I wasn’t even playing Magic: The Gathering the last time we were on New Phyrexia, way back in 2011. That block of sets chronicled the fall of Mirrodin, and its rebirth as a corrupted, monstrous hell. It was brutal, messy, and intense, and often stands out as one of the best in the game’s long history.
Our return to Phyrexia in the recent Phyrexia: All Will Be One is just as gruesome, but things have changed. It’s been over a decade since Mirrodin, and Elesh Norn and her Phyrexian Praetors have had time to completely recreate the plane to their own design. Returning was always going to be a challenge for Wizards of the Coast; how do you portray a living nightmare, 12 years later? For that, I spoke to Phyrexia: All Will Be One’s lead art director, Ovidio Cartagena.
New Phyrexia is ruled by five Praetors: the Urabrask, Jin-Gitaxias, Sheoldred, Vorinclex, and their leader, the Mother of Machines herself, Elesh Norn. Each Praetor is born from a different colour of Magic, and, while they all seek the compleation of the multiverse, what compleation even means to them is different. For instance, while Norn, the white Praetor, pursues order and control, while the green-aligned Vorinclex is committed to survival of the fittest and social Darwinism.
“Like any great civilization, each ideology had its own resonant visual motifs and quirks,” Cartagena tells me. “One of my goals was to clearly distinguish each praetor allegiance with clear visual cues. Take all the ‘eyestalks’ in the Progress Engine [Jin-Gitaxias’ blue faction], for example, as an element that is distinct and can be added to other designs for mana identity purposes.”
Perhaps the most radical redesign of all new Phyrexia: All Will Be One was to the red faction, led by the rebel heretic himself, Urabrask. Urabrask stands apart from the other Praetors, as he strongly believes that people should want to be compleated willingly, rather than forcibly converted like the Norn, Sheoldred, and the rest. As the only real challenger to Elesh Norn, it was about time he finally had a more cohesive style.
Interestingly, Cartagena described a wide spread of inspirations for this, sleeker look for Urabrask, including motorbikes and pipe organs. He describes Urabrask as “one of my favourite characters to work with”, and that the challenge was in connecting two objects that seemed disparate but shared visual and thematic similarities, like the tubular look of a pipe organ and motorcycle engine, which both make “fascinating music”.
You can see these influences throughout the set. While lots of the red Phyrexian creatures look like Tron-like machines, monochrome bar the glowing lava in their cores (Exuberant Fuseling and Furnace Punisher are great examples of this), other cards, like Urabrask’s Anointer and Solphim, Mayhem Dominus have an almost religious air about then that you might not have expected from such a fiery and passionate Praetor.
Of course, if Phyrexia has anything close to a dominant religion, it would be Elesh Norn’s Machine Orthodoxy. Norn’s style is all sinew and porcelain; perfect, impersonal, emotionless, and ordered. One aspect many of us weren’t expecting as we descended down to the Fair Basilica was just how dental the white Phyrexian aesthetic has become since we were last on the plane.
“The Machine Orthodoxy does take cues from teeth, bones, etc.” Cartagena says, adding that Phyrexians repurpose elements where they can be most effective “ regardless of the original function”. It’s this freedom from “conceptual limitations” that can make them so unsettling.
Few things in Phyrexia get much more unsettling than the Mites, a new creature type introduced in All Will Be One. These small, bitey fiends are Phyrexia’s vermin, made from connective tissue, bone, and lots and lots of teeth. They’re a big part of white’s visual identity, and its draft format as the easily-expendable go-wide creature, which means Cartagena needed to put a lot of work into making them work.
“Mites had quite a few iterations over the course of a few months. Some iterations will never see the light of day, others made it into cards. We wanted a new force that could quickly and effectively permeate any landscape with agents of Phyrexia in order to compleat it and, if needed, process biomass. Of course, this design was also answering to a Go Wide intent in the gameplay, and I love where we arrived with the designs.”
Despite the name, Phyrexia: All Will Be One isn’t only about the Phyrexians themselves. It’s also about the forces who oppose them. The set follows ten Planeswalkers as they descend through the layers of Phyrexia, hoping to get to its core. Sadly, things don’t go well for five of them, who become compleated and part of the Phyrexian machine.
Compleated Planeswalkers have become a huge talking point for Magic ever since Tamiyo became the first victim back in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. All Will Be One not only gave us canonically compleated Jace, Vraska, Nissa, Nahiri, and Lukka, but also what-if imaginings of Phyrexian Kaito, The Wanderer, Tyvar, Koth, and Kaya. Their designs all manage to maintain the essence of their characters while adding that body horror nightmare fuel that make Phyrexians such compelling villains, but it wasn’t easy for Cartagena’s team.
Initially, he refuses to commit to which was the most difficult, owing to the range of ideas. Eventually, he relents. “I can say that Lukka was one of the more complex ones, and I ended up being very fond of the design by Jehan Choo that was illustrated by Chase Stone.”
Lukka’s design sees him physically merge with a Phyrexian beast to become an amalgamation of human and creature. While I wasn’t entirely convinced compleation is the best move for his story – it feels like there’s a lot left to tell with him – it’s hard to deny his appearance is one of the most imposing of any Phyrexian ‘walker we’ve seen.
Joining the reality-hopping superteam of ‘walkers are the various tribes of native humans, still fighting to survive years after Phyrexia had successfully compleated their home of Mirrodin. Oddly, bar a few singular mentions of the other groups, All Will Be One only gave us a look at the Vulshok – the mountainous, red-aligned human tribe that the Planeswalker Koth belongs to. While we did see a couple of references to the white Auriok and the green Sylvok, Cartagena has some bad news about the blue-aligned Neurok.
“Most Mirrans were compleated or eliminated, and some are even hiding and haven’t been found by their peers. There were some surprising survivors, but as you may see Neuroks were not only compleated, their influence was fully assimilated into the Progress Engine’s design.”
While All Will Be One is a brutal set, full of gore, body horror, and intense scenes, Phyrexia has eased up a little since we last visited. There’s nothing in the set that looks quite as terrifyingly grim as Lost Leonin, Spread the Sickness, or the infamous Surgical Extraction.
According to Cartagena, this was a conscious choice to reflect that the war for Mirrodin was won by the Phyrexians long ago, meaning they’ve had time to “evolve and perfect themselves” comparing it to the evolution in the animal kingdom that saw the Tiktaalik transform into the modern Cheetah.
“The toolkit for Phyrexians had to accommodate several iterations across all mana colours (and several combinations), in hundreds of cards. It was very difficult to come up with creatures that were appealing and scary at the same time; and it was even more difficult coming up with several different ways to achieve that”.
Body horror doesn’t have to be violent and brutal, though. Where New Phyrexia went for shock value, All Will Be One has a calm hopelessness, like in Font of Progress and the five Twilight cards showing the monuments to the Praetors. There’s no need for the level of violence we saw in New Phyrexia, as Phyrexia has no need to fight for over a decade.
The end result is the same: All Will Be One is one of the most striking sets in recent memory, artistically-speaking. When you manage to make repulsive machine-mutants look almost beautiful, you know you’ve done a good job.
One thing still bothered me about All Will Be One, though, and I just had to ask Cartagena. When Jin-Gitaxias was in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, he sported a rather striking pair of trousers. Despite being an angular Xenomorph-like monster with an elongated face of razor-sharp teeth, it’s always been those trousers that stood out to me from his last appearance. Did he keep them when he got back home, just to try on when he wants to feel handsome?
“I suppose there is at least a slim chance they’re stored somewhere in the Surgical Bay. Phyrexians waste nothing.”