Mark Rosewater Admits Red Needs Work, Color Pie Breaks Incoming

Last updated on April 25, 2025

Sunset Strikemaster – illustrated by Zara Alfonso

When the Commander format was created, EDH meant Elder Dragon Highlander. It's still nicknamed EDH… but when looking at top-tier decks, you'd think that D is now for Dimir now!

And it would also seem that Red has become MTG's weakest color, at least when looking at Commander data and gauging player sentiment. As detailed in yesterday's article about how WotC improved White…

… you can could make a case that Blue and Black are the top-tier colors in Commander: The majority of the Top 15 cEDH decks by meta share lean either or , and the same is true for the top 100 most popular commanders in the last couple of years. Green, Red and White would be roughly tied as second-tier colors by these metrics, but a glance at the updated Commander Game Changers would put Red at the bottom, with just four cards in the GC category.

Source: Wizards of the Coast

Consensus among MTG players is far from universal, but a good chunk of the playerbase does seem to think that WotC succeeded in making White not the worst, while red becomes Commander's weakest color.

So what has WotC been doing to balance things out?

The Light That Burns Twice As Bright Burns Half As Long

Ashling the Pilgrim – illus. Wayne Reynolds

“When the Commander format was first created, few were concerned with color pie balance,” wrote Magic's Head Designer Mark Rosewater in his The Council of Colors article last year. “But, as the format grew and shared a larger percentage of gameplay, the color pie imbalance became a greater issue.”

The main hurdle is that Magic's colors were designed to face a single adversary who has 20 life points. Four Lighting Bolts, three Skewer the Critics, and a few lands can get the job done by turn 4, using less than 20% of your deck.

But you need to kill three foes with twice as much life in Commander. If you wanted to Bolt them all to death, you'd need a whopping 40 spells to do so, plus some lands.

Another aspect that probably hurt white and red is that some effects that used to be their “thing” were phased out for being unfun. Mass land destruction is the perfect example here: Armageddon and Jokulhaups are two of Magic's most iconic cards – and two of the most hated, to the point that the whole category of mass land destruction is one of the main factor separating Commander Brackets.

Red's Surefire Specialties

While 60-card players likely link Red to “Burn, Baby, Burn!”, in Commander, red is arguably the Treasure color –  to the point that Dockside Extortionist one of the best Treasure spammers in MTG history had to be banned from the format. That's in line with what WotC is trying to do: Red is the primary treasure creator, and Mark Rosewater even considers Blue treasure cards a mistake.

Treasures buttressed one of Red's weaknesses, while still being one-shot mana…

… but that seems to be about to change, as seen by Tarkir: Dragonstorm Sunset Strikemaster: 

Mark Rosewater confirmed this shift on his personal blog. “We’re letting red have more access to [mana dorks]. Not as good as green, but better than red had,” he wrote. And yesterday he confirmed it: “We’re trying to expand red’s color pie a little…”

Impulsive Draw

While other colors can create treasures, WotC's giving Red a full monopoly on impulsive card draw.

“There isn’t one [secondary color for impulse drawing],” Rosewater notes in his blog. “Not all effects have multiple colors.”

“Impulsive draw” is a nickname for effects like Light Up the Stage, that exile the top N cards of your library, then let you play those cards until the end of turn. This is how Wizards solved Red's lack of card advantage, and it's an ability no other color has. 

The Wheels in the Red go ‘Round and ‘Round

There's another mechanic that WotC has decided to monopolize under Red: Wheel effects, named after Alpha's Wheel of fortune.

“We decided that we do this infrequently enough that it could just be a red thing,” wrote Rosewater  back in 2021 in his Mechanical Color Pie 2021 Changes article. “We felt blue didn't need it nearly as bad a red did.”

Red also gets tamer “self-wheel” effects in TDM and Final Fantasy with Narset, Jeskai Waymaster and Celes, Rune Knight. And they even inducted Dragon Mage into Foundations!

They All Have A Plan Until You Punch Them In The Face – Twice!

Red is Magic's color for aggression, and nothing says “Seeing Red” better than multiple attacks per turn.

“Attacking twice has always been red's domain,” says Rosewater. “Thematically, it makes sense that white might occasionally do this.”

A quick tally through extra combat cards shows that the overwhelming majority (more than 80%!) lean into red in their color identity, and that nearly half of all new extra-combat cards have been printed in the last five years…

… and that's not counting Final Fantasy‘s Tifa Lockhart, who has already been leaked and is indeed an extra-combat commander!

Who's the Reddest of Them All?

Lightning Bolt – illus. Christopher Moeller

Another area in which Red has a bit of an advantage is that it has arguably been the “mono-color-est” color across all MTG formats: Regardless of the meta, and even when not top-tier, there's usually a mono-red deck you can show up and do well with.

And, as of this writing, the best mono-color commander is actually red: Magda, Brazen Outlaw is the only mono-color commander among the cEDH top 15, and there are three mono-red commanders among the 100 most popular.

We still need to find out why they'll use their new, unrestricted mana dorks for, though… perhaps in Final Fantasy, with both Cloud and Tifa leaning red, we'll find out!