Of all the elements that define Magic: The Gathering as a game, few are more important than the color pie. The system of five colors, each with its own personality traits and mechanical identities, is a huge part of the game’s appeal. While the five colors are effectively set in stone now, there was a time when a sixth addition to the roster was considered. That addition was purple mana, and it’s now one of the stranger pieces of MTG trivia out there.
What is Purple Mana In MTG?
Purple mana is a theoretical sixth color of mana for MTG. It was first mentioned as an April Fool’s joke in issue 22 of InQuest magazine, from February 1997. The magazine ran an article discussing what a sixth color could look like, putting forward purple as its proposition.
InQuest’s version of purple focused on Shapeshifters and mind control effects as its mechanical identity. One of their custom cards, Invasion of the Soul, was essentially a Mindslaver effect six years before the real thing dropped. It also created a new creature type in Finori and a purple basic land in Portal. While this wasn’t an official article, it did attract a lot of attention at the time.
Eight years later, during the development of Planar Chaos, Wizards itself actually considered adding purple to the game for real. As outlined in The Color Purple, a 2007 article from Designer Paul Sottosanti, “A sixth color” was one of the options the design team considered to convey the alternate reality concept of the set. Purple was the color they went for in the end, likely due in part to the influence of the InQuest article.
According to Sottosanti’s article, the team actually developed the purple concept quite a lot. It was intended as a one-off feature of Planar Chaos, to appear in that set and that set only. Mechanically, it would specialize in counterspells and direct damage, and its basic land would be City. There were even a number of cards designed for the color, including a purple version of Mana Drain.
Unfortunately, as Sottosanti notes, “momentum continued to drift away from purple” during the design process, and it was ultimately left on the cutting room floor.
Will We Get Purple Mana In MTG?
It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever see purple mana used in a real MTG set. Since Planar Chaos in 2007, there’s been no mention of it again as something Wizards is pursuing. On top of that, Mark Rosewater, Magic’s Head Designer, has spoken many times on Blogatog about how unlikely the idea is to be used again.
As he notes repeatedly, the concept was too much trouble even as a one-off in Planar Chaos. The odds of it becoming a regular part of the game, then, are incredibly slim. There are a whole range of reasons for this, but the big one is balancing. Rosewater has mentioned that the current color pie is “too well balanced” to introduce a sixth color to.
Another issue with adding a sixth color is that Wizards has effectively already done so with colorless mana. This was introduced in 2016’s Oath of the Gatewatch, and it recontextualized generic mana by adding specific colorless symbols to mana costs.
While colorless isn’t a new color by definition, it does have its own flavor to it. Rosewater has noted recently that there’s more design space to be explored here, too. With colorless as an outlet for designs that don’t fall under the other colors, there’s little need for an actual sixth color.
For these reasons, purple mana is extremely unlikely to ever show up in MTG. Anything is possible, of course, but all the evidence thus far points to the contrary.
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