Magic: The Gathering has ten two-color combinations, and each one has a guild name from the plane of Ravnica: Azorius, Dimir, Rakdos, Gruul, Selesnya, Orzhov, Izzet, Golgari, Boros, and Simic. Five of these pairs join allied colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel and share goals; the other five join enemy colors that sit across the wheel and fuse opposed philosophies. Each guild has a recognizable identity — a way of thinking and a way of playing — that comes directly from blending its two colors.
For players, the guild names are a quick shorthand for "what does this two-color deck want to do." For custom card designers, they're something more useful: a ready-made template for a coherent gold (multicolor) card. Pick a guild, and its philosophy tells you what the card should reward and how it should win. This guide names all ten pairs, explains allied versus enemy colors, gives each guild a short identity, and shows how to put that identity to work in PipGlyph.
The color wheel: allied and enemy colors
Magic's five colors form a wheel. Going around it in order — white, blue, black, red, green, and back to white — each color sits between two others. Those two neighbors are its allies; the two colors directly across the wheel are its enemies.
Allied colors agree more than they disagree. White and blue both value order and control; blue and black both value doing whatever it takes to get ahead. Because their goals overlap, an allied two-color pairing blends smoothly, and a card in one of these pairs tends to feel cooperative — two colors pulling in the same direction.
Enemy colors disagree at a philosophical level. White believes in community and rules; black believes in personal power at any cost. Red believes in freedom and impulse; white believes in structure. An enemy pairing has to reconcile that tension, so a card in one of these pairs usually expresses a fusion — taking two opposed ideas and forging something neither color could do alone. (If the underlying color philosophies are new to you, the color pie guide walks all five in depth.)
This split gives you the two families of guilds: five allied guilds and five enemy guilds.
The five allied guilds
These five guilds pair colors that neighbor each other on the wheel. They tend to feel natural and synergistic.
Azorius
Azorius is white-blue : the guild of law, order, and control. It combines white's structure with blue's patience and card manipulation to slow the game down — taxing, countering, and detaining threats until it can win on its own terms. Azorius is the archetypal control pairing.
Dimir
Dimir is blue-black : secrets, manipulation, and information. It blends blue's mastery of knowledge with black's willingness to do the unsavory, producing decks built around mill (emptying libraries), card advantage, evasive threats, and quiet inevitability. Dimir wins by knowing — and controlling — more than the opponent.
Rakdos
Rakdos is black-red : chaos, excess, and aggression. It marries black's ruthlessness to red's impulsiveness, leaning on fast damage, sacrifice for value, and a willingness to hurt itself to hurt the opponent more. Rakdos is the pairing for aggressive, high-tempo decks that treat life as a resource to spend.
Gruul
Gruul is red-green : instinct, fury, and raw physicality. It fuses red's speed with green's size to make the most direct deck in the game — big creatures with haste and trample that simply attack. Gruul distrusts cleverness and wins by hitting harder and faster than anyone can answer.
Selesnya
Selesnya is green-white : growth, community, and the collective. It pairs green's love of creatures with white's love of the team, producing wide boards of tokens, +1/+1 counters, and anthem effects that make the whole army bigger. Selesnya wins through numbers and the sum of many small parts.
The five enemy guilds
These five guilds pair colors that oppose each other on the wheel. They tend to express tension — two philosophies combined into something new.
Orzhov
Orzhov is white-black : debt, sacrifice, and attrition. It reconciles white's order with black's ambition through the language of bargains and prices — life drain, recursion, taxing the opponent, and grinding value out of every creature that dies. Orzhov outlasts you, paying small costs to gain inevitable advantage.
Izzet
Izzet is blue-red : invention, experimentation, and spells. It joins blue's intellect to red's impulse, producing decks that chain instants and sorceries, generate value from casting them, and combine pieces into explosive — sometimes unpredictable — results. Izzet is the home of spell-matters and combo-leaning strategies.
Golgari
Golgari is black-green : decay, the cycle of life and death, and the graveyard. It blends black's comfort with death and green's connection to growth, treating the graveyard as a resource to fill and reuse. Golgari thrives on creatures dying and coming back, grinding value through recursion and sacrifice.
Boros
Boros is red-white : zeal, conviction, and aggression with purpose. It fuses red's speed with white's go-wide instincts to make decks that attack relentlessly with efficient creatures, combat tricks, and a swarm backed by a sense of righteous momentum. Boros is the aggressive pairing that wins through the red zone.
Simic
Simic is green-blue : growth, adaptation, and evolution. It marries green's biology with blue's experimentation, producing ramp into card advantage, +1/+1 counter synergies, and creatures that grow and change as the game goes on. Simic is the pairing for building an engine and then snowballing it out of reach.
The ten guilds at a glance
A table is the fastest way to keep the pairs straight while you brainstorm a card or a draft archetype:
| Guild | Colors | Identity | | --- | --- | --- | | Azorius | White-blue | Law and control | | Dimir | Blue-black | Secrets and manipulation | | Rakdos | Black-red | Chaos and aggression | | Gruul | Red-green | Instinct and fury | | Selesnya | Green-white | Growth and community | | Orzhov | White-black | Debt and sacrifice | | Izzet | Blue-red | Invention and spells | | Golgari | Black-green | Decay and the graveyard | | Boros | Red-white | Zeal and aggression | | Simic | Green-blue | Growth and evolution |
Beyond two colors: shards and wedges
Two colors aren't the end of the map. The next step up is three-color combinations, and there are two kinds.
A shard is a color plus both of its allies — three colors that form a contiguous arc on the wheel, like white-blue-black or red-green-white. Because every color in a shard is allied with the others, shards feel cohesive and cooperative. There are five shards, one centered on each color.
A wedge is a color plus both of its enemies — the two colors that sit across the wheel from a third, like white-black-green or blue-red-green. A wedge has more internal tension than a shard, which makes its cards feel more like a clash of philosophies. There are five wedges, again one per color. Three-color design is its own subject; for two-color cards, the ten guilds are the vocabulary you'll reach for most.
Using guild identities in custom design
For a custom designer, a guild is a design brief you don't have to write. The moment you decide a card is, say, Golgari, you've decided a lot: it should care about creatures dying, the graveyard, and grinding value — and it probably shouldn't be drawing three cards off the top or countering spells, because those belong to other pairs. The identity narrows your options in the most helpful way.
That makes the guilds a great starting point for two things. The first is a single coherent gold card: pick a guild, lean into its plan, and let both colors contribute something only that pairing would. An Izzet card built around casting instants and sorceries reads as real because the mechanic is the guild. The second is a draft or set archetype: a custom set often gives each of the ten guilds a mechanical theme, so the guilds become the backbone of the whole limited environment. If you're building a set, the custom set design guide covers how those archetypes fit together.
When you actually build the card in PipGlyph, color identity follows the pips. The colored mana symbols you place in the cost determine which guild the card belongs to — set a cost of white and blue and you've made an Azorius card, with the frame and color treatment following automatically. Build that cost in the mana pip editor, then check the rules text against the guild's identity above: every line should feel like something that pairing would do. For the deeper craft of blending two colors well — when to let them cooperate and when to make them clash — see the guide to designing multicolor MTG cards. Start a new card any time on /create.
FAQ
What are the ten MTG guilds?
The ten guilds are Magic's two-color combinations, each named for a faction on the plane of Ravnica: Azorius (white-blue), Dimir (blue-black), Rakdos (black-red), Gruul (red-green), Selesnya (green-white), Orzhov (white-black), Izzet (blue-red), Golgari (black-green), Boros (red-white), and Simic (green-blue). The first five pair allied colors; the last five pair enemy colors. Each has its own philosophy and play style.
What colors is Azorius?
Azorius is white and blue . It's an allied pairing — white and blue sit next to each other on the color wheel — and its identity is law and control: combining white's order and rules with blue's patience and card manipulation to slow the game down and win on its own terms. It's the classic control color pair.
What is the difference between allied and enemy colors?
Allied colors are neighbors on the color wheel and share goals, so they blend smoothly; the allied two-color guilds are Azorius, Dimir, Rakdos, Gruul, and Selesnya. Enemy colors sit across the wheel and hold opposed philosophies, so their pairings express tension or fusion; the enemy guilds are Orzhov, Izzet, Golgari, Boros, and Simic. The split shapes how a two-color card tends to feel — cooperative for allied pairs, conflicted for enemy ones.
How do I use guild identities when designing a custom card?
Pick the guild whose plan matches your idea, then design within it: the identity tells you what the card should reward and what it should avoid. In PipGlyph, a card's color identity follows the mana pips you place, so the cost you build in the mana pip editor decides which guild it belongs to — and you can sanity-check the rules text against that guild's known strengths. Guilds also make natural draft or set archetypes when you design a full custom set.