Urza Planeswalker

Planeswalker

In the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, a planeswalker is a mage with the ability to travel to different planes of existence.-Magic: The Gathering:...

 is a fictional character from the universe of Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering , also known as Magic, is the first collectible trading card game created by mathematics professor Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic continues to thrive, with approximately twelve million players as of 2011...

, best known for his millennia-long struggle with Yawgmoth

Yawgmoth

Yawgmoth, known as the "Father of Machines" and called the Ineffable by his underlings, is a fictional being from Magic, The Gathering, and is the unabated god of the plane of Phyrexia, a universe of untold corruption and mechanical monstrosity. He wields nearly unlimited magical might and...

 and the plane of Phyrexia. First explored in the Magic card expansion, Antiquities

Antiquities (Magic: The Gathering)

Antiquities was the fifth Magic: The Gathering set and the second expansion set. It was the first set to have an original backstory that explores the mythos of the Magic universe . The story is primarily about the brothers Urza and Mishra who are inseparable at first, but become sworn enemies over...

, Urza is one of the collectible game's notable heroes.

Early years

Urza was born on the first day of the year 0 AR to a noble family of Argive, one of the three coastal kingdoms of Terisiare. His younger brother Mishra was born on the last day of the same year. Urza's mother died while giving birth to Mishra, so his father took another younger wife who did not like the brothers. Ten years later his father fell ill. Fearing the fate of his sons after his death, the father sent Urza and Mishra to his old friend Tocasia to serve as students at her archaeological dig.

Apprenticeship to Tocasia

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

Thran

In Magic: The Gathering, the Thran were a utopian culture of humans whose technology level was much more advanced than any other Dominarians. Their artifact devices ran on powerstones which had stable artificial planes in them...

, 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

Ornithopter

An ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings. Designers seek to imitate the flapping-wing flight of birds, bats, and insects. Though machines may differ in form, they are usually built on the same scale as these flying creatures. Manned ornithopters have also been built, and some...

http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?name=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 most Phyrexian infiltration and invasion of Dominaria. On their first visit, Urza and Mishra each acquired one half of the powerstone that had been holding the portal shut. 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. With her death, Mishra ran away into the desert. With the encampment disbanding, Urza had to leave his precious artifacts and go elsewhere to seek his fortunes.

The Chief Artificer

After Tocasia's death, Urza moved to Yotia and put his skills with machinery to work as an apprentice to Rusko the clockmaker. Shortly thereafter, a public contest was announced by the warlord 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 rare tome that was in her dowry, Urza built a gigantic machine to move the statue. He succeeded, but the warlord of Kroog was reluctant to marry off his daughter to a "weed", until he discovered Urza could build flying machines called ornithopters. As a result, Urza was wed to Kayla. 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, though not before consummating the marriage. Having been appointed Chief Artificer by the warlord, he threw himself into his work for the next few years, working excessively to build and improve artifacts, much to the dismay of his neglected wife and delight of his father-in-law. He also met Tawnos who applied as his apprentice.

The Brothers' War

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-crosses and sneak attacks quickly commenced between the two brothers and their kingdoms, soon resulting in an open war. An increasingly elaborate set of machines developed by the two brothers began to fight on either side, and the war slowly spiralled out of control. It continued for decades, destroying the continent, 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. Filled with rage, he used magic for the first time and knocked his brother back. With his new power, Urza tapped an ancient Thran artifact, the Golgothian Sylex, and poured all his memories and emotions into it. The resulting sylex blast was one of the most traumatic events in Dominarian history. It slaughtered both armies, decimated the island of Argoth, and altered weather patterns for centuries, eventually leading to an Ice Age. However, it did something more important than any of that - it ignited the spark within him and lodged the Mightstone http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?name=Mightstone and the Weakstone http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?name=Weakstone into Urza's eye sockets causing him to become a planeswalker, an immensely powerful immortal being, able to move around the multiverse with merely a thought.

Quest for Vengeance

After he had destroyed his brother, Urza realized that Mishra had been completely corrupted by Phyrexia. This realization filled Urza with grief, and pushed him to begin his lifelong hunt for retribution against Phyrexia, and its demonic ruler, Yawgmoth.

Exploring the Origins of Phyrexia

Urza, having just survived the massive magical blast using the sylex, was transformed in the maelstrom into a Planeswalker, a being of pure energy and godlike capacities who can step between worlds, universes and planes as easily as a mortal man can step into another room.

Urza settled back to ground zero, and found Tawnos, his apprentice, sealed in a mechanical stasis chamber designed to hold Mishra, should they succeed in capturing him, that somehow kept him safe throughout the maelstrom. They had a short reunion, and Tawnos went off to tell Urza's wife, Kayla bin-Kroog, that Urza had died with Kayla's name on his lip. Kayla, knowing Urza through and through, would rather believe that he had died with Mishra's name on his lips, instead. She spent her remaining mortal days with her grandson, Jarsyl, and wrote the Antiquities War, a book that would become a very important source of history for Dominarians.

Urza wandered Dominaria for a time, and found another planeswalker, Meshuvel, who educated him in the ways of his kind. Their relationship didn't last, however, as Meshuvel attempted to trap Urza, as she "feared" looking at Urza's eyes(see above). Urza, at this time, had also developed many derangements, one of which was a fixation to destroy the Phyrexians as they had destroyed his brother.

Urza journeyed Dominaria for a few years more, where in every city he could hear curses against the Brothers and their War. Urza also took up wandering the planes, and in one plane he found Xantcha, a Phyrexian newt (a human-looking sleeper agent) who was deemed "defective" by the Phyrexians and left for dead. Urza healed her, and although Xantcha admits to him that she is Phyrexian, Urza spares her, believing she was captured from her birth-world, tortured, and brainwashed.

Urza then made a traveling companion of Xantcha and showed her the massive dragon engine that he planned to use in his conquest and destruction of Phyrexia. Xantcha had doubts that he would succeed, yet did not speak up, so he continued in his plan.

Unknown to Urza, Xantcha followed in the wake of the dragon engine and used Urza's raid as a chance to get her "heart" back from the keepers. According to stories circulated in Phyrexia, a Phyrexian newt's heart is said to be the repository of a newt's mistakes—whenever a newt commits a mistake, the Ineffable one, Yawgmoth, the lord of Phyrexia, makes a scar mark on their hearts. Too many mistakes and the heart is destroyed, and its owner with it. Xantcha didn't know if the legends were true, but she was afraid nonetheless, and acted to save her heart while Urza laid siege to Phyrexia.

Urza and his battered dragon engine successfully punched through three of Phyrexia's nine layers, but while at the fourth level (where Xantcha was), Yawgmoth, the sleeping lord of Phyrexia, suddenly invaded Urza's mind, and incapacitated him. Xantcha climbed onto the dragon engine, forced Urza to remember where he was, and made him planeswalk them out of Phyrexia.

Once outside Phyrexia, in a strange plane, Xantcha tells Urza to burn Yawgmoth's name out of his mind, which Urza literally does. Urza and Xantcha spend the next few months dodging Phyrexian hunters as they planeswalk from plane to plane. Eventually, on an icy plane where Urza almost experiences defeat, he manages to planeswalk to Serra's realm, an artificial plane populated by warrior angels created by the planeswalker Serra

Serra (Magic: The Gathering)

represented on her Vanguard promo card In the collectible card-game Magic: The Gathering, Serra was the creator and overlord planeswalker of the artificial plane Serra's Realm. Both played an important role in the post-ascension life of Urza.-On Serra's Realm:After Urza left Serra, the plane was...

. It is there that Urza spends five years being healed by the benevolent planeswalker before moving on to exploring the other planes for hundreds of years with Xantcha.