“Bahaha! I’ll ship your rotten, scrawny remains to your family! Wouldn’t that be hilarious?! I have a wife! Stop trying to get under my belt! If I don’t break your neck, my wife will. I assure you, she’s just as capable of doing it as I am.”
who’s the cuddler: Ajani curls up around Elspeth so much that she sometimes doesn’t bother with blankets at night.
who makes the bed: Elspeth, usually because
who wakes up first: she also wakes up first and sometimes makes the bed around Ajani just out of reflex
who has the weird taste in music: Elspeth. She picked up some odd habits in the Underworld.
who is more protective: They’re the couple who will both try to stand in front of the other one when in danger. They squabble over who’s in more danger. Ajani has the upper hand because he can always point out that at least he’s never died.
who sings in the shower: Elspeth, but damn does she get embarrassed if you catch her at it.
who cries during movies: Ajani. Unashamedly.
who spends the most while out shopping: Ajani. Elspeth worries about it too much.
who kisses more roughly: Elspeth. Ajani can’t really kiss so much. He does nibble on her hair and lick her though.
who is more dominate: Elspeth, but she tends to have to be convinced that it’s all right for her to be dominant.
Alara it is then. I'm somewhat confused as to how the Phyrexians operate; I know they destroy planes like the Eldrazi, but how do they convert everything from flesh into a mixture of both metal and flesh? Not to mention, why?
[Handing this over to my fiancé, because he knows the lore better than I do. Buckle down for a long post, guys.]
Well, first off, I’m making the—possibly gratuitous (a word that I originally learned from Magic, incidentally)—assumption that you’re talking about New Phyrexia, rather than old Phyrexia.
Mind you, that assumption is entirely irrelevant, since I’m starting from the beginning, anyway, but I thought that it was good to get out of the way early.
So, once upon a time, in the magical land of Dominaria, there lived a wise king, and his beautiful daughter. Probably, anyway. They’re also irrelevant, but it seemed like a good way to start a story.
We’re actually going to be talking about the Thran empire. They may have been wise, and their daughters may have been beautiful—their sons, too, probably—but they were also kind of dicks to everyone who wasn’t a member of the Thran empire. They kicked out all doctors for some reason, for example. That wasn’t really a good idea, since one of the doctors was an aspiring eugenicist and surgeon named Adolf Yawgmoth. Or something like that.
Yawgmoth is going to get old real fast if I keep typing it out, so we’ll call him Yawgie. Good ol’ Yawgie.
So, a bunch of stuff happened that involved the Thran being dicks and exiling all criminals and anyone who had become sick with a particular plague to the caves beneath the Powerstone Foundry. This is of particularly hilarious note because powerstones are basically magic radium. No, really.
This becomes relevant because the head engineer, Glacian Curie, developed phthsis. (I’m never typing that again. It’ll just be “the disease” from here on out.)
It should be noted that the reason everyone with the disease got exiled to the caves was that healing magic could do nothing about it. Mind you, the Thran also didn’t know that magic came in five colors, so…
Wait, how the hell did they build a powerful, world-spanning empi…never mind. They just didn’t, okay? Okay.
So, Glacian’s wife, the beautiful and influential architect Rebbec, decided that there was a very good solution to this problem. They could just call back one of the doctors! Like that one guy, Yawgie.
This was up there with “getting involved in a land war in Asia.”
Several chapters later, the Thran Empire had become an extension of Yawgie’s will. He had figured out the best way to deal with the disease was a process that he called “phyresis”—improvement of the body through various blah blah grafting blah blah blah. He had also figured out the best way to keep his power and influence: on no account allow Glacian to get better, while making a huge show of trying to cure him.
Yawgie still wasn’t happy, though. For all his wealth, fame, and success, he didn’t have what he really wanted.
Hot, steamy sex with Rebbec.
Yes, Phyrexia is really just one giant, multiverse-spanning cry of “m’lady.”
Long story short, Rebbec tells Yawgie that she actually loves her husband, he starts bitching about the “friend zone”—which I hereby nominate as the new name for the Ninth Sphere of Phyrexia—and ends up going to war with the entire world. Apparently, he had wandered around just being a huge dick to everybody. Unsurprising, really.
Somewhere in there, he pithed a planeswalker in order to look for the organ that housed the spark, failed hilariously, got a portal to another plane anyway, took his armies, and went home.
Some jackass then closed the portals and he was stuck. Poor Yawgie!
Yeah, no, fuck that guy, he’s an ass.
Over the next few millenia, Yawgie moved on and got over Rebbec.
Oh, no, wait.
The opposite of that.
When the Invasion happened, several thousands of years later, he thought the incarnation of all life energy on Dominaria, an enigmatic possibly-a-deity known as Gaea, was Rebbec. He was seriously still on about that.
Anyway, during all those long, lonely hours that he probably spent mastur--I mean, uh, turning into a giant cloud of black mana and PURE DEATH--Yawgie perfected the art of grafting and robotics. Robotics? Yeah. A doctor became a master roboticist for REASONS.
Good ol’ Doc Yawg figured that human beings were inefficient and went full transhumanism on all the Thran who had come with him. They started growing people in vats, having removed the need for sexual reproduction somewhere along the line. This is where Xantcha came from. Her heartstone is now in Karn, through the power of love. Or something like that.
Right, so, the Invasion happens and we kill Yawgie through the magical power of Scott McGough’s in-universe-equivalent’s magical plot-altering powers. Yes, the magical power of magical powers. Shut up. We also sacrifice...more or less the entire cast that we had come to care about, and most of them die in horrible ways. Squee manages to do so once every five minutes for several weeks. I think he ends up being one of the five or so who actually survive, though, so good on him.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH
The ranch didn’t exist yet, until KARN, LORD OF ALL MISTAKES, looked upon the void and said “I could do with a new pad.” Lo, he spake, and a land of metal did emerge. A plane known as...
Argentum!
You were expecting Mirrodin, weren’t you?
Yeah, they’re the same place. It’s an important distinction though, for reasons. But, first
[Insert summary of Odyssey and Onslaught blocks here]
And that’s how Kamahl learned to love.
Anyway, Karn, now fed up with Dominaria AGAIN, decided to take the new planeswalker Jeska planeswalking. First, however, he made the Mirari into a dude named Memnarch and gave him governorship of Argentum. The two then planeswalked away.
Unfortunately, while she was Karona, Jeska had planeswalked to the ruins of Phyrexia. Distracted by her conversation with Yawgie, she didn’t notice when she stepped in
IGNORE THAT. RETCONS.
So, Xantcha’s heartstone, which was now in Karn, was originally a Phyrexian creation. As such, it--being a perfect, flawless crystal--was oozing with glistening oil. Somehow. Reasons. That stuff gets everywhere.
Karn managed to leak a spot of the glistening oil from his perfectly flawless crystal heart that was somehow dripping oil for reasons onto the ground of Argentum. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, were it not for
Oh, no, wait. There is pretty much no way for that not to be a problem. That’s like accidentally dropping a vial of ebola in the school cafeteria. If ebola made you into metal zombie men Cybermen Phyrexians. So, similar, but not the same.
Memnarch cleaned it up, it infected him, he renamed the plane Mirrodin--a really inefficient step, since the oil is then just going to rename it New Phyrexia later on--and mycosynth began growing.
So, originally, the whole “metal into flesh” thing was about building robotics and grafting them onto fleshy beings. You’d also graft flesh from other creatures, and basically go full body horror.
Mycosynth, however, was far more efficient, although it does raise some logistical questions. It is basically a side effect of this new form of glistening oil that Karona had brought completely normal glistening oil that had leaked out of a flawless crystal, which grew into large tree-like growths in the heart of Mirrodin. For whatever reason, it converted metal into flesh and flesh into metal. How on earth this didn’t result in things going back and forth escapes me. There’s a bit where Bosh starts to get fleshy, though, which is actually kind of weird, since he has a compartment in his chest that they hide in on occasion. You have to imagine that being in a box of flesh would be somewhat horrifying.
Anyway, old Phyrexia replaced flesh with metal because it was more efficient, and so they built the metal bits and grafted them on. New Phyrexia replaces flesh with metal because...it’s sort of hard-coded in at this point. They don’t even have to do much any more, really. The mycosynth sort of takes care of it, though they still make some changes because Phyrexians gonna Phyresis. They still have the philosophy that the flesh is weak, but it’s a very different sort of thing when you’re from a world where flesh and metal blend into each other quasi-naturally. Any work they do is, of course, hand-crafted grafting things onto other things. Messy, nasty stuff.
Phyrexians also don’t really destroy planes. Except in the case of Rath, but they also made that one, and it was more fused with another plane, rather than destroyed. They tend to conquer them instead, converting most of the populace into Phyrexians.
Mind you, it’s late, so I may have gotten one or two details wrong, and I’m too lazy to look anything up at the moment.
I think that probably answers your question somewhere along the line.
