I guess it's a matter of keeping in mind what your character's basic motivations are. Sometimes branching into multiple colors is going to be a necessity, but for the most part, I think most characters can be described in pretty simple one- or two- color patterns. Remember also that people in general almost invariably have aspects of all five colors, and characters can, too, without actually being all five colors.

I'm often reminded of a quote by Antoine de Saint Exupery, one which I know Mark Rosewater has also thrown around in terms of design. It can be translated as "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." I find simplicity is often more of a challenge than complexity, and success in simplicity often pays off better than success in complexity.

I guess my ultimate advice is to remember that if you have a three- or even four- color character, the majority of what that character does should reflect all of those colors, which gets pretty difficult to maintain after a while.

if the jade mage went to Theros if he/I would be tempted to splash in White from Karametra, Blue from Kruphix, or Black from Pharika's belief system.

Yeah, I would definitely say that in a situation like that, splashing would be almost completely unnecessary. For one thing, there's no reason mono-colored characters can't worship multi-colored gods. For another, as long as they're not adopting new philosophies that are directly contradictory to their primary color identity, there should be no need to splash them into a new color. If, however, it's important for them to change that philosophy, or to start using spells outside of their color, then you might want to start merging them, but in my experience, there will rarely be a need, and if there is, your characters will sort of let you know.

The other thing, especially with regards to Ajani and other canon characters, often (it seems to me, anyway) Wizards shifts their color focus not for story reasons, but to market new cards. Sorin, for instance, has no business being . Creative then has to come up with reasons to justify the color shifts, and it rarely goes well. So if you feel you need to start adding colors to characters, just look at why you're doing it, what point it serves, and how forced it's going to seem.

It might be helpful to remember that hybrid mana is a thing, and sometimes what seems multicolored may just be hybrid.

Frankly, it is my opinion that there are few characters who couldn't be reduced to a 1-2 color identity, but that a color identity should contain as many colors as it takes to adequately describe the character. Using my own 'walkers as examples, Lourima Viiran could have been all the way to Black/Red/Green -- she's got a hot temper and acts on emotions, and her ruthless "the strong survive at the expense of the weak" can be lensed as black/green or even simply a villainous green character. In the end, however, what defined her was seeing that the way the world worked was unjust and going with it anyway, which is pure black "looking out for number one", not emotional red or the darker social darwin side of green. Black is adequate for her. Ellia, on the other hand, I left with a tricolor identity -- a wedge identity no less -- because no component seemed adequate. There would be something fundamentally missing from her character without blue, from her magic without green, and a little from both without black -- to an extent she's a blue character with a black/green powerset, which is devilishly hard to identity.

Color identity can be different things:
1. The beliefs and personality and philosophy of the character
2. The mechancial color identity of a Planeswalker card
3. The magic the character uses

And in regards to each...


1. Every actual human being has some personality aspects from all 5 colors. That's how the colors are concepted. That means that any especially well-rounded human character, and probably quite a lot of non-human ones, will sometimes dip into every color. But most characters (and probably most real people) strongly favor 1-3 core colors over the others. So keep in mind what your characters' core values and personality traits are, but don't worry if they don't hit every single trait in a bulleted list of their core color's philosophy, and don't worry if they share a few values with other colors.

2. A PW card represents only one facet of a PW, not their whole suite of magic abilities let alone their personality. If you build a character by thinking about how you would depict them, in their entirety, with one PW card, you unnecessarily limit yourself. Also keep in mind something Brady told us: there is no flavor difference between hybrid and gold.

3. Mages and planeswalkers normally have an affinity for one or two colors of magic, or limited schools of magic (like telepathy for Jace or pyromancy for Chandra) that they learn earliest and most easily, prefer to use, and keep perfecting over their lives. But planeswalkers can and have picked up other types of magic as they grow older and visit other planes. Back when they were all immortal, planeswalkers usually ended up quite skilled in all 5 colors, even if they still vastly preferred one over the others.. That isn't likely for most characters now, but there's no reason a neowalker can't dabble in a color outside their usual set of powers. Nissa dabbled in black magic, for example. She's still a green character at the core and mostly uses green magic. She knows a few black spells, but she's still best at using green. This is the equivalent of putting a splash in a deck.

Lastly, when it comes to splashes of off-color magic and bits of off-color philosophy, I see absolutely no reason they have to line up with each other for a character to make intuitive sense. A green character might have white as their secondary color philosophically, but splash black rather than white magic when and if they do learn non-green spells. I don't see any problem there.

I've considered that... but how do you identify the gaps between | | | philosophically? (Sorry, I don't mean Blue, Red, Blue/Red hybrid, and Blue/Red multicolored specifically, just using them as an example.)

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I think one thing we're seeing though, is that maybe color identity really isn't as important as we've sort of been treating it. I mean, especially if we're not putting these characters into cards. Like Tevish said, the characters are what they need to be. But I do think there's a tendency for writers, especially newer writers, to want to fit as much of the "cool" stuff into a character as they can, and that's sort of what I'm getting at.