The Brothers' War: how Magic's story began

Every story Magic: The Gathering has told for thirty years grows out of this one: two brothers who loved the same machines, a stone that broke in half between them, and a war that ended a world. It is the first Saga of The Story of Magic, our retelling of the whole saga from the beginning. New here? The whole story in one read is the map.

Part 1 of 16A buried empire

Long before anyone in this story was born, the continent of Terisiare belonged to the Thran. Their empire ran on powerstones, crystals of stored energy, and their machines were beyond anything the world has built since. It ended in a war with one of their own: a physician named Yawgmoth, who took a dying plane and remade it as Phyrexia, a world of metal and oil where flesh is something to be improved into machine. The Thran sealed him inside it and locked the door with a great powerstone, and then their empire fell. Five thousand years of sand covered what was left. Phyrexia waited behind the door.

Part 2 of 16Two boys from Penregon

Urza and Mishra were born in the same year in Penregon, the capital of Argive: Urza on its first day, Mishra on its last. Their mother died while they were small. Their father married again, and the new wife treated the boys with indifference on her good days and contempt on the rest. When their father fell ill, he did the kindest thing left to him. He sent his sons, about ten years old, across the desert to an old friend who owed him a favor, the archaeologist Tocasia. Their father died while they were away, and the boys never went home again.

Tocasia spent her life digging up the Thran. Her camp in the desert was full of young nobles sent to toughen up, working beside Fallaji tribesmen from the sands around them. Most children went home after a season. Urza and Mishra stayed, and Tocasia raised them. She was an honest teacher and a real inventor herself, and she taught them to read the old machines the way other children learn to read letters.

They grew up opposite. Urza was the scholar, cool and precise, happiest alone with an artifact he could take apart and understand. He rarely picked up a shovel. Mishra liked people. He knew everyone in camp, befriended a Fallaji boy named Hajar, worked nearly every dig and in time ran the digging for all of Tocasia's crews. Together they did what neither could do alone: they got an ancient Thran flying machine, an ornithopter, back into the air. Urza's mind made the wings hold, and Mishra's nerve found out what the machine could really do. Tocasia hoped the flight would teach them to work together. Magic's own card for that day says it was the last happy moment the brothers ever shared.

Part 3 of 16The vault under Koilos

Urza noticed something no one else had: the places where Thran machines turned up formed a ring around a single point in the desert. Tocasia flew the brothers there in their ornithopter, and they found a whole buried city. Urza named it Koilos, the Argivian word for "secret".

Deep inside, in a chamber called the Hall of Tagsin, stood a pedestal holding a great Thran powerstone. The boys came out with it in two halves, one in each brother's hand, and the chamber woke up around them. Its ancient guardians, the su-chi, came at all three of them. Urza turned his half of the stone on them, and it only made them stronger. Mishra turned his half on them, and they fell.

That was how they learned what the stones did. Urza's half made things stronger, so he called it the Mightstone. Mishra's drained strength away, and Urza named it the Weakstone. The original Antiquities cards from 1994 tell the same scene: Mightstone ($5.06) and Weakstone ($5.98).

Neither of them knew what they had really done. That powerstone had been the lock on the door to Phyrexia. It was open now. Soon Mishra began to dream, dark dreams that tried to pull him back toward the caves.

Part 4 of 16Brotherhood's End

From the day they came out of Koilos, each brother wanted the other's half. Tocasia saw it first. She asked them to give both stones to her, so she could study them in peace, and neither would. Each was sure she would hand his stone to his brother. She wrote in her journal a line that Wizards later printed on a card: "The brothers are brilliant, but their quarreling will be the death of me."

It was. One night Mishra, drunk, went to Urza to take the Mightstone. The fight was loud enough to wake the camp. Each brother turned his stone on the other, and Tocasia ran between them to make them stop. The two forces met in her, and the explosion killed her.

Mishra, ashamed of what he had caused, ran into the desert that night. Without Tocasia the camp that had raised them came apart, and the two brothers who had been each other's only family went different ways. Her lessons stayed with them even so. The flavor text on Mishra's Workshop, one of the most expensive cards in Magic at $3,699.99, says Mishra came to despise her but kept her teaching about clarity of purpose: unlike his brother, he fixed his whole mind on a single goal.

Part 5 of 16The prince who married for a book

Urza went to the kingdom of Yotia and took work as a clockmaker's apprentice. Then the Warlord of Kroog, Yotia's ruler, announced a contest: whoever could move a giant jade statue across a courtyard would marry his daughter, Kayla. Urza did not much care about the princess. He cared about her dowry, which held a Thran book, the Jalum Tome. He built a machine, moved the statue and won her. On their wedding night he left her bed to go and read the book.

He became Yotia's chief artificer, and for years he barely looked up from his workshop. He built the kingdom's ornithopters and its soldier automatons. One day a young toymaker from Jorilin named Tawnos talked his way in by showing him a clockwork snake. Tawnos became Urza's apprentice and then his trusted friend. When Tawnos built warriors of living clay, Urza ended his apprenticeship on the spot and named him a master.

Part 6 of 16The slave who tamed a dragon

Mishra, walking back toward Koilos with his dreams pulling at him, never got there. The Suwwardi, a warlike clan of the Fallaji, caught him in the desert, took the Weakstone and made him a slave. He hauled and scrubbed for them until Hajar, his friend from Tocasia's camp, found him and talked the Qadir, the Suwwardi's ruler, into making him tutor to the Qadir's son. Mishra taught the boy to speak Argivian. He was still a slave. And among the Fallaji, leaning on anyone was a weakness, so the Qadir began to wonder whether his son would be better off with his tutor dead.

He never decided. One night Mishra woke screaming from another dream, of a mechanical mockery of nature, and outside the tents a great metal dragon was bursting up out of the sand. It killed the Qadir and many others. In the chaos Mishra and Hajar took the Weakstone back from the Qadir's body, meaning to use it to weaken the beast. Instead Mishra found he could command it.

The dead man's son became Qadir and raised Mishra from slave to wizard. With the dragon engine, the Mak Fawa, the two of them bound the desert tribes into an empire. The beast was Phyrexian, and the engines Mishra later built himself were only pale copies. When his army reached the city of Zegon, a young inventor named Ashnod held the dragon off with a staff of her own design. Mishra was so taken with it that the price of Zegon's surrender was Ashnod herself. She became his apprentice and his lover: brilliant, and known across the desert for her cruelty.

Part 7 of 16Blood at the peace table

Years later, Yotia and the Fallaji met to make peace at Korlinda, and each ruler brought his artificer. The brothers saw each other for the first time since the night Tocasia died. Their reunion was awkward, not hostile. Their masters were the problem. The talks broke down over a strip of borderland, and the Warlord of Kroog sent his ornithopters to bomb the dragon engine. The Qadir drew his sword and killed him where he stood.

Urza's automaton seized the Qadir by the throat. Ashnod weakened it with her staff; Urza poured strength into it with the Mightstone; and Mishra overloaded it with the Weakstone until it exploded. It was the old fight from Tocasia's camp all over again, the brothers' two stones pulling against each other.

The Warlord's death changed something between Urza and Kayla. She saw that he felt guilty for it, and Tawnos helped Urza see that he was afraid of how she would react, and that this meant he had come to love her. For days afterward the prince and princess were nowhere to be seen. They left Tawnos a letter to explain.

Part 8 of 16The fall of Kroog

Mishra asked for a second round of talks, this time in Kroog itself. His treaty had one condition Urza would never accept: hand over the Mightstone. Then Mishra went after the stone another way. He seduced Kayla and talked her into taking it for him. Urza found his wife and his brother together, took the Mightstone back, smashed Mishra's dragon engine and declared war.

For months Urza hunted his brother through the desert. That was what Mishra wanted. With Urza gone, Mishra came back to Kroog with his whole army and a pack of new dragon engines, and in a single morning the capital of Yotia burned.

Ashnod had been a prisoner in the palace since the talks, and Tawnos had treated her kindly. Now he set her free on one condition: protect the queen, who was pregnant. The three of them ran into the Qadir himself in the burning city, and he ordered them all killed, Ashnod included. She drained the life out of him with her staff. Then she put Tawnos and Kayla on a boat downriver to safety and walked back to Mishra, who took the dead man's place as ruler of the Fallaji. In Yotia they called him the Butcher of Kroog.

Kayla's son was born in the months after Kroog fell. His name was Harbin, and he was more than two years old before Urza met him. Everyone said he was Urza's son. Urza, privately, was never sure.

Part 9 of 16The war that ate a continent

Then came decades of it. After Kroog, Urza vowed that none of his allies would ever again have to fear for their own homes while their armies were away, and he flooded the land with soldier automatons. Mishra answered with more dragon engines. Ashnod found a way to turn the dead into obedient soldiers, the transmogrants, and marched them at Tawnos's clay warriors. Wizards' 2022 story shows what that looked like to the people in it: trench lines where fresh recruits arrived as old men, boys and convicts, and where anyone who died on the line might be sent back into it as a transmogrant.

City after city fell. In Terisia City, scholars who wanted no part of either brother's machines banded together as the Third Path, and in looking for a way to defend themselves they found something new: magic. A mage named Hurkyl taught a kind of meditation that let a person draw power through themselves from the land. One of her students was Loran, who had grown up at Tocasia's camp with the brothers.

Around that time, fishermen pulled something strange up in their nets and sent it to the Third Path: a bowl of unknown metal, carved in several languages with a warning about wiping the land clean and bringing the ending. The scholars called it the Golgothian Sylex. When Loran and her colleague Feldon first touched it, the room seemed to go dark, as if the sun had slipped behind an eclipse, and they both heard a faint scream, like a child's, very far away.

Part 10 of 16The whisper in the machine

Something else had come through the door at Koilos. A Phyrexian demon crept into the dreams of the monks of the Monastery of Gix and named himself their god, Gix. His cult, the Brotherhood of Gix, spread into both brothers' courts. Gix tried to murder Mishra in his sleep and take the Weakstone, but the stone protected its master. It burned the demon's hand and threw him back. So Gix chose a slower way to take him.

The Brotherhood became Mishra's council. It turned him against Ashnod and had her banished from his court. It betrayed the Third Path from the inside and opened the gates of Terisia City to Mishra's army. Loran escaped the siege with the Sylex, meaning to keep it from both brothers forever. Ashnod hunted her down, brought an avalanche down on her that broke her body, took the Sylex and held her prisoner, forcing her to teach everything the Third Path knew about magic. When Loran finally got free, years later, the Sylex stayed behind. Ashnod never told Mishra it existed.

Mishra himself was sick by then, a lung disease that had him coughing up slime. The priests told him about their own practice of replacing failing flesh with machinery. He listened closely, and one day he sent loyal Hajar out of the room so he could talk to them alone. At some point after that, Mishra was handed over to Gix. The man was gone. What wore his face was Phyrexian.

Part 11 of 16Argoth

By the last years of the war the brothers had stripped Terisiare bare. Harbin had grown up to be a pilot, not an artificer, and he worried that his father thought less of him for it. At twenty-six, flying in a storm, he came down on an island no one had touched: Argoth, a forest a third the size of the continent, rich in timber and ore.

Argoth was alive in a way the mainland was not. Elves lived in its branches, druids descended from the Thran lived in its heart, and the forest itself could warn them of strangers. It was ruled by Titania, the voice of the nature goddess Gaea. Legend said the whole island had grown from a single place called Gaea's Cradle, a card now worth $1,630.77.

Both armies came, and began to cut. Titania tried to reason with the brothers, and they would not leave. So she became the avatar of Gaea herself and led the forest to war against both of them. In the card game she is Titania, Voice of Gaea, and she melds with the island itself, Argoth, Sanctum of Nature, into Titania, Gaea Incarnate.

Part 12 of 16The last battle

Ashnod came too. She had learned magic from Loran and hoped to bring it to Mishra and win back his forgiveness. When she saw what he had become, she left him. She found Tawnos instead, the enemy she had long been fond of and liked to call Duck, and when Gix himself came for them, she handed Tawnos the Sylex and stood between him and the demon so he could run it to Urza.

Urza and Mishra met face to face at last. Urza saw what Gix had done: his brother was a thing of flesh and Phyrexian metal. In Wizards' 2022 telling, what comes charging up the hill is Mishra fused into a dragon engine, half his face torn away to the steel beneath, grinning like a man who has already won. Urza looks up at it and weeps for him. The cards tell it too: Mishra, Claimed by Gix melds with Phyrexian Dragon Engine into Mishra, Lost to Phyrexia.

Urza sat down with the Sylex in his lap. Blood ran from a cut on his forehead into the bowl; in the 1998 novel he cuts himself, and in the 2022 story it is the wound his brother gave him. He did what Hurkyl taught, and let everything the land felt pour through him into the bowl: the grief of it, the ruin, a whole continent crying out, and his own guilt at the center of it. Then it went off.

Part 13 of 16The Sylex Blast

It killed both armies. It killed Mishra, and Titania, and nearly every living thing on Argoth, and it sank the island into the sea. All that is left of Argoth are a few basalt spires called the Shattered Isles. The shock wave crossed the whole continent. It changed the weather for centuries and set Dominaria on the road to an ice age, and in time it cut the whole world off from Phyrexia, and from most of the Multiverse, for almost three thousand years.

Harbin was at sea, sailing home. A wall of water lifted his ship, and looking back he saw Argoth burning like a red column of fire. Then the ship crashed down. He never reached home. Far away, at the foot of a glacier, Loran felt the blast and understood that the war was finally over. She said one word: "Good."

At the heart of it, Urza burned away, and did not die. His spark ignited. The two halves of the stone fused into him as his eyes, and through them he could see worlds beyond his own. Wizards' 2022 story adds a visitor in that moment outside time: the spirit of Teferi, who would one day be his student, come back thousands of years to learn how the Sylex worked. In the card game, Urza, Lord Protector melds with The Mightstone and Weakstone into Urza, Planeswalker.

Part 14 of 16Snow

Tawnos had lived through the blast sealed inside a metal box he had built to hold Mishra once the war was won: Tawnos's Coffin, now a $111.43 card. When Urza, remade, opened it, the land outside was wreckage. Urza told him his brother was dead, and that the demon had killed Mishra long ago without Urza ever noticing. He told Tawnos it was time to stop being a student and become a teacher. And he asked him to carry one last message to Kayla: to remember him not as he was, but as he tried to be. Then he faded away into worlds only his new eyes could see. As Tawnos walked inland, the first snow began to fall.

Part 15 of 16After

Kayla held the ruined city of Penregon together for as long as she could, with Tawnos at her side, until a new faith, the Church of Tal, laid siege to the city over the very machines that had fought the war. The machines saved Penregon. Tawnos, seeing his work turned to killing one more time, burned Urza's archives and left. As the ice crept south, Kayla led her people west. In her grief she discovered she could work magic. She wrote the story of the war as an epic poem, The Antiquities War, one of the few records of it that survived. And on the road west she heard stories of a last flying man in the western skies, a hero who had died in the cataclysm and been reborn, and she set out across the continent to find out whether he was her son.

Tawnos found Ashnod again. Together they opened a school of magic and artifice at Ronom Lake, on the ruins of the old monastery of Gix, where students knew him as Headmaster Duck. Loran married Feldon and lived ten more years, weakened by the wounds Ashnod had given her. When she died, Feldon spent years learning the magic to bring her back, and it was only strong enough to let him say goodbye.

And Urza began the hunt he would never finish.

Part 16 of 16Why it matters

The Brothers' War is year zero, literally: Dominaria's calendar, Argivian Reckoning, counts from the year the brothers were born. It left the world afraid of machines and of magic. It opened the door to Phyrexia, which would spend the next four thousand years trying to take Dominaria. And it made Urza a planeswalker who would spend all of them trying to stop it. That is where Saga 2 begins.

Who's who

Character	Who they were	Their card
Urza	The elder brother. A cold, brilliant scholar of Thran machines; later a prince of Kroog, then a planeswalker.	Urza, Lord Protector $8.87
Mishra	The younger brother. Warm with people, hungry to prove himself; later ruler of the Fallaji, then Phyrexia's.	Mishra, Claimed by Gix $6.64
Tocasia	The archaeologist who raised them at her dig site and died trying to stop their fight.	Tocasia, Dig Site Mentor $0.21
Kayla bin-Kroog	Princess of Yotia and Urza's wife; the war's chronicler, who wrote the epic The Antiquities War.	Kayla's Music Box $0.23
Tawnos	Urza's apprentice and trusted friend; carried the Sylex to him at the end.	Tawnos, Solemn Survivor $0.43
Ashnod	Mishra's apprentice, an inventor as brilliant as she was cruel; she handed the Sylex to Tawnos.	Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist $0.38
Hajar	Mishra's friend from Tocasia's camp, who got him out of slavery and stood by him.	Hajar, Loyal Bodyguard $0.69
Harbin	Kayla's son, raised as Urza's; the pilot who found Argoth.	Harbin, Vanguard Aviator $0.19
Titania	Voice of the goddess Gaea and ruler of Argoth, the forest the brothers stripped bare.	Titania, Voice of Gaea $5.86

The cards of this Saga

The 2022 set The Brothers' War retold this story on cardboard, and its three meld pairs carry the ending: two brothers who became something else, and a forest that fought back. The originals from Antiquities are some of the oldest story cards in the game.

• Urza, Lord ProtectorThe Brothers' War · $8.87
• The Mightstone and WeakstoneThe Brothers' War · $4.09
• Mishra, Claimed by GixThe Brothers' War · $6.64
• Phyrexian Dragon EngineThe Brothers' War · $0.93
• Titania, Voice of GaeaThe Brothers' War · $5.86
• Argoth, Sanctum of NatureThe Brothers' War · $3.12
• Mishra's WorkshopAntiquities · $3,699.99
• Tawnos's CoffinAntiquities · $111.43
• Golgothian SylexAntiquities · $25.43
• Urza's SylexThe Brothers' War · $0.71
• Gaea's CradleUrza's Saga · $1,630.77
• Stern LessonThe Brothers' War · $0.32
• Clay StatueAntiquities · $0.61
• Yotian SoldierAntiquities · $0.68
• Citanul DruidAntiquities · $8.18
• Terisiare's DevastationThe Brothers' War Commander · $0.37

Play this story

The Brothers' War is still sold sealed: the Set Booster Box, Draft Booster Box, Collector Booster Box and Bundle, and two Commander decks, one for each brother: Urza's Iron Alliance and Mishra's Burnished Banner. Every card is on the The Brothers' War card list, with the reprinted classics on Retro Artifacts and the 1994 originals on Antiquities.

Sources: Jeff Grubb's novel The Brothers' War (1998); Wizards of the Coast's Magic Story for The Brothers' War (2022); the cards' own flavor text. Retold in our own words. Prices are market prices for each card's regular printing (foil where there is no regular one), refreshed nightly; as of 2 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.