How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home!

The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

Richard Garfield took the concept from a fantasy novel, kind of said "Yeah, kind of like that" and didn't think any more of it.

The reason is to limit the players' choices. If everyone has access to everything, there is no variety.

There's a lot of bleed between the colors and a lot of things that just don't quite make sense.

And they're also wrong according to Mark Rosewater, the current lead designer of the game. For example: Black isn't satisfaction, it's looking out for yourself. It's a selfish philosophy. Whereas one can find satisfaction through altruistic acts. And you can argue every color is looking for satisfaction, it's just that every color defines satisfaction in a different manner.

Yes.

I would add that another insight is that it's much easier to communicate with people when you learn their language. It might be much easier for a nerd to introspect about their personality when prodded using MTG, a familiar framework. Similarly some people expect their relative positions in n-dimensional personality space to be codified using zodiac signs. If you can do so, meet people on familiar ground, at least at first.

White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in battle.

Blue represents drawing the right card, mostly by drawing a lot of cards. Blue wins by controlling spells and hands. (When the article says "knowledge", note that the MTG deck in play is called "the library"!)

Black represents destruction. Black wins by controlling battlefields and removing blockers.

Red represents opportunities in the current moment and the random possibility of change. Red wins by playing on offensive tempo (the "upswing") and attacking vulnerable targets with instant abilities. ("Tempo" here is not quite as in music; it means playing cards turn after turn with a reliable ramping up in cost and effectiveness.)

Green represents growth and the potential for planning. Green wins by playing on defensive tempo (the "downswing") and tilting the battlefield in their favor over many turns.

Ideally, this system of categorizing by color works because there aren't any big strategies to winning that aren't color-aligned. "Milling", the strategy of deliberately destroying your opponent's library, is closely tied to blue and black, which are all about libraries and destruction. Keeping a "zoo", a battlefield full of mid-range on-tempo creatures, is closely tied to red and green, which are the two colors tied to tempo.

[0] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Color

Of course it doesn't explain humanity, that's just bad clickbait. But clustering things together helps analyzing things according to a certain theory/outlook.

You can use MBTI that way too, even if its fundation is unscientific. Ask any set of correlated-enough question, and you end up with a cluster of people/events that correlate with a slew of other things.