Drinkable Chicken

The collectible card game Magic the Gathering uses five colors (red, green, blue, white and black). These colors are basically “profiles” that stand for certain attitudes and principles. For example, red stands for impulsiveness, following your emotions, and action, among other things. In the game, this translates to mechanics like “direct damage” and many creatures that pack a punch in the early stage of the game, but that are not as suitable long-term.

Anyway, these five colors can also be seen as psychological profiles. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and applying it to some situations (which caused a friend to call it “uncharacteristically nerdy”, or something to that effect :-). Apparently I’m not the only one who does this; this appeared today on the Wizards site: What Magic color or colors best describe your personality, and why?

Here are a few articles that describe the colors. Note that these are fairly long, and not everything necessarily applies to personalities, at least not without some tweaking. (For example, one of black’s characteristics is that it’s “parasitic”… that does not mean that everyone who associates with black is a parasite! On the other hand, someone who shows parasitic and abusive behavior does have a black streak, at the very least.)

• green
• red
• black
• blue
• white

Also, there’s this article about opposing colors. (Again, this is written from a gaming perspective.)

For those who don’t want to read the articles, here’s a summary, adapted from Wikipedia:

• White is the color of order, equality, righteousness, healing, law, community, absolutism/totalitarianism, and light, although not necessarily “good”.

• Blue is the color of intellect, reason, illusion, logic, knowledge, manipulation, and trickery, as well as the classical elements of air and water.

• Black is the color of power, ambition, greed, death, corruption, and amorality, although not necessarily “evil”. 

• Red is the color of freedom, chaos, passion, creativity, impulse, fury, lightning, the classical element of fire, and the non-living geological aspects of the classical element earth.

• Green is the color of life, instinct, nature, evolution, ecology and interdependence.

Personally, I am mostly blue/white, while my wife is red/green, and my evil stepdaughter is red/black. (Which explains a lot, as red opposes blue and white, and black opposes white… :-)

Like all personality type indicators, this shouldn’t be taken too seriously… especially not this one. :-) But I think it’s an interesting alternative to the more traditional ones.