Commander Glossary
Every color in Magic has two allies and two enemies, and that one arrangement is where guilds, shards and wedges all come from. Here is the wheel, which pairs sit where on it, and what the distinction is actually worth when you build a deck.
Magic's five colors are arranged in a ring: white, blue, black, red, green, and back round to white. It is the order on the back of every card and the order the mana symbols are always listed in, and once you can see it, most of the vocabulary players use about colors falls out of it automatically.
Each color touches two others on the ring. Those are its allied colors, also called friendly or neighbor colors. The two it does not touch are its enemy colors. Every color has exactly two of each, which is why the ten two-color pairs split into five and five.
Neighbours on the wheel. These are the pairings Magic has generally treated as natural partners, and they are the five that Dragons of Tarkir named after its dragon broods in 2015.
The colors across the ring from each other. These are the five that Strixhaven named after its colleges in 2021, which is exactly the half of the guilds Dragons of Tarkir had not covered.
The wheel is a design device rather than a rule. Nothing in the rules of Magic treats a white-blue deck differently from a white-black one, and there has never been a restriction stopping you playing enemy colors together. What the arrangement does is give the game's designers a shape to build sets around, and give the five colors a set of relationships that the flavor can lean on.
That is why the distinction has practical consequences without being a rule. Sets are often built around one half of the wheel: Apocalypse in 2001 was the enemy-color set of its block, Dragons of Tarkir handed the five allied pairs to its dragon broods, Strixhaven handed the five enemy pairs to its colleges. Whichever half a set is about is the half that gets new cards and new dual lands that year, so for long stretches of Magic's history one side simply had more printed for it than the other.
For a Commander player in a card pool this deep, the residue of all that is small. Every pair has a usable mana base and a real card pool. What is still true is the arithmetic in the next section: some three-color combinations ask your lands to bridge more enemy pairings than others, and that is worth knowing before you commit to one.
Take three colors and there are only two shapes available. Either they sit in a row on the wheel, which is a shard, or they do not, which is a wedge. There are five of each, and between them they are all ten of the three-color combinations.
Shards: a color plus its two allies
Wedges: a color plus its two enemies
The wedge is the one people find harder to see, and the second reading is usually what makes it click. A wedge is not three colors that all dislike each other: it is an allied pair plus the single color that opposes both of them. Abzan is green and white, which are neighbours, plus black, which is an enemy of each. That is the same statement as "black plus its two enemies", pointed at from the other end.
Dragons of Tarkir demonstrated the structure by taking it apart. When the timeline changed and each clan became a two-color dragon brood, what every clan lost was its odd color out and what it kept was its allied pair: Abzan became the green-white Dromoka brood, Mardu the black-red Kolaghan brood, and so on down the five.
The useful number is how many enemy pairings your lands have to bridge. A two-color allied deck has none, a two-color enemy deck has one. A shard has two allied pairings and one enemy pairing; a wedge has one allied pairing and two enemy ones. That is the whole of the difference, and it shows up as how many of your lands enter tapped rather than as anything about what the deck can do.
Past three colors it stops being a useful distinction. Every four-color combination contains allied and enemy pairings in quantity, and a five-color deck contains all ten pairs by definition, so the question becomes the flat one of whether you can afford the fixing.
None of this should decide what you build. A wedge is not a worse deck than a shard, it is a slightly more expensive mana base, and the thing that actually decides whether a color combination suits you is what those colors do. That is what the individual pages are for.
All 32 color combinations, what each is called and how each one plays →The two colors either side of a color on the color wheel. The wheel runs white, blue, black, red, green and back to white, so white's allies are blue and green, blue's are white and black, and so on. There are five allied pairs: white-blue, blue-black, black-red, red-green and green-white. They are also called friendly colors or neighbor colors, and Magic's own rules and design articles use the word allied.
The two colors a color does not touch on the wheel. White's enemies are black and red; blue's are red and green; black's are green and white; red's are white and blue; green's are blue and black. That gives five enemy pairs: white-black, white-red, blue-red, blue-green and black-green. Every color has exactly two allies and exactly two enemies, so the ten two-color pairs split evenly down the middle.
They mean the same thing. Allied is the term Wizards uses, friendly and neighbor are what players often say, and all three describe the two colors adjacent to a given color on the wheel. There is no equivalent informal name for enemy colors that has caught on, so those are just enemy or opposing colors.
A three-color combination made of a color plus its two enemies. Said the other way round, which is often easier to see: a wedge is an allied pair plus the one color that opposes both of them. Abzan is green and white, which sit next to each other, plus black, which is an enemy of each. The five wedges were named after the clans of Tarkir in Khans of Tarkir (2014).
A shard is a color plus its two allies, so it is three colors sitting in a row on the wheel. A wedge is a color plus its two enemies, so it reaches across the wheel. The practical difference is how many enemy pairings each contains: a shard has two allied pairings and one enemy pairing, a wedge has one allied pairing and two enemy ones. Shards are named after the five fragments of Alara, wedges after the five clans of Tarkir.
Slightly, and much less than they used to be. The gap was never about card power, it was about support: sets are often built around one half of the wheel or the other, so for stretches of Magic's history the allied pairs simply had more cards and more fixing printed for them. Commander's card pool is deep enough now that every pair has a workable mana base. The honest version is that a wedge has one more enemy pairing to fix than a shard does, which shows up as a slightly slower land base rather than a worse deck.
TurnZero HQ tracks every game you play, so your record breaks down by deck and by the colors you keep coming back to. Free to start.
Create Free Account