Ever since InQuest magazine was in print (which was from 1995 to 2007), adding a sixth, additional color of mana to Magic has been a discussion that periodically comes up. There were even fake cards and a proposed mana symbol for the color purple in an issue of InQuest. You can check out some of the details of that over on the Magic wiki here.

Along with the devoid keyword ability that implied a creature was colorless, a brand new mana symbol was also introduced in Oath of the Gatewatch for the second time since the game's inception (if we're counting snow mana): the colorless mana symbol. This was kind of a huge deal and colorless mana was intrinsically tied to the Eldrazi. In fact, there are 28 total cards that have colorless mana in their costs, and they are all Eldrazi creatures or Eldrazi-based spells.

One of the biggest implications of this symbol was that Magic now needed a distinction between colorless mana and generic mana. All colorless mana could be used as generic mana, but not all generic mana was colorless. If that seems a little complicated, it was when the colorless mana symbol was first introduced as well.

One of the trickiest things to grasp was that if a card had a numeral in its casting cost, such as , that was generic mana, and any type of mana could be used to pay it, including colorless.

If a card had the colorless mana symbol in its mana cost, that needed to be paid specifically with colorless mana.

The hardest thing to do might have been changing the public lexicon's definition of "colorless mana," which had been the term for "any generic colored mana used to pay for spells" for as long as the game existed.

Paying for colorless mana might have seemed difficult to manage, since there would be so few lands in the game that produced colorless mana, but that might be the neatest part. Every card that previously produced mana without a color, like pain lands (Yavimaya Coast, Underground River) or Sol Ring, now produced colorless mana. Mana sources no longer just produced generic mana. Any card that previously produced what is now known as generic mana, now specifically produced colorless mana, and could be used to cast colorless spells.

This was a shockingly elegant solution to adding a new type of resource to the game after 20+ years: you take the mana that lands, artifacts, and creatures were already producing, and you specify that it's a new, named type of mana. The biggest hurdle with introducing a new color to the game would be catching that color up to every other color in the game that has already had two decades to establish themselves. But by making colorless mana work this way, you basically get to grandfather in a bunch of cards that already make colorless mana!

Additionally, there was also a new basic land that was printed that produced colorless mana - Wastes! Although it unfortunately doesn't have its own basic land type. In other words, Wastes is "Basic Land," but not a "Basic Land - Wastes." This means that it can still be fetched with cards like Terramorphic Expanse or Fabled Passage, but it can't add a sixth damage to a Tribal Flames. Your lands can't tap for colorless mana with a Dryad of the Ilysian Grove in play and Scion of Draco will never cost 0 mana. Similarly, Leyline of the Guildpact doesn't make your lands Wastes, because it isn't a type, so they also won't produce colorless.

While I would have loved to see domain cards go up to six, I think this would be a bit too much of a change. It would fundamentally affect how a lot of cards worked, like allowing Boseiju, Who Endures's target's controller to search for a Wastes, or causing Coalition Victory to require six different land types. Ultimately, it feels like making Wastes a "type" would have been a bit messier, even if it would have felt a lot more symmetrical with every other basic land to my brain.

Colorless was an awesome addition to the Magic resource system, and I was thrilled to see them print a ton of new colorless cards as recently as Modern Horizons 3. I hope colorless mana becomes a more evergreen mechanic that can be used more freely, but considering its ties to the Edrazi, I'm not so sure that can happen without colorless mana becoming a more mainstream part of the game.

I will say, it feels a little odd having so many cards producing specifically colorless mana - about 430 if Scryfall is to be believed - with only 28 cards that specifically need it to be cast...

Frank Lepore

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