Pattern Recognition #385 - The History of Benalia
Features Pattern Recognition
berryjon
9 October 2025
337 views
9 October 2025
337 views
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!
And welcome back everyone! Today is going to be something of a recap and lecture on of of Magic's oldest and curiously enough, least developed places. After all, when you have the whole of Dominaria to examine, one nation may not make all that much of a difference in the world. Except when it does.
And here you thought I was going to use the Saga to segue into things, weren't you?
Benalia, like many nations on Dominaria, arose in the aftermath of the Ice Age and the casting of the World Spell by Freyleise and company. Before its founding, the area we know as Benalia was the home region of the Sheoltun Empire. We know very little of this, save for a couple names associated with it as well that it would collapse shortly after the ending of the Ice Age due to various factors that they were not prepared to handle.
If you have the Map of Dominaria handy, then this region is the small-ish continent in the upper-left corner of the map. Benalia itself is the center of one of the compass rings. It is mostly flat plains, with several rivers running through it form the mountains that line the nation to the north and north-east - Hurloon and Ironclaw for example, through to the ocean in the west and southwest including the major Andrion Bay. The south and south-east limits of the region were where the nation reached the Elvish nation and woods of Llanowar. This natural back drop and the prevailing West-to-East winds made Benalia quite the fertile region in terms of agriculture as well, so it was a good spot to settle if that was your intention.
Anyway, after the Ice Age, and the previous people in the region have hit rock bottom. The great plains are home to a great number of horse-tribes who wander the land, and not many towns let alone cities. In fact, there were none at all!
And into this emptiness comes a man. Not a great man. Just a man.
Torsten Von Ursus was not a pleasant man by any means. Having been exiled from his own homeland due to some troubles there, he had spent time learning from the Minotaurs of the mountains north and east of the plains. He came upon the various tribes and peoples that inhabited the plains and plied the rivers and thought to himself "This would make a great Country!" or words to that effect. Through force of arms and of charisma, the man took seven of the major clans of Horse Lords under his banner and without hesitation or remorse, used them to conquer the former core of the Sheoltun capital region.
He took his banner with him to the north-west corner of the region, on a peninsula where the former capital of the previous empire stood, and where its ruins now lay. At the site of the city formerly known as Benfosa, he proclaimed the end of the previous empire, and the founding of a new one.
The man forced a nation into existence that would lay the foundations for the eventual destruction of one of the great enemies of Dominaria - Phyrexia. But he would never live to see that as he died childless. But on his deathbed, he gave specific instructions to his followers for the ruling of Benalia. The seven clans who followed him would draw lots for an order, first to last. With each lunar year, the first would rule the nation, then at the end of that year, the second clan would take the place of the first, and the first clan would become the least and the whole process would repeat over seven lunar years with each in turn.
Honestly, this was probably the best decision he could have come up with. Without a single legitimate heir to rally around, an even and rotating distribution of power would avoid accusations of favoritism, and would encourage people to accept the new status as everyone would get a turn, and these turns in power would be often enough that no one would be in power long enough to try and usurp the system nor would the time between turns be so long as to be effectively 'never'.
These seven tribes became the seven Clans of Benalia as they shifted from nomadic horse-lords to a settled nation-state. Over time, some of these Clans would die out either by famine, disease, war or other bad luck. If that happened, the remaining Clans would elect a new seventh Clan to take the spot of the deceased clan. This had happened a couple of times over the course of Benalish history, so the precedent and the systems are there to ensure a continuance of government even in the case of catastrophic loss.
As of the modern era, the Seven Great Houses of Benalia - in rotation order are Capashen, Avenant, Croger, Rosecot, Tarmula, Deniz and Joryev. They each have different strengths and weaknesses, and the nation is generally seen as stronger for it.
However, as the years went on, a certain need was seen for the nation. That being a core Military force. Sure, each year, each Clan would take up the mantle of leadership, and knock the previous leader back down to the bottom, but when you're flanked on multiple sides by indifferent-at-best neighbors to the outright hostile, you can't keep changing your military every year. The Capashen didn't fight like the Croger who didn't fight like the Ternsev. To this, the Seven Houses created a core force for their military that was explicitly exempt from the Clan rotation. These individuals were those who placed the good and status of Benalia itself over their Clan time and time again, whose reputation was faultless and whose skills were exemplars of their creed. You may think this is hard, but Magic is still a High Fantasy setting, so it's more common than you might think. These people were given a unique title to show their commitment to the cause, and they are represented by a single card.
The Benalish Hero
Also the poster-child for Banding, but this isn't the place to cover it.
Moving on, Benalia was blessed not only by fair weather and ample resources, but it was also perhaps the single most powerful source of on Dominaria with the nation of Corondor coming in a distant second. As time went on, it was Benalia that defined the measure of that color of Mana in the Dominions and across Dominaria itself. This would lead to consequences, both good and bad down the line, but for most of its history, it was a good thing.
Benalia expanded during this time, reaching out across the shallow sea that it bordered to the Spice Isles, taking control of them much like their predecessor did. Unlike the Sheoltun however, they recognized some of their limits and didn't push through to Epityr. They did make great strides into the northern mountians, bringing them and their resource bounty under their control while displacing or destroying most of the local goblin and orcish populations. Their efforts to expand into Llanowar were mostly rebuffed, and the two nations entered into a fairly uneasy but respectful non-alliance of mutual "Get Off My Lawn!"
This would have just been business as normal for the history of Belaia, except that these factors made it appealing to a certain person of less-than-noble intentions. Urza, Planeswalker Meld Meld, in his quest to build the Legacy Weapon, recognized the importance of mana to counter and offset the mana that his foe Phyrexia brought to the table. So he looked around Dominaria and decided that Benalia would serve as the crucible for his Bloodline Project, the effort to build the best person to lead the war against Yawgmoth. And Dominaria's best source of would be a great place to start!
So he and his agents set out to stabilize the nation as best they could while avoiding overt control. They let things happen for good and for ill but with the end goal of there being an ever-rising cycle across the ages. Eventually, Urza would take a more direct hand, arranging for marriages and such to produce his perfect warrior, but for the most part, Benalia was left alone to its own devices.
And so Benalia grew. It shrunk. it went to war. It went to peace. It did Nation-State things for about a thousand years because that's how these things happen.
This would change, naturally, as the leadup to the Invasion began in earnest. The leader of the Invasion, Tsabo Tavoc sent agents and spies ahead of the planned Invasion by years. They discovered Urza's plans for Benalia - namely that it was being set up as a strong-point and spearhead for dealing with the Invasion when it came. So she began a campaign of terror and targeted assassinations against the Clans, narrowing her focus to Clan Capashen, whom she had learned was the core of Urza's project.
When she thought she had succeeded, she moved on to larger projects, leaving behind a Benalia was was reeling from what seemed like a massive uptick in raiders, pirates, brigands and murderers that culminated in the sacking of Capashen Manor and the loss of the head of the family, leaving behind a few smaller, cadet branches to carry on the name and their Legacy.
In 4205AR, the Invasion began. While the whole of Dominaria was hit, some places got more attention from Phyrexia than others, and this included Benalia. In the opening stages, several Planar Portals were opened over Benalia directly as the Phyrexian strategy at that time was to hit Dominarian strongpoints with overwhelming force. There were enough active portals dedicated to Benalia alone that the Skyship Weatherlight wasn't able to Planeshift back to Benalia directly to aid in the defense, and instead had to 'Shift back to Dominaria over the ocean to the west and fly back in conventionally.
While Benalia was able to fight back the Invasion, and join the Coalition in the counter-attacks around the globe, the nation suffered greatly as Plague Spores were released indiscriminately over the land, and the city of Benalia itself was destroyed. With prejudice.
With the land ravaged, their peoples dead and dying, and their leadership gone, Benalia was in dire straights. The once proud nation was broken into pieces as the resurgent clans each bit out a piece of the nation for themselves where they could rule without interruption. Even minor clans like the Vess (yes, those Vess) claimed marginal territories for themselves.
The effects of Karona, False God affected the mana flows around Benalia, but they stabilized eventually. Not as powerful as they were before, but still a major source of power for the region. Benalia was still .
But the road to recovery was a long one and it would have probably failed - or rather it was in the process of failing when the Time Spiral Crisis began. Here, Benalia's location worked against it as the shallow sea to the west became a corrupting influence on the nation, turning plains of soil and grass and covering them with salt and sand.
Benalia under salt.
The land was rendered vastly uninhabitable with the soil to grow crops buried under inches if not feet of salt driven into existence by the time storms and the breaking of the adjacent ocean. But an unknown person realized from learning or experience that you could still use the salt. Salt was just crystals, and sand was too. And you know what you can make out of both of those? Glass. So this unknown person scraped down to the soil below the crust and took the materials they excavated out of it and built a greenhouse out of glass made from the materials that would otherwise ruin their land. A greenhouse that could withstand the outside world for it was made of it, and could create a small agricultural space to grow food.
This technique spread slowly across Benalia, but spread it did. And people started to build larger structures out of it, or rather, built shelters made of salt-glass with hovels and stables for horses inside them until finally...
An entire city, built under a glass dome, reinforced with magic and steel. Glass became so ubiquitous to the resurgent Benalia that they started to not only create art out of it, but also arms and armor. The Dominaria alternate art style, found on cards in Dominaria United are that art style, that beauty.
With this technology and magic under their belt, Benalia quickly began to recover after the end of the Crisis. The remnants of the Seven Clans took charge as unification started to happen, while new Clans were raised up to replace the ones who were lost to time. The Compact of the Seven Pillars, named for the system of government that came before was instituted which drew on the lessons, the successes and failures of the past thousand-plus years to create something better for the Nation as a whole.
Curiously for a nation that was heavily mono-, it was only in this era that the Church of Serra became recognized as legitimate. Partly because of cultural considerations with regards to their own self-dependency, and there is the possibility that Urza himself didn't want a reminder of what happened to her Realm cropping up in the middle of his personal petri dish. Refugees from Otaria - the majority of which were Aven - also came to settle in the resurgent lands.
It took less than fifty years for Benalia to reclaim its previous heights, one of the fastest nations to do so after the Time Spiral Crisis. However, the actions of Demonlord Belzenlok and his Cabal had infiltrated several of Benalia's Clans for his own nefarious purposes. But his death at the hands of one of Benalia's forsaken daughters - Liliana Vess - put an end to those plans before they could come to fruition.
In a sad repeat of history though, the most recent events in Benalia came when Teferi and his allies came to Dominaria to warn about the impending Second Phyrexian Invasion. Repeating history, New Phyrexia had infiltrated New Benalia to open the gates for their attack, and only the happenstance discovery of Compleated individuals, including the head of Clan Capashen - Aron, Benalia's Ruin. This pre-invasion defeat forced the forces of Sheoldred, the Apocalypse to pivot to attempt their invasion at Tolaria West and the Mana Rig in Shiv, where they would be beaten and pushed back by the reforged Coalition with Benalia once again answering the ancient call for which they were raised.
And that is a summary of the History of Benalia. Honestly, for a lot of their history, they suffered from "Generic Good Guy Faction" in Magic's lore, being the default origin for their heroic figures like Gerrard Capashen. It was sort of 'assumed' to exist, to be there and doing things in the background to support the existence of the protagonists. It was only after Time Spiral that it was allowed to breathe and do its own thing. And personally? The Stained Glass was a stroke of genius that has given New Benalia something that is very much theirs to work with going into the future.
I like Benalia, and it's dear to me from when I started the game. But the Magic Multiverse is wide, and it is unlikely we'll be back there seriously any time soon.
So tell me, what places around Magic's history do you like? Tell me in the comments below!
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!