Pattern Recognition #367 - The Legacy

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

15 May 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Ah, the Legacy Weapon! Urza's Greatest Creation! The result of millennia of work and a device that can never be replicated! Slayer of Yawgmoth and the paragon of doing things right and winning!

Except every last word of that is wrong.

The Legacy wasn't Urza's Plan A for dealing with Phyrexia. It wasn't Plan B or C either. It was Plan D at best.

Legacy Weapon

The Legacy began life not as a concrete goal or device that Urza would put together to defeat his enemy, but rather it was more an eclectic collection or artifice, people and concepts that would synergize to create something more than the sum of its parts. There were three major aspects to the Legacy that I will cover before we reach the endstate.

The first part is the one that is most visible to people. Namely, the Planeship Weatherlight. Not Skyship, Planeship.

The Weatherlight was designed by Urza and constructed with the intent that Teferi Akosa of Zhalfir  ^Flip would be the intended captain who would gather more resources for use in the Legacy. After he told Urza off, Captianship temporarily fell to Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain, but it wasn't under her command that the Legacy would be forged.

You see, the Weatherlight was designed to be incomplete, that each additional piece of the Legacy that was collected would integrate into the ship, bringing it closer and closer to proper completion. This was it's primary purpose, and to that end, Urza knew he couldn't do all the work himself, he was far too busy, so he designed the Planeshift Engine that would allow the ship to travel the Blind Eternities. It would require a navigator, which is where Teferi was supposed to come in, but, but that plan went kaput, so he had to go back and create a navigation aid for the ship.

The Weatherlight would fulfill this purpose perfectly well, and is probably the only thin about this whole thing that actually went according to plan. But we'll come back to the Weatherlight in a few minutes, as I just needed to introduce it first.

The Second part, is the one most people haven't really heard of. It is the Bloodlines Project.

Urza was many things, but an idiot was not one of them. He also recognized that he was an artificer first and foremost, so while he could definitely create the weapons and technology that would strike Phyrexia and Yawgmoth down, he would be very much unfit to be the one to actually do that. This was proven during his ill-fated attack on Phyrexia along with the Nine Titans during the Invasion itself where he was finally brought to Yawgmoth's way of thinking. But in a degree of forethought that he really didn't display most of the time, Urza set out to utilize the Tolarian Academy - or rather their admissions department and other subtle gestures through his guise of The Blind Seer to create the ultimate warrior to utilize the Legacy!

His primary goal was to create a person so utterly aligned with mana that there would be no way for Phyrexia or Yawgmoth to corrupt them. That was... mostly a success. He focused his efforts mainly on two of the most viable locations on Dominaria to this end. The first was the nation of Benalia, and the other Jamuura. The first location had the convergent eugenics program aim itself as the Capashen clan, and as the Invasion drew closer, Crovax and Gerrard Capashen were the scions of the family.

Meanwhile down in Jamurra, the project wasn't meeting expectations, so Urza shifted his goals there from creating his ultimate warrior toward creating a backup plan and shell game. Teferi was working in the region at the time, trying to stabilize it in his own efforts to prepare for the invasion, so Urza calculated that he could elevate a certain family there to draw attention away from his real winning hand, the Capashen family.

The family of one soon-to-be Captain Sisay was chosen for this task without their knowledge, and Urza helped guide the Weatherlight into their hands to support his deception.

Of course, this wasn't the end of the project, as the Bloodlines also created the Metathran army to help fight off the Phyrexians, a single generation of genetically augmented super-warriors to fight the Phyrexians and die for the cause. And it also created secondary bloodlines to provide able helpers to the primary goals. One such sub-project saw the marriage of Rayne, Academy Chancellor, the person running the Tolarian Academy to Barrin, Master Wizard, Urza's right-hand man at this time. Their only child, Hanna, Ship's Navigator was deemed by the Project to be a success.

And Urza realized he had succeeded. That he had his perfect champion.

Once Hanna and Gerrard met and had a child. That would be it, and he could step in to do the last-generation touches!

You may see the slight problem here.

Phyrexia realized what was going on, and directed their Agents to try and kill as much of the Bloodline as they could. They succeeded, wiping out Sisay's family when she was a child - hers is a story for another day - and the Capashen clan was wiped out, with Crovax being taken captive and Gerrard being spirited away by Karn, Silver Golem *oversized*.

Eventually, Gerrard would find his way to the Weatherlight, and we'll come back to that after the third part.

The last and most well-known part of the Legacy was the devices involved. With only a few exceptions, Urza had no hand in creating any of them, instead divining their existence, and adding them to the Legacy Project as a sub-goal to attain before the big event.

The things he did create however, were essentially anchor points and the framework for the whole project. The first is the aforementioned Weatherlight, which would house the Legacy and in the end use it. He also utilized Karn, Silver Golem *oversized* to, once his initial purpose (and Plan A to stop Phyrexia) was a failure, act as a living keeper of the Legacy and to keep things on track for Urza.

We don't know for sure what Urza had intended to be part of the Legacy at this point in time. We know for sure that the Null Rod, Squee's Toy, a Thran Turbine built into the Weatherlight, and Gerrard's Hourglass Pendant. What parts they would have played in the whole thing we will never know as the plot was changed partway through, and a lot of ideas were cast to the wayside.

But it is in this list that things start to show how Urza's plan wasn't just falling apart at times, but rather fixing itself.

You see, the Legacy was imbued with purpose, not just a goal and a plan. And as time came closer to the impending Phyrexian invasion, the Legacy started to assemble itself.

Sisay's family was told that they were the inheritors to the Weatherlight, and when Sisay survived the killing of her family, it was that knowledge that kept her going to when she was able to free herself and browbeat Teferi into giving her the Weatherlight. She then used it to hunt down pieces of the Legacy that were on Dominaria.

Now, while she had Karn to help her, things started to get out of hand. Sisay found things that were not part of the Legacy, but were. The Juju Bubble was something that practically fell into her hands, and it fit. The Legacy itself was directing Sisay in its own way towards pieces that it needed to achieve its goal.

This became more and more apparent as time went on, with the Thran Tome that was being used as a guidebook adapting to the changes as things were discovered. On Rath, the Skyshaper was added to the Weatherlight as part of temporary repairs to get her flying again, and it fit. On Mercadia, the Bones of Ramos, the remaining pieces of Ramos, Dragon Engine that were blasted clear from Dominaria to Mercadia in Urza's Ruinous Blast - the Eye of Ramos, Heart of Ramos, Horn of Ramos, Skull of Ramos and the Tooth of Ramos. Urza had no idea they existed, and yet, they were fused into the Power Matrix by Karn during repairs to enhance the ship even further.

When Multani, Maro-Sorcerer joined the Weatherlight crew, he found that the ship adapted to accommodate him, and grew with his presence, and it was doing this for not only every_thing_ on the ship, but every_one_.

And then the Invasion happened.

Things happened, people died, and as Urza's other plans failed and even he was reduced to just his head, the Legacy was the only thing still standing after far too short a time.

And then the Weatherlight was destroyed. The Invasion caused the Primevals' Glorious Rebirth, and Crosis, the Purger challenged the Weatherlight, striking it down from the sky.

But the Legacy was missing something. Something that Crosis provided. It was all sorts of positive things, a grand assembly the likes of which was never seen before. But it didn't know death. It couldn't actually kill anything if it didn't really understand it.

So the Legacy died, outside of Urza's plans.

And the Legacy rose.

Now possessing sapience of its own, the Weatherlight merged fully with most of the Legacy - only those pieces with their own volition - Gerrard and Karn - were able to resist for a time. The Weatherlight then brought death to Phyrexia wherever it went until Yawgmoth himself took to Dominaria, a Death Cloud of his own essence to smother the world beneath him.

So the Legacy rose up. It left Dominaria and headed for the Null Moon, that ancient accident from the Thran that had spent the past few thousand years passively gathering mana. The Legacy punched through the Null Moon, and supercharged itself with the sheer raw power of the collected Legacy and it fired....

A wave of pure , channeled through the greatest artifice the multiverse had ever seen....

Failed to kill Yawgmoth. Injure? Yes. Kill? No.

The Legacy died, burned out by the power it held for that briefest moment.

Urza died, the Mightstone and the Weakstone plucked from his skull.

Gerrard died, his spirit finding Hanna in the afterlife.

The Weatherlight died, crashing into and sinking off the coast of Urborg.

Squee's Toy failed to save anyone.

Karn, Silver Golem *oversized*....

Karn, Living Legacy said "No."

The last surviving piece of the Legacy, Karn, took all the power and intent and desire that went into the Legacy and forged himself anew, absorbing not only Urza's Spark, but the collected might that went into the Legacy, and struck the wounded Yawgmoth dead.

The Legacy succeeded, without Urza knowing. And not in the way he had envisioned.

The Legacy was, in the eyes of its creator, a failure. It didn't do what he wanted, and while for many others, this would mean that the project should be scrapped. But Urza didn't do that. Because he was capable of self-reflection enough to realize that while this was his war to fight, that Phyrexia and Yawgmoth were his mortal enemies, this may not was been his war to win.

"You can build a perfect machine out of imperfect parts".

The Legacy was Urza's greatest creation because he didn't control it. He didn't try to corral or contain or limit it. Once he set it loose, Urza stepped back and watched it grow into what it was needed to achieve the task set before it. It was a self-building machince, and that is what defeated Yawgmoth in the end. Not force of arms. Not the multiverses's biggest Wave Motion Cannon. Not a perfectly designed artifact that would od its task without fail.

Just.... growth. That's it. That's the legacy of The Legacy. That Phyrexia was defeated not through some plot device (ok, it was), or some grand scheme (yes, it was), but rather because Phyrexia couldn't grow, but their opposition could.

Score one for the good guys.

Thank you all for watching and reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!