Posted in: Card Games, Games, Magic: The Gathering, Tabletop, Wizards of the Coast | Tagged: card games, Dominaria, magic, Magic: The Gathering, MTG, MTG Arena, Tabletop, Urza, wizards of the coast, WotC

Magic: The Gathering: On Urza, Mishra, & The Brothers' War

Hello there, fans of Magic: The Gathering lore, fluff, and flavor! In this series revolving around Magic in-game history, we have already looked at the nature and origin of Phyrexia. This retrospective on the compleated monstrosities was left open, but do not worry! We will be seeing more of them quite soon. For now, though, it is time to tell you all a story of two brothers, and how their bitter rivalry shook an entire plane of existence to its core. This is the beginning of the story of Urza and Mishra, two rival artificer siblings, and their war over a simple-yet-catastrophic pair of artifacts.

Five-Thousand Years After Yawgmoth…

Urza and Mishra were born on the Dominarian continent of Terisiare (much later on, historians of the realm marked Urza's birth at 0 AR, or Argivian Reckoning). Brothers with the grandest of designs, the two were prodigious artificers for their time. Their mother died when Urza was young and their father remarried into the aristocracy of Terisiare. The father's new wife was rather cruel to the brothers, and so when their father fell ill, he sent Urza and Mishra to study under his friend Tocasia's tutelage.

Under this new guidance, the brothers learned a lot about the Thran dynasty and their manufacture of artifacts of war (we covered the Thran dynasty during our coverage of early Phyrexia – click here to learn more!). Urza and Mishra discovered the Thran's designs for the Ornithopter as well as the Caves of Koilos, a remarkably important archaeological site for Thran history (if you've read about the Thran, you'll understand that this was where Yawgmoth's Phyrexian portal to Dominaria was hidden).

In the Caves, Urza found the Mightstone, one half of the artifact pair that kept the planar portal to Phyrexia shut. Mishra found the other half, known as the Weakstone. Ultimately, the two brothers each coveted the others' stone, the Brothers' War began, and the two officially parted ways for their own Machiavellian designs.

The two brothers began to exert any show of influence they could throughout the plane of Dominaria, each in an attempt to overthrow the other. When the two finally reunited on the field of battle, it was clear to Urza that Mishra had been compleated! He had gone to Phyrexia in a bid for more power and was turned from a man into a half-machine, Phyrexian monstrosity.

Urza did the only thing he could do in order to quell the fighting between his forces, and so he detonated the Golgothian Sylex, an artifact that was created by the Thran and had power rivaling any sort of nuclear blast that we have seen in real-world history. This killed everyone involved and devastated the entire landscape… except it didn't kill everyone. Urza's latent Planeswalker spark ignited, and he managed to leave Dominaria for parts unknown.

As Urza departed, he came to realize that the Phyrexians were to blame for the distorting black mana that corrupted his dear brother, and he vowed to enact vengeance on them, and especially upon Yawgmoth. The two stories combine from here. Where will the story lead? You'll just have to read on. What do you think of our story segments? Are they comprehensive enough? Are they accurate? Let us know in the comments below.

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