A History of Artifacts: From Mono-Brown to Rainbow

There's no time like there present to dig up the past! It's time for another retrospective... of a sort. I'm digging through Magic's history again, orienting around the card types and how they've changed and evolved over time. It's interesting to dig into the original concepts and how they've left a permanent impact on the game's design history. There's no better place to start with than artifacts, one of the card types with the most (ironically) colorful histories.

Card types are, naturally, a big subject to tackle, so I'm going to focus in on a particular aspect. For this go-around, I'm tackling one of the core features of artifacts: their color identity. Why were all artifacts colorless to start and what happened to change it?

The Beginning!

Let's start at the start, where we ought to begin! Alpha released in 1993 and presented the world with the game as a whole. Amongst creatures, spells, and enchantments, players opening booster packs of this strange new product would find cards with brown borders, the only cards whose mana costs didn't require a single pip of colored mana: artifacts.

Artifacts originally had special typings (Mono, Poly, and Continuous) which would mostly be rendered moot by the invention of a tap symbol. The card type also had a quirky, flavorful piece of rules text in which artifact's abilities automatically "turn off" whenever tapped. This got to be confusing (and, it turned out, limited design space), so this would be corrected around Sixth Edition. What would last far longer was the rule about artifacts being colorless.

As originally conceived, artifacts represented physical objects with magical properties. If they were physical objects, then any wizard could conceivably pick it up and use it, so they would have to be colorless. Pulling artifacts and colorlessness fully apart would take nearly thirty years. 

There is, innately, a problem with colorlessness. It is famously known as the Queen Problem in trading card game circles. The best piece in chess is the queen: it has the fewest restrictions on movement. If people were able to assemble a team of chess pieces rather than just use the standard array, most competitive players are going to use a team of all queens. In a trading card game, you have to have a reason why people can't just put literally all of the best cards in one deck and call it a day. For Magic, it's the colored mana system. You can't put all the best cards in a deck without putting a severe strain on your mana balance. 

Artifacts being a beloved and flavorful card type which flew directly against one of the three pillars of Magic's design would prove... unfortunate. With the origin out of the way, let's look into ways that designers interacted with that persistent colorlessness trait!

Color Restrictions without the Color

Homelands is basically the perpetual joke. You can tap on a microphone, grumble the world "Homelands" into it, and someone in the crowd will chuckle. Even so, it gave us Didgeridoo, the origin of one Minotaur Reviewer, so it's not all bad! This is a prime example of a very specific but powerful effect being placed on an artifact: it can't go into every deck, but it puts in nice work where it goes. (Also of note: aside from Labyrinth Minotaur, all Minotaurs at the time were red, so this was effectively a red card.)

Speaking of deck restrictions, Malachite Talisman and the entire Talisman cycle are a solid way of making sure that a colorless cards couldn't actually go into just any deck and provide value. (The earliest example would be Gauntlet of Might, but this shows the design technology being used more readily.) Artifacts would go on to care about specific colors to remain narrow, a great tool in the box. 

Serrated Arrows represents another major innovation: charge counters! Charge counters are a somewhat flavorless way to limit the total number of uses the artifact has. This example is a clear case of it: being able to continually weaken or outright remove creatures for the rest of the game, guaranteed, is too oppressive. Limiting the uses created a new knob to tweak and use to keep colorless from innately being more powerful

Limiting uses and use cases would be very important for the card type, unfortunately not a lesson which the design team held close to.

Artifacts Get Broken: Urza's Saga

Urza's Saga was intended to be an artifact block, and they succeeded. The power level was insane. There were decks that could combo off turn one thanks to cards like Tolarian Academy allowing for insane mana production. Then there was Megrim in conjunction with Memory Jar. Pop that off and your opponent takes, minimum, 14 damage. 

There were spells in this block which would "refund" their mana cost by untapping lands equal to their mana cost. Combined with lands like Tolarian Academy, things got silly. 

There were a lot of problems that resulted from the number of insanely powerful artifact decks in the block. There were lessons learned, but eventually someone would reach back into the cookie Memory Jar...

Where did they go from here? Well, the next four years saw a dwindling number of artifacts being printed, and with fewer major shots at constructed viability. (2002 saw six artifacts printed, and they were all clearly intended to play into the kindred themes of the sets therein. 2001's highest-played-in-Commander card is Millikin.) 

But then... 

Twice Shy: Mirrodin

They broke things again, folks. 

Another swing and a miss. Mirrodin was very cool and interesting, sure, but the colorless soup problem prevailed. They tried to stave it off by putting colored mana activations on cards to guide cards like Cranial Plating away from being easy inclusions. 

Unfortunately, Mirrodin block was trying to innovate on artifacts in a big way. In short order, they introduced:

• Affinity for artifacts, a cost-reducing mechanic
• Equipment, the first ever artifact noncreature subtype
• Artifact lands

In modern times, Mark Rosewater discussed at length the problems of simultaneously developing the Mutate and Companion mechanic for Ikoria, saying that making too many new, complex mechanics at once leads to problems when developing them. Mirrodin block did this in a big way with a less-experienced R&D team.

Putting colored mana in a few text boxes did little to help, and artifacts burned down Standard. Artifact lands tapped for two in affinity decks, Equipment offered way too much power for the resilience they came with, and modular was a surprisingly linear deck with explosive endpoints. 

Oh, well.

The Turning Point: Shards of Alara

In 2008, Magic introduced a new plane: Alara. It was once a plane that was fractured into five shards, each one only having access to three colors of magic. Naya, for instance, only had red, green, and white, lacking blue and black; it is a very un-subtle plane full of great beasts and a small religious following. We haven't been back to Alara in over 15 years, but we still use the names derived from this setting.

Four of the planes had named mechanics. The fifth, Esper, had an interesting problem. What mechanic best represented having access to only white, blue, and black, lacking red and green? Well, green represented nature and red represented vibrancy and warmth. Without that, they decided the world would be cold and mostly artificial. What represented cold artifice better than artifacts?

Second problem: artifacts are colorless, but the shards are defined by having those three colors. If all the artifacts were colorless, then Esper drafters could find their cards ending up in other player's decks, maybe enough so that it made it impossible to reliably play the Esper deck as intended. 

Solution: the very first artifacts with colored mana costs! 

The designers decided that colored artifacts would be a thing unique to Alara, something which made it special. Problem: Alara has been referenced and seen in brief in the years since but has not been given a full revisit. They essentially locked away a valuable tool in the interest of keeping an unusable plane special. 

Over the next few years, colored artifacts would only be used when they absolutely had to be. New Phyrexia saw Phyrexian Metamorph and the like, which used Phyrexian mana and could still be treated as colorless. Theros had a handful of colored artifacts representing the weapons of the gods (Bident of Thassa). Any time it happened, it felt like a weird exception and never like a realization that this was a valuable resource.

And then they tried a full artifact block again.

The Final Straw: Kaladesh

The designers really tried to limit breakability, I think. If you scour Kaladesh, you see how the artifacts are siloed towards certain colors 0r deck archetypes. They even did a cycle of Gearhulks with colored mana costs to keep things kosher. Unfortunately, by committing to the artifact theme with the card type still intrinsically tied to colorlessness... things still broke.

Aetherworks Marvel and Smuggler's Copter would get banned before the block's end in Standard. The old looter scooter was generically good; any deck running creatures could run it and do well. The Marvel required energy, but energy was in all five colors. Whichever combination of energy you ran, Aetherworks Marvel was worth including, but it was also just... stupid with Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger still in the format.

So, another Standard roasted by powerful colorless cards. They had refined the process and made lots of heavy restrictions, but it still wasn't enough. Kaladesh had compounding factors, namely that energy was a complicated new mechanic with several costs having been misjudged, but had the designers been able to easily slap colored mana costs on most of the artifacts without tradition turning them away, things could have been different. 

Resolution: Eldraine and Core Set 2020

In many ways, 2019 represents a massive shift in Magic as a whole, so much so that it may have been easy to gloss over the slow shift in artifact's colorlessness. See, it started with War of the Spark actually. The set had many things going on, obviously, so the rare cycle of mono-colored artifacts may have gone largely unnoticed. Bolas's Citadel is the most noteworthy of the bunch. But these were rares, after all. It happened sometimes.

Then Eldraine came along and brought with it things like Witching Well and Embercleave. Each color had at least one artifact at common and mythic rare. The set has a minor artifact theme due to the need for knightly quests and fairy tale items, but the full set at common is big. It had 21 artifacts with colored mana costs, while the original Alara set had 33 when that was a major component of the set. This was significant.

Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, but thrice is a pattern.

Colored artifacts? At uncommon? With no specific flavor justification?

Could it be!?

At last, the normalization of colored artifacts would begin! 

Mark Rosewater spent some time answering questions in the wake of this. Allowing artifacts to fully embrace colored mana cost removed a major divide between this card type and enchantments. When it comes down to it, static abilities are static abilities. At this point, the main things separating the card types are flavor and how colors interact with them. 

That and, well, enchantments don't tap.

...Mostly.

At any rate, I think artifacts are in a much better position with this change. Artifacts have been a small theme in Phyrexia: All Will Be One, Wilds of Eldraine, and Lost Caverns of Ixalan and nothing broke. 

There's a curious thought experiment to be had in trying to review the artifacts that broke previous Standards and consider how they would have fared with colored mana costs (or artifacts in the most recent sets with colorless mana costs). Just... just consider Embercleave with no red pips. 

Anyways, what do you all think of artifacts hitting their stride and picking up colored pips on the regular? Did it ruin the flavor? (I'm genuinely curious! I joined the game in around 2011 and thought that colored artifacts were cool and needed to happen more often.)