What Lorwyn-Shadowmoor Block is Doing to Color

I'm going to take a break from talking (exclusively) about Eventide to talk about Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block as a whole. But first, a few more quick comments about red-white in Eventide.

First of all, it seems that the red-white Avatar has flying and not haste. This means that although he is slower, he also has evasion, which is something red-white doesn't get much of, so it's welcome. I'm not sure whether it's strictly better or worse than haste for this card, but I don't think the overall effect on gameplay is significant enough to change my mind about whether or not I'd draft it. I still think it's a powerful card, it's just powerful in different ways now. The red-white aura is also a bit more useful on him when he has evasion, allowing you to hit the enemy for more direct damage (at least 7) and gain that much life. Pretty cool.

And now that the rest of the Eventide cards have finally been spoiled (though, as evidenced by the previous paragraph, they're not entirely definitive), I can talk about the final red-white card. It could have turned out to be some lame dude that doesn't do much, or another combat-based instant, but instead it's a nice little creature with an ability that fits right into the red-white theme of power pumping that I mentioned before. It's a 2/1 for 3 mana, but his 2-mana untap ability gives attacking creatures you control +1/+0 until end of turn. This means that he's basically a 3/1 with vigilance, and if he can be given first or double strike, all the better. A welcome addition to red-white's arsenal, to be sure.

And now I can get to what I actually wanted to talk about: Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block and color. This is mostly a set of observations; I'm not sure what to conclude. But I'll talk about that more later, and hopefully I can get some feedback.

Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block does things with color that break a lot of rules, conventions, or just patterns that have developed over the years of Magic, specifically with regard to creature type. Lorwyn is about creature type, and Shadowmoor is about color, and the way these two features interact is quite interesting in both miniblocks. I tend to think about it on a tribe-by-tribe basis, so that's how I'll explain it. I'll start with perhaps the most unique tribe in terms of color: elementals. (There's enough to say about elementals alone that I'll leave the other tribes for another time.)

Throughout Magic's history, elementals have basically been random magical dudes that do neat things, with little tribal cohesion. I did some research about elementals and color and drew up some numbers - the number of elementals of each color printed before Lorwyn. Since this is mostly a flavor issue, I ignored changelings. I considered "elemental" to be any card with the creature type Elemental, including Tribal cards. As for color, I counted multicolored "gold" cards as half a point for each color, and hybrid cards as a full point for each color. I ignored artifact creatures since there was only one.

So here's what I found: prior to Lorwyn, there were 3.5 black elementals, 9 white elementals, 25 blue elementals, 41 green elementals, and 47.5 red elementals. This broad range was somewhat interesting: black and white have hardly any, green and red have a ton, and blue has an amount somewhere in between. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, and it kind of makes sense: elementals are often made of fire (red) or are creations of nature (green) or intellect (blue). White tends to have a lot of humans and humanoid races with little interest in magical entities, and black has mostly zombies, undead, and things that smell bad. What's also interesting is that red and blue are both elemental colors - fire and water - and green is sort of a general "nature" color, also containing the element of wood. White and black, however, have no connection to elemental magicks; white is the color of light, and black is the color of death, neither of which is easily manifested into an elemental form. So it basically makes sense.

Then I counted the elementals in Lorwyn block. There are 6 black, 7 white, 8 blue, 6 green, and 5 red elementals, plus 20 red flamekin and Horde of Notions (which is all five colors). What's unique about Lorwyn elementals is that they have both one and five colors, unlike the other tribes, which either have a solid two colors, or have one main color and splash into one or two others. But elementals are split into two types: the classic random magical beasts, which are distributed evenly among the five colors, and the flamekin, which are all red. However, each of these categories diverges significantly from previous Magic history, and in quite different ways.

The flamekin are unique in that they are a cohesive tribe. Previously, elementals were just random magical dudes, but in Lorwyn, they have a consistent shape, color, and creature subtypes. Never (or rarely) before have elementals had sentience, tribal unity, OR subtypes. This makes the flamekin quite unique as elementals, but of course they fit right into Lorwyn, where that's the norm.

The other elementals are unique in the mere fact that they are evenly distributed among all five colors. There are more black elementals in Lorwyn block than in the entire history of Magic before that. This is partly because the elementals in Lorwyn have a certain unique Lorwynness that separates them from previous ones. They're weird combinations of animals, mostly, and a lot of them have Evoke. The black ones aren't manifestations of death, they're combinations of pigs and centipedes, snails and crabs, or...well, a lot of them are difficult even to identify. But they're NOT manifestations of death, even if some of them deal directly with it (Shriekmaw). They're just...weird...things.

So that's all right. Elementals now have a foothold in all five colors, and are pushing red even further ahead in the lead. But then there's Shadowmoor block.

In Shadowmoor, elementals gain black. This is part of the flavor and story of Shadowmoor - the red, fiery flamekin burn out and become the vicious, resentful cinders. Black is the color of decay and withering, so of course, flavorwise, it makes sense for them to shift into black. But when you look at the data, it is almost astonishing. In Shadowmoor block, there are a whopping 26 black elementals. That's more than SEVEN TIMES the number of black elementals printed before Lorwyn, and the number is still THREE TIMES as many if you include Lorwyn into the mix. Now, the number 26 includes red-black hybrid elementals (and other hybrids), but they are no less black for also being red (or other colors). You can still play them in a mono-black deck, and they definitely have aspects of blackness, so it is fair to count them on par with mono-black cards. This pushes the number of black elementals almost past blue in the grand total. Going from a black-to-blue count of 3.5-to-25 to 35.5-to-38 is a massive leap in proportion.

Of course, elementals are still red, too. There are 20 red elementals in Shadowmoor block (including hybrids of course), which brings red's grand total for elementals even further out in front. No big surprise there. And the other three colors each have a few more elementals of their own, several of which are hybrids, pushing those numbers up further as well.

So for a final bit of number crunching, I calculated the percentage that each color has increased their total elemental count since before Lorwyn, and the grand totals for each color as of Eventide. Black's elementals increased 914% for a total of 35.5, white's increased 156% to 23, red's increased 95% to 92.5, blue's increased 52% to 38, and green's increased 32% to 54. Red now has a huge lead over all the other colors, and black has surpassed white, leaving white at the bottom. Now here's the thing: I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. Does this mean that Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block is ruining sacred traditions of Magic? Is it exploring and opening up new design space? Is this entire study irrelevant? If there's anyone out there who can answer this question - or who at least has SOME opinion on it - I would love to hear it.