Duckay wrote:The best way I can think to explain it is that "glass" (the mana that Wastes produce) functions a little like a new colour but is not a new colour.
If your commander's colour identity is colourless (I.e. If it casts for colourless or for generic and has no other signifiers of colour like coloured activated abilities), you can use Wastes in your deck.
You can use Wastes in any Commander deck, not just colorless ones. They have no color identity, therefore they can be used. Sol Ring or Basalt Monolith or whatever produce ✧, and we've been using them for years in colored Commander decks. Wastes are just another ✧ producer.
Whether you'd
need to add Wastes to a colored Commander deck, or if it's a good idea, that's a different story, depending on deck construction. But you certainly
can add them.
Aeralis wrote:I guess what I'm mainly hung up on is if this new colorless mana concept is truly considered a specific kind of mana, or if it's just a roundabout way of saying "this card can be cast with any mana, but a portion of it MUST be colorless."
Yes. The second. The second is how to think about it. The "new" colorless mana isn't new. Sol Ring has made it and you've been using that for years.
With colorless mana, only 2 things have changed with OGW:
1. Colorless mana has a new symbol now: ✧
This symbol separates it from generic mana, which can be paid for by any color or colorless. This is a change that
should have occurred back sometime around Time Spiral, but WotC dragged their feet about it.
This part of the change seems to be the most confusing to people, but it's really something along the lines of the tap symbol going from
a tilted T to
an arrow. The notation is new, but the function is the same.
2. Never before has anything specifically
cost colorless mana.
From Alpha up to BFZ, everything has cost colored and/or generic mana. And nothing has
produced generic mana. Everything has produced either colored or colorless mana. The thing that trips up most people is that colorless mana has only previously been able to be used in generic costs. Because there were only generic and colored costs, and colorless couldn't pay for colored costs, it was used for generic, and that's where the two got conflated. This is why people could easily ignore it as a "constraint" in deck-building before now. With the new specifically-colorless costs, though, you can't just stick Kozilek in a mono-red deck and run all Mountains, expecting to cast him. (
Technically, you could, if you ran some mana rocks that produce ✧ like Sol Ring or Basalt Monolith, but it might be easier to just add a few Wastes.) You have to factor in what your deck produces vs. your costs, and this now includes colorless costs, which you need to have colorless mana producers (of which there are currently 322 in MtG history) to pay for.
If people could get the two ideas of "Colorless is not a color" and "Wastes aren't the only thing that produce ✧ mana" into their heads, they'll have a much easier time with this, I think.