Every card in Magic belongs to one of the five colors, multiple colors, or no color at all. Colorless is not a sixth color so much as an absence of color, and it occupies a genuinely unique place outside the color pie's normal rules.
Artifacts have been colorless by default since Magic's earliest sets, giving every deck access to a shared pool of effects regardless of what colors it's actually playing. Colorless creatures were much rarer until 2010, when the Eldrazi arrived as an entirely new kind of colorless threat.
Because colorless cards sit outside the color pie's normal restrictions, they can be genuinely dangerous design tools, capable of putting powerful effects into any deck rather than gatekeeping them behind a specific color's philosophy.
This guide covers how colorless mana and cards actually work, what the Eldrazi added to the color pie, and why Wizards treats colorless design so carefully.
A card with no colored mana symbols in its cost is colorless, meaning it does not belong to white, blue, black, red, or green at all rather than belonging to some sixth option. This matters for spells that care about color, since a colorless card is simply outside that entire system.
This absence of color is exactly why colorless cards can slot into literally any deck, and it's also why Wizards treats colorless design carefully: an effect available to every deck regardless of color choice has to be balanced against all five color philosophies at once, not just one.
Artifacts have been colorless by default since Magic's first set, representing constructed objects rather than the natural forces or living beings colored spells usually depict. This let early Magic hand out powerful effects like mana rocks or equipment to any deck, since an artifact does not care what colors it's paired with.
This flexibility makes artifacts a genuine sixth pillar of deck design in practice, even without being an official color, and it's why so many of Magic's most format-warping cards throughout history have been artifacts rather than colored spells. A dedicated Eldrazi or artifact-heavy deck fits neatly into an EVORETRO Plastic Deck Box once it's built.
The Eldrazi, introduced in 2010's Rise of the Eldrazi, were Magic's first major push into colorless creatures rather than colorless artifacts, presenting them as ancient, alien beings from beyond the plane entirely. Titans like Kozilek and Ulamog were colorless giants with world-altering abilities that felt genuinely outside the normal five-color conflict.
The Eldrazi returned in 2015's Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch, this time built around an entire colorless-focused mechanical theme rather than standing alone, cementing colorless as a real design space rather than a one-off gimmick. An original Rise of the Eldrazi titan pulled from an old booster is exactly the kind of card worth a EVORETRO Semi-Rigid Card Holder before it changes hands.
That 2015 return introduced devoid, a keyword marking a spell as colorless even though it's cast using colored mana, alongside the dedicated colorless mana symbol for costs that specifically require generic-but-colorless mana rather than any mana at all. This distinction matters mechanically for cards that care specifically about color identity.
Devoid cards are a clever middle ground, letting a card use a color's mana and, in Commander, its color identity, while still functioning as a truly colorless permanent once it's on the battlefield for any effect that checks color.
Wizards has been explicit that colorless design needs extra caution precisely because it bypasses the color pie's built-in checks and balances entirely. An effect assigned to colorless is available to every deck, so it has to be weaker or more situational than an equivalent effect locked behind a specific color's philosophy.
This is part of why genuinely powerful colorless cards, like the original Eldrazi titans, tend to come with real drawbacks such as high mana costs or restrictive casting requirements, keeping them from simply outclassing every colored alternative.
Colorless cards remain a strong way to round out any deck's mana base and utility slots, since artifacts like mana rocks or equipment fit into literally any color combination without straining a manabase. Eldrazi-focused strategies, meanwhile, still show up in Commander and cube as their own distinct archetype built around ramping into huge, world-ending threats.
Even a deck built entirely around one or two colors benefits from a handful of well-chosen colorless cards, since they're the one part of a deck that never depends on what colors the rest of it ends up playing.
No, colorless means a card has no color at all, rather than belonging to a sixth category.
In 2010's Rise of the Eldrazi, with a mechanically themed return in 2015.
It makes a spell colorless even though it was cast using colored mana.
Because a colorless effect is available to every deck regardless of color choice.
Big colorless threats like the Eldrazi titans are exactly the kind of card worth protecting the moment they're pulled, so reach for a EVORETRO Plastic Deck Box to keep your ramp-into-Eldrazi deck organized between games.
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