The intro to Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender clearly explains the show’s setting. The four nations, each associated with one of the four elements, are meant to exist in harmony. The Fire Nation has disrupted that balance, but there is hope in the form of the Avatar, who can master all four elements and establish peace.
The four elements are so important to the show, but they’ve become a problem for the Avatar: The Last Airbender Magic: The Gathering set releasing on Nov. 21. The Avatar Aang card depicts his connection to the four elements by being red/green/white/blue. The first major card reveal shared the mechanics for bending, mostly connecting white to air, blue to water, red to fire, and green to earth.
But Magic has five colors. Without a strong elemental affiliation, the set seems to just be using black as a stand-in for bad guys. Fire Lord Zuko is RWB to show how he’s a firebender who abandoned his evil ways and allied with the Avatar to bring peace. Both Fire Lord Ozai and The Rise of Sozin saga are black, but have abilities that generate red mana, so they’re not really useful in mono black decks. Presumably, other Fire Nation villains like Princess Azula and Admiral Zhao will have similar issues.
There are some characters from Avatar that could be truly black, like Koh the Face Stealer, since black is typically the color of demonic entities. But most of the show’s villains still have strong affiliations with the elements. The bloodbender Hama could be blue/black since she’s also a waterbender. Black is typically the color of secrets and treachery, meaning the Dai Li will fit right in, but they’re also earthbenders.
This is a problem of stapling a setting to a system that wasn’t designed for it. Before Magic committed to trying to grow its player base with Universes Beyond sets based around established franchises like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Final Fantasy, the game’s worlds and mechanics were built together. The guilds of Ravnica and the clans of Tarkir ascribed values and personality to color combinations so powerfully that they became shorthand for deck types.
That marriage of design and theme creates cards that feel like part of a cohesive whole. The green/black Golgari Swarm represents the link between life and death. The white/red/blue Jeskai practice martial arts and focus on strategy over brute strength. The red/white school of Lorehold from Strixhaven includes bold adventuring archaeologists and scholars. Wizards’ most recent original set, Edge of Eternities, uses five planets to represent the five colors, each with its own complicated faction.
Being handed a beloved setting and having to figure out how to make it fit with the rules of Magic: the Gathering is inherently going to be a bigger challenge for designers. The long history of Final Fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons made those Universes Beyond sets easier to mold because there was so much to work with, but even then, there were complications.
The crossover Adventures in the Forgotten Realms had cards for all of D&D’s chromatic dragons. The fire-breathing red dragon, swamp-dwelling black dragon, and poison-breathing green dragons all made perfect sense for their corresponding colors. But blue dragons breathe lightning, which has been associated with red since the earliest days of Magic, while white dragons are creatures of cold, which is typically the domain of blue.
The physical hue of dragons not matching their traditional color identity probably wasn’t a big concern for the set’s designers, but it’s a demonstration of how Universes Beyond inevitably erodes the design principles that have allowed Magic to thrive for more than 30 years. Trying to stretch a world of four elements into five colors does the same thing. The five colors of Magic aren’t ever in harmony, but the push and pull between them defines the game’s lore and deckbuilding strategies. Without a clear role for black, Magic’s Avatar: The Last Airbender set will have a very hard time achieving design balance.
