In the card game Magic: The Gathering, all cards have one or more colours¹, which is rougly equivalent to a faction in other games. This concept unifies the narrative and the mechanical aspects of the game:

• narratively, colour acts as signpost for “flavour” of the card - Red cards represent Dragons, Goblins, and Damage spells; White cards represent Angels, Knights, and protective spells, and so on².
• mechanically, the “Colour Pie” design philosophy suggests that all colours should be strong at some things and weak at others, to avoid an imbalanced game where one colour is always superior³.

Mechanically, the advantages of building a deck that includes many colours (and so, can patch up the weaknesses of one by by borrowing from another) are offset by needing to provide the mana base to support it - it’s no good having a great Red card in your hand if you only have Green mana sources that cannot be used to cast it. The Commander format takes this concept a step further by having each deck be led by a single iconic creature, whose Colour Identity is a hard-limit on the cards you can have in your deck - if your Commander is Blue and Green, you cannot include any cards in your deck that are White, Red, or Black.

Magic Players are, shall we say, known for their enthusiasm for ordered categorical structures. This colour system presents a natural objective - “build one deck for every one of the 32 possible colour combinations (including ’no colour’)”, the so-called 32 Deck Challenge⁴. This page is me charting my progress towards that goal.

Rules

For a deck to qualify, it must be:

• a real deck that I consistently want to play and iterate upon, or have played consistently enough in the past to feel that I understand it well. No meme-decks that I put together as a joke, as an illustration of a fun rules interaction, or for any other one-off purpose like my playgroup’s yearly White Elephant event.
• a deck I built myself, rather than one I primarily copied the decklist for.

Progress

As of 2026-11-14, I have 12 qualifying decks. Next targetted would be actually playing some of my Temur decks so they qualify, or building something from a white-pair (maybe Iroas with Dolmen Gate, Kratos, and Reconnaissance?)

Mono-coloured

• White: Evra, Lifegain synergy with some combo potential.
• Blue: No candidates. I have built Mm’menon, the Right Hand but that’s so unfun to play that I would feel bad bringing it out for a second outing
• Black: Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier. Classic Aristocrats (sacrifice-synergy). Kind-of a grind to play against as it has some Stax-like tendencies (Grave Pact or Dictate of Erebos plus a token generator can be really tough for creature-based decks to play against), but I’m still counting it as valid despite not being played often - if a playgroup is onboard, I’d be very happy to bring it out.
  • Honourable mention to the Phage, The Untouchable deck I have designed but not-yet played. “Here’s a card that you can make the figurehead of your deck. You’ll lose if you ever play it. Figure it out.” is an irresistible challenge!
• Red: Herigast, Erupting Hellkite. A really fun Glass Cannon deck - if the Commander can stick around, Emerge allows you to chain creatures up into big fatties at a hugely-discounted rate; but without it, the deck’s pretty dead. Responsible for my best start to a game ever.
  • I also have a Zada, Hedron Grinder deck that I’ve not yet played.
• Green: No candidates

Guilds

• Azorius, Orzhov, Boros, Selesnya: No candidates. Guess I just don’t like White that much! I do have a coupla non-qualifying decks:
  • Sliver Group-Hug is a fun idea, built around my favourite creature type - but I haven’t even proxied it up yet, let alone played it.
  • Ditto Vigorbloom, based on the recently (at the time of writing) released Hexhaven Sphinx. Repeatable Black Loti is hard to resist!
  • I have an deck themed around Enrage triggers (i.e. damaging your own creatures). Played it once, it kinda worked, but I have no desire to return to it
• Izzet: For my favourite colour pairing, it’s surprising that only one of my three really qualifies:
  • one is a fully copy-pasted cEDH list that I still haven’t played beyond Goldfishing, so it doesn’t qualify.
  • I can’t remember if Melek was the first or second EDH deck I ever built (potentially after Slivers) - but, regardless, I also can’t remember the last time I played it (copying “extra turn” spells gets old real fast unless you have a guaranteed way to win)
  • my Pinger Synergy deck (I can never remember how to spell Ghryson’s first name) is, according to our playgroup’s tracking, my best deck, with a 5/5 record⁵
• Dimir: I can’t in good conscience claim any of these three decks to be played enough to qualify:
  • Jon Irenicus - play terrible creatures and give them away
  • Phenax, God of Deception - target your opponent’s deck rather than their life-total
  • Gail, Waterdeep Prodigy // Scion of Halaster - spellslinger with graveyard synergy
• Simic: No candidates. I built a Nadu deck just to prove how broken the card was - it won the first game I played in a deeply-unfun way, I took it apart soon afterwards, and Wizards (rightly) banned the card a few days later.
• Rakdos: Smaug The Impenetrable is one of my favourite decks right now. There’s something deeply satisfying about targeting your own creature with damage effects to have it spit out treasures
• Golgari: I haven’t played or updated Gitrog in a while, but it was in my common rotation for long enough that I count it. I have an unbuilt Shelob idea that I might bring out at some point.
• Gruul: Unsurprisingly for my least-favourite identity, no candidates. I did theorycraft a Konstrari build, but I don’t think it has legs.

Shards and Wedges

• Bant: No candidates
• Esper: Aminatou, Veil Piercer was my most-played deck until Tifa came along.
• Grixis: No candidates
• Jund: No candidates
• Naya: Tifa, Martial Artist, my beloved. Started crafting this as soon as it was spoiled, and it was the first deck for which I reached zero proxies. It’s just lovely to be able to say “and for my seventh combat phase this turn, Zopandrel doubles all my creatures’ power again…”
• Abzan: Hare Apparent certainly qualifies - I haven’t played it much recently, but I still wouldn’t describe it as a meme deck. I’d be very happy to refresh it for recent cards, I just have other priorities right now.
• Jeskai: like Tifa, Kilo was one I started brewing for as soon as it was spoiled. Robots go brrr…
• Sultai: No candidates
• Mardu: No candidates
• Temur: No candidates. I do have two fun ideas (Lesson synergy with Iroh and Prismari, Quandrix, and Miirym), but neither have been played.

4-Colours

No candidates for any of the 5 options

All Or Nothing

• Colourless: Syr Ginger has a solid place in my rotation. I’m kinda tempted by a “U.S.S. Farragut, Bold Explorer” deck, though, that seems pretty exploitable.
• Five-Colour: Slivers have a special place in my heart. They featured prominently in the collection I inherited from a Mum’s-Friend’s-Son that kickstarted my interest in the game, and Sliver Queen was my chase card in another collection (from a coworker, this time) that was auctioned off in chunks. I will probably never stop tuning this, even though the creature type is parasitic-enough that new candidates will be rare (it’s hard to build a balanced typal card that’s better than any given Sliver).
  • Honourable mention to the Urtet deck I built for my partner Stephanie when she was first getting into the game - technically 5-colour identity, even though it plays no cards with a green cost.

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