The problem is you're approaching characters from a far less intrinsic path. And quite honestly, probably less interesting too.
Like, if you're starting that far down, you might as well look at their deck and try to glean what it says about them rather than try to fill in details based on color.
Hell, you shouldn't even be futzing with color if you have a homeplane in mind. Look at what the FLAVOR of the character wants, not what the mechanics want.
Take your Orochi, for example. Stop thinking of it as a green snake person. Start thinking of it as an OROCHI. Sink into the culture it comes from, try to figure out what those details say about the character, because right now, you aren't doing that at all. You're looking at race, home, and color as being details to tack onto the character when they should be the FOUNDATION.

Find out what you want these characters to say. First, though, figure out WHY you want to use these details, and not just because they haven't been done.

Or think about what story you want to tell with them.

I don't think there's any reason for a character, when they visit a new plane, has to join up with or form a relationship or opinion about whatever group is nearest to their color identity or race. Real people react to the world around them based on lots of things -- their goals, the reason and circumstances they ended up on that plane, first impressions, emotions, etc. And they aren't obligated to fit themselves in by, for example, changing their color identity to match the dominant factions of the plane. Planeswalkers can try to assimilate themselves, yeah, but how many stories are there of them doing that? Mostly they stick out and look and act different from the locals, and that contrast is a great vehicle for creating conflict, or saying something really interesting about society or politics or religion or reification, or whatever. If you want to tell a story about a green character who tries to immigrate to Ravnica and struggles to fit into any of the green guilds, that's an interesting story. But if that isn't the goal of your story, there's no reason to force a character to join a guild and then change their color identity just because they are on that plane.

Also, there's no multiverse in which an Orochi and a Naga would recognize each other as being at all related. When writing fanfic, try to ignore the creature types and mechanics that make no flavor sense, because many of them have no flavor. Some are even blatantly anti-flavor, like Orochi being labelled Snakes. They are not snakes. They aren't even reptiles.

Similarly, don't throw characters together just because you think it would be cool for them to be friends. Make sure that there are elements that make SENSE for the characters to interact in.

And remember that you should not attempt to write stories based solely on obscure and complex rhyming puns. Raven has set a very bad example and I think we can all agree that he should feel very ashamed of the precedent he's set now.

Really though, you CAN write stories that draw things together randomly, but you have to go into them with a strong sense of the characters, I think, and a sense of why they're there and why they don't just planeswalk away and so on... You shouldn't just decide beforehand that two characters, as Barinellos says, would be cool friends... if you're tossing two characters together really think through whether their personalities would mesh, or whether there's things that if brought up would jeopardize things.

One of my favorite moments in our canon for example is Aloise having a suppressed but still clearly very visceral reaction to Beryl making a crack about being burned alive. Those moments are what you should be looking for--moments in which character histories grind against each other in interesting ways. Those are way more compelling all things considered than just throwing a character onto a plane and having them sample the local gods or guilds or whatever. It's much more interesting to think about, ok, so this character runs into someone from Selesnya... Who is this character? What role in the guild do they have? What's their personality like? Are they sort of a stereotypical member or not? is this character having a good day or a bad day? What does all of that do to their interaction?

Well, there goes my story featuring Sava and a certain four-armed mutant.

I was going to call it Pith and the Pendulum. All well, you can't have it all.

I don't know whether to congratulate you or denounce you after that brilliant pun.

My point was, and still is, that he's focusing (and a lot of us are telling him how to focus on it) on the what and not so much on the how. Why is Aloise an uncompromising optimist? Because of how she interacts with the world. Why is Raiker Venn an irredeemable jerk? Because that's his M.O. -- his silked tongue and blackmail-y ways.

Without these pins that define the "how", most characters will just be empty words on a page, cool "what-ifs" that don't actually gain any merit on their own; which some of our unused characters fall under, I feel, since we haven't seen any of them in action.

A good example//mental exercise is that old Star Wars: old vs. new argument -- try to describe your character without mentioning their appearance or name,* and with what we're working with we could probably extend that to color, race, and gender. I'm sure we can do that for a number of our characters, and that's the point I'm trying to make. I'm not disagreeing with you, but I don't want to be discredited simply because I was trying to be snarky.


*A quick search into Plinkett's original skit reveals the full challenge: "Describe the following Star Wars character WITHOUT saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore, or what their profession or role in the movie was. Describe this character to your friends like they ain't never seen Star Wars."

Have I mentioned in the last five minutes how much I love you guys?



And, for whatever it's worth, that moment was not scripted. It just came up during the course of writing that encounter.

Which kind of brings me to the tiny shred of wisdom I feel I can offer here. Namely, the question I find useful isn't, "I bet characters A and B would be best friends," or even "I bet characters A and B would be sweet enemies." For me, the useful thought has inevitably been: "I bet it would be interesting if character A ran into character B -- I wonder what would happen?"

It's that lack of foreknowledge which makes those encounters worth exploring, in my experience. For example, given the fact that Fisco Vane and Jackie DeCoeur had both forged mythical identities for themselves on Jakkard, I always wondered what would happen if Old Smokey ever met Red Jackie. It was plausible to me that they might get on like a house on fire. It was equally plausible to me that they might try to kill each other. And I was always dying to find out which it would be.

In the end, it turned out to be a little bit of both, and the specifics of that were nothing I ever would have anticipated before Ruwin started to write that encounter, and we tossed the ball back and forth for a while. If I'd gone into that exchange with a preconceived notion for how those two characters would interact, I probably would have missed out on some of the most exciting things that followed.

Basically, the best indications that something would make a good story are the "what ifs?" and the "I wonders?", not the "I wishes" or the "I bets."

Thank you all for the criticism and advice, though I hope I don't make the thread too about me. I suppose I'm too I aim too high for perfection. Without (m)any friends who dabble in story creation, I'm left playing Chess (or in this case Magic) with myself, making most encounters stale, or isolated (most of my ideas are just that, ideas, like a character who kills Noston? Nostron? both for his/her distaste for zombies and for wealth by taking their dropped masks, and even wearing them as trophies)

I do have characters that stick to a theme and it does well for conveying their personal inclinations, but I tend to write their colors to 2-3 to enforce that (like how Chandra is mono-colored and yet she is narrow and at the same tine flexible enough due to her defining her completely, down to only casting fire motif spells and summons and being a stereotypical hothead and troublemaker) such as Milov ( philomancer who's all about fraternity and romance, looking for people he can trust and love and enjoy life with, even if he does pursue RED short, sweet sexual "love" a little too often) Aran ( gender-swapping Drow--or MtG equivalent with a penchant for Fiora-style gambits, but who also explores his/her gender roles, heavily based on the very gender-centric culture of Drow society. Most likely deaf thx to my very top-down desire to base him/her off my half-Drow character in the past who went deaf after failing a "listen" check in 3.5. But I do want to explore a deaf character and gender roles throughout the multiverse) and last among the good potential characters: Alfhilda ( werewolf from Innistrad who, like Sarkhan Vol, gained a fascination with elves due to tales about the extinct race, and upon being hunted by her church-serving sister, ascended, and juggles her curse, the loss of love from her family, her fondness for the mystique of elf-kind, and her only hobby-- her use of magic for cooking) and Chrysanos ( leonin from Theros whom I really intend to explore the notion of controlling one's rage in a Bloodfire way and instincts in a Awaken the Bear kind of way and the artistic, creative side of Red. Dabbling with a method that Theros kiiiind of supports for him to struggle with a divine birth) but when it comes to mono-colored characters I have in development suffer from the problem that their 1 color is too few to solidify their identity and are vulnerable to my error of splashing colors at every multi-colored encounter with a guild/god/shard/clan/whatever. I need to solidify their identity where they stick to their creed and only explore applications within their color (Tsuchigo utilising Populate, Bolster, or even Delve only in Green ways, a la Druid's Deliverance for example)

Gotcha. Yeah I think the adjective/adverb thing was a bit confusing honestly because I didn't really get that this is what you meant since Dilleux's original post uses the term "classy" which is an adjective.

I think we're basically arguing just slightly different heads of the same Urza though, since it'd be pretty easy to adapt "kirsh is neurotically caring" to "kirsh cares neurotically" or say that Jade practices her gifts unconfidently and distrustingly... you can verb and adverb the stuff and get the same result; the core point is, as you say, how the character is being in the world

Yeah, or you can base characters off puns...

Lol The only pun I've truly wrapped into a character (other than trying to name a character to fit a little bit, or the reverse -- I was looking up Germanic names and found "Alfhilda", meaning "she who fights for the elves" or something to that effect. She is my werewolf walker and her name's meaning reminded me of the seemingly nonexistent elf population on Innistrad, so I added that to her character. I finally settled on the name Chrysanos for my leonin character whom I have, for a very long time, wanted to possess gold nyxian features, so his name is nearly a portmandeau of "chrys" meaning gold and "anos" from "Ouranos", a root of Uranus' name referring to the sky.)
is Chrysanos, I couldn't help myself but to succumb to the pun and try to sneak "a cat's nine lives" into his story, so it needs tweaking but so far I have it so that his spark is a bit unorthodox in that it only partially ignites under the same circumstances most sparks do and take him away to another plane, and this happens (or can happen) an allotted amount of times. So basically he doesn't have one full spark, his is somehow segmented into 8ths.

I think it dances somewhere between "Oh, I could kind of see that...maybe" and "Woah, insane much?"

Well it doesn't have to be a weird segmented spark. Teferi ascended gradually over a period of years. Maybe Chrysanos ascends in 8 or 9 little short bursts, and at the end of the last one he's finally fully ascended. Granted though, there's a much shorter distance to ascend for a neowalker.

Arcades, the only reason he ascended that slowly was because he was trapped in a slow time bubble, so for him, the experience was near instantaneous.
He didn't even realize it had happened for years besides.

He didn't ascend during that event actually. Or at least that's not what the word on the street was for many many years.

Time Spiral nailed that detail down.
He didn't realize he'd become a planeswalker until he reconnected to Zhalfir's mana and realized how different it was.

I still don't think it's too extremely far-fetched. Anyway, how do most of you do mono-colored characters? I notice more often than not, my more stable-ish characters are all dual-colored. While they couuuld sway to either a different combination of colors on an axis of one of their colors or even dabble/swerve into 3 colors but overall they're content with their combination (minus some hiccups along the way) mono-color characters seem to have too much space not to be swayed a tiny bit. I guess a main obstacle is multicolored combos have so many different interpretations, where each color alone has.... less, and sometimes already blend with other colors. It's almost like there's limited design space in "distinctive mono-white character personalities" or "distinctive mono-blue character personalities", etc.

I assure you, there's a lot of space to work with in terms of mono-color. The problem is, you don't have the structure of another color limiting it, so you end up with a lot of options and not much guidance, which you probably mistake as meaning there's less personality space.

But while limitations breed creativity, that doesn't mean that having a great deal of options isn't also a good thing. Mark Rosewater wrote a number of articles about the colors, and it might be in your best interest to check those out.


Aside from that, do remember, also, that just because one is mono-colored doesn't mean they can't show attributes of other colors. A white character can be reckless, but that doesn't make them red. Color comes from what one values, which will add to the way they act, but it isn't proscriptive to their personality. It certainly will push them in certain directions, but you should feel able to break the mold if you so desire, just as long as you don't go too far.

Yeah, I can pretty much promise you that if, for example, everyone in the M:EM were to participate in a challenge, and that challenge was "Make a mono- character," you will get some VERY different characters out of that, and the same is true for any color or color combination. Basically, let the colors serve as a general guide, not a limitation.