Notice: For legal reasons, this article is completely fan-made and unaffiliated with Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro, who own the rights to all images and story used. For non-legal reasons, this article is a follow-up to the previous Magic the Gathering articles I’ve written, and I’d very much recommend you read those first.

Before we begin discussing the next story properly, it’s important to expand a bit further on previous events discussed. In my first article, I wrote about the inciting incident of most of Magic’s story, the Brothers War, but my description was kept brief to give space for an overview of Magic’s world and characters, so allow me to amend that. Before the war began in proper, Mishra was searching the 

continent of Terisiare for weapons, and decided to go to the caves of Koilos, a remnant of a long lost civilization known as the Thran who also made the Mightstone and the Weakstone, the two artifacts the war was fought over. In the caves, Mishra and his ally Ashnod find and activate a gate to another plane, at which point a terrifying being named Gix emerges through it. Little did Mishra or Ashnod know, but they had just stumbled upon the long lost plane of Phyrexia.

To put it simply, Phyrexia is a world of horrors. The plane is inhabited by just one species: the Phyrexians. Phyrexians are unique among living creatures due to the fact that they aren’t technically living at all. Phyrexians produce a unique type of oil called simply Phyrexian oil or glistening oil, that corrupts and mutates other entities and “compleats” them (yes, that is how you spell it), converting them into Phyrexians, and they can also use this oil to meld with nonliving things, most often metal. Though it was made long ago by an unnamed evil planeswalker, Phyrexia was actually a

beautiful and peaceful plane for thousands of years, until a vile Thran “physician” named Yawgmoth use the aforementioned portal and traveled to the plane with other Thran he had previously “cured” of a deadly illness through a process he called Phyresis that involved surgically implanting metal into a body, and would later become the blanket term for transforming into a Phyrexian. Yawgmoth would perform phyresis on the native inhabitants of Phyrexia, transforming them and mutating them into the modern phyrexians. However, Yawgmoth’s ambitions extended beyond just the transformation of Phyrexia. He believed phyresis was absolute perfection, and wanted to spread it to all planes, as well as use it to attain godhood. Luckily, despite still fulfilling the second goal and attaining godhood, the gate to Phyrexia was closed before he could spread his infection to other planes–at least until someone reopens the gate.

So to return to the present, Mishra and Ashnod opened the gate. Though they escaped Gix, the creature that emerged from the portal, Gix had actually infected Mishra with Phyresis, which would cause his mind–and later body–to morph. In fact, the entire reason the Brothers War was started in the first place was because the Phyrexian corruption of Mishra’s mind grew his ambitions and ruthlessness. His condition wouldn’t be discovered until the end of the war, when Ashnod, finally noticing something was wrong, gave the Golgothian Sylex to Urza’s ally Tawnos. She instructed him to give it to Urza and tell him to detonate it, before she was attacked and killed by Gix, who finally decided to exit the shadows. Tawnos did as he was told, and Urza, realizing what his brother had become, detonated the Sylex, which also ended up causing his consciousness to fuse with the Mightstone and Weakstone (the artifacts the brothers fought over) and ignite his planeswalker spark, sending him hurtling through the Blind Eternities, and causing him to vow to hunt down the vile creatures that corrupted Mishra.