Magic and Music: Bant (Green-White-Blue)

http://www.lala.com/#memberplaylist/47893P81261/

Now we come to the shards. Since some three-color things already were on the guild ones, these are 60 to 64 minutes long instead of 70 to 74. It's harder to find three-color songs than two-color, but they're often richer and therefore more fun.

You can approach a three-color compilation in a couple of ways. You can do like they actually did to make Shards of Alara and define the three colors together by what two colors aren't there. You can go by the uncommon Shards lands (I found this approach unproductive). Or you can do the additive method: taking the principles that made the guild mixes and finding songs that shade toward a third color enough to where they "round up" into the shard or wedge. The last one's probably the most practical if you're trying to do one of these with your collection, because if you're like me, your collection skews to a couple of guilds anyway. It's also the easiest to categorize them by that third method, so I recommend it. This is most helpful when making the wedges, as Magic's given them no flavor save for the Apocalypse expansion and the Planar Chaos dragons.

On to Bant...Bant's flavor is noble military, which seems to skew it toward red-white when you play with it. Wizards has admitted that Bant's signature card, Finest Hour, just felt Bant even though its ability is red. You run into the same problem making a Bant compilation; how do you make it sound all Exalted without turning it into Boros 2.0? The trick is to focus on two areas: the smoothness in the electronic rhythms (what Azorius prefers, which is as far away from red as possible), and the organic sounds (emphasizing the green). By the three-part breakdown, you get the combinations below; for this and all other shards/wedges, I'll list them by their prominence on my compilation, most frequent to least frequent.

Blue Selesnya (dancing hippies)
Green Azorius (natural order)
White Simic (experimenting on nature but only releasing the orderly bits)

Blu Mar Ten's Black Water album is the Bantiest thing I've heard.

So it all leads to this:

Blu Mar Ten - Black Water
Delerium - Silence (Sanctuary Mix)
Bassic - Tranquility Bass
Cardamar - Start
Banco de Gaia - Last Train to Lhasa
(Secret of Mana) - Fear of the Flava
BT - The Road to Lostwithiel
(Gauntlet) - GAUNTLET!!
Blu Mar Ten - Ghost Trio --> Turtle Beach
Chicane - Saltwater