Next up for my fantasy heartbreaker: The Mage!

I'm really doing it!  I'm plodding forward with my fantasy heartbreaker!

(Those sentences were as much about positive affirmation as they were about exposition.  But really...I think I'm doing it...)

I introduced a minimalist Warrior class a couple weeks ago.  Now it's time to take a look at those who choose to wield magic.  Alongside the Warrior, there shall be...

The Mage

I don't think I've ever shied away from making it obvious that my view of fantasy is heavily influenced by Magic: The Gathering.  One of the most interesting aspects of the magic employed in MTG lore is the balance of five colors, each with their own goals and methods.

From the MTG Wiki

I really don't know that it can be overstated how elegantly brilliant this cosmology is.  While I know that colors of magic and a circular grouping of elements is a whole trope in itself (one that I played around with consolidating earlier this year), the MTG color wheel has been a robust foundation for both the mechanics of the game and the philosophical underpinnings of the game's world for more than 30 years, and there's no sign that the approach has lost any luster over time.  If you want to check out a really solid article about the colors of Magic and their real-world implications, you'll probably want to click here to see Duncan Sabien's treatise "The MTG Color Wheel (& Humanity)."  It's a great read and worth some re-reads!

The MTG team has taken a lot of care over the years to give their in-universe magic wielders the trappings of fantasy lore that best fit the colors.  Blue magic-users are almost always wizards, for example, while black mages might be wizards, but they also could be clerics or warlocks.  This taxonomy reached an apex of symmetry in the expansion Strixhaven: School of Mages in 2021.  The set is based upon the happenings at a university of magic -- the titular Strixhaven -- which is divided into five colleges, each based upon one of MTG's pairs of "enemy" colors (the ones that oppose each other on the wheel above).

Furthermore, the nature of each college highlights the tension between its constituent colors on an axis that makes them "enemies."  The red-blue college, for instance, is Prismari, focused on the arts.  Students and faculty here may take a very blue approach, working to understand the elements of their craft and how they interact to produce a reaction in an audience.  Or...they might be very red, concerned only with passionately expressing the feelings that drive them to create.

It's a pretty cool setup.  And since the set is filled with mages of all five colors and some mixtures thereof, the MTG team firmly divided up the "character classes" (creature types) of the cards by color, with each color getting one term to describe the practitioners of its magic.  Here is one of the cycles of the set, the Pledgemages...each one is a species associated with one color, and the class of mage associated with its partner:

From a Scryfall search

And I love this.  It satisfies some of the fundamental cravings of my neurodivergence.  It's just so round...so symmetrical...so clean!

And so...that's what I want to bring into the Monstrous Heartbreaker's Mage.  I'm already working on a general class model where each hits a point of specialization at level 2.  For the Mage, second level will be when a player determines if their character is actually a druid, a shaman, a warlock, a wizard, or a cleric.  It shouldn't be too difficult to assign each spell one or more sources of power according to the D&D classes that cast it.  I just need to figure out exactly what to call these types of magic.  Right now, I'm working with...

Wizard (blue) - Arcane or Metaphysical

Warlock (black) - Eldritch or Diabolic

Cleric (white) - Divine or Holy

Druid (green) - Nature maybe?  (Not sure I like Primal...)

Shaman (red) - This is the toughest one to me.  Elemental?  Emotional?  Passion?  I'm very open to ideas!!

So hopefully, when next I post on the heartbreaker, I'll have this terminology figured out and have a class laid out for building...!