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There are many colors in Magic: The Gathering. While some cards only have one color, there are plenty that are multi-colored as well. These range from only having two of the five possible colors, all the way up to possessing all five of them. All color combinations have nicknames and a kind of playstyle they fall under. This guide will go over each one so you can understand the lingo and know what to expect when building decks of those color combinations, and it’s also going to give you a good chance of understanding the best precon Commander decks too. This is the Magic: The Gathering Color Combination guide.
A Note On Themeing:
This guide will go over all the color combinations as well as a brief description of what kind of archetypes they generally lean into. However, each color pairing goes well beyond that, and some color combinations have too many archetypes to list, some on the very niche side while the others are broader and see play in various formats. While these will help guide a baseline understanding of what to expect from certain color pairings, it won’t go over every single archetype found within the combinations.
List Of All Two-Color Combinations and names in MTG
There are a total of ten different two-color combinations in Magic: The Gathering. All of them get their name from the ten guilds of Ravnica, a setting in the game which is focused on two color pairings.
Azorius
Azorius is white and blue, and is the staple color of control. In almost every format, there’s an Azorius Control deck at the top of the metagame. It’s good at shutting down your opponent’s plays, as well as getting cards into your hand quickly so you always have answers.
Dimir
Dimir is black and blue, and tends to have a lean on graveyard strategies. These include milling your opponent to deck them out, or milling your own library to set up your graveyard with reanimation spells and other payoffs for having a ton of creatures in the graveyard.
Rakdos
The black and red color pair, Rakdos tends to sacrifice its own permanents to gain an advantage with powerful effects. Often, many Rakdos cards require you to either sacrifice something, discard something, or pay life, all for useful effects that make the trade-off worth it.
Gruul
Gruul is red and green, and is the color of aggro. Gruul cards tend to encourage hitting the battlefield as quickly as possible and dealing explosive amounts of damage with a lot of ways to give creatures haste (if they don’t have it already) to bring the life of your opponents down to zero.
Selesnya
Selesnya is the white and green color combination, and the one that tends to lean the most into lifegain. Selesnya has a plethora of ways to generate excess life, as well as being the color combo that has the most support for tokens.
Orzhov
The white and black color combination, Orzhov is another color pairing that dips deep into lifegain. However, Orzhov also has you paying life often to balance things out, paying life for beneficial effects that you get back later in the game with its lifegain.
Izzet
The Izzet color pairing is blue and red, and is a staple of spellslinger strategies. Spellslinger refers to the archetype of casting as many spells as possible, caring about instant and sorceries in particular, with Izzet being the most popular flavour of spellslinger.
Golgari
Golgari is black and green, and cares about their own graveyard most often. Many Golgari cards want cards in their graveyard to either reanimate, exile for the cost of a spell, or pay off with effects that count how many permanents are in the graveyard.
Boros
Boros is the white and red color pairing with a lean on aggro. Boros tends to trade off the ability to ramp and draw in exchange for a powerful board presence of cheap creatures that overwhelm the opponent with sheer numbers.
Simic
The color pairing of ramp, Simic is the green and blue combination. Simic has access to the best ways to get extra lands onto the battlefield on top of your one land per turn. It also mixes in draw power to ramp into big creatures with your excess lands.
List Of All Three-Color Combinations And Names
The three-color combinations get their name in one of two different ways. Half of them come from the shards of Alara, while the other half get their names from the factions (or wedges) of Tarkir, two planes that had three-color cards as their main focus.
Esper
Esper has white, blue, and black for its color combination. Esper is heavy in artifact support, along with drawing and discard cards, taking advantage of the two color pairs found within them for a boosted-up version of them all.
Grixis
Grixis, the blue, black, and red color combination is one that has two primary focuses, sacrifice and discard. Grixis has many ways to force your opponent to discard cards as well as benefit from sacrificing your own creatures for beneficial effects.
Jund
Black, red, and green make up Jund, the color of lands. This includes ramping your own lands, bringing them back from your graveyard, and destroying your opponent’s lands. In addition, Jund often veers into sacrifice strategies.
Naya
Naya, with red, green, and white in the color pairing, is one that is most focused on creatures. Naya decks usually want to be ramping with the green it has access to in order to go into powerful creatures that can boost the rest of your battlefield up.
Bant
When it comes to three-color combinations, Bant (green, white, and blue) is the one that is most focused on ramp and control. It has access to the best counterspells and the best draw spells, making it easy to control the board state with counters and planeswalkers.
Abzan
White, green, and black make Abzan, the color with the highest focus on self-mill. Abzan decks want to be filling their graveyard with their own cards, as they have many payoffs for having permanents in the graveyard to bring back or use with other card effects.
Jeskai
Jeskai is blue, red, and white, and the main three-color combination that’s focused on casting spells. Jeskai cards lean heavily into prowess, which want you casting multiple spells a turn to give them big stat boosts. In addition, Jeskai has a lot of ways to cast spells for free to lean even further into its spellslinging identity.
Sultai
Green, black, and blue are the Sultai colors, which are a bit of a “jack of all trades” archetype. They can lean into graveyard strategies, draw strategies, and creature strategies. While Sultai can do a lot of different things, they can’t take advantage of them all at once, and often need to focus on one of the themes instead of multiple.
Mardu
Mardu (black, white, and red) is all about combat. Many Mardu cards have payoffs during the combat step, from causing extra triggers to even gaining extra combats. It’s heavily focused on cheap creatures that can take advantage of battle effects found within Mardu.
Temur
Temur, with its green, blue, and red color combo, and is all about ramping into big spells. Temur has a large number of payoffs that have high casting costs, something that the green side of things makes easy to cast thanks to how much it can ramp. These spells take the form of both creature and noncreature, depending on the route you go down.
List Of All Four-Color Combinations And Names
Four-color combinations go by two different names. The simpler one is “Not-X,” with “X” being the color that is missing (so a white, blue, black, and red combo would be Not-Green). The other name they go by is named after the Nephilim from the Guildpact set, which were the first four-color creatures released in the game.
Yore-Tiller
Yore-Tiller is the color combination that’s missing green, and has the biggest lean on artifacts. It is missing green so it’s weaker on the ramp side of things, but gets the benefit of having support for all the best artifact cards.
Glint-Eye
Missing white, Glint-Eyes has every other color in its combination. This is the most “open” color combination, with access to just about every theme you can think of. The lack of white is hardly felt, and for Commander players, is very common at the cEDH level.
Dune-Brood
Dune-Brood has all colors except blue, and usually leans heavy into combat. Dune-Brood decks have no access to useful counterspells, trading those away for access to powerful creatures and permanents.
Ink-Treader
Ink-Treader lacks black, and has the most unique theming. There are a lot of different ways to build Ink-Treader decks, but tend to fall in line with one specific kind of archetype. There are many within Ink-Treader, from landfall to multi-colored spells, but none stand out about the rest as the most notable style.
Witch-Maw
If you have a four-color combination without red, you have Witch-Maw. Witch-Maw decks are usually built around a specific creature that is especially powerful, or use powerful effects to push the game to your advantage. It’s one of the highest ceilings for power when it comes to four-color combinations.
Five-Color Combinations
Five-Color combinations are sometimes referred to as “rainbow,” but much more commonly referred to as “WUBRG,” the abbreviation of all five colors.
As one could expect from having access to all colors in Magic: The Gathering, if can take all the archetypes talked about in this guide and play them, all under one umbrella of all five colors. There are a handful of cards that care about playing cards from all over the color pie (including multiple Niv-Mizzets that are all five colors), but sometimes just having access to all five colors is all you need to build the perfect deck.
While it’s nice to be able to play any card, you do still have to take into account your lands. One downside to WUBRG decks is the potential to not have the lands to generate the mana you need to cast the spells in your hand. While some effects can counteract this downside by giving them all land types so they can tap for any color, you can’t rely on drawing them.
What Is The Overall Best Color Combination in MTG?
Between all of the color combinations, after taking into account all formats throughout all of Magic: The Gathering, the one that sticks out the most above the rest is Rakdos. The black and red color combination is found in partially every format, including Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and even Arena-exclusive formats like Historic and Timeless.
Rakdos has had so much support released for it over the years, and has enabled it to constantly stay on top of the metagames across all Magic formats. This is largely thanks to just how many powerful removal spells have been released over the years. These spells can answer any problem creatures, and keep the battlefield clear for your own creatures to get in for damage.
Rakdos also has pro-active spells. There are many within the color pairing that can get cards out of your opponent’s hand that would otherwise stop your strategy in its tracks. It has plenty of useful creatures as well as very strong effects that can hit the battlefield early so you can get in for damage early.
There are so many black and red cards released over the years that continue to make a splash across multiple formats. The benefit of Rakdos is how solid of a shell it has.
It is worth noting while Rakdos is the best color combination in constructed formats, the same could not be said for Commander. When it comes to Commander, the nature of the format depends much more on the contents of the 99-card deck rather than the power of the cards that come from a certain color pairing. With Commander, there is no best color combination, but rather, just simply the best cards in the format which are found from all over the color pie.
Now that the MTG Fallout collaboration is upon us, it’s a good chance to consider an up-to-date guide on the MTG Color combination chart.
