Masquerade: Mercadia, Rath's new evincar and the Keldon war

Part 3 of 12Orim and the Cho-Arrim

Orim woke among the raiders. Their leader, a man whose hands glowed when he worked magic, was Cho-Manno, and his people were the Cho-Arrim, who lived in villages high in Rushwood's enormous trees. They had not taken the ship for salvage. To them it was a sign. Long ago, their stories said, a god named Ramos had fallen from the sky, and one day he would return. A great ship falling out of the heavens could only mean he was coming back.

Orim was a healer, and the Cho-Arrim's healers worked roughly. When she could, she showed them a better way. "Orim taught Ta-Karnst and the other Cho-Arrim healers a far less invasive method of healing," says Soothing Balm. She helped a hard birth come right, and she was taken to the sacred places of the forest people and told their stories, the scenes Orim's Cure, Story Circle and Reverent Mantra picture. The stories said Ramos had beaten a rival god and that his fall had scattered his people into three: the Cho-Arrim of the forest, the Saprazzans of the sea and the Rishadans of the coast. One day a Uniter would come, a great serpent of metal, and make them one people again.

Orim had not meant to stay. But she was respected here in a way she had never been on the ship, and she and Cho-Manno fell in love. "Mercadia's masks can no longer hide the truth," he says on Cho-Manno, Revolutionary. "Our day has come at last." He meant the city that ruled them and the goblins that ruled the city. He did not know that the next army to come into his forest would be trained by her captain.

Part 4 of 12The massacre in Rushwood

The city's soldiers marched on Rushwood under Gerrard, and behind them came caterans under a commander named Xcric. Cho-Manno watched them come. "Cho-Manno had never seen Mercadia City's forces fight so well," says Warpath. "The magistrate must have hired a new hero." Gerrard had given one firm order: no fire in the forest. Xcric broke it. The trees of Rushwood fought back with their own elementals, and in the chaos the soldiers Gerrard had trained broke into the Cho-Arrim villages. "Cho-Arrim righteousness was no match for Benalish combat training," reads Lunge. It was not a battle. It was a massacre.

Takara fell in the fighting and got up again, wounds and all, which no one stopped to wonder about. She reached Orim before Gerrard did, and she told her that the attack had been Gerrard's order. Cho-Manno was among those counted dead. "May the River claim Cho-Manno's body, wherever it lies," a healer prays on Honor the Fallen. When Gerrard found Orim, she would not hear him. "Gerrard offered no defense to Orim's condemnation," reads Renounce. "The mission was under his command, and he was responsible."

The city had what it wanted. Xcric arrested Gerrard on the magistrate's orders. He had been hired for exactly that, and the Weatherlight was hauled to Mercadia City as the magistrate's prize. Gerrard was put on trial for crimes the city had ordered. At the trial Orim walked up to him, took off her healer's turban and threw it at his feet.

Part 5 of 12The road to Saprazzo

The women of the crew saved him. Hanna, Sisay and Orim went to the magistrate and his goblins and made a deal of their own, the meeting Kyren Archive shows. The crew would go free, and the Weatherlight would be repaired and returned to them, if they fetched something the city wanted: an artifact called the Power Matrix, kept in the sea city of Saprazzo. Hanna knew the name. The Power Matrix was part of the Legacy. Gerrard, Tahngarth and Karn stayed behind in the city as hostages, in comfortable rooms they were not allowed to leave.

The road ran through desert. "You say Saprazzo is a city built on water?" Sisay asks on Dehydration. "I hope they have enough to wash the dust from my throat." It ended at the port of Rishada, where everything had a price. "Rishada is the gateway to free trade," says Rishadan Port, "but the key will cost you." At sea a crewman harpooned a great beast that turned out to be one of Saprazzo's war creatures. It dragged Orim under. She healed the wound instead of fighting it, and later came back riding the creature.

Saprazzo was built inside a sunken crater, its merfolk living on and under the water. Its grand vizier told the visitors his people's story of Ramos: not a god but a great artificer who reached for the stars, whose Power Matrix was his heart, and who fell and scattered his peoples across the land. Pieces of him had broken away when he fell, five Bones of Ramos called the Eye, the Skull, the Heart, the Horn and the Tooth. "I see more than others do because I know where to look," the Saprazzan vizier says on Brainstorm, and he was right to be careful. "The vizier's wisdom proved invaluable in untangling the Mercadian knot of lies," reads Soothsaying.

The knot tightened anyway. Orim overheard Mercadian and Saprazzan envoys plotting to steal the Matrix and blame the crew, and then woke up blamed. "Orim had no memory of the previous night," says Arrest. "The first thing she could remember was waking up with the dead guard's blood on her hands." Help came from the last person she expected. Cho-Manno was alive. He had escaped Rushwood and joined the rebels who called themselves Ramosians, and he came to Saprazzo for her. A sharing of minds proved to the Saprazzans that she had done nothing, and they let the crew leave with the Matrix. "'I need to get back to Mercadia City,' said Sisay," on Blockade Runner. "'We can get you there,' the vizier answered. 'Easily.'"

Part 6 of 12Poison in the wine

In the city, Takara kept Gerrard company. She kept his cup full, and she talked about betrayal: who had abandoned whom, whose fault each death had been. Gerrard told her he blamed himself for what Vuel had become. Karn told him otherwise. It was Starke who had poisoned Vuel against him, the golem said, and he warned Gerrard not to trust Starke's daughter. "Anything can happen when patience is scarce and wine is abundant," reads Brawl, and in the end Gerrard and Tahngarth came to blows.

Karn had been busy. In the city's archives he had found an old document written in a script like that of the Thran, Dominaria's ancient empire, which suggested that Mercadia's first people had come from Dominaria. There were signs, too, that someone in Mercadia still had dealings with Phyrexia. When Tahngarth and Karn finally showed Gerrard what had been in his wine, the truth about his companion arrived all at once. "Gerrard realized that the helpless woman they'd rescued from Rath was nothing of the sort," says Liability.

Starke had already found out. Before the magistrate and his Kyren, the woman the crew called Takara turned on her blind father, and her voice changed. "Starke knew the voice was Takara's," reads Vendetta, "but the venom was Volrath's." She killed him, and as Starke died the body standing over him became Volrath's. The evincar of Rath had never died in the Stronghold. He had walked out of it wearing Takara's face, aboard the ship that was fleeing him, and he had come to Mercadia to destroy Gerrard and take the Weatherlight for himself. To the crew he went on being Takara.

The crew broke Gerrard out. Cho-Manno came with them, and Gerrard faced him and apologized for what his army had done in Rushwood. "Cho-Manno knew he had no choice but to ally with Gerrard," reads Uphill Battle. "If that's what it took to free his people, he'd pay the price." The Power Matrix was not enough to fly the Weatherlight; it needed the Bones of Ramos too. So they split up. Some would retake the ship. Gerrard would go after the Bones.

Part 7 of 12The Bones of Ramos

The Bones lay beyond a forest called Deepwood, at a ring of stones called the Henge of Ramos, and Deepwood belonged to the dead. "It seemed as if no one wanted them to reach the Henge of Ramos—not even the dead," says Haunted Crossroads. Its ghouls moved with a single mind and screamed in the same voice. "As he gritted his teeth to focus through the pain, Tahngarth glanced at Takara," reads Specter's Wail. "She seemed completely unaffected." Tahngarth held the rear. "You lot go on ahead," he says on Ferocity. "I'll keep killing them until it sticks."

Somewhere in that forest Gerrard said the thing this Saga turns on. You could survive a place like Rath on hate, or you could survive it on hope, he said, but only hope made heroes. The one listening hardest was the brother who had survived it on hate, walking beside him in a stolen face.

Near the Henge they met the dryads of Deepwood. "Like the dryads, the forest itself willingly gives up some of its life for the sake of the future," says Sustenance. They chanted, and Gerrard joined them. "Gerrard knew little of Ramos, the sky god they worshiped," reads Collective Unconscious. "But he felt the power of the chant." Through the forest he felt everything at once. "I can feel the strength of the entire forest," he says on Ley Line.

The forest showed him what Ramos really was. Ramos was a machine: a dragon engine from Urza's war, a hundred feet of metal that Urza had remade to protect people. When the Sylex Blast ended the Brothers' War in Saga 1, it hurled the engine and a shipload of refugees off Dominaria, and they came down on Mercadia. The engine's heart, the Power Matrix, fell into the sea. Its people settled the land and became the forest, coast and sea peoples, and five pieces broke away from it: the Bones, which were powerstones. The god of the Cho-Arrim was a dragon engine from Urza's war, and the Mercadians were the descendants of Dominarian refugees. That night "Takara" stole the Bones and vanished.

Part 8 of 12The hangar under the city

In Mercadia City, Squee went exploring. Under the Magistrate's Tower he found a passage, and at the end of it a cavern, the Subterranean Hangar, holding the Weatherlight and a whole fleet of new warships being built around it. The ships had a Phyrexian look, and there was a Phyrexian among the builders. The goblins and the magistrate had been building a fleet for Phyrexia. Then Volrath caught him. He captured Hanna and Karn too, dropped Takara's face in front of them, the moment Unmask shows, and made Hanna repair the Weatherlight for him, with Squee's life as the price of refusing.

Gerrard came back with the others and went into the mountain. "Without a word, Gerrard and Sisay ran deeper into the mountain," reads Tremor. "Neither of them intended to leave Mercadia without the Weatherlight and its crew." Goblin bombs set the docked ships off one after another. "Explosions ripped through the ship overhead," says Sizzle, "and those unfortunate enough to be directly below scrambled to find cover." Up in the city, a storm the people called Ramos's wrath broke over the streets, and the Ramosian rebels rose and killed the chief magistrate and his Kyren advisors. "Squee watched his Kyren cousins fall with a mixture of sympathy and relief," says Snuff Out. Tahngarth got Hanna out.

Gerrard found Takara in the hangar and finally saw his brother in her. He called him a coward to his stolen face, and they fought. Gerrard knew how Vuel fought; he had grown up fighting him, and Vuel had always favored his left. He beat him. He did not kill him.

Karn rebuilt the ship's heart. He joined the Power Matrix, the Bones, a Thran crystal and the Juju Bubble, a piece of the Legacy he had carried inside his own body, into the Weatherlight's engine, and then he joined himself to it, flying the ship with his mind. When the new heart flickered, "Karn said nothing," reads Energy Flux. "He just grasped the powerstone and squeezed tightly. The wild flashing ceased." The ship came out firing with the Phyrexian cannons the builders had fitted to it. "With an explosion that shook the foundation of the city, the Weatherlight burst from the underground hangar," says Mercadia's Downfall. Behind it the cavern came down on Phyrexia's fleet. "One fleet was gone; others were poised," reads Cave-In.

Above the city, Cho-Manno was speaking to every one of Mercadia's peoples at once, and they looked up and saw a great ship in the sky and cried the name of their god. Volrath followed in his own ship, the Recreant, and the crowds named it for Ramos's ancient enemy. The Weatherlight rammed it. Volrath fell, and dropped through a portal back to Rath. Then the real Ramos rose, the dragon engine itself, and the peoples heard the words their stories had promised: the Uniter had come. Cho-Manno would help lead a free Mercadia, with Atalla from the farm where it had all begun. Orim said goodbye to him, and the Weatherlight shifted home to Dominaria. "Sisay had been restored to her place on the ship, the Legacy had been recovered," reads Tranquility, "and the Weatherlight was sailing home to Dominaria. Gerrard focused on the debts he'd settled . . . and on those he'd soon collect."

Part 9 of 12Rath without its evincar

On Rath, the Stronghold had lost its master and did not know where he had gone. Phyrexia did. Volrath had abandoned his throne to chase a private grudge, and Phyrexia sent someone to choose his successor.

She was made for the job, in the plainest sense. In the Skyshroud forest lived an elf princess named Avila, the daughter of Eladamri, leader of Rath's rebellion. Her former love had been taken by Phyrexia and turned into its agent, and he was sent back with one mission. "In darkness, the assassin sneaked into the village and destroyed what Eladamri loved most: his daughter," reads Murderous Betrayal. He carried her body through a portal to Phyrexia. There it was taken apart, studied and rebuilt with a skeleton of steel, a mind full of Phyrexia's knowledge and no memory of who she had been. They named her Belbe, from a Thran word meaning lens, because that was what she was: inside her they set the Eye of Yawgmoth, so that Yawgmoth himself could watch the choosing through her.

Belbe arrived at a Stronghold falling apart and put it back in order. "It protects her from the ravages of Phyrexia and the savages of Rath," says Belbe's Armor of the armor she wore. Then she looked at who could rule. There were three.

Greven il-Vec, captain of the Predator, had served for years and commanded the army. Belbe offered him the chance, and with it freedom from the graft in his spine that let his masters hurt him at will. He turned it down. He had seen what that power made of the one who held it, he said, and he would rather be the sword than the hand that held it.

Ertai was the second. Left behind when the Weatherlight escaped, he had fallen into Greven's hands, and Greven's torturers went to work on him. "This may hurt a little," says Rackling; "This may hurt a lot," says Viseling. He did not break. Belbe found him beaten in a cell, told him he too was a candidate, and healed him in Volrath's rejuvenation chamber. The cure did not last, and each time he used it the chamber changed him a little more, his body and his magic both. He was learning to bend flowstone, Rath's living stone, as Volrath had. He was also falling in love with Belbe, and she with him.

The third was Crovax, whom Saga 3 left on Rath as a vampire, cursed to destroy the angel he loved. Phyrexia took him and finished the job. In Phyrexia the voice in his head turned out to be Yawgmoth's, and he was remade: stronger than any man, able to bend flowstone and to step from place to place, his conscience cut out of him, and fed by the life of anyone he killed. "Things are going to change around here," he says on Ascendant Evincar. "The army was never at a loss for weapons," reads Flowstone Surge. "Crovax was their forge." When he fought Greven, he found the graft in Greven's spine and used it to drop him.

To prove himself, Crovax marched the Stronghold's army on Eladamri's rebels in Skyshroud. "Crovax never passes up an opportunity to cause widespread misery," Belbe says on Stronghold Discipline. The rebels hit his camp before it reached the forest and broke the army. "The forest's constant struggle is to keep the spreading flowstone at bay," reads Skyshroud Claim. While he was gone, Ertai found a way to keep Rath's peoples quiet: thousands of hostages taken from the leading families of the Kor, the Vec and the Dal, to be released when the army came home. Crovax came back beaten and found the hostages. He impaled every one of them on spikes of flowstone, the scene Massacre shows, and as they died he fed on them.

Belbe was changing too. The longer she lived on Rath, the more elf there was in her and the less Phyrexian. She shut off the Eye so Yawgmoth could not see through it. She saw what the Stronghold's makers did. "He twists the laws of nature until they scream," reads Stronghold Biologist; "She stretches the laws of physics until they snap," reads Stronghold Machinist. And she saw what the Stronghold was for. Rath was going to be laid over Dominaria, and the flowstone it made was how. Pieces of Rath were already appearing on the other world. "One must reap before one can sow," says Overlaid Terrain. For Ertai's sake she began quietly slowing the flowstone down.

Part 10 of 12The coronation

In the forest, Eladamri went to the Oracle en-Vec, the seer of Saga 3. "The future isn't sacred, but its speaker is," says Oracle's Attendants. She told him two things: that his destiny lay inside the Stronghold, which he would enter in chains, and that a door would be offered to him, to a land of light and color, and he must go through it. He chose to go in after the Predator. With ten fighters disguised as Rathi soldiers, among them a young Vec rebel named Lin Sivvi, he talked his way in, the scheme Sivvi's Ruse shows. "Getting in was the easy part," reads Infiltrate. "Getting out proved to be more difficult."

They brought him before Belbe, and he knew his daughter's face. He threw himself at her in chains, screaming at the thing wearing her body. She did not fight back. She had him locked up and questioned, and she could not stop wondering why a prisoner surrounded by enemies would attack when it meant certain death. Greven could not break him either. Eladamri escaped his cell and found another prisoner nearby: the real Takara, Starke's daughter, held all this time while Volrath wore her face. "I have seen and heard much here," she tells him on Accumulated Knowledge. "There are secrets within secrets. Let me show you." Lin Sivvi's fighters went for the Predator, set off the alarms, and fought their way through the Stronghold to them.

Crovax had run out of patience. His soldiers seized the Stronghold, he took Ertai and threatened to kill him, and Belbe, to save the man she loved, agreed to crown Crovax evincar. At the coronation Greven announced that there was another candidate, and beside him a Kor, the one who had sold Eladamri out, began to change shape. Volrath stood in the hall. He had come home through his portal and walked back into his own fortress in disguise. "I stepped out," he says on Volrath the Fallen. "I did not step down." To Greven, whom he had already drawn into the plan, he had made himself plain: "I've come to reclaim what is mine," he says on Dominate. "And you, Greven, are mine."

Belbe ruled that the throne would be settled by combat. Volrath was the better fighter, but Crovax killed the onlookers as they fought and drank their lives to keep going. "Blood is foul, the flesh dross," he says on Vicious Hunger. "My ascendance thirsts for life itself." Volrath got the upper hand anyway, and at the last moment stumbled. Ertai had pushed him with a spell. He had seen that Crovax would win in the end, and that Volrath would kill him and Crovax might not. "All that's left is the coronation," reads Dark Triumph.

Belbe had one more thing to do. She found the rebels trapped in the Dream Halls and showed them a portal she had hidden there. "The fight will continue on a new battlefield," says Belbe's Portal. Takara and Lin Sivvi went through to Dominaria as Crovax's soldiers beat at the doors. Before Eladamri followed them, he did one last thing: he took the last drops of the poison that had killed Avila and used them to kill Belbe. Then he went through his door, into the land of light and color.

Crovax gave Belbe a grand funeral and held an execution beside it. "Let all witness the fate of those who defy me," he says on Topple. Volrath, stripped of everything Phyrexia had given him, was only Vuel again. They injected him with liquid flowstone, and Ertai, the new evincar's court mage, took it apart inside him. Ertai had lost Belbe and let Phyrexia rebuild him, four-armed and twisted, as Crovax's servant. At the funeral he reached into her pyre and kept her skull. And Vuel, dying, looked up and saw the blue sky of Dominaria appearing where Rath's gray sky had always been. The Overlay had begun.

Part 11 of 12War in Jamuraa

On Dominaria, a war began that had nothing to do with the Weatherlight, and everything to do with what was coming. The Keldons, a warrior people from the far north, crossed the sea and fell on Jamuraa, Gerrard's childhood home. Their warlord was Latulla. "Everything around her suffers," says Latulla, Keldon Overseer, in the words of Haddad, a soldier of Jamuraa's Kipamu League whom she captured and kept as a slave because he knew how the League's war machines worked. The Keldons dug a substance called tufa out of Jamuraa's bogs to fuel their great war barges, believing it was the spilled blood of their ancestors and that it made the land theirs. "The Kipamu League knew what Keld refused to acknowledge," reads Overburden. "The land could support no more."

Barrin came to Jamuraa: Urza's oldest partner, master of Tolaria, Hanna's father. He met the planeswalker Teferi, Urza's onetime student, aboard Teferi's airship, and he fought beside the League's soldiers and a spellshaper named Alexi, defending a port town and breaking a Keldon ambush at sea. "The Keldons didn't know her name, but they still cursed her in battle," says Alexi, Zephyr Mage. Then his wife arrived from Tolaria. Rayne, the Academy's chancellor and Hanna's mother, brought news that Urza could spare almost nothing for this war.

Rayne went east to scout with the Zhalfirin mage Jolrael. "I need no army," Jolrael says on Jolrael, Empress of Beasts. "I have Jamuraa." Yet in that forest she could not draw on the land at all, as if something had tainted it. They watched a Keldon war party walk into a thresher beast's trap, and took the one survivor prisoner. He told them what the Keldons believed: that the Keldon Twilight foretold by their prophecy had come, the hour when their dead witch kings would rise and lead Keld to conquer all of Dominaria. "Wound, maim, kill," reads Inflame, "it's all the same to a Keldon." He broke loose, and Barrin saved Rayne from him.

The League's army met the Keldons under its general, Mageta. "In the jungle of war there is always a Lion," says Mageta the Lion. Barrin was uneasy: the League fought almost entirely with machines. "Though it moves like a living thing, anyone can tell it lacks a soul—not to mention mercy," reads Hollow Warrior. The machines did well until the Keldons found their weaknesses, and the League lost. Far away in Keld, Haddad woke in one of Latulla's houses with a bracelet bolted to his arm that could fill him with pain on command, set to building the League's machines for his captors. "Battle is our religion," Latulla says on Citadel of Pain. "This fortress is our temple." There Haddad saw a Keldon woman bring a child named Greel an infant, and saw Greel drain its life and grow. "You're Latulla's gift to me," Greel tells Haddad on Greel, Mind Raker, "and I always play with my presents."

Latulla meant to make the prophecy come true herself. She marched to the Keldon Necropolis to wake the witch kings, as Latulla's Orders sends her, and the Necropolis's steward, Gorsha, barred the way. They fought by ritual, and Latulla lost. The witch kings slept on, and she and her followers were exiled from Keld forever, sent back to fight and die in Jamuraa. Meanwhile a blight was spreading through the land and into the League's soldiers. "Ultimately, it became a three-way battle," says Noxious Field, "the land attacked both armies." "This plague chooses its victims," reads Outbreak. Rayne studied its spores and found something machine-made inside them. Whatever it was, it might not have come from Dominaria at all.

The Keldons came for the League at Arsenal City, and Mageta held them with Barrin, Rayne, Alexi and Teferi beside him. "To arms! To arms! The Lion roars!" goes the cry on Reveille Squad. Teferi had held back from this war. Now, as it turned, he called up a storm that wrecked the Keldons' base in Jamuraa. Latulla came back with her exiles, still determined to bring on the Twilight. "They no longer care about their own suffering," she says on Brutal Suppression. "Show them something worse." Greel fed on her slaves as they marched. "With each grunt of pain from Haddad, Greel's grin widened," reads Steal Strength.

In the last battle Latulla unleashed a weapon she had held back, a blast from her barge that crippled the League's machines and killed many of its soldiers. "You're willing to die for your homeland," she says on Devastate. "I'm willing to kill for it." Mageta rallied what was left. Rayne followed the blight to its source and found Greel. "The Keldons would never admit it, but Greel unsettles them, too," reads Flay. She was holding him off when Barrin sent Alexi's airships to bomb the Keldon convoy. An explosion threw Rayne to the ground, and Greel killed her.

Barrin found her body. What he did next is the first sign of the man the invasion would make him. He tore Greel apart with a spell, then turned his magic on the Keldon army itself. He found Latulla pinned under her overturned barge, and she, taking him for a slave, ordered him to free her. He killed her where she lay, and he ordered that no Keldon in Jamuraa be spared. "It startles me how alive one feels on the edge of death," he says on Heightened Awareness. Haddad died when Rayne's assistant, Shalanda, tried to take the bracelet off him. And Teferi went home to his island, counted what the war had cost, and made a decision: he would face the invasion coming for Dominaria, but in his own way, not as one of Urza's soldiers.

Part 12 of 12Why it matters

Saga 4 is the quiet before the storm, and it is not quiet at all. On Mercadia Gerrard does what Volrath wanted him to do: an army he trained, on a mission he chose, slaughters a people who had done nothing to him. He takes the blame, because it was his to take. Then he learns where the poison came from, and he learns that his brother had been at his elbow the whole time. He beats Vuel, and he does not kill him. The man who left Rath surviving on hate leaves Mercadia surviving on something else.

It also widens the war. Mercadia was building a fleet for Phyrexia, and it was not Phyrexia's only fleet. Ramos, its god, turned out to be a machine from the Brothers' War, and its people the descendants of Dominarian refugees: the past of Saga 1 still shaping the present. The Weatherlight came home stronger, with the Power Matrix at its heart and Karn fused to its controls. On Rath, Phyrexia chose Crovax, the cruelest candidate, and Ertai's love for Belbe ended with him bending to Phyrexia instead. Volrath, who had started all of it, died as plain Vuel under a Dominarian sky.

And on Dominaria itself, the cost had already started. Barrin has lost his wife and found a fury no one knew he had. Teferi has decided he will not follow Urza blindly. The blight in Jamuraa was not Keldon. For the people who played these sets, the story was again told card by card, and Mercadian Masques gave Magic some of its most lasting cards, among them Rishadan Port and Food Chain. Prophecy is remembered less fondly: Mark Rosewater, Magic's head designer, has called it the second worst designed set after Homelands.

Who's who

Character	Who they were	Their card
Gerrard Capashen	Heir to the Legacy. On Mercadia he led a massacre he never ordered, and learned who had been at his ear.	Gerrard Capashen $0.43
Sisay	Captain of the Weatherlight, rescued from Rath, who bargained the crew back their freedom.	Captain Sisay $13.41
Orim	The Samite healer, swept away with the ship. She fell in love with the Cho-Arrim's leader and renounced Gerrard.	Orim, Samite Healer $2.08
Hanna	Navigator and artificer, the woman Gerrard loved, made to rebuild the ship for its enemy.	Hanna, Ship's Navigator $2.23
Karn	Urza's silver golem, who read the city's archives, carried the Juju Bubble home inside himself and flew the ship by thought.	Karn, Silver Golem $21.07
Tahngarth	The minotaur first mate, still bent by Volrath's torturers, who would rather have died on Rath.	Tahngarth, Talruum Hero $1.13
Squee	The goblin cabin boy, treated as a lord by Mercadia's goblin rulers. He found what they were hiding.	Squee, Goblin Nabob $35.17
Starke	The man who ruined Vuel. He came to Mercadia blind and did not leave it.	Starke of Rath $1.22
Takara	Starke's daughter. The Takara on the ship was not her; the real one was still Volrath's prisoner on Rath.	Takara $14.69
Volrath	Vuel, evincar of Rath, who came to Mercadia wearing Takara's face, and went home to find his throne taken.	Volrath the Fallen $3.14
Cho-Manno	Leader of the Cho-Arrim, a forest people with healing in their hands, and of Mercadia's revolution.	Cho-Manno, Revolutionary $1.62
Ramos	The Cho-Arrim's god, who fell from the sky: an old dragon engine of Urza's.	Ramos, Dragon Engine $2.95
Belbe	Phyrexia's emissary to Rath, built from the body of Eladamri's murdered daughter, sent to choose the next evincar.	Belbe, Corrupted Observer $0.38
Crovax	The cursed noble, remade in Phyrexia as a killer who feeds on death, and evincar of Rath.	Ascendant Evincar $6.95
Ertai	Left behind on Rath. Loved Belbe, chose Crovax, and let Phyrexia remake him.	Ertai, the Corrupted $1.49
Greven il-Vec	Captain of the Predator, who would rather be the sword than the hand.	Greven il-Vec $9.03
Eladamri	Lord of Leaves, leader of Rath's rebellion, Avila's father.	Eladamri, Lord of Leaves $78.32
Lin Sivvi	A young Vec rebel who walked into the Stronghold in disguise beside Eladamri.	Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero $2.22
Latulla	Keldon warlord, commander of the invasion of Jamuraa, who tried to wake her people's dead kings.	Latulla, Keldon Overseer $0.34
Greel	A Keldon horror who grew by draining the life from others.	Greel, Mind Raker $0.57
Mageta	General of the Kipamu League's army, the Lion.	Mageta the Lion $2.62
Barrin	Urza's oldest partner, master of Tolaria, Hanna's father.	Barrin, Master Wizard $4.13
Rayne	Chancellor of Tolaria, Barrin's wife and Hanna's mother.	Rayne, Academy Chancellor $2.53
Teferi	The planeswalker of Zhalfir, Urza's old student, who came out of the Keldon war with his own plan for the invasion.	Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir $3.11

The cards of this Saga

Wizards told this story across three sets: Mercadian Masques (1999), then Nemesis and Prophecy (2000). Some of the cards that tell it are among the most sought-after of their era, each with today's price.

• Rishadan PortMercadian Masques · $105.30
• Food ChainMercadian Masques · $52.33
• Rhystic StudyProphecy · $63.79
• Parallax WaveNemesis · $32.36
• Tangle WireNemesis · $27.01
• Squee, Goblin NabobMercadian Masques · $35.17
• Cave-InMercadian Masques · $17.68
• UnmaskMercadian Masques · $23.61
• Reverent MantraMercadian Masques · $19.91
• CharismaMercadian Masques · $13.61
• High MarketMercadian Masques · $9.09
• DazeNemesis · $2.03
• Avatar of WoeProphecy · $15.69
• OverburdenProphecy · $13.74
• Stronghold GambitNemesis · $10.08
• Ascendant EvincarNemesis · $6.95

Sources: the Masquerade Cycle novels, Francis Lebaron's Mercadian Masques (1999), Paul B. Thompson's Nemesis (2000) and Vance Moore's Prophecy (2000), and the cards' own flavor text. Retold in our own words. Prices are TCGplayer market prices for each card's regular printing (foil where there is no regular one), refreshed nightly; as of 12 November 2026. The Story of Magic is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.