Two Colored Decks / First Question thing too
General forum
Posted on June 8, 2023, 12:49 p.m. by Lanther
Wanted to post on here like the tutorial suggested.
And.
Do most tournament's or table tops or whatever you call them use decks with two colors?
I am only a one mono card guy because I am learning, I have won all the starter decks on Arena online. I can see it will be fun just not ready to expand. :)
FormOverFunction says... #3
I enjoy having decks that I can either commit a great deal of focus on or pilot like I’m drunk, so mono-colored decks are my favorite. I’ve got a couple of multi-color decks, especially in paper Commander, but if they’re multi-colored they’re usually only two color. In arena I almost exclusively play mono colors because I have my best luck relying on speed rather than fancy tricks. YMMV.
June 8, 2023 4:16 p.m.
wallisface says... #4
As legendofa mentioned this answer will depend highly on format. If you’re playing on Arena, then you’re likely playing Standard currently, which will typically have decks playing 1-3 colours - though as this format rotates this number may vary (i’d think 1-2 colours is more typical).
I’m only really knowledgeable in two of the current biggest 60-card formats, Modern and Pioneer, so i’ll provide some insight into those:
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Modern decks typically run 2-3 colours, though its not at-all uncommon to see them run 1, or 4 (5 colours are a bit rarer to see, but very easy to field if you wanted to).
There’s a decent range of mono-coloured decks in Mono-White HammerTime, Mono-White Taxes, Mono-Red 8Whack, Mono-Black Coffers, Mono-Black 8Rack, Mono-Blue Merfolk, Mono-Green Tron, and Colourless EldraziTron. Saying that, some of these decks are a much smaller part of the meta than others, and the Modern meta is soo diverse that these decks only take up a small portion of it, with the vast majority of decks running 2-3 (or-more colours).
The format has a landbase that makes running any number of colours easy, and would likely be overwhelmed with 4-5 colour nonsense if it weren’t for a few cards keeping those gameplans in check - most notably Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon - these cards will constantly be rising-and-falling in popularity depending on how greedy the current metas manabase is (at the moment, they’re played quite a lot, with Blood Moon in 33% of decks (though a lot of that will be sideboards)).
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Pioneer is an entirely different beast. It has access to most of the landbase of Modern, and there are no real hate cards to prevent you playing colours. However, without fetchlands (tge cycle of cards including Verdant Catacombs), it becomes a much harder struggle to justify multiple colours.
Decks typically run 1-3 colours, with 2 colour decks being super-common. It’s worth noting that some top-tier decks still run 5 colours here also.
Mono coloured decks include Mono-Green Ramp, Mono-White Angels, Mono-White Humans, and Mono-White Clerics (there’ll be others, i’m still reasonably new to this format).
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I would say that before worrying about what colours to play, you need to figure out what format you want to play in.
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Modern is currently a very “open” format, being able to homebrew decks that win games, and has a massive range of cards, but is expensive, with decks usually costing around $800-$1000.
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Pioneer has a less diverse meta and cardpool, but still allows for a bit of creativity, with decks usually costing around $250-$500.
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Standard is likely what you’re already playing on arena. There is a LOT less room to brew, and a much smaller cardpool. Also, with cards rotating every few years, the worth of your collection is more likely to drop over time. The decks costs aren’t too dissimilar to Pioneer, usually ranging from $100-$500.
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Legacy says money machine go brrr. I have no idea of the current health of the format, but i am aware its more likely to get periodically ruined by the various commander-focused cards than any of the above formats. Decks usually cost $2500-$5000.
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I don’t want to mention Commander (because imo its gross and not fun/healthy for play-patterns or deck construction - but each to their own), but as it’s the most “popular” format I probably should mention it exists. Prices will largely be dictated by the group you personally play with, so may be $20, or $2000.
June 8, 2023 4:33 p.m.
Like all the others above have said, it is super dependent. But generally it's a tradeoff between ease of producing mana for the deck and specific mechanics you want to run.
For example, if you were wanting to leverage cards like Bring to Light, you'r going to have a bad time if you try to make your deck even two colours. Decks that want to make this card work will run a 5 colour mana base, even if they're a 4 colour deck for example. But if you're building a deck around cheap anthem effects like Honor of the Pure or are wanting to run really heavily costed cards (like Cryptic Command for example) you're (generally) going to be limiting the number of colours you're running. Though even for this kind of stuff, it's not uncommon to see a mono-coloured deck splashing another colour (if you're unfamilar with the term, it means adding one or two cards of another colour but not commiting to that colour for the deck).
For most eternal 60 card formats though, the better access to mana bases they have, the more colours they will run to give the biggest card pool. Legacy and vintage decks will commonly be 3-4 colours as they have one of the best mana bases available, so you may as well take advantage of it. On the flipside, you will see decks specifically designed to punish this attitude; modern blue moon made some waves a few years back running a very basic heavy mana base (mainly blue with some red) and then ran Blood Moon to hate on the fact that most modern decks are like 3 colour and they all rely heavily on shocklands.
For formats like commander which have a buildaround card, people wanting to play that particular card is usually the driver and whatever colour(s) that card is will come second to what it does (typically). People will then make the card work with what they have available in the legal card pool, so sometimes you will see some interesting card choices to overcome colour identity restrictions.
June 8, 2023 8:50 p.m.
Very cool response thank you very much. Reading through the prior thread titles I guess I did not see "the above" comments on this topic. So a very big thank you, encp, for taking the time to answer my newb inquiry. In the future I will search the topic here and elsewhere as well.
Lanther
June 8, 2023 9:26 p.m.
My personal experience is that the lower your budget is (and the higher your opponent's is), the harder it is to add another colour. You can build decent mono decks for (usually) pretty cheap, but these will often have inbuilt flaws that will require more relative skill to compete with decks that have access to more colours. Another thing, if your deck has lots of Green ramp you might get away with more colours, but unless you're playing Commander ramp is a touchy thing, most decks are much better served by keeping a low curve and playing relevant cards for each drop, unless you can use something like Deathrite Shaman your ramp is likely good at only that, making it a dead drop when you play it.
I feel like Legacy doesn't have to be a $2k format, there are some cheap Burn decks that can win plenty of games, and most creature decks still wouldn't be happy to face off with an old fashioned Pox deck, you might not win tournaments but either is a fun/cheap deck to learn the basics of Legacy. I think Legacy is a reasonably healthy format, but there are too many parasitic strategies out there, and when something is printed that exploits the fact that most decks cut the same corners (shoestring removal, paying too much life, building super greedy decks with a small creature pool of pushed creatures that something like Oko just annihilates) it's an unmitigated disaster. If it wasn't for Force of Will I think Legacy would collapse under it's own gross bulk, but people definitely still try to run fast greedy combos, so a deck has to either be very fast or very good at slowing opponents down. There is still a part of me that suspects that Legacy, like Commander, isn't fully solved, the card pool is too massive and grows by thousands of cards each year (almost every card is Legacy legal). There is a bajillion decks that sit in the bushes waiting for a card or two to push them back into competitive territory, Legacy decks often feature a mix of Standard legal (or recently rotated) cards with older stuff, many decks use no Reserved List cards outside their mana bases, and some decks have no Reserved List cards period (Reserved List cards tend to cost at least 10x what is reasonable, some are more like 100x).
I think on Arena you'll want to move to a 2 colour deck if you can, 2 colours is has so many more options.
legendofa says... #2
It depends on the format. The more cards a format has access to, the more likely a deck is to run several colors. Standard decks pretty regularly use 1-2 colors, Pioneer is 1-3, Modern is 2-5, EDH is whatever you want it to be (although 2-3 seems to be most common), and for the highest-tiers of Legacy and Vintage, color is more of a polite suggestion than a restriction. Those decks run whatever they want.
If you're enjoying mono-color, Standard, and Pioneer are good places to play. I recommend experimenting with the different color combinations, to see if you really get into one. I like decks, and never really got the hang of .
June 8, 2023 1:01 p.m.