Long before Planeswalkers fought across the stars or entire worlds fell to biomechanical nightmares, two brothers tore a single world apart. This is where the tragedy, ambition, and original sin of Magic: The Gathering truly begin.
The Golden Age of Thran and the Rise of Yawgmoth
Every great fantasy epic requires a foundational myth, and in the history of the Multiverse, everything traces back to the ancient, prosperous world of Dominaria. Millennia before modern history was written, the dominant civilization was the Thran Empire – a marvel of architectural brilliance, soaring white stone structures, floating cities, and master healers who had seemingly conquered mortality and disease.
At the height of this golden age, the empire faced an existential threat: a mysterious, wasting, and incurable affliction known as null-pox. This rotting plague devastated the ruling elite. Desperate for a solution, the Thran council turned to a controversial, brilliant, but ostracized physician named Yawgmoth. Yawgmoth had already been exiled for his radical, ruthless experiments with biological decay, tissue regeneration, and forced evolution.
Recalled to the capital, Yawgmoth successfully arrested the plague. But instead of returning to exile as a hero, he systematically seized control of the Thran Empire from within. He manipulated the ruling council, exiled his political enemies, and turned his brilliant, clinical intellect toward a darker horizon. Yawgmoth became obsessed with finding a source of ultimate perfection—a philosophy where organic weakness, pain, and death could be replaced by eternal, unfeeling machinery.
His obsession led him to discover a dying, artifact-rich dimension known to history as Phyrexia. Beneath the metal skies and synthetic oceans of this dead plane, Yawgmoth found a biomechanical paradise of flesh and steel. He began moving infected Thran citizens and sympathizers into Phyrexia, laying the foundation for a malignant empire that would eventually threaten the entire Multiverse.
When civil war finally erupted within the Thran Empire between Yawgmoth’s forces and loyalist factions led by the valiant general Glacian and his wife Rebecc, the conflict culminated in a desperate closure of the portal linking Dominaria to Phyrexia. Yawgmoth was sealed inside his new domain, but the seed of mechanical horror had already been planted. The Thran Empire collapsed into dust, leaving behind a ruined wasteland of forgotten super-science and buried artifacts.
Two Brothers, Two Stones: The Roots of Hatred
Centuries passed. Civilizations rose and fell on Dominaria, forgetting the technological terrors of the Thran. Into this fragmented world were born Urza and Mishra, two brothers of noble descent whose youthful rivalry would shape the fate of the entire planet.
Sent by their guardian to study the ancient ruins of the Thran civilization, the brothers explored a network of subterranean caverns known as the Caves of Koilos—the very site of the sealed portal to Phyrexia. Deep within the ruins, they discovered a pair of dormant, glowing artifacts embedded in the stone: the Weakstone and the Powerstone. Each brother claimed one of the stones, completely unaware that these relics were halves of a powerful energy core designed by the ancient Thran, and that the stones themselves carried the lingering, whispering influence of Phyrexia.
What began as a typical, competitive sibling rivalry quickly metastasized into a bitter, global hatred. The stones amplified their psychological flaws. Urza became cold, calculating, obsessed with logic, architecture, and mechanical invention. Mishra became suspicious, proud, and deeply empathetic to the marginalized human tribes and humanoids working the mines of Dominaria.
As they grew into adulthood, their academic disagreements escalated into political rivalries. Urza allied with the wealthy, technologically advanced nation of Argivia, while Mishra found common ground and adoption among the nomadic desert tribes of Kjeldor and the Fallaji. Nation was pitted against nation, kingdom against kingdom, until the personal grudge between two brothers ignited a world war.
The Brothers‘ War: A Mechanized Holocaust
The conflict that followed, known simply as The Brothers‘ War, is arguably the most destructive conventional war in the history of Magic’s Multiverse. It was a war that pushed Dominaria to the absolute brink of extinction, replacing traditional sword-and-shield combat with industrial-scale slaughter.
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Urza’s Dominion of Steel: Operating primarily from his fortress city of Yotah and later establishing workshops across the continent, Urza revolutionized artificery. He built colossal clockwork infantry, soaring ornithopters, mechanical dragons, and devastating siege engines powered by mana-cores. To Urza, the war was a grand engineering problem to be solved through superior logic and firepower.
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Mishra’s Path to Damnation: Feeling outmatched by his brother’s mechanical genius, Mishra sought power wherever he could find it. His search led him back to the forbidden wastes of the Caves of Koilos. The seals holding Phyrexia at bay had weakened, and the biomechanical horrors reached out to embrace him. Mishra was corrupted piece by piece; his flesh was replaced with dark, synthetic steel and organic machinery. He returned no longer fully human—serving as a puppet for Yawgmoth’s long-term design, commanding legions of twisted engine-beasts that merged flesh and metal.
The war did not merely devastate armies; it ravaged the biosphere of Dominaria itself. Forests were clear-cut to feed massive foundry furnaces, oceans were poisoned by chemical runoff and industrial waste, and the skies were permanently choked with thick, black soot. Fertile regions were transformed into the scorched, glass-covered wastelands known as the Shiv deserts. The planet was literally dying beneath the weight of the brothers‘ mechanical malice.
The Sylex Blast: A World Shattered and Reborn
The apocalyptic conflict finally converged on Argoth, a pristine, sacred island sanctuary that served as the last bastion of untouched nature on Dominaria. Both brothers brought their full, nightmarish arsenals to the island, turning paradise into a smoking abattoir.
As the final battle raged, Urza finally saw through the illusions and perceived the true horror of what his brother had become. He realized that Mishra was no longer his sibling, but a vanguard for the multiversal evil of Phyrexia, and that if the war continued, every living thing on Dominaria would be eradicated or forcefully converted into machinery.
Faced with absolute defeat and cosmic horror, Urza made a desperate, universe-altering choice. He uncovered the Golgothian Sylex, an ancient, legendary artifact of unimaginable destructive potential hidden deep within the ruins of Argoth.
The activation of the Sylex triggered a cataclysm of unimaginable scale.
The resulting white-hot blast vaporized the armies of both Urza and Mishra instantly, reduced the island of Argoth to pulverized dust, and sent catastrophic shockwaves rippling across the tectonic plates of the entire planet. The atmosphere collapsed, blocking out the sun and plunging Dominaria into a brutal, centuries-long frozen dark age known simply as The Ice Age.
Yet, the explosion did something even more profound. In the blinding flash of energy, caught between overwhelming grief, guilt, and the blinding realization of the multiversal scale of Phyrexia, Urza’s mortal existence was torn apart. His Planeswalker spark ignited. In a fraction of a second, Urza was lifted out of mortality, ascending into the infinite expanse of the Multiverse with godlike power and an eternal, obsessive mission to destroy Phyrexia once and for all.
Why Chapter 1 Defines the Entire Multiverse
The tragedy of Urza and Mishra is the original sin of Magic’s narrative. It establishes a core thematic truth that echoes through every subsequent plane and expansion: the greatest threats in the Multiverse are rarely external monsters from the dark, they are born from human ambition, sibling betrayal, and the unchecked pursuit of power without wisdom.
The scars of the Brothers‘ War shaped the history of Dominaria for thousands of years, and the shadow of Phyrexia, awakened by this ancient conflict, would eventually return to threaten every living world in existence.
Ready to explore the frozen aftermath and the dawn of a new age? Continue reading with Chapter 2: The Ice Age and the Rise of the Early Planeswalkers.
