World Info

Phyrexia
  Phyrexia is a society of biomechanical creatures who want to achieve an artificial, inorganic vision of "perfection." Their parasitic civilization invades and consums all planes it encounters, expanding its ranks by converting other beings into biomechanical creatures ("compleation"). They believe their infection ("phyresis") is a divine gift, and those who oppose them are misguided or evil and must be shown the error of their ways.
  The Nine Spheres
  Originally a plane known as Argentum or Mirrodin, New Phyrexia was born from a single drop of glistening oil, the infectious agent of phyresis. Under the influence of the plane's five suns, five phyrexian Praetors arose and infected the plane, taking it for themselves. Since conquering Mirrodin, Phyrexian engineers have worked tirelessly to transform the plane’s original two layers into a more fitting array of nine.
  The Glorious Facade
  After conquering Mirrodin, the praetors decided to display their unified power by enclosing the entire plane within a single outer sphere. It was built 100 feet above the surface using scraps of the Glimmervoid, Mirrodin's desert. The sphere was then decorated with commemorative monuments. These ominous structures exist beyond human comprehension and have no obvious pattern.
  Occasionally, towers crumble without warning, only for another to mysteriously arise elsewhere. Outside the monuments, this layer is made up of a desert of sand-like particulate metal that has a hypnotic effect on non-Phyrexians. The facade is covered in dense fog, through which the plane's five suns dimly shine. Its underside is a plate of black metal.
  The Mirrex
  Mirrex was originally the outer of Mirrodin's two original spheres, but the Phyrexian invasion left it an apocalyptic ruin. Mirrodin's various landmarks were dismantled and their parts taken under the surface to make New Phyrexia's inner spheres. Cut off from their suns' mana, the Mirran survivors continue to scrape by while evading constant forays of Phyrexian scavengers on the lookout for more material.
  The Autonomous Furnace
  The Autonomous Furnace was the first layer the Phyrexians established, prior to their first assault on Mirrodin. It is a sphere where rivers of molten metal are used to construct new titanic forges and machines. Magma teems all around this layer, and the air is swelteringly hot. Shelves of pyroclastic rock serve as solid ground, and burning pools experience steep thermoclines.
  Although the entire sphere functions as a single forge overseen by Praetor Urabrask, it is divided into smaller, independent sections overseen by furnace bosses who operate them independently from each other. Urabrask's detached leadership means they often do whatever they want and clash with each other.
  Since the Phyrexianization, Kuldotha has become the main gateway into Mirrodin's Core. It is a massive furnace-city that was onced treated as a church to the Steel Mother by the goblins of the Oxidda chain mountains. The structure has developed into a quasi-living entity through a rich diet of mycosynth. It already had a sort of digestive system, and as time passes, it also seems to have moods and tempers. Too many impurities sicken it, and a steady supply of rich, pure ore and metal keep it quiet. Elsewhere in the layer is the Salvage Complex, a former Mirran prison compound now run by the compleated goblin tinkerer Slobad (CN Phyrexian Goblin Boss) to repurpose obsolete Phyrexians.
  The Mirran Resistance, surviving natives who have not been compleated, have a holdout in this layer; a camp known as slagmaw. The camp is located inside a once-living creature protecting it from the surrounding environs and, in turn, allowing it to be the best outfitted mirran camp.
  The Quiet Furnace
  The Quiet Furnace faction's original function was to tend the forges present there, building weaponry and recycling failed Phyrexians and Mirrans alike. During the war days, they emerged from the Oxidda Chain and expanded onto the surface. While the majority of these Phyrexians have returned to the depths of the Furnace, the mountains are guarded by Forgehammer Centurions and Kuldotha Cacklers.
  Phyrexians of the Quiet Furnace differ from all others in the way that they have strong emotions and individuality, and as such, developed empathy for the Mirrans. While still brutal creatures, their empathy proved strong enough to allow them to let Mirran survivors dwell on their layer, treating them as if they didn't exist. To hide this secret, as well as to avoid having to deal with other factions, Urabrask demanded that all access to the Furnace be denied to the other factions, isolating himself and his servitors; the surface Phyrexians in the mountains serve as guardians to the entrances to the Furnace Layer. For the most part, the other factions ignore the Quiet Furnace, except for the Progress Engine, which is paranoid about them.
  Other agents of the Quiet Furnace include Furnace Striders, Masticores, and Squealstokes.
  The Hunter Maze
  The Hunter Maze was assembled from the remains of the Mirran Tangle, a huge expanse of copper structures rising out of the ground; it was the closest thing to a forest on Mirrodin. After being compleated, the former elven hero Glissa (CE Phyrexian Elf Death Knight) worked with the praetor Vorinclex to dismantle the Tangle and transform it into a "survival of the fittest" battlefield. Giant, deadly beasts prey on each other in its endless, canopied forest. Most praetors rule with an iron fist, but Vorinclex and Glissa prefer to sit back and admire the beautiful evolution they created.
  With the advance of Phyrexia, the Tangle became infected by the growth of lamina, a species of dark green, fleshy fungus. The floor has become spongy and mossy as the lamina contaminates the metal ground and inches up the trees. The ground seeps a substance like yellowish pus. Trees made of oxidized metal flourish here and neither the sphere's floor nor ceiling is visible. The Maze is hot and humid, smelling strongly of rotten flesh. Green light pierces the canopy, and metallic screeches can be heard throughout.
  At the bottom of the Maze, the ground is riddled with water-swollen potholes, oily pools, and thick roots rendering it practically impassable. Pulsing veins transport black oil through the dense undergrowth and small suckers protrude from tree trunks, branches sprouting toward sunlight. Fungus-like tree platforms are coated with glowing patches of the green, lichen-like lamina and fern-like foliage. The ecosystem of the Maze is interconnected; small eyeballs protrude from trees and mites scuttle about.
  At the top of the canopy, the light is brighter, a hotter and richer buttery yellow color. The intertwining branches form a network of roads that life travels across. On the trees, leaves glimmer, fist-size stomata opening and closing as the trees breathe; large berries dangle in bunches; and flowers, pink and rank with the smell of flesh drip black oil.
  Toward the center of the Maze, the underbrush and inhabitants give way as most life forms avoid the area around Vorinclex's chamber. Phyrexians near this area hear loud voices murmuring unintelligibly the deeper they enter, and the cilia lining the Maze's walls wave visitors inward. Inside Vorinclex's chamber, the cilia grow thicker, longer, and paler: a glistening, yellowy white. The floor depresses into a hole that resembles a starfish's mouth, and monstrous skulls hang from the ceiling.
  The Vicious Swarm
  Like all Phyrexians, the members of the Vicious Swarm faction believe that flesh is weak, but unlike the other Phyrexians, they believe that New Phyrexia should progress more naturally, based on the roles of predation, allowing the strong to emerge triumphant over the weak. They believe that artificial engineering should be restricted to making predators more efficient, and that sentience and sapience are curses, inadequate when compared to the raw power of instinct. Lacking any sort of organization whatsoever, they are merely a massive variety of creatures that kill each other to select the strongest. The strongest predators carve out a niche for themselves in the Tangle and battle with each other for supremacy. In typical Phyrexian fashion, the predatory urge remains even though the need for sustenance is gone. Predation is the goal in and of itself.
  Members of the Vicious Swarm include glistener elves, paladins of predation, plague nurses, and rot priests. Other phyrexian creatures that can be found in the Hunter's Maze include cankerblooms, contagious vorracs, contaminators, copper longlegs, evolved spinoderms, oil-gorger trolls, phyrexian tyrranax, and skulldwellers.
  The Surgical Bay
  The Surgical Bay is a sphere where sterile laboratories rise from islands in the middle of a sea of Quicksilver and glistening oil. Even breathing the spray of the sphere's fountains can begin phyresis. Mechanical eyes appear in all places, alongside the ever vigilant Watchful Blisterzoas, to observe all who enter and reside in this sphere. Painful and inhumane experiments are conducted here to further Phyrexian knowledge though no real substance is gained. It is patrolled by chrome prowlers and maintained by the atmosphere surgeons, all while experiment subjects fill the sphere with their muffled screams.
  Known simply as the Fourth Layer during the initial invasion, this liquid sphere was created to spread glistening oil under Mirrodin's surface. Once the Mirrans had been compleated, Praetor Jin-Gitaxias drained Mirrodin's Quicksilver Sea into the Fourth Layer to create an even larger oil reservoir. Vedalken cities and research centers were transported down and renovated for Phyrexian experimentation.
  The Lumengrid is a city-stronghold rising above the Quicksilver Sea on a massive cylinder with a mushroom-like dome at its top. It was the center of technology and artifice on Mirrodin before the Phyrexian invasion and was the seat of the Synod, the ruling council of the Mirran vedalken. The Fathom Ward is an underwater facility where "sea monsters" are engineered, and where vials of blinkmoth serum are kept safe.
  The Progress Engine
  The ruins of the Lumengrid now serve as a research center for Jin-Gitaxias' Progress Engine. They hold themselves to a higher degree of perfection than the other factions, conducting hideous experiments. Fueled by untold volumes of mana that emanate from the Quicksilver Sea, slaughterhouse-style laboratories investigate the most rapid and effective forms of compleation for all races and species, as well as methods for creating new life forms and technology. The Engine is the most organized group so far, with at least ten observable ranks that oversee various sectives or research experiments, including Subpraetors, Pontiffs, Exarchs, Vat-Priests, Surgeons, Transcriptors, and Servitors. One of their great experiments is The Meldweb in which the original vedalken Pools of Insight are filled with the brains of hundreds of sentient beings all networked together. It is tended by Meldweb Curators.
  Jin-Gitaxias has modified the Phyrexian Scriptures in their mentioning of "The Grand Evolution." He sees it as "The Great Synthesis" and has etched his own lengthy treatise about its merits. Within the Great Synthesis, Jin-Gitaxias laid out a guideline for the sectives who began work compleating the Mirran population. This scripture is known as the Gitaxian Standard of Purity.
  Other members of the Progress Engine include Gitaxian Raptors, Glistener Seers, and Mercurial Spelldancers.
  The Dross Pits
  The Dross Pits are a land of eternal conflict led by the Seven Steel Thanes. The landscape is shallow, pockmarked with glowing pools of liquid necrogen, shining bright green and poisonous. Humped, crude structures of black-gilded bone break up the horizon. Acidic pools and toxic vents spewing necrotic gases are siphoned from the Dross Pits. Non-Phyrexian visitors are killed by inhaling the Pits' fumes before they can be compleated by the spores they contain. It was once home to the Moriok human tribe, and remains home to undead creatures such as the vampire clans and the nim, zombies reanimated by necrogen. From the peak of the Fair Basilica, Phyrexians can travel up a shaft to the Dross Pits.
  This sphere was initially created by thane Roxith as the Flesh Sphere he promised Kraynox, but after falling for Sheoldred's deception, he lost control of it to her. Since then, the other remaining thanes have moved in, established their own strongholds, and restarted their war games. They regularly send armed battalions against each other, but no one has deposed Sheoldred yet.
  Those unfortunate enough to get caught here are sent to Sheoldred's arena to fight for their survival and glory. Those who fall face death by Sheoldred's Headcleavers. The winners can harvest parts from the losers and graft them to themselves. The Coliseum is a vast, black structure surrounded by a massive ribcage. Its gate is so narrow that competitors are forced to enter single file. The interior is a vast bowl surrounded by steep ranks of backless seating. Its floor is black metal, with a pool of black necrogen at its center and around its edges.
  The Seven Steel Thanes
  Phyrexians of the Dross Pits serve one of the Seven Steel Thanes, powerful Phyrexians who are masters of necromancy, corruption, slaughter, and enslavement. Having claimed power during the war with the plane's inhabitants, the thanes have managed to carve out territories around the expanding edges of the Mephidross. The thanes are all fighting a war of succession to be named Father of Machines. They are led for the moment by Sheoldred, the Whispering One. The other thanes are: Kraynox, the Deep Thane, Roxith, the Thane of Rot, Vishgraz, the Doomhive, Azax-Azog, the Demon Thane, and Vraan, the Thane of Blood.
  Creatures under the thanes exist in two broad social strata. In the lower strata are the savage nim, bestial creatures, compleated Mirrans, and mercenary undead. Pure Phyrexians of intelligence and the most resourceful of the compleated Phyrexians form a higher caste. The relationship is not unlike some feudal societies, with the lower caste as the serfs and conscripts in armies, while the higher caste serves as the nobility in the courts and the knights and officers of the thanes' armies. Yet this structure takes a uniquely Phyrexian form. For example, a thane might express a strange civility in welcoming the emissary of another thane, speaking cordially with the messenger while the emissary's bodyguards are flayed alive. The herald of an important Phyrexian lord might announce the arrival of its patron by cutting his name into its own skin.
  Phyrexian servants of the Seven Steel Thanes include the Archfiend of the Dross, fleshless gladiators, hivemasters, necrotitans, skirges, the soulless jailer, and the syphoner. Other creatures found in the Dross Pits include blightbelly rats, scraptraps, and skulldwellers.
  The Fair Basilica
  After declaring herself the dominant praetor of all Phyrexia, Elesh Norn claimed the prime location for the Machine Orthodoxy. Her realm surrounds Mirrodin's mycosynth growths. Controlling a crucial material for building new spheres ensured Norn retained power over the other praetors. Every aspect of the Fair Basilica was designed as a symbolic testament to Norn, helping her consolidate her rule over all Phyrexians. It contains Norn's throne room, though she now resides in the plane's second layer and designates the unification of the plane to Atraxa in her stead. Though no light from the plane's suns can reach this layer, its structures generate their own light; the layer's walls, composed of ossified Phyrexian corpses of those Norn deemed perfect, glow white, while crimson capillaries etched into its marble-esque floor glow blood-red. Becoming ossified as a part of Elesh Norn's throne is considered the highest honor in the Basilica.
  Elesh Norn's altar, a tall cathedral larger and more ornate than other buildings on the layer, serves as a monument to a unified Phyrexia. Norn's throne, inside the altar, sits atop a chamber containing a winding stairway that leads to the Gardens below.
  Hidden on this layer is the Auriok city of Bladehold, one of the last few holdouts of the Mirran Resistance, survivors who have escaped compleation.
  The Machine Orthodoxy
  The Grand Cenobite Elesh Norn, the Orthodoxy's highest-ranking priestess, commands and guides this faction of Phyrexia, promising them a glorious future under the principles of the Argent Etchings, Norn's religious laws and maxims. Everything the Phyrexians practice under the Machine Orthodoxy is designed to achieve perfection through phyresis across the multiverse. They see non-Phyrexians as either lost unfortunates or willful sinners, deserving of reclamation and transformation in either case.
  The Machine Orthodoxy is one, but divides itself into smaller sects. Three of the most prominent sects include The Flesh Singularity, The Porcelain Legion, and the Disciples of Karn. The Flesh Singularity tries to achieve total unity by literally flaying the creatures that inhabit the lands and sewing them together. The Porcelain Legion repurpose and adapt creatures by implanting white metal plates into their bodies, while the Disciples of Karn previously held Karn himself hostage, in hope of pushing him ever deeper into insanity to glean leadership out of his madness.
  The Orthodoxy is filled with countless orders of priests and chancellors. Cenobites are the priests in charge of the inquisition of non-Phyrexian life. The suture priest is a specialized cenobite whose job is the sacred act of binding the individual into the collective. Short-statured tome lackeys are creatures built to serve as mobile stands for Phyrexian arcane or clerical texts. The bulk of Norn's forces are made up of soldiers of the Porcelain Legion. The Orthodoxy also includes Annex Sentries, crawling choruses, ichorplate golems, incisor gliders, mandible justiciars, mite overseers, angelic choirmasters, porcelain zealots, sinew dancers, skitterfangs, and an endless supply of mites.
  The Mycosynth Gardens
  The Mycosynth Gardens were the original inner core of Mirrodin. In contrast to the other spheres, which are packed with bustling Phyrexian unlife, the Mycosynth Gardens are mysteriously still and empty. Norn forbids any visitors to this and the lowest layer without her invitation, including other Praetors.
  Within this layer is a gateway leading into the Seedcore. It appears as a piled-up structure of fungal strands that twists into a mimicry of entrails. It infects anything it touches. As someone approaches the gateway, it heaves, pulsing, before opening into a terrible hole into darkness ringed with waving tendrils.
  The Seedcore
  The Seedcore grows from the most historically significant site of Mirrodin. The plane's first ruler, Memnarch, lived among the mycosynth towers in an observation deck he called the Panopticon. It was later renamed the Throne Room and converted into a prison for Karn, a golem planeswalker and the second ruler of the plane.
  The seedcore contains a replica of Norn's throne made of woven roots. The air hums with an uncanny chorus of discordant voices, layered across each other to form a harmony of inchoate parts. The air shimmers with static and tastes of aether.
  Norn planted essence from Kaldheim's World Tree in Karn's empty seat, which serves as an incubation chamber for New Phyrexia's Invasion Tree, Realmbreaker. Its branches will grow and create Omenpaths, connecting New Phyrexia to other planes.