In gameplay terms, to “modify the effect of energy elements” mostly meant “hose the everliving hell out of your opponent’s deck if they were foolish enough to run a single color.” Since Magic also punished multicolored decks initially, this led to quirky situations like tournament-winning decks running the Swords-proof Ihsan’s Shade and Serrated Arrows as tech against Order of Leitbur. It’s an anodyne way to refer to the warring philosophies of the five colors and the frustration of someone cutting your entire deck out from under you, whether with Balance or Boil, but such is the lingua franca of the legal application. Those “energy elements” are how Garfield initially introduced the concept of lands and mana to his legal audience and they’re brought up multiple times in the sense of altering or destroying lands or shifting colors. Garfield’s application, he outlines the basic rules, noting that core gameplay includes “entering one or more energy elements into play and entering one or more command elements into play as the level of energy elements permits to enable a player to attack other energy elements, command elements, and other players, to defend against such attack, and to modify the effect of energy elements, command elements, and the rules of play and alter the state of a player.” Patent #5,662,332 was issued on my eleventh birthday-September 2nd, 1997-and granted Garfield/Wizards of the Coast rights to the phases, rules, and card layouts, among other guarantees. Richard Garfield applied for a patent in 1995 for the core mechanics and rules of Magic: the Gathering. All of this was done better, as many things were, in Invasion, which added in-game reasons to switch colors and land types through cards like Hobble and Phyrexian Reaver, but Alpha planted the “color and lands matter” flag from day one. It wasn’t all the thematic elegance of White Knight versus Black Knight or the appealingly ambivalent Kormus Bell-there was the cycle of Laces at rare ( Thoughtlace, etc.), the clunky and borderline-useless Cyclopean Tomb, the cycle of life gaining artifacts like Crystal Rod. This doesn’t even include the land destruction that every color had access to, from Sinkhole to Volcanic Eruption to Ice Storm.
Evil Presence, Cyclopean Tomb, Conversion, Magical Hack, Phantasmal Terrain, Flashfires, the list goes on and on-Richard Garfield knew what a good thing he had hit upon with Magic’s mana system, and Alpha/ Beta had a rock-solid devotion to making land types and color matter, perhaps to a fault.
Out of the 276 non-land cards printed in Beta (which included the Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island that were missing from Alpha), by my count, 57 directly refer to a color or a land type, from Red Elemental Blast to Circle of Protection: Red to White Ward. If you didn’t get your lands targeted by Strip Mine, Sinkhole, or Armageddon, you still had to contend with an opponent dropping a Conversion or a Flashfires on you. That’s a pretty opaque sentence to anyone who started playing post- Sixth Edition (which has to be something like 96% of Magic’s current audience by this point), but what it Boils down to is that early sets were loaded down with color shifting, land destruction, and truly punishing color hosers like Perish and Stench of Evil. Games were meant to be decided by “Cast my Interrupt, Sleight of Mind, to switch your Circle of Protection: Blue to Green, attack with Mahatmoti Djinn, claim both cards in the ante.” Richard Garfield’s original concept for Magic was interwoven with color identity and was built around the tension between the five philosophies (the game’s original name, while in development, was Mana Clash), meaning games were as much about sabotaging your opponent’s plans as they were about enacting your own.
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