaching a stodgy, well-crafted strategy by opposing spikes and turns it into bile. If I had a time I heard someone say they only lost because of a Burning Inquiry, I'd have about fifty cents, but I'd spend that fifty cents to buy gum to look cool while I played Book Burning again to the combined sighs and laughs of my collective opponents.

Ye gods, when they attach a Glitterfang to this, I'll just have to joy-quit Magic forever.

Scrambleverse takes all the permanents on the board and gives them to someone at random. Given that you have N players, and one player has more than 1/N of those permanents, Scrambleverse redistributes the wealth. Probably. That's randomness for you.

Man, I hope that guy can grab the invisible ball before all those chess pieces do.

You won't get an image of Warp World because the text is too small to read, but rest assured when I tell you it completely rips and rebuilds the board. I have a Warp World deck that's so awesome, not only has it never won, but I've never even drawn Warp World.

Why Blue/Red? Red is just wild, but can solve problems that serious[1] players will pose. Blue can solve problems too and throw fuel on the fires that red starts, which is good. What's great about blue is that it has a wide net; it can do any number of stupid, unfocused things that make its slice of the color pie that oozy undercooked piece that's just fruity ooze flanked by two pieces of triangular crust.

Blue/Red is imagination printed onto little cards that someone thought up and packaged so someone else would market them to you so you'd buy them.

So not much like imagination, but fun. Fun and better than the alternatives.  

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[1] boring