The Taste of Innistrad’s Werewolves
So last week I made a quick Twitter thread about some aspects of the werewolves on Innistrad and I kind of like how it turned out so I decided to sort of reorganize and polish it into this little article. Depending on how I feel about it or how much traction it gets I may post other writings or ramblings about MTG. Now, this isn’t a fully comprehensive analysis of the werewolves more like a skimming of one particular aspect of them. It’s also specifically about the werewolf tribe of Innistrad and not the werewolves of every Plane or card.
Now one aspect of Magic the Gathering I think is a bit underappreciated is the Color Pie. Now, this a bit weird to say because literally, every fucking player talks about the Color Pie every once in a while at the very least a “Is this a bend, is this a break, why can this color do that but that color can’t, wow this is a great Commander for X color(s)” shows up. What I am specifically referring to is how the Color Pie is used to convey a narrative and the thought that goes behind why certain creature types go into certain colors on certain planes. Let’s start with the werewolves.
First thing’s first. We must ask WHY werewolves are Red-Green on Innistrad. Red is a color of freedom, emotion, and action. While all the colors have extremely complex and nuanced ideologies that I could spend literally hours talking about Red is the easiest to get the jist of. Red basically believes you should follow your emotions and do what your emotions tell you. If you feel like crying then cry, if you feel like fighting then fight, if you feel like laughing then laugh, so on and so forth. Red is basically saying to do whatever you feel like. Green, on the other hand, is a bit harder to explain but if I had to summarize it Green believes that everyone is born a certain way for a certain reason and they have a destiny or niche to fulfill. Green believes you are born with all you need to be happy and if you just embrace what you are and your role you will be happy. This is why Green has such a big nature theme because it believes your natural state is what you should be embracing. If you were born without wings you probably shouldn’t be flying, so on and so forth. Now to be clear Green does believe in things like change and even using artificial means in certain cases but again all the colors are extremely nuanced so I’ll just save that talk for later.
So what happens when we COMBINE Red and Green. Well, you get what most players would call Gruul colors, not to be mistaken for the Gruul Tribes on Ravnica. The overlap in these colors is basically summarized as instinct. Red is all about doing what your body wants and Green is about following what you were born to do, which in a decent number of cases will involve following your instincts. Now, these colors can combine and manifest in a myriad of different ways, i mean just look at Xenagos, but I’m going to have to continue to restrain myself so we don’t get off-topic. How does this tie into werewolves? Well, when you get right down to it it’s the transformation aspect.
The transformation part of the werewolves is where their horror aspect comes from and where I believe the Red-Green aspect comes from. When someone transforms into a werewolf the scariness comes from the fact that they usually lose who they are as a person and begin operating on purely predatory INSTINCTS. They will kill and devour whoever or whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be foe or family and friends. This emphasis on instinct is probably why the werewolves are a mostly Red-Green Tribe as opposed to say Black. Black cares about power and does whatever it takes to win but when most werewolves transform they are hunting and slaughtering, following what their body tells them to do as opposed to dominating all who oppose them. Now there obviously is a pack dynamic to most of the werewolves we see but again this is tied to Red and Green. Green believes in nature taking its course, which means everyone has their place, and Red believes if you want something you should do it, even if it means you have to fight others for it. There is also the fact that the werewolf transformation itself is tied to the day/night cycle, which is something that is a naturally occurring process and thus you could argue would also push werewolves towards green.
Now on Innistrad, the curse of Lycanthrope isn’t completely damning. We know that characters such as Arlinn Kord have managed to gain control of their wolf form. If this is the case then how is she still Red-Green?
Well, it’s about how she gained control of it. Had she used a potion that probably would have been Blue-aligned means to control it, had she used some forbidden magic that would have been a Black-aligned way of controlling it, but she manages to control it by basically growing an appreciation for this wild side of her and she ends up accepting it as a part of her and embracing it.
This is the most Green way to solve the problem. Green is all about accepting what is and the natural order of how things work. Note that Arlinn is secondary is Red but centered in Green hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…. Now back to werewolves in general. What is some of the story conveyed through their color identity? Well for one, they have Green in their color identity which just so happens to be one of the center colors of a lot of the humans on Innistrad, while humans fall under all colors on Innistrad Green-White is the most prevalent.
One important thing about a lot of the werewolves is that at night they are monstrous wolf people but during the day they look like ordinary people. This means that they are often hanging out or hiding amongst normal people very often. However, they are also Red aligned, and Red is an enemy color of White, and while it’s not impossible for an enemy color pair to get along in this case it shows us that while some werewolves may live among humans a lot of them don’t have the same priorities and actually come into conflict with humans most of the time, so most of them aren’t so buddy buddy with each other.
A lot of the Green aligned humans we see tend to hang around a sort of rural or woody areas, while a lot of the White aligned humans either are either members of the church, a heroic figure or live in the city. Obviously, this isn’t a hard rule, but note where the Green-aligned humans tend to hang out or travel through.
The woods tend to be where werewolves hang out and hunt, and thusly they can tend to be found in places with quick access to something like a forest for when they transform, or in some cases they just live there at all times, because I mean let’s be honest being stuck in a city as a rampaging beast with no way of leaving is either super badass or super awkward with all the people who probably want you dead. Something interesting about the wolves in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt is that we are starting to see a couple of Black-aligned werewolves on Innistrad.
I think this appearance of the Black aligned werewolves can be best summarized with this line from the first story article for Innistrad: Midnight Hunt as said by a werewolf before they kill a vampire “The night belongs to those who take it...” It is also worth noting that the story of Midnight Hunt involves the night on Innistrad getting unusually, no unnaturally, longer and longer as the days get shorter and shorter. This factor means that most werewolves are probably starting to spend more and more time in wolf form and the appearance of Black-aligned werewolves shows that some of them are getting more and more power-hungry. I mean think about it, when you’re a werewolf during the day you’re basically as vulnerable as any other human, you have to worry about things like vampires and whatever other gothic horror-styled beast decides to rear its ugly head that day. However, if the world got stuck in an eternal night some werewolves could take advantage of that. They could do things like fight toe to toe with vampires 24/7 they could basically rule this new eternal night if they can manage to play their cards right, but that’s enough from me for now. I don’t have a cool or witty outro so I don’t know just say. Well, who/what is your favorite werewolf from either a mechanical perspective, flavor perspective, or character perspective? If you want to you can leave the reply to this question in the inevitable Tweet that contains the link for this piece. Also, as winter comes and the nights get longer and longer just make sure you don’t accidentally turn into your werewolf during dinner. It’s super awkward.