For example, Esper refers to decks made up of White, Blue and Black cards.
What are the names of the other colour combinations? In particular, how do we refer to a Red-White-Black deck?
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One color:Most decks with a single color are not competetive in tournaments (due to the fact you're settling for the top ten cohesive cards in a color instead of two sets of the top five in two colors. The difference in power level between the top 1-5 and the top 6-10 can be massive and game deciding. The other colors also make up for each others weaknesses.) But they do exist, and are referred to as "Mono X".
Two color:Each of these corresponds to a guild of Ravnica. Since the guilds were released (and especially now that we've returned!) the color pairs have become common names for duo-color decks. Both allied and enemy color pairs are common to see, although allied more so (due to higher deck cohesion).
Three color:The first of these are the shards of Alara. They jive well because they give two sets of allied colors each. The less commonly used are the enemy colors of the dragons of Planar Chaos, or the volver cycle from Apocalypse. Having only one allied color pair (the two enemies of a single color will be allied) limits deck cohesion, making their use infrequent. More typically, enemy three color decks are not full fleshed out in the colors. You're more likely to have an "Izzet splashed with green" deck than a "Ceta" deck.
Informal usages:
In addition, it's especially common for red + blue + green and black + blue + green to be called by their abbreviations — "RUG" and "BUG" — because these are names that are easy to remember and pronounce. Four color:Most decks do not have four full colors. As with three color enemies, if they reach this many colors, it's a shard with a slash of another color. So you're more likely to see something like "American splash black" instead of "Yore". The names are based on the Nephilim cycle from Guildpact.
Five color:Decks with all five colors usually revolve around a single combo that they hope to pull off. It takes a lot of mana fixing and a massive amount of playtesting to get a reliable five color deck. For this reason, you don't often find them in tournaments. You find them often in Commander (giving the player access to every card ever, greatly increasing the power level of the deck) and in skill challenges where a player just tries to come up with a crazy deck idea to see if he can make it work. Obviously there's only one five color deck, it uses all five:
Sometimes, four color decks will also be called Rainbow just because they have so many colors. No colors:Sometimes, particularly in formats with a very large card pool, you'll see colorless decks as well. The most common name for these is a reference to the old card frame for artifact cards:
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As noted by others, the 'aligned' color triplets - that is, those that consist of a color and its two siblings to either side on the usual Black-blUe-White-Green-Red color wheel - have nicknames (but not formal names!) based on their 'shards' in the Shards of Alara block: Esper (Ubw), Bant (Wug), Naya (Gwr), Jund (Rgb), and Grixis (Bru). As for the non-aligned color triplets (which of necessity are one color and its two enemies), the 'dragon' scheme that Lee Abraham mentions based on the names of the dragons that were in Planar Chaos (Intet for Urg, Oros for Wrb, Vorosh for Gub, Numot for Rwu and Teneb for Bgw) is one that I've seen; the other (and slightly more common, at least in the playgroups I play with) is based on the 'shards' that were in Apocalypse, the original 'enemy colors' set - there's a consistent name there that's used on both enchantments and creatures that care about the enemy-color combinations. That set is:
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WUB: Esper The other colour combos (two allied colours, plus their joint enemy) have not yet been "named" by another Shards of Alara-esque block, but I'm sure it will happen one day... |
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I don't believe there is an answer to black-red-white. Esper refers to one of the Shards of Alara, of which there are five. From a post on TappedOut and MTGSlavation:
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I've seen some people call the other color combos by the names of the elder dragons. For instance RWB - Oros after the card Oros, The Avenger. Other times I've seen them called based on a national flag that contains their colors. For instance RWU is regularly called American. However the moment there are no "official" names for the wedge colored decks. |
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Other answers have addressed the 3 color combinations (aka Allied colors correspond to the Shards of Alara and Enemy colors are much less clear) but the two color combinations correspond to the guilds of Ravnica:
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