A set for six is the thing you eat off every single day, not the thing you bring out when someone's visiting. Plates, bowls, maybe a few side plates, enough to cover a weeknight dinner and a Sunday where you've got two extra people at the table without digging out mismatched leftovers from three different sets. It's not decorative. It's the stuff that goes in the dishwasher four hundred times a year and has to come out looking the same each time.
Plain white or a soft off white is the easiest thing to live with, and I say that after going through a phase of buying patterned sets because they looked nice in the box. They didn't look nice a year later, chipped at the edges with the pattern worn thin from scrubbing, and once one plate breaks you're stuck hunting for a replacement that matches a design that's been discontinued. White doesn't have that problem. It also doesn't fight with whatever you're actually serving, a roast looks fine on it, so does cereal, so does a sad microwaved dinner at eleven at night. If you want something with a bit more character, go for a stoneware in a warm gray or a sandy tone rather than anything with a bold color or a busy print, same logic, it ages better and you won't tire of it.
If you've got nothing yet, start with a basic stoneware or porcelain set rather than anything delicate. Stoneware takes knocks better, holds heat well, and doesn't look precious sitting in a drying rack next to a chipped mug. Porcelain is lighter and feels a bit more finished if you want something for actual dinner parties, but it chips if you're careless, and someone in every house is careless.
A plain set like this sits well with almost anything else on the table, wooden boards, simple glassware, a mismatched set of mugs you've collected over the years. It doesn't sit well next to anything else that's also trying to be the main event, a heavily patterned tablecloth or colorful serving dishes will start competing with it instead of complementing it. Keep the fuss to the food and let the plates stay out of the way.
What tells you a set is actually good is how it holds up after a house move, after a year of being stacked, unstacked, microwaved, and occasionally dropped on a tile floor. The cheap ones show hairline cracks within months. The decent ones just look like they've been used, which is exactly what you want.
This is kitchen stuff, plain and simple, and it belongs in the kitchen cabinet closest to the table, not the one you have to climb on a chair to reach.
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