sarpadianempiresvol-viii:

This is it, folks, the final week in my cycle on the philosophies of the color pairs in Magic. It’s been quite an adventure, and this is the last stop for the color train. If you haven’t read all the other nine articles, don’t worry. You don’t have to read them in order. If you’re that kind of person (I sure am), here they are: White/Blue, Blue/Black, Black/Red, Red/Green, Green/White, White/Black, Blue/Red, Black/Green, and Red/White. As with those articles, I’ll be answering a few questions:

What are the conflicts between these two colors?

Where are these two colors similar?

What mechanics do these two colors share?

How has the Ravnica guild of these two colors express them?

What are real-world examples of these two colors’ philosophy?

And if you hadn’t deduced it already, today’s color pair will be Green/Blue. Also known as my favorite color pair.

What Are the Conflicts between Green and Blue?

Like the previous four enemy color pairs, the key to Green/Blue’s color philosophy lies in the differences between the colors. In Blue, Green sees a color too obsessed with unnatural experimentation. It tinkers with the natural way, which frightens Green. In Green, Blue sees a color with no ambition. Green sits there and lets things be, when Blue thinks it should be pushing forward and advancing its cause. At its core, this conflict is nature vs. nurture. Green feels the way things are is the way things are, but Blue thinks everything starts as a blank slate that can be molded however you want. Meeting at the halfway point, Green/Blue accepts that change is the natural way. If there’s a single word that sums this relationship up, it’s evolution. Green/Blue wants to be a catalyst for growth, because that’s what it was born to do.

Where Are Green and Blue Similar?

Green/Blue looks at evolution as the convergence of its ideologies. Green feels that growth is just nature’s way of changing and adapting. Blue thinks that self-improvement is the same thing as growth. The divide between knowledge and wisdom is also broken down. Green/Blue says that more knowledge will, over time, become more wisdom. Promoting change gives Green/Blue great focus, which has the downside of Green/Blue not being able to take a step back and evaluate what it’s doing. It makes Green/Blue a little crazy to other people, because they don’t often understand what Green/Blue is doing.

What Mechanics do Green and Blue Share?

Despite Blue’s lack of creature mechanics, it still shares many of them with Green. They previously shared shroud, but now share hexproof. In Green it’s flavored as a natural resistance to magic, while in Blue it’s flavored as invisibility or a self-imposed magicproofness. Green and Blue also share flash, as Green has ambushing predators and Blue can tweak the nature of æther to summon things faster. While not a mechanic, the colors together often use +1/+1 counters to signify growth.

Off of creatures, Green and Blue share a lot of card drawing. Blue has straight-up drawing power, while Green’s version is usually tied to creatures. Both colors can also untap permanents; Green mostly untaps creatures and lands, while Blue untaps anything. Each color can clone creatures too, although Green usually only clones token creatures or searches for more copies of a creature you control. Finally, both colors can return their creatures to their hand.

How did the Simic Express Green and Blue?

Technically, there have been two Simic guilds. The original one was run by an Elf named Momir Vig, a brilliant scientists who developed a bioenhancement substance called plax. It was fused onto every Simic member (and experiment) and allowed them to share their powers between each other. The end goal was the assimilation of every member of the Simic Combine into the paragon of growth an adaptation: the Ooze called Kraj. Kraj was killed by Rakdos, however, and thus the Simic went extinct.

The Simic Combine was reborn, however, when sections of Ravnica opened up to the primordial ocean below. Called zonots, these regions erupted with Merfolk that had been dormant for millennia. They were much more controlled than Momir Vig was, seeking to combine animal species to facilitate evolution. A fusion like this was called a krasis, and it represented the core principle of Green/Blue’s “catalyst of change” philosophy.

What are Real-World Examples of Green and Blue Philosophy?

Glowing proteins were introduced into rat stem cells and implanted into infertile males…who were able to then produce fertile sperm carrying the genes for the glowing protein (glowtein?), proving that they had become fertile.

Some of the craziest parts of science belong to Green/Blue, the most notable of which is genetic engineering. It’s literally taking the building blocks of life, which are naturally occurring in every living thing, and tweaking them in order to incite a desired change. Pretty much any scientific endeavor that seeks to artificially control nature has a bit of Green/Blue in it. The other big one is ecological conservation, which pulls a lot of “don’t change this!” from Green’s philosophy. Since science, by definition, studies the natural world, any branch of science looking to tinker with nature has a variation that’s Green/Blue, not just biology.

Growth of the Self

In earlier articles I’ve hinted that I’m not as Blue/Red as I used to think. It took me a bit to get there, but I finally realized that I’m much more Green/Blue (which should have been a tip-off, has Green/Blue has trouble with introspection sometimes). A lot of my gut decisions are more instinctual than emotional, and my style of knowledge gathering is definitely in the “deconstruct the building blocks” style of Green/Blue. The good news is both answers were only half right, and I think I’m definitely a Temur (Blue/Red/Green) person. But that will have to wait for a future Temur article.

Join me next week, planeswalkers, when I tell an origin story.