Phil Foglio, the Prophet

There have been many threads in this newsgroup (rec.arts.sf.written)
about the Girl Genius webcomic.

Other Foglio projects are also on the web - Buck Godot, and What's New
with Phil and Dixie.

The latter one dealt with Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing
games, and then moved on to the world of collectible card games. One
of their pages:

http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growfcomic.php?date=20080713

ended with a panel showing a speculation about how Magic might change
in the far future. Thus, a card that was very popular in the basic
set, Serra Angel, is shown as unfamiliar to new players.

One player asks "Is it affected by orange mana?".

In Magic: the Gathering, there are five basic colors of magic: White,
Blue, Black, Red, and Green. The strengths and weaknesses of these
different colors differ, and this is the core dynamic of the game. So
adding a new color would be a major change, but over a long time, it
could happen.

Well, this article

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/386

on the Wizards of the Coast site shows that it was seriously
considered to bring in a new mana color, but purple, not orange, for
the _Planar Chaos_ expansion. (The idea, however, was not adopted.)

John Savard

> Well, this article
>
> http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/386
>
> on the Wizards of the Coast site shows that it was seriously
> considered to bring in a new mana color, but purple, not orange, for
> the _Planar Chaos_ expansion. (The idea, however, was not adopted.)

Well, what's so prophetic about Phil Foglio? Not only he got "new
color" wrong, it did not even actually happen! It's as if after
building of Baikonur and Plesetsk someone said "Russians will build
third spaceport in Vladivostok", and later Russian government
CONSIDERED building one on Dnepr river, but decided not to. About as
accurate.