And our posts lend credence to Raven's idea that color identity may have been given undue importance.

To add to your example of young Liliana, Braids is also a good example of a black character with a reckless streak, especially in Onslaught. I was more thinking about how a black mage might sacrifice their life for some magical advantage, which puts them closer to defeat and risks them not being able to access the spells that they need. The spells are in the mage's library, and they have plenty of ways to search out those spells. However, what happens when the black mage is facing a burn-happy red mage and is paying life for spell advantage, only to draw more search spells that require they pay increments of life? Here the black mage is acting in a reckless way, yet has numerous means of reducing more gambler-esque nature of their spell library than a reckless red mage with a penchant for gambling.

In duels, paying resources isn't the only form of risk. Any deck archetype has strengths and weaknesses, things it sacrifices that make it risky to play against certain other deck archetypes. Although flavor and gameplay segregation is a thing, I'm certain the same rock-paper-scissors applies to real spell duels.

But what kind of recklessness? What is courageous, and what merely foolish? Is a white knight who charges into certain death to save a town recklessly throwing away her life, or seflessly sacrificing herself to save others? When the Dragon Fodder seek out dragons to eat them, are they stupidly throwing away their lives for nothing, or trading lives that were inevitably short and violent for long-lasting glory? That all depends on your perspective. Any character can take a risk unknowingly, since everybody is ignorant about something. And every color values some things and devalues other stuff. From the white knight's perspective, her life is a more than fair trade for the lives of everybody in Haplessville, so she's not being reckless nor making a poor decision. If the goblins value glory and honor more than their already short lives, then being eaten by dragons is profit!

And maybe the black mage in your example doesn't mind dying, because they have put enchantments on themselves so that if they die, they will rise as a lich on the next new moon. If they don't value their live-ness as much as whatever they stand to gain from this fight, maybe they're only taking a small and calculated risk.

Also, when I confine recklessness to only risking harm to oneself and not risking harm to others or stuff in general, I admit I'm being more narrow than the usual English use of that word. Ob Nixilis throwing away the lives of his soldiers is still recklessness in a general lingusitic sense. But it is a very different sort from the generic goblin hordes who throw themselves into battle when hopelessly outmatched.

The mages in my example are the players themselves. You're right that every archetype has inherent strengths and weaknesses and by extension an element of risk. What differentiates the risks in playing black versus red is that black has tutors to help you dig for exactly what you need. You're guaranteed to dig out said spell but not without paying some amount of life in most instances. Even then, in the case of something like Vampiric Tutor, you aren't getting that spell right off the bat. There's your opponents turn in which they could burn you out or smash you with their creatures. Black's card draw works similarly, with you trading increments of life for cards (Necropotence and Phyrexian Arena). In comparison, Red has a higher element of risk, usually requiring the mage to pitch spells from their hand to take a chance at gaining more spells from their library. Red's tutor, Gamble, does get you the exact card you're looking for. However it comes with the risk that you'll end up discarding that same card for Gamble's effect.

Dragon Fodder: I interpret the goblins' sacrifice as something guided entirely by their passion for Jund's form of brutality. It is a very red sort of risk, and there's an element of gambling in that the second goblin may be devoured by the dragon that gets the first one.

Translating this into the storyline, let's consider Toshi Umezawa's kanji magic. His best kanji spells involve the use of his own blood. Using too much of these spells would run the risk of drastically weakening Toshi. Some of his gambles also involve a high amount of risk, though he attempts to mitigate these risks by the use of his kanji magic and his patron myojin. Both of these sources provide quite a bit of magical power. However the kanji magic requires Toshi use his own blood, or find the time to prepare his kanji from whatever materials (I think he used some sticks at one point) while hoping his enemies don't discover him. The myojin's blessings depend on Toshi's devotion to his myojin, though it doesn't really take the form of what one might consider traditional worship...its more like doing jobs for the myojin than prayers and lip service. In Toshi Umezawa we have a black mage whose recklessness is tied to the risks associated with his preferred form of magic and his service to the Myojin of Night's Reach (and this is essentially a form of Faustian bargaining). This is entirely different than, say, Hidetsugu who allowed his rage to guide his attack against Minamo Academy.

The problem is that players do not translate well to characters, and that's ultimately what we're really talking about.
Players playing the game might use a deck that doesn't actually match their personality, but also the fact that the very structure of the game is inherently different than how that would play out in terms of the world itself.

You wouldn't try using a tutor in the middle of a battle. That'd be just downright stupid. You would use the tutor, the card draw, all of that OUT of combat to prepare. In world, you don't have a hand size, you don't have a library. Your hand is the entire wealth of the spells you know.

Three out of four of my stories involve characters tutoring actually >_> <_< >_>

but not everyone is as completely obsessed with translating card mechanics to narrative as I am

I think, in the early days of Magic, this was something they tried to encapsulate with character's grimoires, like we see in Arena and The Whispering Woods and so on. I also suspect that the hand was originally supposed to represent that D&D style of spellcasting where the spell vanishes from the mind after it's used. But yeah, characters don't really work well with these constraints. Someone should write a story trying sometime...

Your hand size sounds a bit like the spells you'd have at the forefront of your mental construct for the duel. I think there's a case to be made for tutoring and draw effects during the course of the battle, depending on the battlefield itself. A black mage dueling another mage in a street surrounded by shops and restaurants might dash to the side, beseeching "Shauku"* for a particular spell, and lead the enemy on a chase through the buildings or alleys while the "Shauku" fetches the needed spell. Hiding or occupying the opponent would also allow the mage to snatch some new spells from the mental construct that serves as their library, assuming the mage isn't using a satchel like Garth and the Arena mages, and thereby literally drawing spells at random during the battle (due to the mage needing to coordinate their forces during combat).

Could one's interpretation of personality allow a mage to interpret the color characteristics so that they feel congruent with the mage's personality?

*I know that Shauku was part of the Mirage War. Since the Vampiric Tutors all mention the character, I figure a mage with that spell would have read of Shauku and formulated a mental construct resembling the vampire in the artwork as part of the spell. Likewise for the other anonymous mages on the other Tutors.

Edit: @Keeper: I enjoy the challenge of it.

That assumes the mental construct is how people store their spells... and the only person we have ever seen to do so was Jodah so... not a good model to assume everyone follows. In fact, the overwhelming majority of precedents we have shows nobody has anything like the mental construct method. (even people that Jodah interacted with! Jaya didn't store spells in some mental manor.)

Similarly, while the satchel thing has been used a little around here, to be quite frank, virtually no canon walker in this era uses any sort of mental or physical construct to represent the library. They are simply aware of what they know and most spells are some variation on their specialty or they actively have the time necessary to do something else, like heal someone.

There's a little wiggle room as far as color and personality goes, but a big part of it is that no color has an absolute monopoly on personality traits. There can be reckless white mages, their can be altruistic red mages. It all depends on how they filter their world.
Basically the only thing that CAN'T happen in terms of meshing with color and personality is the concept of black altruism. Black can be noble, but they always have a reason to do it that is in their interest.

Well the way I've depicted Kirsh spellcasting involves him using charms as mnemonic devices, which I stole from Arena. So what he has sort of immediately to hand is... his hand. His memory spells are ways of guiding his eyes and hands and mind to hit on new possible solutions.

I kinda love the image of spells being called as literal spellbook pages by mental tutor constructs though. Kinda like Doctor Jest but not terrible. There's a lot of potential there and we've probably got an established character or two that could be fleshed out with that sort of spellcasting... it'd be a good fit for Asher I think.

Yeah, that's why I added the bit about how some of us have done a little with the concept.

Well, Dementia Space is, in itself, something else similar but unique to that since it involves actually creating a space and then populating it with REAL things you pull into your mind... and you sacrifice space in your brain that dictates things like sanity and the like (IMPORTANT brainspace) to accommodate the things you put there.

That's an oxymoron.

Using a spellbook isn't any less workable than just memorizing what you know how to cast. In both cases you don't lose the spell from your "hand" like D&D wizards use up spell slots. You can cast the same thing over and over, if you want. Sort of like a D&D sorcerer?

Also, while I don't think planeswalkers should usually be required to use physical stuff to cast spells, I like the idea of many mortals using that sort of thing -- writing, alchemcial powders, circles, crystals, candles, herbs, maybe even staffs and wands, in addition to the incantations and hand-waving that I assume most mortals and many planeswalkers use.

I will say it also gets difficult when I explore possible minor events to happen on a particular plane to a particular character of mine, and too often I sluggishly wade through issues concerning matching their colors up. (Now I will generally defend the importance of the color pie, it's very good profiling tool, but I will agree, sometimes those labels limit us, and sometimes those limitations are beneficial, but they can be just as harmful the rest of the time) For example, my mono-Green Orochi Planeswalker, Tsuchigo, I could expect him/her (haven't decided which gender meshes better, I have plenty of male characters, but pretty much ALL of my female characters are green-aligned, and I don't like to make a pattern like that) to go to Theros at some point, but then Tsuchigo's emphasis on nature and mana could lead him to side towards Karametra's White-Green or Kruphix's Green-Blue, or being an Orochi might give Tsuchigo reason to explore Pharika's Black-Green, but that typically distracts me from discussing him/her having an encounter with an Avacynian priest or Izzet guildmage or most off-color associated characters (or phenomenon, like a Roil-fueled lightning storm for example)

I think you're being waaaaaaaaaaay too reductive and mechanical about this and I say that as an extremely mechanical writer. Like, there's being mechanical and there's being totally blind to interesting possibilities because they don't fit what's ultimately a pretty arbitrary organization system. There's no real reason for your character to explore any of those things unless your character tells you that's what they want to do (if you can write this way--I can't) or unless you can find something in particular you want to accomplish with the character's overall arc, some theme you want to explore, some particular idea you want to express... (which is how I write)

This seems like an organization system becoming a straight jacket.

A relavant quote from this thread, edited by me to deliver the message more clearly.

Well I don't actually do things that way, considering the fact that I notice myself drifting that direction, it's just I pick up on the nuances of the system steering me into a very rigid path. Even when I break out of the color profiling, I think I need the "pinning" method described above now, because I add too many facets to my characters that I lose sight of who they are or who they were supposed to become. This is even considering that most of my characters I keep to myself so that I can sort them between canon scenes, which also requires some of them to not have home worlds, though sometimes I wonder how much I can leave open, when I think about it, Sarkhan Vol's vague home plane and backstory came together really well when transformed into what would become Tarkir.

Shouldn't there be more than one "pin", considering there are other things you want permanent? For example, the only constants I have so far for Tsuchigo is the name, the race, and the color green. I'm not even certain the gender yet, the only thing driving me towards female is I also do want to focus on his/her care for nature, and mana, and most Orochi depicted as nature-nurturing and mana producing are the females (and I like their designs more than the males) what is a good pin? Another source of my detours is the whole "birds of a feather" thing, as in I have Tsuchigo who's a snake, so encountering Naga on Tarkir is a red flashing light to me, so bright it deters me from being less predicatable, same for Chrysanos, my leonin; "He has to form an opinion about the rakshasa!" surfaces in my mind fastest when Tarkir is concerned (bear in mind other planes have the same potential for this dilemma.)

None of those are pins, you completely missed the point.

Hmm? I'm saying isn't it a bit tough to just have one pin? Wouldn't 2-3 be more efficient per character? As for color, there are still associations that are hard to not make, like a non-green elf.

You keep using adjectives, you need adverbs.

Actually I think, if I read Dilleux's thing correctly, he's using too many NOUNS and needs more ADJECTIVES.

A name and a species, for example? Not pins. Not what Dilleux is talking about.

The idea of pins is getting to a core PERSONALITY trait and behaviors that go with it.

I don't think a pin even needs to be one word, like you can pin a particular phrase like "Kirsh is neurotically caring"--two words but one fused character trait. Jade is talented but troubled by mistrust of herself and of others. Raleris is jovially Intellectual... but maybe that could be extended to jovially Intellectual but Inwardly Pained.

The words "Aven" "Cursed Tiger" "Blue Mana" "Infinite Library" and so on don't feature in those phrases because that's not really what Dilleux's thing as I understand it is attempting to address. You're taking something that is useful for ONE ASPECT of character development and extending it to EVERY ASPECT.

(And expecting it to result in a perfect sense of each character's color. Like Kirsh's personality and colors fit really well imo and I think Raleris's personality meshes with his color but could easily signal UR as well... but Jade's is... I dunno, my sense of her character is sort of personally grounded and emerged more naturally from her backstory than from her colors, so there her colors work as a thematic and symbolic thing more than a personality thing I think?)

Anyway point is that these can probably be more complex phrases but you're misapplying what you're counting as a pin.

Oh okay, I understand. Just my main problem is I'm too.... bottom-up? I guess? with my character creation, and my big question is when do you know your character is ready to be pinned? So far I start with things like race, home plane (if relevant) necessary colors (for race or skill set) then try to pin things down so their color identity matches their skillset AND philosophy/personality.