Magic is defined by its five colors. No game mechanic has been more important to the function of the game (ok, maybe lands and mana - though that's closely related) and it has given Magic a wonderful richness in flavor. Every world has these five elements, but the roles that each plays can be very different.
In particular, I like the fact that, while some colors might be seen as the "good guys" more often and some (one in particular) might be seen as the "bad guys," this is not a hard and fast rule.
Take the Kamigawa Block, for example, where the bad guy of the story was the very White-mana Lord Konda and its hero (admittedly more of an antihero) was the Black-mana Toshiro Umezawa.
Perhaps it is because I played Magic long before I played D&D, and perhaps it's because I tended to play Black, but I've always found the idea of nuanced and unexpected behaviors in fantasy creatures to be very cool. While even in Magic a demon is extremely unlikely to be a good guy, it's technically possible, just as an angel can be a villain (ok, I feel like this is less surprising given that the whole "fallen angel" archetype is pretty hardwired into Western culture.)
D&D has a long and storied history of its two-axis alignment system, which I've heard described as the moral and ethical scales (as someone who has always held ethical integrity as a great virtue, I realize I'm pretty Lawful) and that system allows for things like its sixteen outer planes and provided distinctions for beings like Devils as opposed to Demons, giving you interesting consequences like the fact that you can technically have a mutually beneficial deal with a devil if you've got a good enough lawyer to draft the contract.
But again, Magic is my first fantasy game - hell, it might be the thing that really got me into fantasy in the first place - and I love the five colors so much.
So it got me thinking: should a Ravnica-based game use them instead of alignment?
In a sense, if a player isn't guildless, they are picking two colors simply by virtue of the way the guilds were first constructed. As amazing as the flavor of the guilds is, one can remember that their entire genesis was purely a mechanical one - a way to define the personality of each two-color combination.
The guilds blend their colors seamlessly, for the most part, and part of the genius of the card set was that it felt like MTG had just doubled its colors.
As such, though, I think that you might have to limit a character's color options if they are going to serve as an alignment to single colors. That nearly halves the options you'd get in D&D's classic nine-alignment grid, which is less great.
On the other hand, the combination of a single-color alignment and a guild choice would provide some nuance.
Take two Boros characters. One might be a White Boros Paladin, whose intentions are all totally altruistic with an attitude that "I fight today so that there will be peace tomorrow." On the other hand, you might have a Red Boros Wizard who feels a visceral thrill in battling agains the forces of evil. Thus, within the same guild you could have some serious tension as to what their true purpose is - or less dramatically, you'd simply have some different attitudes within the guild.
As another example, a Red Rakdos Swashbuckler Rogue might really just want freedom and the ability to express themselves, whereas a Black Rakdos Fiendish Warlock might really enjoy the power they feel by breaking other people under torture.
Now, I'll confess that I nearly wrote in the last paragraph that the Rogue might be Chaotic Good while the Warlock is Chaotic Evil.
Still, I do think there's some value in thinking about the colors that make up the guilds, even if the book intentionally makes no mention of the "color pie" so as not to make D&D veterans worry they're going to have to learn a bunch of new Magic rules (they don't.)
At the very least, you're going to get a solid way of saying what kind of guild member you are. I think it would also be a cool way of playing a character who is clearly in the wrong guild, and working through that problem by maybe realizing they need to change. I imagine a Blue character who joins the Boros (maybe because their family or friends were staunch Boros members) expecting to have a desk job where they can analyze evidence and track down leads. When this character discovers that the Boros are much more about marching around, fighting, and projecting their righteous will across the city, they'll probably find themselves depressed - the nerd in a guild of jocks.
Maybe over the course of this character's adventures, they come to realize that they're in the wrong place. Perhaps they decide to instead apply for the Azorius Senate, where things are much more proper and someone's intellect is respected as much as their brawn. Or perhaps they find themselves contacted by the Dimir, and thanks to resentment they've felt against their muscle-headed colleagues, they decide to start siphoning information about Boros troop movements to their Dimir superior.
Or they decide to become a scientist instead and join either the Simic or the Izzet.
Naturally, I think that developing a character beyond the simple descriptors of alignment, traits, ideal, bonds, and flaws is a good thing to do - every character I plan to play (I've only really played one - DM problems, amirite?) has a couple-page backstory (can you tell I like to write?) So there's no reason that standard D&D alignment needs to clash with this color alignment.
Some combinations would be tricky, though. Could you be a Lawful Neutral Red character? (Again, Boros kind of solves this, where you could have someone who is lawful, but zealous and passionate about it.) What about a Neutral Good Black character? (Very tricky, though I could see a benevolent necromancer in such a role.)
Still, it might be a way to add both a little more Magic flavor to your D&D game and also add a little shade and nuance to the way you think about your character.
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