We don't know: Alivaril changed the meaning of colors from canon Magic the Gathering so it may or may not be the case.
So as you said, yes, we need to do some R&D. But we need to research and practice not only on mana magic, but also on ethernano, soul magic, landbonding, even the mysterious primatic ability from some time before, etc. The problem is that we only have so much time so we need to prioritize. For example, some of the bigger priorities right now are:
- Practising Unison with Agneyastra
- Practising Red Overchanneling
- Research Red Dust conversion
- Research how to safely clean Grief from non-fireproof soul gems using red mana (to teach pyro MGs in PMMM)
Is it really worth it to displace some of them for researching Black? Or better said, what's your argument to the thread to make Black research a better use of Jade's time than other researchs?
I was sort of talking about as general tropes; the themes that Black runs with seems to be rather in line with a lack of organization; it shouldn't be overly hard to malform a Black Mana colonies sacrifice designation organization into something that benifits our intentions.
To answer your question though: because we know where to harvist Black from, we should also grind some levels of Recoloring anyway, and i'm particularly advocating overspecialized ways to convert Black, or at least Grief, into more Red and the start of a idea of how to go about it might be able to be applied to souls without burning them since it would be a manifestation of Reds emotional themes rather then Reds thermal themes.
I'm also pretty sure that Channeling will help us figure out other shit so that should probably be the priority; dipping into some Green should hopefully help us keep up with all of our Summon Bonds.
Also i think that finding some people on each Plane that we could bribe into lending us their Mana generation sort of trumps Dust conversion given that MGLN apparently already has Mana capacitors.
Actually i sort of had musings about trying some Green/Red Channeling in order to make a Green land that tends to overgrow like roses and setting itself on fire to produce Red mana which might be a pretty good way to set up a mana capacitor and get into Green style mana ramp at the same time.
...You know if we combined some research into Dust, Land Bonds, Witch Seeds containing Grief as a "record", and Lyrium, particularly Red Lyrium, managing to grow while holding/echoing a "Song" we could probably figure out something to do with the Land, among other things, managing to grow Mana containing stuff; it's nothing solid but i feel like there's probably some sort of synergy there; i'm pretty sure that there was talk about enchanting a Land and/or our Bond with one but that we didn't have enough information or experience; now might be the time to come back to that project especially if it alows inner circle to contribute Mana to their own Summoning before contracting Summoning Sickness and having it run its course.
Actually if we synergize the idea of giving Lands a Mana buffer, our friends contributing to us via them to help pay for their own Summoning, and us paying others to lend us their Mana generation to help Summon our friends faster then we might be able to get some peopleto enrich our Bonded Lands to support our effort from another Plane; have we thought about this?
That does seem like an effective way to take down a black enchantment. Break it into piece that fight each other.
I was thinking more along the lines of getting each part to fight the collective rather then be sacrificed for the collective or to figure the strongest parts of eachother rather then the weakest parts of eachother; basically anything to prevent their sacrifice from being orderly.
Edit: Black breaking into different pieces is actually exactly what we would want to prevent; it needs to spend itself to make itself but it won't spend any part of itself until a part of itself isn't itself; the point is that you want to be the one to control what it thinks its self is and Catch 22 its attempts at changing that since it won't change that about anything but the least damaging part of itself; got'a make each part of itself change which piece of itself is the most of whatever it bases which part of it it sacrifices based off of what part it's about to sacrifice; Black Mana can't figure out Game Theory...I hope.
Researching black doesn't really make that much sense unless we get a teacher.
I was actually mainly just thinking that we'd mantle Red!Us to figure it out; that schtick seems to be the best we would have for figuring out how to make more fuel by burning things.
Actually if anything that'd probably be our best bet at figuring out how to convert and/or smother Grief production from a Grief Spiral into/in Red, or possibly Red Not!Grief, given that it's sort of converting almost, if only almost, everything else about the person/personality/soul into Red; thinking about it any emotional way of drowning/converting/corrupting Grief production probably end up being a function of a byproduct of combining Grief with Aura and Red or Red Overchanneled Aura or something like that; it'd be in theme.
Granted we'd probably want a few people knowledgable about Black to help us along but i'd think that Black to Red conversion magic would be mostly a Red thing; it's sort of like how you'd expect a Green to Red conversion magic to be a primarily Red thing as well.
Speeking of which; did we ever keep track of that one Green/Red guy that we healed of that magic producing infection? He'd probably be able to teach us a few things about Mana Ramping if we supplied him with some good resources; he'd also probably be the most knowledgable about figuring out how to use Red to help a ecosystem grow which, given that i've been having throughs about making a self-combusting Green Land enchantment to store Green mana in plants and release it as Red mana, seems like it would be important to Land sustainability.
Speeking of that guys Plane; i brought up thoughts about getting that places underground city slums hooked up with something along the lines of fiberoptic natural lighting system and nobody really reacted to it, was that people just not having a opinion about it or not noticing it? I had sort of intended to bring it up for a while.
Apparently i'm feeling a bit tangential today it seems; i hope that i didn't throw out too many ideas at once; they just seemed important to get out at the time of them comming to mind.