Why have different colors/factions/whatever? Why not have one

>>50403552
Some trading card games work like that. Generally, however, it's better to have multiple colors that represent multiple things in the game, so as to ensure that no one deck can do everything and thus dominate the play experience.

>>50403552
You've either never seen a power gamer or you are one. Splitting up the decks like that help with minimizing broken combos and defining play style.

>>50403552
flavor and fluff
shit i wish there was a arcane and divine spell list for each color for D&D.

its just like classes, cleric, druid, shaman, warrior soldier, etc etc

>>50403552
This is another "Why aren't you playing Yu-Gi-Oh instead of Magic?" thread.

Rivalry and Factions are always more fun. By being forced to pick a side you have to weigh the different options an choose one that best fits your style, then develop that into a real strategy and deck. Honestly the most fun in Magic is seeing the deck you built up by hand in action.

>>50403552
They ARE one pool of cards, only thing is you need to build mana accordingly. More colors in one deck is greedier and punishes your consistency due lack of not having the right mana or for example in modern you need to pay quite a bit of life for your fetchlands and shocklands.

>>50403850
>>50405056
I always figured that the actual limitation on one deck doing everything is that you can't run every card.

>>50405841
Isn't choosing which archetype to play kind of like that?

>>50408068
Fair enough. You get what I mean though.

File: Smuggler%27s+Copter+%5BKLD%5D.jpg (34KB, 223x311px) Image search: [Google]

34KB, 223x311px

>>50403552
Great idea, OP. I love Smuggler's Copter in Standard and I wish all pushed cards were player in every single deck.

Outside of gameplay reasons, probably the biggest is that people like factions. Humans are very tribal people, so even in games we like to be part of groups.

Magic will probably remains the king of tcgs because it caters to this sort of thing. With just it's colors alone you can get people lumped into mono, dual, and tri color factions and even build whole sets around them like Alara, Khans, and Ravnica. Then you layer in stuff like tribal and commanders and you can have a player entrenched into several factions for a single game.

>>50408268
So, game designers exploiting faux nationalism?

The advantages of having different colors of magic are multitudinous, many of which are brought up in this thread. Although there may be some downsides, I believe that magic's initial and continued popularity are due to the brilliant core design of the game, and the 5 colors are a big part of that.