#grixis

Games Workshop never consulted the Color Pie when it built 40k (Magic: The Gathering did not exist yet), yet the setting it formulated maps with uncanny precision onto Black’s axioms. Warhammer 40,000 is not merely grimdark. It is a setting whose entire cosmology, metaphysics, and survival logic align with Black to the exclusion of all other Colors.

And it is primarily because of the Warp.

Black’s core thesis is that the locus of control is internal: reality is clay to be reshaped by the strongest Will. Nothing external—gods, nature, reason, or communal harmony—has the final say unless you let it.

In 40k, the Warp makes that thesis literal. Collective emotion and belief literally forges gods. The gods and mortal rulers of the Eldar Empire failed to ruthlessly control its subjects' behavior and thus allowed them to birth Slaanesh. The Emperor confided in Malcador that if he had warned all of his Primarchs about Chaos then all 18 of them would have fallen to it.

The Imperial Creed’s enforced ignorance and the Inquisition’s purges of anyone who knows too much about Chaos—these are not merely “necessary evils.” They are the optimal strategy in a universe where letting the masses believe the wrong thing feeds the enemy. The regime that keeps trillions deliberately deluded is the regime that survives. Only Black endorses that as the correct path.

White calls it tyranny. Blue calls it anti-progress. Green calls it unnatural. Red calls it boring. Black simply says: “Yes. And?” And the other Colors have no answer.

Black is the perfect philosophy for living in Warhammer 40,000 precisely because it celebrates the absolute virtue of self-determination, the triumph of Will, and the defiant dream to tell God—if He exists—to go fuck Himself. The Emperor did exactly that: He rejected the Chaos Gods, hid their existence from his own sons, and tried to build a secular empire on the corpses of old faiths. Every Chaos champion who bargains with a patron does the same in reverse—feeding Chaos simply to tell the Corpse-Emperor to go fuck himself. The setting’s metaphysics reward the ruthless exercise of internal locus of control above all else.

Here the inevitable objection arises: how can Black’s philosophy of “telling God to go fuck Himself” possibly be correct when four terrible gods and an entire dimension of daemonic horror stand arrayed against any individual human who dares exercise Will?

The answer is already written into the Color Pie itself. Black has never pretended its path is safe, clean, or free of cost. Every Black card that reaches for godlike power—Liliana’s contracts, Yawgmoth’s experiments, the Phyrexian oil, the endless demonic pacts—demands terrible sacrifices and harrowing deals with the devil. The Chaos Gods are that devil, and they are monsters because only greater monsters would offer their blessings to lesser monsters.

The horror of the Warp is not a bug in Black’s worldview; it is the price Black willingly pays for a universe free from White’s moral restrictions and Green’s natural cycles. In exchange for freedom from White’s ideals of justice and compassion and Green’s ideas of inevitable natural order, Black must also forfeit whatever safety, inherent dignity, or cosmic benevolence those Colors might have provided. There is no benevolent force to surrender to, no perfected rational utopia that cannot regress, no harmonious natural balance that rewards selflessness. There is only Will, sacrifice, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

In a cosmos without guardrails, anyone with sufficient Will can reshape reality. That necessarily includes the people you hate most, who hate you right back, and the hateful gods they birth. When the potential for apotheosis is a cosmic constant, then that path is just as available to your worst enemies as it is you.

And that is what fuels the engine of endless war: Everyone must forever seek to dominate or eliminate any possible rivals for control of Reality Itself. The alternative is to inevitably find one’s self at someone else’s mercy… in a universe where the act of mercy is vanishingly rare, because the very concept of ‘mercy’ is not a cosmological truth, but a suicidal delusion.

In such a world, inevitably someone will have achieved apotheosis before others… but they need not be the last. The Chaos Gods are merely those early winners whom everyone else must appease or supplant. They aren’t simply obstacles to one’s apotheosis, they are the proof that Black’s path of apotheosis is true and superior. At least for those who embrace the truth for how it is achieved.

So naturally, in general and aggregate, the Four Chaos Gods are primarily Black. Khorne (Rakdos) may embrace Red’s impulsive urges for violence and bloodshed, Tzeentch (Dimir) embraces Blue’s pursuit of knowledge and foresight, Slaanesh (Grixis) may embrace both Red and Blue for her dual pursuit of passionately excessive perfectionism, and Nurgle (Golgari) might compromise with Green to inspire despair and surrender through humility and acceptance, but these are merely how each one distinguishes itself from the others… Universally, they all operate on the Black axioms of Parasitism, Vampirism, and Domination.

They exploit the best aspects of humanity, tempting humans into giving into the worst, most excessive extremes that each of the gods feeds upon. They gleefully devour as many souls as possible to enrich themselves, dooming each one to a state of everlasting torment. And the ultimate end of the Great Game is seeing which one of them succeeds in finally devouring the others. Just as Slaanesh devoured the gods of the Eldar.

Nurgle has not devoured Isha, but he nevertheless keeps her imprisoned and enslaved. He exploits her; torturing her with new diseases to test their potency. He feeds on her despair, turning the souls of her brave children into wailing trees to mock her and any hope she could ever have for rescue.

Should the Corpse-Emperor himself ever achieve apotheosis, ten millennia of suffering the constant agony of half-death, of being forced to consume human souls to remain alive, and of listening to the prayers of a vast interstellar empire worshiping him as a god in a betrayal of his grand mission… Pile all of that on top of the ruthlessness he already displayed in life. It is too much to hope he will become a benevolent White god to oppose the Blackness of the Chaos Gods. He would sooner rise as the Dark King; White/Black (Orzhov), at best. Forever holding humanity in mental bondage to keep them safe from themselves, because they will forever be enslaved to him for the debt their transgressions accrued.

Just as Games Workshop presciently predicted Black in its design of Warhammer 40,000, it likewise presciently predicted Blue in how that design rejects it. For the longest time, Games Workshop has advertised this explicitly: “Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”

The pursuit of utopia is futile; the struggle against regression is doomed. The Old Ones failed. The Necrontyr became the Necron. The Eldar Empire destroyed itself and its direct descendants thwart the efforts of those cousins who are trying to save their species. Humans destroyed their own Lost Age of Technology, plunged themselves into the Long Night, ended that Long Night only with a ruthless ‘Great Crusade’ of conquest and subjugation and extermination, and then that empire destroyed itself and left behind a massive rotting corpse. The rising T’au Empire thinks it can do better only because it has no conception of those empires that rose and fell before it, and the terrible realities that inform the policies of the Imperium of Man.

Even the recent “Hope Spots”—Belisarius Cawl’s innovations, Primaris Marines, Guilliman’s reforms, the Lion’s return—do not shift the setting toward Blue. They are Blue methods ruthlessly subordinated to Black ends. Guilliman does not restore the Emperor’s dream of rational enlightenment; he triages a dying empire with colder, sharper efficiency so that the machine can keep grinding corpses into prayers. Cawl hoards forbidden knowledge in secret vaults because actual Blue progress would shatter the ignorance that protects the Imperium from Chaos. Every upgrade serves one purpose: more efficient slaughter to feed the throne and keep the masses believing the Creed. These are not steps toward utopia. They are the strong using every tool available to reforge reality in their image for one more grim millennium.

Even setting aside the industrialized human sacrifice of the Imperium of Man (the imperial tithe, the black tithe, the hive cities, the forge cities, the servitors, the kidnapping and torturous transformation of young boys into aspirants who might become Space Marines), let’s look at the Asuryani Eldar.

Only in a universe as bleak and hopeless as Warhammer could it ever be justified to practice necromancy on the level of the Craftworld Eldar. Their Craftworlds are fueled by Infinity Circuits empowered by the souls of dead Eldar. Mass Asuryani deaths actually supercharge their Craftworlds. The Asuryani consider it horrifying and disgusting and disgraceful to weaponize their dead, and yet not only do they not face any divine censure for employing Ghost Warriors, the setting treats this only as the most sensible pragmatism. In this universe, there is no atrocity too heinous to commit for the sake of victory. Is it any wonder, then, that the Eldar’s greatest hope for victory is the Ynnari Death-Cult that seeks to give birth to a second, more dangerous god than Slaanesh, with the desperate hope that this new god will eat the old god, and then not turn around and eat them more effectively than Slaanesh ever could?

But in Warhammer 40k, every other Color becomes a delusion, a coping mechanism, or fuel for the machine. The Salamanders’ compassion is noble but futile. The Tau’s progress is naive. The Eldar’s grace is irretrievably lost. The Orks’ joy exists only because they demand and supply the eternal war Black demands.

Even the Tyranids may be a bioweapon made by the Old Ones out of ultimate Black callousness; nothing more than a tool to wipe the galaxy clean of all ‘failed’ species and their psychic messes. Let’s not forget that the Old Ones already weaponized entire species before, when they made the Orks and the Eldar to fight the Necrons for them. Or how the Necontyr started the war only because the Old Ones denied the Necrontyr a cure for their horrible form of cancer.

Thus, 40k is not simply “a Black-aligned setting.” It is the definitive Black setting—the one in which Black is not merely viable but the only actually honest Color.

“Spears, together! Take it down!”

Surrounded by polearms on all sides, the whip-wielding zombie finally fell to the Bant paladins’ weapons. With the largest foe torn apart, they then turned their attention to the lesser undead. But the horde had yet to attack.

“…What’s going on?” one squire hissed to the knight beside her.

“No idea, Rowena. Usually they’re more- Look out!”

One armored zombie shambled forward, while the rest of the undead dispersed into the surrounding wasteland. With a rotting hand, it reached out to Rowena, shrugging off a spear hit that merely scraped against its heavy plates. It groaned, seized her hand, and…

“Uh. Is this what usually-”

“Not at all.”

The other knights watched in disbelief as their enemy vigorously shook Rowena’s free hand. That is, until the squire studied the undead more intently.

“Hey, I recognize that armor…Dahlia?”

The zombie paused her shaking to nod, coupled with a wordless groan.

“So. I see the Knight of the Reliquary gig worked out well for you. And I also see you aren’t attacking us.”

Dahlia pointed first to the larger undead’s whip fallen on the ground, then awkwardly to her own back.

“What…oh. You’re thanking us, then.”

Another nod.

“Well. It’s been lovely catching up, but…Oh, not again.”

Rowena readied her spear as the undead slavedriver began to rise once again. Despite its grievous injuries, it still managed to almost regain its footing, only for Dahlia to trip it back to the ground. Rowena then quickly followed up with a spear through its head.

“Thanks for the assist.”

Rotten teeth angled into something resembling a smile.

“Nice to see you’re still on our side. And your form is still good, almost as good as mine.”

Dahlia’s smile disappeared, replaced by a more typical open-mouthed grimace. She pointed to the full-fledged knights behind Rowena.

“What…I’m almost a Knight of the Reliquary! And besides, I still fought here.”

The living knights laughed.

I’ve seen a few polls for favorite guild, and I thought it would be neat to make one for favorite shard/clan. I would really appreciate if you decide to reblog; I’m a pretty small blog, and I’d be curious to see what the wider MTG Tumblr community thinks.

Artists: Jason Chan; Karl Kopinski

Requested by @progrocksterone

Merry Grixmas! Day 1: Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge

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