Color Combinations
Boros, Golgari, Jund, Abzan, Witch-Maw. Magic's color combinations have names, the names come from five different sets across nineteen years, and nobody ever explains which is which. Here is the whole list, and what each one actually does at a Commander table.
There are exactly thirty-two color combinations in Magic, because there are five colors and a combination is any set of them, five single colors, ten pairs, ten trios, five four-color sets, one five-color set, and colorless, which is the empty set and counts. Every one of the thirty-two is a legal Commander color identity, and every one of them has at least one legendary creature that can lead it.
The confusing part is the names. They were not designed as a system: they accumulated. The two-color names are Ravnica's guilds from 2005 and 2006, the allied three-color names are Alara's shards from 2008, the enemy three-color names are Tarkir's clans from 2014, and the four-color names come from a cycle of Guildpact creatures that cannot legally be commanders at all. Single colors and five-color were never named. That is why a player can know exactly what Boros means and have no idea about Mardu: the two words are nine years and two planes apart.
What color identity is, and why it is not the same as a card's color →Single colors have never been given faction names. Nobody says anything but mono-white, and Magic has never printed a word for one color the way Ravnica did for pairs.
Ravnica: City of Guilds (2005), Guildpact (2006) and Dissension (2006) between them named all ten two-color pairs after the guilds that ran the plane. These are the best-known color names in Magic by a distance, and they are the ones most players learn first.
Shards of Alara (2008) shattered a plane into five fragments, each holding one color and its two allies, with its enemy colors simply absent. Streets of New Capenna gave the same five trios a second set of names in 2022 (Brokers, Obscura, Maestros, Riveteers, Cabaretti), but the Alara words are the ones that stuck.
Khans of Tarkir (2014) named the five wedges (one color plus its two enemies) after the plane's clans. They are nine years younger than the shard names, which is exactly why a player who knows Jund often does not know Mardu. Before 2014 these combinations had no common names at all.
Guildpact printed five four-color Nephilim in 2006 and Magic then ignored the space for a decade. Commander 2016 built the first four-color decks and gave each identity a theme word instead. Both sets of names are in use, and most players just say "no green". Note the joke: the Nephilim are not legendary, so none of them can be a commander.
No faction name: five-color, WUBRG, or rainbow. Every card in Magic is legal in the deck, which makes the mana base the entire difficulty.
The one nobody counts, and the reason there are 32 rather than 31: color identity is a set of colors, and the empty set is a legal one.
Two of the names above only make sense once you know the color wheel. The five colors sit in a ring (white, blue, black, red, green) and each color's two neighbours are its allies while the two across from it are its enemies. White's allies are blue and green; its enemies are black and red.
That is the whole difference between a shard and a wedge. A shard is a color with its two allies, so it sits as a contiguous arc of the ring; a wedge is a color with its two enemies, so it jumps across it. It is also why the two-color guilds are usually taught in two batches: the five allied pairs first, then the five enemy pairs, which historically got less support and are still the ones with slightly rougher mana.
What each color actually does, and where the pie draws its lines →Thirty-two. Five single colors, ten pairs, ten three-color combinations, five four-color combinations, one five-color combination and colorless, which is every possible subset of the five colors, including the empty one. All thirty-two are legal Commander color identities.
After Ravnica's ten guilds: Azorius (white-blue), Dimir (blue-black), Rakdos (black-red), Gruul (red-green), Selesnya (green-white), Orzhov (white-black), Izzet (blue-red), Golgari (black-green), Boros (red-white) and Simic (green-blue). The first four-guild batch arrived in Ravnica: City of Guilds in 2005 and the last three in Dissension in 2006.
A shard is a color plus its two allied colors and is named after a fragment of the plane Alara from 2008: Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund and Naya. A wedge is a color plus its two enemy colors and is named after a clan of Tarkir from 2014: Abzan, Jeskai, Sultai, Mardu and Temur. Both are three-color combinations; which one you have depends on which three colors.
Because they were named twice. Guildpact printed five four-color Nephilim in 2006 (Yore-Tiller, Glint-Eye, Dune-Brood, Ink-Treader and Witch-Maw), and Commander 2016, the first product built around four-color decks, gave the same five identities theme words instead: Artifice, Chaos, Aggression, Altruism and Growth. Both are in circulation, and most players in practice just name the missing color.
Start from what you want the deck to do rather than from a color pair you like the sound of. Two colors is the easiest place to start (the mana base is nearly free and the card pool is still deep), and three is where most decks end up. Each identity's page here lists what it does well and what it genuinely cannot do, which is the more useful question than which colors are strongest.
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