Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1341: The Phyrexian War Arc

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

In this episode, I talk about putting together the larger story arc of the Phyrexian War storyline from Throne of Eldraine through March of the Machine.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay. So previously, I had a podcast where I talked all about the making of the bolus arc. It was a multi-year story arc. So today I'm going to talk about the making of the Phorexian War arc. So we're going to talk all about the making of that and how it came together.

And some of the things we thought about but didn't do and some things we did do. And anyway, today is the story of the Forexian. War arc. Okay, so first, a little bit of background, so let's set ourselves up correctly. So a little history of the Forexians. I did do a whole podcast on the Frexians that you can listen to, but for a short recap, they first show up in Magic's second ever expansion Antiquities. They're not the made, they're sort of a background character in the Brothers War. They obviously interact with Mishra and cause Mishra a bunch of problems. And so they're part of the story, but they're not the main

villain of the story. And it's not until the Weatherlight saga, the Michael Ryan and I created, where the Frexians become sort of the major villain of the story. They were the major villain of the Weatherlight saga. And it turns out

Erzer realizes how dangerous they are, and the Weatherite saga is Erz and his master plans to stop the Frexians. And at the end of the Weatherlight saga, they purge the Frexians from the multiverse. Ha-ha!

We are done with them. But of course, the Frexians were too good to villains. And so Brady Domruth and I came up with them after a plan to bring back the Frexians because we really wanted to bring back the Frexians.

And so the idea was that when we first went to Mirrodin Block, we did a little bit of teasing with Frexian oil. So Karn accidentally brings Ferrexian oil to Mirridon when he makes the plan of Mirrodin.

He's unaware that he's done this. And when we're in original Mirren, we just tease it just a little bit that the phrexins are there. Like in one of the first pages of the novel, the main antagonist, like, sees oil and it goes into his fingers. And we just sort of hint at it, but it's there.

We were setting up the story. So then the plan was we were going to come back to Miriden many years later and discover that Miridon was new phrexia. The original plan there was it just goes going to mean new phrexia, and at the end of that block, you discover, oh my goodness, it was formerly Mirrodin, but we realized in making it

that actually the fall of Mirren was kind of a cool story. So we ended up doing Scars of Mirren, where the Frexians are like 10% of the set, and then there's Mirrenbysge where there's a war between Mirren and the Frexians, in which it's 50-50. And then what we did for that block is we said the audience, we're not even going to tell you how that. The final set's either going to be called Miriden Pure if Miriden wins or New Phrexia. Ferexia wins.

Spoilers, New Phrexia won. So it's called New Phrexia. And so we see the phrexians. We wanted to put them back on the map. The idea was Miriden was this tough world and even they fell to the phrexians. But the idea was we have baked in, there's one of the core sort of weaknesses to the Frexians is they could not, they had no way. ability to planes walk. So while they took over the plane they were on, mirrored in, which they

renamed New Forexia, there was no way for them to get off the plane. So that was the one saving grace was they were trapped on the plane. The other weakness they had, by the way, was that phoresis, which is the process of making one of phrexia and didn't work on planeswalkers. Something about the spark kept phrexias from happening. So anyway, that where we leave them and we knew that we were going, I mean, on some level when, when, um, when Brady and I first bought the Frexians, we had kind of this long plan. I don't quite know, we knew we were going to bring them back, we were going to put the stake in the ground, and we knew that at some point they would take, they would be the main villain again.

The idea of Scars of Mirren was just kind of reintroduced them. We wanted to give them a win. In storytelling purposes, you normally when you introduce your villain in Act one, you give them a win over something. So you demonstrate how dangerous they are as a villain. And that's what kind of what we did was Scarce Mirren. So anyway, after the Bola story, we knew the next story one to tell was the Forexium story. In fact, there are seeds of the phrexian story built in to the Bola story.

For example, Nicole Bollis is part of his master plan. He wants to lure all the Plainswalkers or as many as he can to Ravnikah and he has this this zombie eternal army made in Aminkat and the challenge is

he needs to do he wants this thing to happen to Ravnika but his army is on Amin Ket well how do you get your army your eternal

zombie army from Aminkat to how do you get it to Ravnikah well the answer was based in something that happened

in Kaladesh now Aviskar and in the that Caladesh. We discover they're doing an invention. They're doing like a, it's a world of invention. And somebody, I forgot her name, designs a thing called the planar bridge.

There was a scientist on Kaladesh, not as your average car, who figures out that there are multiple planes and they create a means to travel between the planes. Now, the planar bridge has one core weakness, which is it can't, organic material can't go through it, only inorganic material. But for purposes, Ebola's, well, his zombie army isn't alive, so that is fine. And so he has Tesserit steal it. Tessarot ends up encompassing the planar bridge into his body, because that's the kind of thing Tessarit does. And Tessorot uses the Plainer Bridge to get the Eternal Army to, to, Ravnika. But then

he gets away. He's not there at the end when Bolus gets caught. He's not there. And one of the reasons we wanted the Planner Bridge to exist is that it served a secondary purpose. Yeah, it helped Obolus. But we knew that we needed a way to get the Phrexians off

of New Phrexia. And the thing about the Planner Bridge is the phrexians are part machine, part flesh. Well, the Plainer Bridge strips that are flesh off, but there's still enough machine that they can use it. And so that was an after plan.

The idea was we introduced the planar bridge in the bolus arc, and okay, that exists. We were trying to be subtle about it, but the idea is that was going to be the way the phrexians, at least the praetors, first get off new phrexia. So the plan was we were very subtle in the planar bridge. We didn't really announce that this is what... I'm sorry, Tezaret was going to do. So what we wanted to do, we thought it was going to be really cool was,

what if the way we introduced, this to the Vorphosis, to the hardcore story people, the way we'll first tell you something is wrong is we'll let you see a phrexian praetor not on new phrexia. And if you knew anything about the, about the phrexians,

that should scare you. That should go, uh-oh, things are so, so obviously, uh, where the spark ends, the very next set is Throne of Eldrain. So original plan, which is just jump right into the story right away.

And in fact, so originally Thornton Eldrain was not one set but two sets. The first set was going to take place on the courts, and the second set, Rowan and Will, we're going to go find their father and go into the woods. So the second step is going to be in the woods. And one of the villains we planned, the main villain, really, we had planned, was a character we called the whispering queen. And the idea, oh, sorry, the whispering witch. The whispering witch.

And so the idea was in the second set when they go in the woods and they finally meet her, we were going to make her a card. And when you saw her a card and saw the illustration, the Vorthosis would realize it's Shildred.

Because she's the whispering one, right? So that she, that the whispering witch is in fact, shieldred who's gotten off of New Phrexia. Like, oh, oh, that's not good. But we ended up deciding that we wanted to, we wanted to give a little bit of a break.

We decided that, like, we just had a story. Let's do a little bit of a slower role of the new story. Oh, the other challenge we had was when we had done new phrexia, one of the feedback we got was there was a part of the audience that really, really liked. The phrexians have a lot of kind of the cross between science fiction and horror. There's some body horror. You know, they're definitely a little intense. and the note we got from New Phrexia was

there's an audience that loved that, but also the audience was like, okay, a little much for me. So we wanted to be careful how much we sort of showed the Frexians. We wanted to tell a story, but had the Frexians not take up too much space, we knew we were going to have one set

where we went, you know, wall-to-wall Frexians, and we knew we wanted to have the big finale, and the big finale was more of a war story than a Frexian story, although the Frexians obviously would take a role in that. So we know those two sets would have a lot of Frexians, but other than those two,

we wanted to kind of slow-roll the Frexian, X-ins. Like I said, the very first thing we wanted to do is just show you a phrexia and not even say anything about it. Just, oh my God, there's a phrexene. What does that mean? Well, if you're in the no, you know that's the problem. Okay, so we ended up not doing, early on, there was a whole different storyline we were doing with Will and Rowan. They were actually originally going to become, there's a new villain we were making where they were going to have a whole sort of

what's the word? Like a night's of the round table they were going to have a whole crew and that they could teleport all of them they could planes walk all of them and that we were trying to make this villain that was his whole team but that because Roan and Will were there

they could planes walk both things. We didn't end up going that route there was a bunch of plans of things we tried that didn't actually come to fruition but anyway we ended up saying, well, we're going to push back that. I would say the first

new story we did actually was in the second set, which was in Theris Beyond Death. When we audibles and decided for Elreda was just be one set, we pushed up Theros Beyond Death. So the important part there was we knew that we wanted,

it was important that Elspeth was a big player in the story. The Frexians is a huge part of her backstory. And we didn't want to have a job giant fight with the Frexians and not had of Elspeth involved. Well, we kind of left Elspeth to be continued. So when we did Throne of Elton, not Thore Edwin, we did Theros. Elspeth was our main character.

And in the story, it made sense in the story for Heliod to kill her. But we knew that we were on Theros, which had an underworld. Which means she wasn't 100% dead because there was an underworld. And so we knew that before the Frexian story happened, we had to get her out of the underworld. And so we talked about going back to Theros, and so part of the reason we went back to there was we knew in order to tell the story we had to free Elspeth. Due to a bunch of factors, the story ended up not coming out as we had planned.

In the story, there's like, Elspeth's story has a nightmare about the Frexians. We do a little bit of seeding of something's going to come up with the Frexians. But anyway, we did manage for her to escape. She escapes in the story in the cards. Okay, so we ended up, the first set we decided, we sort of slow-rolled it a little bit, did some individual stories. So, Caldheim was where we ended up putting the first pharynxian. So, um, um, uh, Vorunclex ends up showing there. Um, we kind of liked, uh, him being, um, uh, sort of, uh, like a Grindle sort of, uh, character from mythology.

Um, just this wild beast. And we really did, we did exactly what we wanted to do, was he just shows up on the set. We don't talk about him. He's not in the story. We did do a Frexian version of him just to sort of reinforce he's a Frexian. And it was clear for the people in the know. When Vorunclegg showed up, the Vorthoses were very much like, uh-oh, uh-oh, like the entire weakness of the Frexian says their inability to travel. And they figured out pretty quickly that it was, that it was Teserite in the Plainer Bridge.

I mean, I guess we had done a good job of establishing that. They figured out that's what it was. And the reason that we bring him to Cal time, we didn't really explain it too much of the time, but Caldheim has the world tree. And the world tree is this thing that connects all the different planes of the multiverse. So we knew that the master plan was they were going to escape and then attack the multiverse. We knew that from the very beginning, that we were trying to, like the last story had been the War of the Spark. It's like, oh, it's bolus against almost every plane's like you've ever heard of.

And we were trying to find something equally large in scope. And so how about the phrexians invade the multiverse? That sounded pretty large in scope. And so what we did was we introduced... So when we did call time, we introduced the World Tree and explained... There are ten different... I don't know what I call them, planes, I guess, of call time. And the World Tree connects those.

And we sort of explain that, you know, it... already is connecting different planes, but it has the ability to connect to all planes, and so we sort of set that up. Once again, we knew we were going with it, but we were pretty subtle on... I mean, now, Voron Kliks was there. We didn't know how to explain why Voron Kleex was there.

Then we don't do anything again until about a year or so later when we go to Kamagawa and Neon Dynasty. We have our second predator show up, Jim Kataxis. And this time, we do one more thing. The idea is every time they show up we were trying to sort of raise the stakes a little bit.

And what happens here is we see Tommy O get phrexianized. Yes, jingotaxis with the help of new phrexia. Not new phrexia. From Kamagawa, figures out how to ferexonize plainswalkers. Like I said, they couldn't move planes. They couldn't deal with planeswalkers. Now we've seen them move planes, and we've seen the move with planeswalkers. So we're just upping the threat.

We're trying to little by little explain, this is going to be a problem. And we just did one. We knew we were going to fructize more Planswalkers, but we wanted to introduce this one. We showed Tamio, we wanted to serve an emotional one

that really would hit home, and we wanted to be on Kamagawa. So anyway, that all tied together. Then on the very next set, Streets and Nucampano Erbrass shows up. Urbos is the one that's very much against what the... He's kind of the rebel of the praetors,

and he was trying to stop what Elshn was up to. So he's trying to get, what's it called, Halo. The substance that's on Nucopena is problematic for the plainswalkers. We set up the story that the Frexians

used to be on Nucopena. They got driven off Nucanna. Halo was part of that. And so trying to sort of set up, okay, maybe there's some answer to the Frexians and introduce that element of it. Then, the next time we see the Frexians is

Shieldred on Dominaura United. And this time we wanted to see an actual, we starts seeing a little bit of the invasion. So Sheldred and Frexian shows up in black. Black is the color that most fits with the, you know, like early, early Frexians, you go back to the beginning, were just in black. We made a conscious choice when we brought them back in Scars and Meriden to spread them across all the colors just because we needed them to be. There's no reason they couldn't be across the colors. But black is where they're most at home and a lot of their

hoarish elements makes more sense in black. So the first set that does kind of more phrexians, more so than just, you know, a handful, is on Dominaria. Also, Dominaria has a long history with the Frexians, so there's fun stuff to play there. And we get a Frexian, as our second Plainswalker, a Johnny. Notice, we're going for the jugular from an emotional standpoint. We're hitting the fan favorites showing that, uh-oh, anybody could fall to the Frexians. So the final year, we knew that we wanted to sort of ramp up and tell the story in the final year. Like before that, they were showing up and we're giving hints of things, but usually when we're doing our big story,

it's the final year we're really ramping up the story. The story before that is kind of the background. There's bits and pieces of it. You can understand elements that are going on. But we want to, so the final year, there's four sets in the final. First is Dominion United. That is, we see the Frexians show up for the first time in mass. Shiodrid brings a whole squadron of black Frexians.

We see a Johnny fall. So, like, there's a bunch of stuff there. So then we wanted to do the Brothers War. And so the Brothers War was interesting because we wanted to go back in time to see the Brothers War. And the Frexians played a role in the Brothers War. So we knew that they would be there. But the idea in the story, what we do is that Taferi goes back in time

because they realize they need the Gygophian Cylex, which is the thing that... Erza sets off to end the Brothers War, which devastates Terseer. So it's this huge weapon. The problem has been lost in time. So Tafari brings Sahili from Avshkar, and she is able to, by letting her witness it, she's able to recreate it so they can make a new Sylex. And that becomes very important to the story.

Okay. Next up is New Frexia. So we knew that we wanted to have a period. we're going to go back and we're going to see new phrexia. Like that had always been part of the plan, is that, hey, you love the phrexians? Well, we'll give you an all-frexian set. So that was the plan of new frexia. It's going to be the all-frexian set.

Deliver on phrexia. You want poison. You want Frexian mana. All the things that you would come and expect from Frexian. We also, it's a place where we did a whole cycle of Frexian planeswalkers. So the master plan basically was that Jace gathers a couple of course. collection of heroes, including Elspath, and they're going to invade new phrexia and save the day. That is the plan.

Now, that plan goes horribly awry. They get scattered when they arrive. A lot of them get frexianized. So things do not go the way they plan. And then, Jace, because Vraska had been frexamized, through Vraska, Jace gets fractionized. And as he's slipping, flipping away into his ferrexianus, as his lest, as his, last act of free will, he decides that he

needs to set off the silics. Now, the silics will destroy all of new phrexia. I think it'll destroy any planes that are connected at that point through the world tree. But Jace is like, they're too dangerous. You know, we need to do it. This is his last act before he's getting fractionized. Elspeth decides that's not the right thing to do.

It would kill too many innocent people. So she... She planes walks away with it and it explodes as she's sort of traveling through the blind eternities. And apparently kills Elspeth. And anyway, the story ends with, uh-oh, things are looking bad. So the final, March of the Machine was the actual invasion. And the idea was, like I said, we knew from the very beginning we were going big.

Like, the Frexians invade the multiverse, which mostly meant they invade basically every plane that you've ever heard of. We came up the idea in design that we wanted to show off all the planes that ended up becoming battles. So the idea is we're going to show you different planes. We toyed around a lot with how we wanted to execute on... There was a point in which we were going to show you 10 worlds, one per draft archetype. And in the end, decided we wanted to go a little bit broader than that. So we ended up showing a whole bunch of... A whole bunch of different planes.

And we had a lot of fun, and the machine really went big. Did it go a little too big? I don't know. It definitely was. One of the notes we got about March and the Machine was it felt because we had to show the beginning of the invasion, the middle of the invasion, and the end of the invasion, all in one set, a lot of people felt like it just went too fast. I think in retrospect, probably what we needed to do was have the phrexian invasion really begin in new phrexia and see a little bit of them invading and have the story end of new phrexia end with they've begun to invade the multiverse and it's looking like they're going to succeed. and then have the march of the machines about the saving the multiverse.

Not about both the invasion and the saving of it, but maybe just the saving of it so that we can see. Like, we need a point in which it looks like the Frenchians are going to win. And that's in the story, but because the carcettes has to show the whole story, it does feel like they invade and lose right away.

Like it didn't give the sense of, like a lot of bad things happen. The Frexians actually are very successful. I mean, in the end they lose, but they do a lot, a lot of damage. So what happens, by the way, is through a series of actions, Elspeth does come back. She's been reincarnated as an angel.

Oh, really quickly, just to talk about that. We had talked about wanting Elspeth to be an angel for years, and a lot of it was trying to figure out where and how to get there that we could do it. We talked about it, but we'd not found a place we thought was the right place. Even on Theros were like, oh, could she be reborn as a... That didn't make sense on Theros. But we liked the idea that she'd escaped from the underworld. And so we've been working toward this opportunity.

So we were working this story and the idea that, oh, she sacrifices herself, that seemed like the perfect opportunity to make her into an angel. So we did. And she's from New Capena. So when we first had made the storyline, we didn't quite know where she was from. And we figured out some of her background when we made New Capena. So it all sort of wove together in a cool way.

Also, another big part of this, is Zolfir. So Zolfir, so there's a set called Mirage back in 1996. And Mirage takes place, the early sets mostly take place on Dominaria. Jamora, which is the continent, is very inspired, African-inspired.

And part of that is called Zulfier. And so Tafari is from Zulfier. When the Phrexians invade during the Frex invasion, during the Weddlight saga a story during the Frexian invasion. He uses his powers to phase them out so that they, he puts them in a place that the Frexians can't get access to. But then he loses his, during the mending, like he loses his planeswalk ability, loses the spark, and he's not able to bring them back. And that is one of the ongoing storylines for DeFerry is his people are

lost in time, essentially, and he needs a way to bring them back. We knew we were going to bring them back. We decided that the right time to finish that storyline was this storyline. What if the key to solving the problem of the Frexian invasion was Zulfier, who had been preparing for the Frexian invasion.

And so that was an important part of bringing them back in. In the end, they end up swapping Zulfier with Miriden. So now what was Miridens now Zulfier and what was Zulfier is not Mirridan. So we set that up. The other thing that was really important,

is we wanted some large consequences of this. A lot of characters die. A lot of worlds are majorly affected. I know because the war starts and ends on the same set, it felt to some people like it was inconsequential, but we've done

a lot on a lot of the world, like Eldron's a good example, where not only did the king die, but like the kingdoms fell. To save them, they put the lot of the a lot of people were put to sleep,

but they couldn't wake them up because the sleep fell didn't know to break it. Like, there's a lot of consequences of this across. And as we go to different worlds, when we kind of revisit things, you'll see what impact of the fractions being there having them. And like I said, a lot of them, it was a pretty big impact.

Okay, but one of the big things was, the two biggest things, I think, like the, one of the things of having big events is you want to sort of shift and allow us to sort of change things around. So one of them is the desparketing, which is a lot of planes walkers lost their spark, not all of them, but a lot of them.

And so some of that was seen in aftermath, some was seen after. We didn't sort of advertise exactly who got desparked and who didn't. So it's been an ongoing thing you sort of learn. It's been a big, like it had a big impact in the people that got to spark and even some of the people that were still sparked

who had relationships with people that were despaired, had an impact. And then probably the biggest thing from an ongoing story, standpoint is the way they go between planes on call time is they have a little way we call Omen Pass. So normally, so when the mending happened, so in Magic's past, there used to be planar portals of things.

The Frexians would use planar portals. But when the mending happened, we decided to sort of do away with the portals and said, the only people that can cross between worlds out of the plains walkers, that's what makes them special. Nobody else can go between worlds. And so for quite a while, it's very, like, unless you're a planes walker, you have no way to go from one plane to another. But then we decided that there might be some fun stories of watching planes intermingle or characters move. And so one of the side effects of the story was the Omen Pass.

Now, the Omen Pass are very unstable. They can be small, they can be large, they can show up for a minute, they can stay for a year. They're very, what they are and how they work is very up to us. the people who make the stories, have them work, meaning there's a lot of, and the idea is like if I go through an Omen Path, there's no guarantee it's there when I come back, meaning I might go to another world

and then not be able to return. So there's a lot of consequences. Only Plainswalkers can control where they go. Like if you go through an Omen Path, it goes to wherever the Omen Path goes. And even then, like I said, that they can be temporary, and there's a lot of ramifications of that.

We definitely have started building stories of that. outlaws of Thunder Junction, Aether Drift, there are future things that are taking advantage of the fact that there are things intermingling between things. That actually became a big part of what we're going on. We did, by the way, come up the idea of doing a set called Aftermath, where the idea was, at the end of the story, we would do something to sort of show what happened.

For those that don't know, that went horribly awry. People did not like that. And so we are not doing those anymore. But we try to introduce that concept. But anyway, the real master plan was... Oh, and the other thing is, there are, as you will see in the storyline, there are consequences of what happened.

For example, let's give a little tip here, is as we learn more about reality fracture, Jace being flexenized has a big, like a lot of what Jace is up to, of the stories we'll learn about it comes from this was a really traumatic event for jace and so um the idea is the seeds of things that happen here affect future stories the omen pass affects future stories the sparking affects future stories like we did a lot of seeding in this story arc of future story arcs and so as we get to future things you will see there's through lines

that like the planar bridge in bolus affected this like there are pieces that show up in each storyline that affect the next story line and so um Jace getting Frexonized is a big, big deal and affects a lot of things. So anyway, guys, that is the mapping of how we did the Frexian War arc. Like I said, we sort of mapped it ahead of time. We did a slow roll. One of the ways that we've been sort of trying to do these now is that, hey, we want people to just have fun and get different stories. And we like the larger arching story to be in the background a lot of the time.

And then usually from the last year when we're coming up to the climate. We raise the volume of a little bit so you can see more what's going on. But anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed the walk through the arc. That is the making of it. So anyway, I'm now at work, so we know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoy today's story, and I'll see you next time.