Pattern Recognition #264 - Mishra and Phyrexia

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

24 November 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

So here we are again, with the life and times of Mishra. As I've mentioned before, there is a lot said on how the War started, and how it ended, but the details in those 50 years are sparse on the ground, and the most recent set didn't do much to add to what we already know, instead reaffirming most of what we knew, and re-contextualizing some minor things that were skipped over in the original tellings.

But you're not here for me to babble on about that. You want to hear about Mishra and his encounters with Phyrexia, don't you? Well, it's time for that.

We know that at some point, a Biomancer named Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist came into Mishra's service as he was more willing to allow her to indulge in her inner and outer habits; which is to say, she more than earned her colouring with her utter disregard for things like ethics and morality. Sure, she focused more on flesh than metal, but hey, no one is perfect, right? And the two of them were implied to have an on-again-off-again friends-with-benefits relationship, so there was that.

But Mishra did not find Phyrexia. Yes, his nightmares kept coming and going, but in the end, Phyrexia found him. You see, the actions of the Brothers in disrupting the old Powerstone and machine under Halcyon did not go unnoticed. That place, that machine, was a direct line to Phyrexia itself, and from there, it's lord and god, Yawgmoth. And Yawgmoth wanted back into Dominaria, but wasn't going to be an idiot about it. He sent a proxy, someone who could act in his name and in his stead, someone who could test the ground and prepare the way. And the portal from Phyrexia to Dominaria was weak and erratic, meaning he couldn't send an army to establish ground.

No, he sent Gix.

Sure, there was some help, but they were the help. But the real voice and power was Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor.

Gix looked around and saw that while his Master could take Dominaria, the problem was the War that was going on. Adding a third party to this conflict between the forces of Mishra and Urza had a far too great a chance to cause the two to set aside their differences, no matter how temporary it might be, and take out the forces of the Ineffible before they could assure victory. No, he had to be smart about this, and that meant doing something that New Phyrexia couldn't even conceive of.

He talked.

Gix sent out feelers to both Urza and Mishra, establishing himself as a sort of third party studying the artifice of the Thran - though as he was Phyrexian, he had a slight advantage there, being part of the same technological base. He found some inroads into both factions, but he found that Mishra was far more... agreeable to his advances than Urza. Not to say that Urza didn't hear out Gix's offers, but the Brother with the Iron Alliance was too far up his own ass to consider that some random nobody like Gix would have anything to offer him.

But Mishra? Mishra listened.

It started simple. Gix's agents offered Mishra a small thing. Mishra had a problem, so Gix sent him a solution, with the statement of "Oh yeah, we encountered that problem a while ago, here was our solution. Does it work for you?" It was a simple and little thing that opened the door for an agent of Gix to slowly work his way into Mishra's confidence. For in Mishra, Gix saw a path for Phyrexia. If he could manipulate and improve Mishra and his forces, he could manipulate the war to the point where either Mishra would win and be open to Phyrexia openly moving in, or the two forces would be so worn down that no matter who lost, Gix would win.

This would just take time. Time which the Preator had plenty of.

Mishra met Gix in person at some point, and he was properly impressed by the, in his view, minor player in the war between the Brothers. Gix, for his part, pledged the services of himself and his Artificers to Mishra's cause, which the man accepted, bringing Gix into his confidence. Now, I'm skipping over a couple decades of work here, but you have to understand, we still don't know the whole chain of events that occurred. We don't know fully the inroads that Gix made into Urza's side of the war, and what it was that finally tipped Gix into siding with Mishra.

Personally, I have a couple of theories.

First is that Mishra was more susceptible to general Phyrexian influence thanks to his holding of the Weakstone. We know that he had nightmares and visions of Phyrexia after he and his Brother broke the gate between the two planes, and I suspect that this was something that Gix discovered and played into through his interactions with Mishra, driving him to the edge of his mind to make his comments more and more reasonable and correct.

The second, and probably more important, was that the Caves of Koilos were firmly in Mishra's hands the whole War. The center of the Thran Empire, the portal underground that could be reactivated to open the way to Phyrexia. Thus, allying with Mishra meant that the path to the portal was far more open, and far less contested. After all, he could access it under the guise of salvage and research, rather than needing to conquer everything in his path to get there. Why fight for something you can be given freely? Why take when you are offered?

But while Gix was doing this, he was being opposed by someone he didn't fully expect, but still knew better than to trust. Ashnod watched the actions of Gix and his people, and saw something that didn't make sense to her. She had spent her life studying the nature of the body and how to improve it thorugh metal and flesh, and yet, Gix and his acolytes seemed to already have the answers. But this wasn't something they were researching and developing. No, she knew the signs of experimentation and what was needed and she saw none of that.

So she did the smart thing and she went to Mishra and asked if she could get in on Gix's supply. You know, streamline the process, everyone's working from the same materials means that you can cut down on resource extraction costs by making sure everyone is using the same things. It was an argument designed to appeal to his preference for efficiency, and it worked. Sort of. He agreed, but didn't know what he was using, instead Gix supplied his own resources to work with.

Ashnod went to investigate, and found that, well, Gix's works were far, far more mature than even she had predicted or understood. You see, there is a sort of cycle to these things, a developmental pathway for any technology, science, or in this case, Magic, that is followed without fail. First, you get experimentation, where things are thrown at the wall to see if they stick or not. This is followed by prototyping, where you have an idea that seems to work, not you need to develop a proof-of-concept for it. This iterates into a mature resource, something that is known, established, and has the core concepts well enough known that people can trust it as reliable.

Ashnod and Mishra were at that stage with their relative fields of focus. Gix was past that. His understanding and utilization of Thran machines and biomancy was past mature and into the realm of artistic. A level of development where the basics are so well understood and perfected that you enter into the realm of style and deliberate choice. And to use a word properly, it was compleate. And she found a name.

Phyrexia.

Ashnod took this inforamtion to Mishra, but she failed to reach him in all senses of the word. And instead, she saw in all things the hand of Gix, of that ancient and terrible foe known only as demons and monsters. In this, she found herself with no choice at all, but to set Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice free with Ashnod's Intervention and leading to a Fateful Handoff allowing him to take the message of Gix's duplicity to Urza - but as she would not know, until perhaps afterwards, this act also allowed Loran to deliver the Sylex to Urza, and the rest is history.

But what did Gix have over Mishra that would cause him to ignore Ashnod's warnings and proof?

Gix had played a long game with Mishra, and he knew that as long as Mishra was Mishra, there would always be some chance that things might not go according to plan. So in a move that would appeal to those who studied history, Gix encouraged Mishra to study the nature of the Thran Powerstones, and their construction. He phrased this as a possibility to Mishra, that in doing this, if he could replicate what even Urza could not, he would have an advantage over him as he could perpetually power his war machines.

Now, those of you who remembered my description of the history of Phyrexia itself, you may recall me mentioning a flaw in the Thran Powerstones. Namely, their production. In how the disease known as Phthisis had its source in the Stones. And Mishra, unlike his Brother, was more than willing to use his half of the Powerstone when he wanted and needed it. Especially to control the Dragon Engines that were in his army. Mishra was dying as the war dragged on, dying of the same disease that claimed the Thran, and so Gix offered Mishra a favor. He knew of the disease, he admitted, had been afflicted with it himself, in the past. But he knew a treatment. A way to make you make you whole. He promised Phyresis.

note: Screw you the people at Wizards, for your retcons to the Brothers War to justify your desire to make New Phyrexia the biggest, baddest, most unstoppable evil ever. Gix would have never used the word 'compleat', and he never forced anything onto Mishra. Phyrexia is, and always was, about the choice.

Mishra chose to accept the offer, and traveled with Gix to the Caves of Koilos, leaving behind the vital and developing situation on the Island of Argoth, where Urza and he contested the resources of that place. As Urza moved to take advantage of this, Mishra stepped into Phyrexia, and was never seen again.

As Urza rampaged across Argoth, Mishra returned, this time bringing with him openly Phyrexian forces. The two forces quickly collided in a battle, and during that climactic conflict, Mishra and Urza found themselves in single conflict. Mishra held the upper hand, but Urza was able to strike a deep blow against his brother in the heat of the moment.

It was not Mishra. With a Gruesome Realization, Urza discovered that the thing he was fighting, that he thought was his Brother, was nothing more than a machine, a Phyrexian that wore his Brother's face. Literally. He struck down the monster, and the rest is history. Urza's Sylex enabled Urza's Ruinous Blast, and everything was changed forever.

In Mishra's death, and the re-unification of the The Mightstone and Weakstone  ^Meld, Urza, Planeswalker  ^{Meld  Meld} was born.

We see Mishra two more times, though both instances are cases where it may not have been him. At the climax of the Invasion, when Urza descended into Phyrexia, he was guided to Mishra - or someone or something close enough, who was being tortured for his failures against Yawgmoth and Phyrexia. Urza passed this test when he closed his heart to his own Brother, and walked willingly into Yawgmoth's embrace.

Much later, there was a person who may or may not have been a time-displaced Mishra, Artificer Prodigy, from a point in time from before the Brothers War, but after his elevation in the Fallaji, and this version of him saw the possibilities of the machines around him, and took that inspiration with him into the past.

Mishra died before the end of the War that bore his name, one way or the other. And in the circumstances of it, he helped set the course of his Brother in fighting Phyrexia, and thus thousands of years later, would, in some small part, be responsible for getting revenge on his killers, all of them.

Mishra lived and died, sadly, in the service of the story of Magic. As a character by himself, he could have been interesting and unique, but a historical footnote to the game of Magic. But because he was Urza's brother, and Urza being the driving force of much of the game and its plot for many years, he was portrayed in a way to set Urza up the way he was. Filling that sort of person in would have been the work of more than just the Brother's War set, but in the end, all we got was just more of the same, no attempt to contextualize or elaborate on Mishra's life.

He is, as he always was, a victim of Phyrexia, for Urza. For all his actions, it was in service of that single goal. And that, I find as a writer, quite sad. We never get to see his fateful choice, the effort Gix went into manipulating him his growing desperation in his fights against age, sickness and infirmity in the face of his war against his Brother. Instead we are told it happened. Never properly shown.

I don't know if I'll have something for you next week, it's Black Friday tomorrow, and I work retail. Things will be very bad for me for the next month, but I will see what I can do.

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!