D&D 5E D&D Power Sources ≈ Magic The Gathering Colors

[Yaarel]

D&D Power Sources

The D&D Power Sources work well to organize magical themes in the following way.

Note, the arcane power source that can do anything and everything, here divides up by themes.

Note, regarding the divine power source, divination includes fate and bless.

Note, the power sources below represent every D&D trope involving spells and features. These sources are reasonably comprehensive.

Note, the Plane of Ether, being the fifth element, is force, including gravity, and by extension telekinesis, flight, force constructs, and magical energy. Each of the five sources inherently uses the ethereal power source, especially in the sense of "magical energy". Moreover, force allows an Elemental Wizard to treat it as a fifth element to construct Mage Armor, a Divine Cleric to physicalize a symbol, a Psionic phantasm to become a quasi-real illusion, the mind of a Primal feature of nature to project outward and manifest physically, and so on.



Power Source (Approximate Color): Themes
• Divine (White): bless, divination and teleportation
• Psionic (Blue): telepathy, enchantment and illusion
• Shadow (Black): death, undead and fiend
• Elemental (Red): earth-fire and air-water
• Primal (Green): nature, healing and shapeshifting
Plus:
• Ethereal (Colorless): force and magical energy



D&D Classes

With these five power sources in mind, each of the D&D classes typically combines two sources. Albeit an archetype might expand the base class to involve an additional source.



Power Source: Class
• Divine-Psionic: Mystic
• Divine-Shadow: Necromancer
• Divine-Elemental: Sorcerer
• Divine-Primal: Cleric
• Psionic-Shadow: Warlock
• Psionic-Elemental: Wizard
• Psionic-Primal: Bard
• Shadow-Elemental: Demon?
• Shadow-Primal: Vampire?
• Elemental-Primal: Druid

 

[Yaarel]

Where the fifth element is ether, being magical energy, one can almost say, that the ethereal plane and the "Weave" are the same thing.

Just because ether exists, doesnt mean people know how to utilize it to do magic. Different power sources use different approaches to wield magic.

 

[Parmandur]

The "Power Soirces" are not a n active concept in D&D (Class is where the real action is at), and this is overly reductive view of the color wheel.

 

[Bardic Dave]

Abjuration for blue, surely? C-c-c-counterspell!

Although, abjuration also works for white (protection from evil is very circle of protection-ish).

That aside, I’m not sure I get where you’re coming from or what you’re trying articulate. As someone who’s played a lot of d&d and a lot of mtg, your post doesn’t really resonate with me.

 

[Cadence]

It feels like if there are going to be as many breaks as there are, that trying to emulate MtG's five colors might not be worth the trouble.

Color Source: Themes
• White divine: divination and teleportation

Teleport and Divination are actually blue cards Is blink both blue and white? (I guess blue has teleporting others a lot).
If divination is actually seeing the future, is that mostly green and blue?

• Blue psionic: enchantment and illusion

Illusion does feel blue as does charming. Are the blue effects more permanent though, while the red ones are temporary?

• Black shadow: undead and fiend

Sure.

• Red elemental: earth-fire, also air-water

Air water are definitely blue though in MtG. Hydroblast vs. Pyroblast. BEB vs. REB. The air and water elementals are blue.

• Green primal: shapeshifting and healing

Is healing primary Green or primary white? (Healing Salve vs. Stream of Life).
Most of the shapeshifters are blue, right (with very few Green)?

 

[Yaarel]

It feels like if there are going to be as many breaks as there are, that trying to emulate MtG's five colors might not be worth the trouble.


Teleport and Divination are actually blue cards Is blink both blue and white? (I guess blue has teleporting others a lot).
If divination is actually seeing the future, is that mostly green and blue?



Illusion does feel blue as does charming. Are the blue effects more permanent though, while the red ones are temporary?


Sure.


Air water are definitely blue though in MtG. Hydroblast vs. Pyroblast. BEB vs. REB. The air and water elementals are blue.


Is healing primary Green or primary white? (Healing Salve vs. Stream of Life).
Most of the shapeshifters are blue, right (with very few Green)?

The original post organizes D&D magic into six sets of themes. This organization mainly derives from an analysis of every spell in D&D. It also considers other magical features. Each thematic is flavorful, and is about equally powerful to the other five thematics, in terms of spell selection and so on.

The class descriptions in the Players Handbook are vague about power source. However a brief sidebar describing the Weave loosely divides the classes into the arcane power source and the divine power source. Now psionics becomes more prominent, and the distinction between power sources more central to thematic concepts. Designers have mentioned by name, arcane, divine, psionic, primal, and "other power sources". More official D&D references to power sources seem to be on their way.

Each of the six thematic sets correspond well to a power source, especially when arcane splits up into its many themes. Probably the "elemental" power source can be renamed "arcane", in the sense of the alchemy-esque protoscientific flavor of the Wizard. But here, the power source is called elemental to disambiguate. Thus, in addition to divine and psionic, there is elemental and shadow, plus primal. The ethereal power source can relate to magical energy itself, thus somewhat resembles the 3e Universal spell school.



The number of power sources and their suggestive themes reminds one of the MTG colors. I am less familiar with MTG, and appreciate those of you who are knowledgeable about it scrutinizing specific examples from MTG. These six "power sources" here are robust presentations of D&D tropes. But their connection to MTG is more exploratory.



Healing is primal, relating to living creatures, and closing a wound is a kind of shapeshifting. Thus the Cleric is largely divine-primal. Likewise both Druid and Bard who are the primary D&D shapeshifters are primal. The main difference between the Druid and the Bard is, the Druid also is competent at elemental magic, while the Bard is also competent at mind-affecting magic (enchantment and illusion) whence psionic-theme magic.

 

[Cadence]

Scryfall.com is one of the best sites to search and see what's out there for MtG.

For classes or races, put it into the search bar as type:druid or type:shapeshifter

type:druid

315 Magic cards found where the card types include “druid”

scryfall.com

type:shapeshifter

138 Magic cards found where the card types include “shapeshifter”

scryfall.com

If you go to advanced search, and put the mouse in the type box it will let you see the list of all of them. The classes and races are technically subtypes. How they did the spellcasting names is:

For parts of names, just enter them in the search line, like

heal

44 Magic cards found where the name includes “heal”

scryfall.com

But that would miss that green has a bunch of gain life spells

oracle:gain oracle:life

1,755 Magic cards found where the text includes “gain” and the text includes “life”

scryfall.com

I'm not sure how a non-MtG player would know to search for that though.

For a color by itself, use color:red

color=r

4,223 Magic cards found where the colors is R

scryfall.com

(in advanced search, you can also go more broadly by choosing "Including these colors").

To see the first set (which isn't actually a great representation of the color pie in many ways) see: Limited Edition Alpha (LEA) Card Gallery

For a more modern take see: Mechanical Color Pie 2017

Googling Maro Color Pie will give more articles. Maro also takes questions (and answers some) on Blogatog .

Good luck!

 

[Cadence]

I wonder if the best analogy for the five colors is something like an alternate (not matching the real ones) Wuxing / Five Phases, where they don't really go with elements or power sources and are much broader. Wuxing (Chinese philosophy) - Wikipedia

I'm apparently not the first to wonder about that (although I wasn't thinking of matching them up) - Reddit on trying to match them.

 

[Yaarel]

I wonder if the best analogy for the five colors is something like an alternate (not matching the real ones) Wuxing / Five Phases, where they don't really go with elements or power sources and are much broader. Wuxing (Chinese philosophy) - Wikipedia

I'm apparently not the first to wonder about that (although I wasn't thinking of matching them up) - Reddit on trying to match them.

The Daoist Wuxing are ways of moving, "five motions". They correspond closely to the Hellenistic elements, especially the traditions that identify states of matter.

• Fire motion (goes upward) ≈ Fire element (plasma)
• Water motion (goes downward) ≈ Water element (liquid)
• Tree/Air motion (expands outward and encompasses) ≈ Air element (gas)
• Metal/Crystal motion (contracts inward and separates) ≈ Earth element (solid)
• Soil/Space motion (motionless) ≈ Ether element (force)

These equivalences show up in various Daoist systems.

With regard to the six power sources:
• Soil/Space and Ether correlate with ethereal power source
• Fire, Water, Metal/Crystal and Earth correlate with the elemental power source
• Tree/Air and Air also correlate with the elemental source, but have special affinity with the plants of the primal source

 

[Shiroiken]

White - Arcane
Blue - Arcane
Black - Arcane
Red - Arcane
Green - Arcane
It's MAGIC: the gathering after all

On a serious note:
White - Divine (Celestial)/Martial
Blue - Arcane/Psionic
Black - Arcane (Necromancy)/Divine (Fiendish)
Red - Arcane (Evocation)/Martial
Green - Primal