Happy 8/8!
Let me tell you in brief about this character and why he means so much to me.
I love Eight (more widely known as Realmbreaker) because he is a Phyrexian, and he is also undeniably innocent. He is a frightened child who was warped by Norn's mental manipulation into becoming the centerpiece of her interplanar invasion. His plight represents, on a cosmic scale, the bodily invasion and exploitation Phyrexia inflicts on not only other people, but also its own. The seed that would become Eight was stolen from Kaldheim by Vorinclex, and as such he isn't technically a core-born native Phyrexian, but he has been Phyrexian for the entirety of his individual existence and largely shares the angsts of core-born Phyrexians rather than forcibly compleated ones.
There are children and innocents among the Phyrexians. Even more importantly, the Multiverse was only saved because 1) one such child and innocent asked for help, and 2) somebody sincerely answered. Somebody--Wrenn, a non-Phyrexian and Planeswalker, who could easily have denounced his existence as anathema and vowed to "cleanse" his kind from the Multiverse--instead reached out to him, gave him a name rather than an assignment-as-weapon, and encouraged him to grow. (This of course only compounds the tragedy that afterward, only Wrenn and Teferi were credited for saving the Multiverse, and not Eight himself--the unsung Phyrexian hero.)
The tragedy of Phyrexia is not that Phyrexians, the people, exist. It's the violations imposed on both Phyrexian and non-Phyrexian people in the name of expansion. And the Multiverse could only be saved when Wrenn saw Eight not as synonymous with New Phyrexia as an expansionist state, but as an individual who deserved freedom.
