Great Designer Search 2 - Essay 02: Colorshift An Ability

You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.

Blue wants information and to mess with its opponent’s mind. Blue wants to achieve its plans while denying its opponent from doing the same. It’s a game of control through knowledge and having more ideas and options. It wants to have card advantage

Blue currently achieves this through counterspells, card draw, library manipulation, and looking at the opponent’s hand. Blue can use discard to achieve these goals as well.

Mechanically, discard still achieves card advantage: reducing an opponent’s hand rather than increasing your own hand. Many discard effects require the opponent to reveal their hand; this grants knowledge of the contents of the opponent’s hand and increased knowledge of what else might be in their deck.

Flavorfully, blue wants to cause distraction, confusion, altered perception, and forgetfulness. While it may not destroy the knowledge or memories like black would, it can still prevent them from being accessed in the form of discard.

While black causes discard into the graveyard it might be more appropriate for blue to discard to the bottom of the deck. The graveyard is for things that have been destroyed which blue rarely does. Discarding to the bottom of the deck means the idea is not gone but simply temporarily lost; it may yet return (via shuffling, card draw, or tutor effects).

If this change were to be made, card drawing and/or counterspelling would need to be mostly shifted out of blue. Most likely, they would go into black to compensate for the loss of discard.

I played it safe on this answer. Possibly too safe. Plus it wasn't made clear if Planar Chaos colorshifts were off limits or not or if they were only talking about permanent shifts (ex: Ritual effects from Black to Red, Shrink effects eventually to Blue). Admittedly, I had no fresh ideas here. I probably should have spent more time brainstorming this.

On the upside, I think my idea of blue discarding to the bottom of the library instead of the graveyard is a very nice creative touch.