Essay:Six element system
Several years ago I had the "bright" idea to make a trading card game based on mtg which fixed it's perceieved flaws, core among those being that mtg tied capacity to play the game to a random resource (lands, and by extension, mana) and the thought that their five color system somehow felt unbalanced. The magical elements system I came up with is the subject of this essay.
I wanted to tie the elements to the color wheel and make complementary colors correspond to complementary concepts, and adjacent colors to correspond to concepts that mix the two beside them. What resulted was something far more abstract that traditional elements or even mtg's system.
There were 6 colors and 3 colorless mana types. Colorless was straightforward:
- white - creation
- grey - "flux", or raw change
- black - destruction
Colored were as follows:
- red - chaos
- chaos is what the mind projects onto reality
- Orange - reality
- reality/ the universe is a physical manifestation (body) of chaos
- yellow - body
- a body is a locus of ordered reality
- green - order
- order is an illusion projected onto the physical realm
- blue - illusion
- illusions are the mind made abnormally ordered in one direction
- purple - mind
- the mind is a chaotic illusion (monkey mind)
The ordering still feels off, but the constraints make it difficult to swap colors without violating other relations. For instance, red being "chaotic" is a staple association, perhaps even an unconscious archetype related to blood and fire. I may update this concept in the future, but I wanted to document it in case I forgot again.