The Hornet Sting Quandary

Originally coined as The Hornet Sting Fallacy by Cajun, this conundrum has two halves:

• The Color Pie’s mechanical limits govern what colors should be able to do efficiently rather than what they can do.
• Inefficiency shouldn’t be used to ignore principles of good design.

While the original point of the quandary was that designers chose which half they believed in more, I think it illustrates a fundamental issue with the color pie, because both halves are entirely correct, even if they are at odds with each other. While we’re led to believe that there are five colors in magic, there’s a sixth “color” in the pie: sufficiently large amounts of mana.  Even though red can’t destroy enchantments, black can’t destroy artifacts, and blue can’t destroy anything, all of them have access to Scour From Existence, Universal Solvent, Ulamog the Infinite Gyre, and Ulamog the Ceaseless Hunger. Even though black isn’t meant to draw cards without paying life, it has access to Kozilek, Butcher of Truths or Ugin the Spirit Dragon’s ultimate. 

But expensive colorless spells are effectively a color unto themselves. You can’t be a typical mono red deck and have access to Scour From Existence because 7 mana is a lot of mana. Enough that you need to purposefully achieve it through ramp, rituals, or cheat out spells. In a sense, it is another color that you are splashing at the cost of consistency in your primary game plan. This to some extent is a counter to the first half of the quandary, which is based on colorless spells ‘breaking’ the pie and being something every color has access to.

But, on the other hand, what if we took Scour From Existence and replaced a 1 generic of its cost with a single red pip (for the resulting cost of 6R). This is almost identical in practice to Scour From Existence in a red deck, but suddenly we are led to believe that this is not okay, per the second half of the quandary. Why? Well, the color pie serves two primary roles (flavor being a secondary role): to ensure that no color has too many strengths or not enough weaknesses, and to make sure colors feel distinct from each other. While the first is critical for game balance, the second one is critical for the feeling of deckbuilding and playing magic. Other colors having access to your strength, even if they only have access to it at really inefficient rates, undermines what makes your color special. 

On top of that, Magic design is inherently a slippery slope. Precedent invites iteration, and it is trivial to slowly depart from the underlying rules (“Green gets fight spells” becomes “Green gets one sided fight spells” becomes “Green gets target creature burn as long as it has a creature in hand”.) If you give Red incredibly inefficient removal of every permanent type, it normalizes that Red should have removal of every permanent type. It’ll feel less wrong when it gets it at 6 or 5 mana, or attached to an expensive creature’s enter the battlefield trigger. Now, this shouldn’t be taken as insane levels of slippery slope of “Scour From Existence leads to mono red vindicate,” but some amount of sliding is to be expected, and the end result poses a major risk to the first purpose of the color pie we outlined.