I've been following Mark Rosewater's Tumblr for a long time and I often find myself scratching my head over some of the questions (and outrage - real or feigned) that he receives about the color pie. So I thought I'd write about my own thoughts about the color pie.
I see the five colors in Magic as representing five naturally-occurring sources of magic in the game milieu. Each color is very good at doing certain things, not so good at doing other things, and largely unable to do the rest of things.
For example, Green is the color of living nature. As such, it is really good at doing things with creatures: It can summon large creatures (and plants), it can summon creatures for less mana than other colors can, it can summon creatures with several impressive abilities (Trample, Indestructible, Deathtouch, Haste, Regeneration). It can cast spells which can make its creatures bigger and more powerful. It can cast spells to use its creatures to do interesting things (smack other creatures from afar, draw cards with them). It also hates artifice, and is able to easily destroy artifacts and enchantments. As the color most in touch with the land generally, it can also create more land or summon creatures which can generate mana.
But Green is not at all good at other things. It's not the color of inanimate nature or naturally-occurring phenomena (that would be Red), so it can't summon storms, throw lightning around, create earthquakes, etc. It's not the color of death or disease (that's Black). It's not the color of artifice or developing the knowledge of how magic works (that's Blue). And it's not the color of civilization, society or the use of technology to advance those (that's White).
These are the pros and cons of Green within the metaphor of how the game works. There are also some pros and cons which exist for gameplay purposes. For example, Green rarely has flying creatures, because someone has to be worst with flyers and since Green has some many other creature advantages it makes sense for it to be bad at Flying. But it also has good removal for flyers, usually with spells which feel more Red (Hurricane, for example), but that's because it needs some defense against flyers given how good Flying is in the game. (It also uses Reach for this purpose.)
But everyone knows all this.
The second part to the central metaphor of the five colors is that wizards (Planeswalkers, in the game milieu) learn how to use the colors to cast spells. The "learning" here is constructing a deck. If you construct a deck which is only Green, then you are a wizard who is really good at doing the things that Green enables wizards to do, but not so good at doing things Green isn't good at doing. By electing to be a pure-Green wizard, that is the trade-off you have chosen to make. It's like deciding to become a programmer: You're good at programming computers, but that doesn't help you replace the electrical system in a building.
If you want to be able to do more things well, then you need to learn a different color of magic. If you want to be able to kill creatures from afar, then you probably want to learn Black or Red magic to add to your Green - let's say Black (since I love Black/Green as a color combo). But the trade-off you make here is that you can only keep so many spells in your head at once, and there's a mental cost to trying to use two colors simultaneously. The cost in game terms is that your deck has fewer Green cards so that you can have those Black cards, and your brain has trouble switching between the two paradigms, and sometimes you stumble (by not drawing the right mana to cast the spells in your hand). You can do more things, but not as consistently. A really learned wizard (i.e., a good deck creator) can smooth over the inconsistencies a lot, but usually not entirely.
So when I see people questioning the color pie, what I see them asking is something like this:: "I see myself as color X, and I really want my decks to do Y. So I want to figure out how color X can do Y." But that's not how magic works in Magic; if you're color X, then you can do the things color X does well. If you want to also do Y, then you have to make the trade-offs to be able to do Y by learning another color.
(When I say someone "sees themself" as being a color, what I really mean is that they really like playing that color and want to play that color as much as possible. But doing so means having to make trade-offs. If enchantment removal is important to you, then maybe you're not really mono-Black.)
Since I started playing it, I've always viewed the color pie in pragmatic terms: If I want to do thing Y, then I need to play a color which can do thing Y. Sometimes I start with the colors and work from there, but I'm always mindful of what those colors are (and aren't!) good at doing. For example when I put together a Blue/Black deck, especially for casual multiplayer, I'm aware that those colors are poor at dealing with enchantments and artifacts and that my deck could be hosed if my opponents play some powerful enchantments.
But I never really wish that any color could do everything well. That would take a big part of what makes Magic interesting out of the game.
Lastly, I don't entirely agree with Mark that power level is not part of the color pie. I think the color pie informs power level, but that every color gets some access to high power level in all aspects of the game. While Red and White are the aggro colors and get access to cheap, efficient creatures, all colors get some cheap and efficient creatures - but Blue and Black get them less often, and sometimes with strings attached (Black's often can't block, for example, and Blue often can't back them up with beefier creatures as finishers). But power level for creatures is a bad place to look for significant differentiation, because creatures are the backbone of the game and every color needs to have enough decent creatures at a variety of power levels for that color to be playable (especially in limited formats).
Anyway, that is probably several hundred words too many on this topic, but it was rattling around in my head and I had to get it out.
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