Purelace

Color was supposed to be mutable. That was the premise behind the five "lace" instants Richard Garfield built around an idea he was sketching in the game's first months: color is a property that can be changed on the fly, and the rules should support it. The fiction imagined color-protection effects (Circle of Protection: Red, the original protection-from clauses) becoming a richer subgame once you could recolor the thing being protected against. In practice the recoloring premise produced almost no playable cards, because changing a permanent's color rarely matters: the affected permanent keeps its mana symbols, its rules text, and its identity, and the targets that care about color (protection, color hosers, a handful of pump effects) are few enough that setting up the interaction asks you to spend resources and tempo for a payoff that seldom arrives. What Purelace and its siblings preserve is a record of how broadly the original designers thought color-changing should be supported, before the team learned the interaction was narrow enough to belong on the back half of more flexible cards. It rode the early reprint sets and then fell away; the lineage runs forward instead through Mind Bend and the various "color of your choice" riders, where recoloring lives as a clause rather than a card. The cycle reads now as a curiosity from the period when rules and fiction were still being reconciled.