Urza's long war: Xantcha, Tolaria and the making of Karn

When the Golgothian Sylex went off over Argoth, both armies died and Urza lived. The blast made him a planeswalker, set the two halves of the powerstone in his head as eyes, and left him with one certainty: his brother had not simply turned against him. Mishra had been taken, piece by piece, by a Phyrexian demon named Gix. This is Saga 2 of The Story of Magic: what Urza did with that certainty over the next four thousand years, and what it cost the people who loved him. It follows Saga 1, The Brothers' War. New here? The whole story in one read is the map.

Part 1 of 15The world he left behind

The blast was only the start of the damage. In the years after it, summers grew shorter and winters harsher, famine spread, and the great nations of Terisiare fell apart. People blamed magic for the catastrophe, and the Church of Tal hunted down anyone who still practiced it. Historians call those four centuries the Dark Age. Then the cold took hold for good. One man's vengeance had plunged the world into ice and darkness, as Urza's Ruinous Blast remembers it, and for about two and a half thousand years Dominaria lived in an Ice Age.

Something stranger happened beyond the sky. The blast, in time, sealed Dominaria off from the rest of the Multiverse inside a barrier later called the Shard of Twelve Worlds. Nothing could walk in or out. Urza, the one man who most wanted to defend his world, was locked outside it. And Phyrexia, which had been getting ready to send its spies into Dominaria, was locked out too. For the new planeswalker, that was the only mercy in it.

It was another planeswalker who finally broke the ice. Freyalise, patron of the elves, built the Ice Cauldron as a copy of the Sylex itself and used it to cast the World Spell. Its power matched the blast that had started the winter, and it would have done the same damage if the wizard Jodah had not spread it across the continent. When it was done, the Shard was broken and the long thaw began. As the flavor text of Tamanoa puts it: "When Freyalise spoke the World Spell, the tamanoa rose to bring a new morning to Terisiare."

Part 2 of 15The newt who thought for herself

Deep in Phyrexia, in a place called the Fane of Flesh, Yawgmoth's servants grew spies. They were called newts: small, human-looking creatures with their memories wiped, made to be dropped into Dominaria as sleeper agents who would not know what they were. One of them had what Phyrexia counted as a fatal flaw. She thought for herself.

Her overseer was Gix, the same demon who had whispered Mishra into ruin. He called her Xantcha, using the word as a name the way he used his own, and when she met him she chose to be female, as a way of being his opposite. Gix tried to tear her secrets out of her mind, and she held some of them back. "Do not presume to speak for yourself," he told her, as Oppression records it. She kept doing it anyway, and told him so on Unnerve: "If fear is the only tool you have left, then you'll never control me."

The first sleeper agents were sent to Dominaria and found out almost at once: they were too small and too alike, and the people they lived among killed them. A second batch was grown, taller and different from one another, but by then the Shard had closed and there was nowhere to send them. Xantcha, never assigned, was left over, and on Phyrexia a thing with no use is scrap. Victimize has the moment: "The priest cast Xantcha to the ground. 'It is defective. We must scrap it.'"

Part 3 of 15A rescue on a nameless world

Xantcha survived by making herself useful again. Under a new name she worked as a relic-seeker, sent to other worlds to bring their artifacts home to Phyrexia, and she quietly ruined every one of them instead. Phyrexia caught her at it on a world nobody bothered to name. Its monsters were about to finish her when a planeswalker who had spent centuries looking for Phyrexia saw a human girl in trouble and stepped in. It was Urza. He saved her life. She told him how to find Phyrexia.

It was not a kindness on his part, and she knew it. Ill-Gotten Gains sums up the partnership in two sentences: "Urza thought it a crusade. Xantcha knew it was a robbery." For centuries afterward the two of them traveled together: she the only Phyrexian he trusted, he the only person who had ever treated her as more than a tool.

Part 4 of 15Into Phyrexia

Urza spent those centuries building a weapon: an eight-legged dragon engine big enough to carry the war to Phyrexia itself. When Xantcha found Phyrexians back on the world where he had rescued her, he chased them home and went in after them. He blasted his way through the First, Second, Third and Fourth Spheres of Phyrexia. Sicken gives the rest in eight words: "Urza dared to attack Phyrexia. Slowly, it retaliated."

At the Fourth Sphere the engine was stopped. Then Yawgmoth himself reached into Urza's mind. While Urza stood frozen, Xantcha slipped back into the Fane of Flesh where she had been made and took her own heart, the device that held her life. She came back to find the dragon engine broken and Urza under attack, climbed into the cockpit and shook him until he woke. With the last of his strength, he planeswalked them both away.

He had lost. He had also learned what he was fighting, and the part that frightened him most was the spies. "Yawgmoth spent eons wrapping Phyrexians in human skin," Xantcha warned him on Darkest Hour. "They are the sleeper agents, and they are everywhere."

Part 5 of 15Healing in Serra's Realm

For years the two of them ran from world to world with Phyrexia always somewhere behind. They found peace for a few decades on a world called Moag, until Xantcha found glistening oil in a fire god's temple and Urza burned the temple down. Then they ran again, for nearly two hundred years. "Planeswalking isn't about walking," Xantcha said on Planar Void. "It's about falling and screaming."

At last they came to a world made of light. Serra, a planeswalker, had built her own plane as a haven where no one would ever have to suffer, and filled it with angels. She took Urza in and healed him with white magic, at the risk of her own life. Xantcha she could not heal that way, because white mana would have killed a Phyrexian. "Xantcha is recovering," Serra told Urza on Healing Salve. "The medicine is slow, but my magic would have killed her."

The healing took five years. "Serra told them to guard Urza as he healed," reads Sanctum Custodian. "Five years they stood." Urza used the time to study how Serra held her made world together, and what it cost her. Then the Phyrexians who had been hunting him found him there. Urza and Xantcha escaped to Dominaria, and left Serra's Realm to face the war they had brought to it.

Part 6 of 15The man who looked like Mishra

Dominaria was free of the ice by now, and Urza came home a broken man. Yawgmoth's touch had never left his mind, and his guilt over Mishra grew into an obsession: he began to dream of undoing his brother's death instead of defending his world. Xantcha did the only thing she could think of. She found a slave named Ratepe who looked like Mishra, bought his freedom, and taught him to be Urza's brother.

It should have been a cruel trick. It worked as medicine. Ratepe could hear the Weakstone in Urza's eye singing to him, and between his act and Xantcha's coaching, the two of them shocked Urza out of his guilt. Somewhere along the way Ratepe fell in love with Xantcha, and she with him.

Part 7 of 15The sacrifice at Koilos

The sleeper agents had reached Dominaria after all. Xantcha found them stirring up a war between two small cities, and Urza built artifacts that shrieked at a pitch only Phyrexians could hear. Planting them, Xantcha walked into a crypt and found Gix.

Gix went to Koilos, the Thran ruin where the brothers had first found the powerstone, and waited for Urza. The two of them fought, and neither could win, until Gix began to. Xantcha and Ratepe saw what had to happen. They threw themselves into the fight, and the moment it bought Urza was enough. Gix died at Koilos, where the whole story had begun. So did Xantcha and Ratepe.

Urza kept one thing of hers: the heart she had taken from the Fane of Flesh. And in the ruins he learned what Koilos had been hiding all along: the Thran and the Phyrexians came from the same people. Grafted Skullcap carries Gix's offer to his victims, the one Mishra took and Xantcha never did: "Let go your mind. Mine is fitter."

Part 8 of 15Master Malzra's school

Urza came out of Koilos sane, and sure of one thing: Phyrexia was coming, and Dominaria was not ready. So he built a school. On the island of Tolaria, under the false name Master Malzra, he gathered the best artificers, wizards, mathematicians and scientists he could find, and set them to work on the war. The Tolarian Academy would change Magic's history more than once. Its flavor text reads like a warning: "The academy worked with time—until time ran out."

Only Urza and his mage master, Barrin, knew what the academy was really for. The students were young and brilliant and not always grateful. A gifted, mischievous boy from Zhalfir named Teferi turned up late to everything. Barrin's progress report, on Disruptive Student: "Teferi is a problem student. Always late for class. No appreciation for constructive use of time." A young artificer from Shiv named Jhoira was a little older than Teferi.

Part 9 of 15A silver golem with a borrowed heart

Urza wanted to reach the past: to see the ancient war in which the Thran had sealed Yawgmoth away and, if he could, to change how it ended. For that he built a time machine, and to travel through it he built a man of silver. Inside the golem he set Xantcha's heart, the last of her. "By this glyph I affirm your role," Urza told it on Brand.

The heart let the golem feel and learn as no other artifact could. At first he expected to be replaced, like every machine before him, and students like Teferi teased him for it. Jhoira became his first friend, and she gave him his name: Karn, from the Thran word for "mighty". The two of them argued about what it means to be built. "If it is meant to be nothing but a machine," Karn asked her once, about another of Urza's creations, "why did Urza build it to be like me?"

Part 10 of 15The disaster

Karn's first trips went a day into the past and came back safe, though the heat of each jump nearly cooked him, and the small rifts the experiments tore in time made the students sick. Then Jhoira found a shipwrecked man on the beach, a stranger named Kerrick, and hid him, trusting the secret only to Karn. On one of his trips back, Karn saw a shadowy figure stealing powerstones from the academy, followed it outside, and watched Kerrick call for a squad of Phyrexian Negators. He was a sleeper agent.

Karn warned Urza, and it was already too late. The Negators massacred most of the students and teachers, Jhoira, Teferi and Barrin among them. Karn grieved for Jhoira until Urza sent him further back to stop Kerrick before it began. Karn did it. But as he came home the time machine's energies surged out of control, and it exploded. Sunder describes what happened better than we can: "The flow of time was disrupted; like a flooding river it rose from its banks. Tolaria was drowned in an instant that stretched toward infinity."

Urza planeswalked fourteen teachers and students to safety in the instant before the blast. Karn led thirty more out of the rubble. Barrin, alive again in the new timeline, was among the saved, and Urza called it a good trade. Karn looked at the ruins and called it unforgivable.

Part 11 of 15Ten years in the ruins

Time on Tolaria had broken into pieces. In some places it ran fast, in others almost not at all, and it killed anyone who crossed into the wrong pocket. When Urza and Barrin came back ten years later with a new class of students, they were saved by someone they had given up for dead: Jhoira. She had lived alone in the ruins for a decade, mapping the rifts, staying young by drinking water from a pool of slow time, and she was furious with Urza.

She showed them two things. One was a fortified chasm of fast time, where time ran ten times faster than outside. Kerrick and his surviving Negators were trapped inside it, building an army. "The fools thought me dead," he says on Brink of Madness. "But I built an empire inside my tomb." Barrin did the math: for every year they had to prepare, Kerrick had ten.

The other was a pocket of almost frozen time with one person in it: Teferi, still running from the flames of the explosion. Jhoira had thrown a wet blanket over him, and it took years to reach him and put the fire out. It took years more, and a machine Jhoira invented to carry fast-time water into the slow pocket, before Karn and Urza could pull him free. He came out still a boy, into a world where everyone he knew had grown up. "Careless, like a child with fire," he would say later, on Vanishing, "so was I with time."

Urza turned the disaster into a tool. In the fast pockets, researchers in Urza's armor could finish decades of work in hours. Water from the slow pockets added years to a life, and Barrin, Rayne and Jhoira drank it and lived for centuries. For the first time, Urza could start to catch up with Phyrexia's thousands of years of preparation.

Part 12 of 15The forest remembers

Ten years on, the new academy had beaten back five Phyrexian attacks. Urza left its defense to Barrin and went looking for what the war would need. In Shiv he found a vast Thran mana rig, standing idle, made peace between the viashino, the goblins and the fire dragons who lived around it, and put them to work. Teferi and Jhoira went with him to run it, turning out new Thran metal and powerstones. Urza had designed a ship, and the ship needed a special wood that grew only in the forest of Yavimaya. He went to get it alone.

Yavimaya remembered Argoth, the forest Urza had destroyed, and its spirit, Multani, received him coldly. Urza apologized. It did not help. Multani bound him inside a great tree and made him feel the pain he had brought on Argoth and its guardian Titania, for three years. "To make peace with the forest, make peace with me," Multani told him, on Multani, Maro-Sorcerer.

What broke the spell was a beacon from Barrin. Kerrick's army had broken out, and Tolaria was being overrun; Urza saw the students being slaughtered and tore himself free. Multani tried to seize him again and was caught up in Urza's power instead, carried along as Urza planeswalked first to Shiv for warriors, then to Tolaria. In that battle his students learned at last that Master Malzra was Urza the planeswalker. Multani watched Urza protect every living thing on the island, then followed him down into the fast-time chasm and saw what Phyrexia was. When Kerrick struck Urza down, Multani lent him his strength, and together they killed the Phyrexian. Multani woke Tolaria's own forests against the last of the Negators, and promised that Yavimaya would fight beside Urza when the real war came.

Part 13 of 15A world for a ship

Urza's answer to the coming invasion was a ship: a flying warship with a frame of Thran metal, grown around a seed from the heart of Yavimaya, fast enough to cross the sky and powerful enough to cross between worlds. He named it the Weatherlight. It had one problem. Its powerstone needed the energy of an entire plane.

Serra's Realm was dying. Phyrexia had followed Urza there all those centuries ago, and the black mana it left behind could not be scrubbed out. Serra had given up and left. In her place her archangel, Radiant, hunted Phyrexian taint so fiercely that her armies began slaughtering civilians and calling them dissidents. When Urza came back and offered to take her refugees, she refused and named him a Phyrexian. "He has returned," she warned her angels, on Knighthood. "He who brought the dark ones. He who poisoned our paradise."

Urza went back again and again, carrying refugees to Dominaria. When the ship was finished, he named Karn its Master of Engines and Jhoira its captain, and took it to Serra's Realm with Barrin and two fire dragons from Shiv. The angels attacked at once. Radiant challenged Urza to single combat, killed his dragon, Gherridarigaaz, and tore the powerstones out of Urza's eyes. She tried to join the two halves back together, and the explosion destroyed her and made Urza whole. Jhoira, Karn and Barrin got the Weatherlight out as the realm collapsed behind them, its power held in the ship's stone. Planar Collapse puts it plainly: "With heavy heart, Urza doused one world's light to rekindle another's." He had saved his world by spending someone else's.

Months later, Jhoira still commanded the Weatherlight, with Karn in its engine room. The Serran refugees were settling in Zhalfir, where Teferi was working to end a civil war. And Barrin, watching his old friend, decided that Urza was finally sane. He understood his past, and he could have friends now, not just companions.

Part 14 of 15Bloodlines

The Weatherlight had its captain. Urza's plan still needed a hero. He had spent centuries building weapons for the war, a whole arsenal he called the Legacy, and he decided that only a person bred for it could wield it. So began the Bloodline Project: for generations the academy quietly arranged marriages among Dominaria's strongest families, in Jamuraa and in the Benalish plains, to breed a hero. Rayne, the academy's chancellor and Barrin's wife, said what she thought of it on Urza's Incubator: "Stop thinking like an artificer, Urza, and start thinking like a father!"

He went further. In machines he grew an army, the metathran, from Dominarian bloodlines and magic. "Urza's metathran children were conceived, birthed, and nurtured by an integrated system of machines," says Thran Dynamo. Barrin protested. Some researchers quit, believing the project had gone too far. One who stayed, Gatha, began splicing Phyrexian flesh into his subjects, and was thrown out of the academy for it.

Phyrexia noticed. In its depths, Yawgmoth woke a member of his inner circle, Croag, and gave him two tasks: build an artificial world called Rath, and kill Urza Planeswalker. The Bloodline Project ran for more than eight hundred years. Its last child, Hanna, was born to Barrin and Rayne. And in Benalia, in a family named Capashen, it produced the hero Urza had spent all those centuries breeding: a boy named Gerrard. What happened to him is Saga 3.

Part 15 of 15Why it matters

Saga 2 is where almost everyone who matters in Magic's first great story is made: Karn, built around a Phyrexian's heart; Teferi, who will become one of the most important planeswalkers of all; Jhoira, the Weatherlight's first captain; the Weatherlight itself; Gerrard. All of it is Urza's work, and all of it is Urza at his best and worst at once. The flavor text of Extruder says what the long war cost him: "As the invasion drew closer, Urza's means began to resemble Phyrexia's end."

Who's who

Character	Who they were	Their card
Urza	The elder brother of Saga 1, now a planeswalker with the two halves of the powerstone for eyes, hunting Phyrexia.	Urza, Lord High Artificer $16.42
Xantcha	A Phyrexian spy who thought for herself; Urza's companion for centuries. Her heart became Karn's.	Xantcha, Sleeper Agent $1.63
Gix	The Phyrexian demon who ruined Mishra and oversaw Xantcha's making. Killed at Koilos.	Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor $2.29
Serra	The planeswalker who built a realm without suffering, and healed Urza there.	Serra the Benevolent $7.31
Ratepe	A freed slave who looked like Mishra and could hear the Weakstone sing. Xantcha's love; died with her.	Weakstone $5.98
Barrin	Mage master of Tolaria, the friend who kept the academy standing while Urza was away.	Barrin, Master Wizard $4.10
Rayne	Chancellor of the academy and Barrin's wife; mother of Hanna.	Rayne, Academy Chancellor $2.53
Teferi	A brilliant, troublesome student frozen in slow time by the disaster. Later a planeswalker.	Teferi, Hero of Dominaria $8.56
Jhoira	A Ghitu artificer, Karn's first friend, who gave him his name. First captain of the Weatherlight.	Jhoira of the Ghitu $1.26
Karn	Urza's silver golem, built around Xantcha's heart to travel through time.	Karn, Silver Golem $21.21
Kerrick	A Phyrexian sleeper agent who survived the disaster in fast time and built an army.	Brink of Madness $0.45
Multani	The spirit of the forest of Yavimaya. Trapped Urza, then fought beside him.	Multani, Maro-Sorcerer $16.58
Radiant	Serra's archangel, who ruled the dying realm and turned on her own people.	Radiant, Archangel $7.49
Freyalise	The planeswalker who ended the Ice Age with the World Spell.	Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury $4.19

The cards of this Saga

Wizards told this story on cardboard in three sets: Urza's Saga (1998), Urza's Legacy and Urza's Destiny (1999). The academy, the golem, the angels' sanctum and the machines that grew Urza's army are all there, each with today's price.

• Tolarian AcademyUrza's Saga · $184.25
• Karn, Silver GolemUrza's Saga · $21.21
• Serra's SanctumUrza's Saga · $522.44
• Time SpiralUrza's Saga · $95.95
• Yawgmoth's WillUrza's Saga · $238.50
• Urza's IncubatorUrza's Destiny · $24.22
• Thran DynamoUrza's Destiny · $5.66
• Phyrexian ProcessorUrza's Saga · $4.74
• WeatherlightDominaria · $1.38
• Multani, Maro-SorcererUrza's Legacy · $16.58
• Barrin, Master WizardUrza's Saga · $4.10
• Radiant, ArchangelUrza's Legacy · $7.49
• Planar CollapseUrza's Legacy · $1.07
• SickenUrza's Saga · $0.16
• Xantcha, Sleeper AgentCommander 2018 · $1.63
• Urza's SagaModern Horizons 2 · $39.39

Sources: Lynn Abbey's novel Planeswalker (1998); J. Robert King's Time Streams (1999); Loren L. Coleman's Bloodlines (1999); Jeff Grubb's The Eternal Ice (2000); the 1995 Ice Age comic; and 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.