Who is urza mtg

Studying with Tocasia, the brothers researched the artifacts of the fallen Thran empire of ancient times, and made several important discoveries and inventions, most notably the Ornithopter, the flying machine; and the Caves of Koilos, an ancient Thran ruin with many artifacts and a gate to the mechanical hell known as Phyrexia.

Inside the caves, the brothers found a Thran Powerstone. They both tugged at it with all their might, for both wanted it to study, ultimately splitting it in two halves, the Mightstone, Urza's half, and the Weakstone, Mishra's half. The blast severely injured the brothers and killed the accompanying Tocasia. Meanwhile, after Urza left the caves in grief, Mishra ventured deeper into the caves and came face-to-face with the Phyrexians, who corrupted him and made him a general for their next attack on Dominaria.

Urza ended up wed to Princess Kayla bin -Kroog of Yotia after impressing her father with his clockwork mechanical skills, but did not love her. Rather, he just wanted to have her Thran Tome to carry on his mentor's legacy.

The same thing happened to Mishra in the Fallaji desert, and when they crossed each other, they went to war. This epic war came to a head in the Argothian Forest, where Urza found of his brother's fate of being corrupted by black mana and evil energy, and blew up the continent of Tersiare with his Golgothian Sylex in a fit of rage, disconnecting Dominaria from the rest of the multiverse, sending it into a millenia-long Ice Age, and igniting Urza's latent Planeswalker spark, which manifested in the form of the powerstone halves that took the place of his eyes, among other things.

Urza soon met Xantcha , a Phyrexian sleeper agent, that is, a fully flesh Phyrexian with none of the machine parts that most have, who had gone against her creator Gix, and who wanted back her Heartstone, the closest a Phyrexian has to a soul, back from Gix's clutches to be truly free. The two of them, unaware of each other's backstories, became inseperable friends, traveling across the Multiverse for countless centuries, until the time came to go to Phyrexia. Urza created a machine-dragon to attack, but failed and was tainted by Yawgmoth, leader of the plane.

Fortunately, the Heartstone was retrieved, killing Xantcha in the process, and Serra managed to purify Urza, but she couldn't stop the Phyrexians from overtaking her plane, until it was collapsed into a Powerstone to power the Weatherlight, which will soon be described. Urza then created a prestigious wizarding school, the Tolarian Academy, on the isle of Tolaria, secretly in hopes of figuring out how to deal with Phyrexia.

He created Karn, a silver golem, as a time-traveling agent after realizing that silver can pass through time unscathed, and used the Heartstone to power him. He also created countless other artifacts known as the Legacy, which together would purge the darkness in the world when the time came to destroy Phyrexia. Among the artifacts were the Weatherlight, a planeswalking airship that was once meant to be helmed by Jhoira before she passed the rights to the ship to Sisay.

Another was Gerrard , the product of the Bloodline Project, which was Urza controlling all the marriage on the plane for generations because he was godlike and got away with it, in hopes of creating the Chosen One. The Phyrexians were the descendants of the ancient Thran and ruled over by a godlike being known as Yawgmoth a former Thran genius who had achieved apotheosis. After trying and failing to defeat the Phyrexians, Urza returned to his home plane of Dominaria to begin preparing a defense against the future Phyrexian Invasion.

Urza trained entire generations of spellcasters and artificers, experimented with time distortion , and even engaged in breeding programs known as the Bloodline Project to create heroes and armies who could repel the Phyrexian Invasion.

He assembled a collection of powerful Artifacts called the Legacy, including the skyship Weatherlight and a sentient silver golem named Karn. When the Phyrexians attacked roughly a millennium after his return , Urza was ready for them. Still, the war was catastrophic. Even as Dominaria was overrun, Urza led a group of nine planeswalkers to invade Phyrexia, detonating soul bombs across his enemies' homeworld.

Despite this, he was captured, as was his greatest champion, Gerrard Capashen, a human warrior created in the Bloodline Project. Yawgmoth forced them to fight each other in a gladiatorial arena. Urza defeated and killed Gerrard twice, but both times, Yawgmoth resurrected the human hero. Gerrard then beheaded Urza, and in reward, was declared Yawgmoth's personal champion.

However, Urza was not going to let a little thing like death stop him, and Gerrard was not about to let the enemy he had spent his life opposing become his new master. Gerrard escaped with Urza's severed head. Then, they gathered the rest of the Legacy Artifacts, including the golem Karn, the Weatherlight , and the stones in Urza's head, creating the Legacy Weapon--a powerful Artifact that was finally able to kill Yawgmoth once and for all. Both Urza and Gerrard died for good this time.

They were born to a noble family of Argive, one of the three coastal kingdoms of Terisiare. Urza's mother died while he was a child, and his father married another member of the aristocracy. This woman treated Urza and Mishra with indifference at best and contempt at worst.

In 10 AR, their father fell ill, so he sent them away to his old friend, Tocasia , to serve as students at her archaeological dig. Under Tocasia's guidance, the two brothers learned a large amount about the manufacture of artifacts from the archaeological excavations of the ancient ruins of the Thran , the mysterious civilization that ruled Terisiare thousands of years prior.

During this time, Urza developed a talent for study. Rarely having a hands-on approach, he would prefer to study the artifacts the excavations uncovered rather than participate in the diggings.

Over their years at Tocasia's camp, Urza and Mishra made several important inventions and discoveries. While the most obvious of these was the ornithopter , the most important turned out to be the Caves of Koilos. A mysterious cave filled with old Thran artifacts, the Caves were also the location of a long-sealed gateway to Phyrexia , used in almost every Phyrexian infiltration and invasion of Dominaria.

On their first visit, Urza and Mishra discovered the powerstone sealing Phyrexia, and in their haste to grab the stone before the other brother, they broke it in two.

Urza and Mishra kept the two halves of the stone, which became known as the Mightstone and the Weakstone respectively.

A mutual desire for the other brother's stone led to a falling-out between Urza and Mishra, as well as the inadvertent death of Tocasia. After Tocasia's death, Urza moved to Yotia and put his skills with machinery to work as a clockmaker's apprentice. Shortly thereafter, a public contest was announced by the ruler of Yotia: Any man who could move a gigantic jade statue across a courtyard would be married to his daughter.

Urza wasn't particularly interested in the daughter, but in an attempt to acquire a Thran tome that was in her dowry, Urza built a gigantic machine to move the statue. He succeeded and was wed to Kayla bin-Kroog.

However, being wed did not make him any more affectionate towards his wife - on the contrary, he left her bed on their wedding night to study the Thran book from her dowry. However, he threw himself headlong into his new position of Chief Artificer, working obsessively on his attempts to improve his artifacts. Urza ignited the planeswalker spark within the re-fused powerstone after the detonation of the Golgothian Sylex. The stone then took on Urza's consciousness. While Urza was inadvertently acquiring the reins of power in Yotia, Mishra was doing the same with the Fallaji desert people, becoming a close advisor to the Fallaji ruler over the course of several years.

A series of double-crossings and sneak attacks quickly commenced between the two brothers and their kingdoms, soon resulting in open war. An increasingly elaborate set of machines developed by the two brothers began to fight on either side, and the war slowly spiraled out of control. It continued for decades until the fateful day at Argoth when the brothers met face to face at the head of their armies. Urza discovered there that Mishra had been corrupted by Phyrexian influence, slowly turning himself from a man into a living machine.

Urza responded to this with the frightening force of the Golgothian Sylex. The sylex blast was one of the most traumatic events in Dominarian history.

It slaughtered both armies, blasted the landscape for miles around, sank the sub-continent Argoth, and altered weather patterns for centuries, leading to the Ice Age. In addition, it ignited the latent planeswalker spark in the reunited powerstone, which took on Urza's consciousness, essentially resurrecting Urza.

The spark was the un-ignited spark of Glacian. Urza then departed Dominaria after saying a final farewell to his student and good friend Tawnos in which he asked his former student and close confidant to go to his wife, whom he had come to love and cherish, that she not remember him as he was but instead that she remembers him "As he tried to be. Urza realized that, after he had destroyed his brother, Mishra had been completely corrupted by the black mana from Phyrexia.

This realization filled Urza with grief and pushed him to begin his lifelong hunt for retribution against Phyrexia, and its demonic ruler, Yawgmoth. After meeting the Newt Xantcha , who had been intended as a Sleeper Agent but had been turned into an expendable servant now that the Agents couldn't be deployed, Urza created a monstrous machine-dragon to attack Phyrexia. He managed to blast a gigantic hole in the plane, all the way down to the 4th Sphere , but then Yawgmoth himself invaded his mind and made him go even more insane.

Urza fled for years and traveled from plane to plane, with the Phyrexians always on his tail. Eventually, Urza was healed by Serra , but after he left, the Phyrexians invaded her realm and corrupted it. Ratepe was a young Dominarian recruited by Xantcha, Urza's Phyrexian assistant. Xantcha sought out Ratepe from a small nation in order to impersonate Mishra , Urza's long-dead brother. Urza was becoming increasingly obsessed and guilt-ridden over his role in his brother's death, so much so that he was abandoning his defense of Dominaria in the hopes of finding a way to undo his brother's death.

Xantcha brought Ratepe, posing as Mishra, to Urza in the hopes of alleviating some of his guilt and allowing him to focus on defeating the Phyrexians. Thanks to Xantcha's coaching and Ratepe's ability to hear Urza's Weakstone singing to him, Ratepe was able to help shock Urza out of his guilt.

He continued to help Urza and eventually became Xantcha's lover. Ratepe and Xantcha's sacrifice helped Urza defeat Gix and also revealed to him the shared Phyrexian ancestry with the Thran.

Though Urza got over his obsession with reversing his brother's death, his interest in the past was far from over. Having learned that the impending Phyrexian threat was more dangerous than ever, Urza created a vast school of magic and technology on the island of Tolaria - the Academy.