Friendship is Card Games/Sacrifice a Story: My Little Praetor: Phthisis is Magic · 1:16pm Jan 24th, 2021
Well, time to face facts on this one. For years, I’ve been saying that I’d revisit this story when Wizards revisited New Phyrexia. Now Vorinclex has barged into Kaldheim, and…
Well, at least I’m getting a card blog out of it.
While I’m at it, I may as well go over what I had planned for the story… though part of why I’m officially cancelling the story is because most of my notes for it were on a computer that bricked in 2017. Even before that, the sprawling, continually dividing plotlines had grown out of control. Plus, looking back, my style has developed quite a bit since then. Some bits make me smile. Others make me want to smack my past self and tell him to stop being so self-satisfied with the clever quips and world building and actually tell the story, to say nothing of the Lavender Unicorn Syndrome. Ah well. If I were fully satisfied with stuff I wrote eight and a half years ago, that wouldn’t be a good sign for my progress, now would it?
In any case, I’ll see what I can dredge and/or make up, though it will work better to make most of it more of a Planeswalker’s Guide sort of thing.
As a quick review, Phyrexia is basically what happens when H. R. Giger, Joseph Mendele, and Hieronymous Bosch got together and tried to design the Borg during a really bad acid trip. Its primary weapon and terraforming device is the glistening oil, a substance somewhere between lubricant and blood full of little microbes designed to divide, grow, and transform whatever it touches into more of Phyrexia.
Old Phyrexia was destroyed an alliance of planeswalkers during the invasion of Dominaria. Yawgmoth, the Father of Machines and god-ruler of Phyrexia was destroyed by a gemstone-powered rainbow laser (No, the other one.) But the slightest bit remained in the silver golem Karn, whose personality was stored in a Phyrexian heartstone.
When Karn created the hollow metal plane of Argentum, he left the smallest trace of the glistening oil. It infected Memnarch, the plane’s custodian, who slowly went mad. He trapped souls from other planes in a crazed attempt to summon his creator back to the plane, or become a planeswalker and find him himself. Argentum became Mirrodin, a surreal world of five suns and natural environments composed of metal: steel razorgrass, quicksilver seas, massive magnetic mountains. After a long struggle, the elf Glissa dove into the mana core of the plane with Memnarch, destroying both, and with Karn’s guidance, the goblin genius Slobad relinquished the power of Glissa’s Spark to resurrect all the stolen souls and return them where they belonged.
But it had been centuries since Memnarch’s infection, and despite his regular attempts to cull the surface population, some new souls had been born. Their elders had vanished, leaving these native Mirrans lost and disorganized. Meanwhile, without Memnarch obsessively destroying them, the fungus-like mycosynth growths on the inner surface of the plane were free to proliferate, creating more sophisticated Phyrexian life. Karn, racing to the plane during the Mending when he finally realized the full depth of his mistake, was captured and slowly driven mad, to serve as a new Father of Machines.
The Mirran-Phyrexian War was nightmarish on every level. Phyrexia had every advantage, even with planeswalkers offering their own aid and freeing Karn from both imprisonment and madness. The Mirrans were reduced to a few desperate refugee camps on the inner surface of the world… and the Phyrexian praetors, one for each color of mana, found themselves with no remaining enemies but one another.
Jin-Gitaxias, the blue-aligned praetor, devised a solution before any of the others could lash out in internecine conflict. He confirmed the theories of the multiverse encoded in the glistening oil and devised a planar portal, opening to a pristine plane that was ripe for conquest: Ungula.
One of Gitaxias’s own offspring was reshaped into the form of a unicorn. Calling himself Clinical Trial, he seduced and infected Twilight Sparkle. Twilight, fascinated by Phyrexia’s call to unite and perfect, introduced the oil to the other Bearers. All the while, Phyrexia geared up for another conflict.
War would consume Equestria, and Phyrexia would have many advantages. Being able to dictate the nature of every engagement will do that, what with their ability to open portals wherever they wanted. Every thinking race on Ungula would fight back, but in the end, that logistical advantage would win out.
… Kind of.
While Ungula could not win the war, Phyrexia lost internal and external coups brought on by the infected Bearers. But its Pyrrhic victory wasn’t as simple as decapitation strikes bringing down the beast. The Bearers all knew through the oil that new praetors would arise unless someone else filled the niche. Or somepony.
* The Elements of Charisma, Vanity, Mischief, Ambition, Cunning, and Chaos, formed in this timeline when the forces of Harmony, Bearers and Elements both, decided that sticking Discord in a statue again wasn’t the wisest move.
New Phyrexia claimed its second plane, but not without getting transformed itself, to a form barely recognizable. It has not spread beyond its initial footholds on Ungula, and no one is sure if or when it will. Between Cadence’s love magic, the stabilizing influences of friends and family, and the reunited Elements of Discord* being used for the first time, the new Praetors of Harmony retain their free will and unaltered memory of the mares they were. Twilight and friends have, in essence, performed the ultimate villain reform… to an extent. Some things are immutable, even by Discord’s standards. It still isn’t clear where this New New Phyrexia will go from here.
The Woven Congregation
Elesh Norn’s Machine Orthodoxy was a mindless collective of dogmatic drones, blindly carrying out hideous parables in the most literal way possible. Its flayed, porcelain-armored legions stormed Equestria’s interior. While Ponyville fended them off, other towns were not so fortunate, and those who did not fall in battle fell prey to the horrendous wasting disease that is phthisis. Even Cloudsdale and the other weather cities were not spared the nonexistent mercies of ragged tine shrikes and shattered angels, intending to seize control of the weather factories and create massive storm systems of glistening oil.
That nightmare shifted to a more surreal dream when Rarity’s experiments in self-augmentation reached their pinnacle. Mutated into a strange bipedal state, adorned with opaline accessories that socketed into ports Spike installed on her body, Rarity found she had anointed herself as a priest of Norn entirely by accident.
Fortunately, that left her in the perfect position to start a schism. When she wasn’t communing with the suborned psyches of Phyrexians on Ungula, she was encouraging the Ponyville militia to accept every edge they could get as more of the country fell to the invaders. By the time Elesh Norn even noticed the problems near Canterlot, the Rarity Heresy (
“Raresy, if you will,”) had already captured many hearts and minds on both sides of the conflict.
Naturally, this could not stand. Norn took to the field personally, making all cower in the face of her manifest majesty.
At least, she did until Generosity gave them what Unity could not. Even Norn’s personal attendants rebelled against her when presented with somepony who legitimately cared about them… and who had plentiful experience dealing with both the Orthodoxy’s drones and self-important divas who refused to acknowledge all the hard-working people around them who made their glory possible.
With a veritable mountain of flesh both compleated and not holding Norn down, Rarity broke off one of the praetor’s cranial fins and drove it through her gut. Scribes discarded their old scripture and began composing the plates of the Alabaster Etchings within the hour.
The Woven Congregation is still Phyrexia, but it is a fabulous Phyrexia, dedicated to a blending of flesh and machine that is just as concerned with form as function. Ungula’s plentiful gems feature just as largely as New Phyrexia’s abundant gold, steel, and yes, the bone-white and iron-hard pseudoporcelain of the previous regime. The merciless insistence of breaking down new members of the congregation has turned on itself; holdouts of the old ways are forcibly converted to the ideals of the new praetor. Officially, she is unaware of such things.
Through both wartime necessity and the oil’s influence, Carousel Boutique has grown to be the sort of towering landmark that Namepending Castle would be in other, more fortunate Ponyvilles. It’s always open for business. Spike has since returned to Twilight’s side, but Sweetie Belle has taken his place. Contamination agreed with her to a stunning degree, catalyzing her magic to incredible heights even as it shifted her coat to something like mother-of-pearl.
Meanwhile, the Ponyville irregulars have found that the equipment that kept them alive during the war doesn’t come off. And nopony’s sure how long Rarity will keep letting them delay their appointments for additional accessories…
Sweetie, Nacreous Cantor 1W
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Cleric
2W: Put a vigilance counter on target artifact or enchantment you control. If that permanent isn’t a creature, it becomes a creature with power and toughness equal to its converted mana cost in addition to its other types.
1/3
Elesh Norn’s Defeat 3W
Instant
Destroy target creature with power 4 or greater. If that creature is a Phyrexian, exile it instead.
“You’ve got to have a thicker skin in this business, darling.”
—Rarity, Grand Couturier
Rarity, Grand Couturier 3WW
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Praetor
Vigilance
Artifact and enchantment spells you cast cost 2 less to cast.
Artifact and enchantment spells your opponents cast cost 2 more to cast.
“True vision goes beyond empty dogma.”
3/5
The Friendship Collective
Jin-Gitaxias’s Progress Engine was science not so much divorced from morality as never married to it in the first place. This Gitaxias was at least capable of a facade of geniality, but his faction still eagerly tore apart both the plane and its inhabitants to learn their every secret. In the invasion, they performed hit-and-run specimen gathering from all points on Ungula. It was Gitaxias who’d first learned of Equestria, and he who knew precisely what he wanted from the ponies.
Twilight was part of his plan from the beginning, first infected and eagerly brought into the fold when she was pulled from Canterlot to Phyrexia while cornered by the Guard. Yes, she was a bit… overenthusiastic, but her intellect and creative spark were welcome additions given how phyresis had an unfortunate tendency to snuff out the latter. Merely one more thing to perfect, given time. And that unremarkable blue unicorn she’d dragged with her would make a suitable servitor for her once fully compleated.
But Trixie helped maintain Twilight’s conscience, providing a carefully applied voice of restraint that helped both maintain their equinity even as mycosynth infection rendered their horns and hooves into living chrome. And as Twilight saw the sorry state of scientific research in most of the Gitaxian sectives, she took it upon herself to fix it all.
Gitaxias was, naturally, less than pleased with this decision.
He was even less pleased when Twilight teamed up with that unremarkable blue unicorn to smear his body across the Blind Eternities through a well-timed portal malfunction.
The Friendship Collective is certainly more humane than its predecessor, though that’s hardly saying much. Still, vivisections are only performed on well-compensated, anesthetized volunteers. Research focus has shifted from maximizing lethal efficiency and eliminating free will to understanding the root causes behind the Phyrexian need to spread and corrupt, and how those impulses interface with the equine psyche. Twilight is holding up a mirror to Phyrexia itself, and she does not like what she sees.
The transplanted Golden Oaks sunk its roots deep into Canterlot. While the vigilance of the princesses kept the city safe from large incursions and even most Phyrexian portals, the already present corruption was happy to spread through the sewers and caverns beneath the city. By the time Twilight returned home, she was greeted by a Canterlot that had been consuming microdoses of glistening oil for weeks. And Celestia, to her shame, fled the capital with only the assurance of one of her greatest enemies that it was all for the best.
"The problem with you, Celestia, is that you tend to think in binary. Light and dark, good and evil, with you or against you.” Discord’s disembodied voice hummed in thought. “I suppose it's an occupational hazard of being a sun deity. You see, you were correct in describing young Twilight's metamorphosis as having a corrosive effect on her soul. What you neglected to consider are the myriad forms corrosion can take. Compare, for example, iron and aluminum.
"When iron corrodes, it becomes rust. The rust flakes off, exposing more iron, allowing the cycle to continue until it's all gone red and crumbly. It's essentially a form of metal burning, just not nearly as fun as the kinds you can get on the left end of the periodic table. Instant explosions, just add water! But I digress...
"Corroding aluminum, by contrast, doesn't become weaker. It becomes stronger. Aluminum oxide is corundum, more commonly known as ruby or sapphire. Not emerald, though. That's beryl, rather more chemically complex, and it's not like you can't capture Rayquaza in the other two anyway. In any case, aluminum protects itself from the harmful effects of oxygen by coating itself in a thin layer of gemstone, guarding the rest of the metal from further transmutation.
"So, Celestia, while we both have observed that your student's will lacks the strength of iron, what we need to be asking ourselves now is does it have the ingenuity of aluminum?”
Twilight reigns uneasily, knowing that she can’t go back on the path she’s traveled down. In her gut, she knows this is not how things should have gone. But she will do the best she can with what she has, whether that means finding a cure for those less far gone than her or transforming the glistening oil into something that truly does leave its victims better than when it found them.
Jin-Gitaxias’s Defeat 2U
Instant
This spell costs 2 less to cast if it targets a Phyrexian spell.
Counter target creature or planeswalker spell.
“Almost perfect, but not quite.”
—Twilight Sparkle, Core Scholar
Trixie, Hoof of the Scholar 2UU
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Wizard
XU, T: Copy target spell with converted mana cost X an opponent controls. You may choose new targets for the copy. (A copy of a permanent spell becomes a token.)
2/2
Twilight Sparkle, Core Scholar 4UU
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Praetor
Hexproof
If a player would draw a card, instead you look at the top two cards of that player’s library and choose one. That player puts the chosen card into their hand and the other into their graveyard.
“Now a truly great work can begin.”
4/3
The Thane of Fun
Before the invasion, seven Steel Thanes vied for control over the Mephidross, New Phyrexia’s blasted mire of corrosion and undeath; the title of praetor; and ultimately that of Father of Machines. Their great game raged alongside the Mirran-Phyrexian War and beyond, razor-toothed smiles and messenger-flaying courtesies concealing other hideous blades at the ready. So much so that the portal to Ungula became but another piece in their political games, barely used as it kept changing hands.
Then Pinkie Pie showed up and started killing them all.
By all rights, Pinkie shouldn’t have been affected by the glistening oil. Not directly. The planeswalker Spark doesn’t provide complete immunity to the foul stuff, but it does make planeswalkers into asymptomatic carriers. But, whether because of the temporal shenanigans that twisted her personal timeline into knots, the bonds of Harmony, or some other inexplicable peculiarity of the Pink, she was on the road to ruin as much as her friends. And she wasn’t happy about it.
Thus did the scourge of Segovia, the sorrow of Mercadia, the Crimson Nightmare of old make one final ride through the thanes’ holdings, eradicating them with extreme prejudice and more than a little bitter irony. Sheoldred managed a desperate escape through the portal, later destroyed by Chrysalis. Many of the others were not so fortunate. The most unusual case was Thrissik, the Writing Thane, who believed that Phyrexia would need to create its own destroyer to continue its cycle of continual improvement. He welcomed Pinkie with open appendages, literally embracing his own destruction to the point that he refused her offer to spare him.
She gave him a cupcake for being a good sport about the whole thing.
Pinkie’s return to Ungula came at the head of a new group of friends. The compleated Moriok humans found themselves in a bizarre world and in bizarre forms, but they trusted the one person who had ever, ever shown them unconditional kindness and optimism. They were still blind, misshapen creatures with chunks of lead coming out of their flesh, but Pinkie had planned for that.
After all, in the right Manehattan neighborhoods, that won’t even get a second glance.
Pinkie set up shop in the Big Orange as she sent word to her old friends. Her new ones may have accidentally introduced glistening oil to the city’s water supply, but they also helped fight off more hostile Phyrexian incursions, so it could have been worse. Little Phyrexia isn’t anywhere near as bad as Old or New Phyrexia, even if the neighborhood seems to grow by another block every few weeks. But hey, at least Vinyl Scratch has found an adoring audience for her experiments with industrial.
Sheoldred’s Defeat BB
Sorcery
Target opponent sacrifices a Phyrexian. If they do, you may return a creature card from your graveyard to your hand. Otherwise, that player sacrifices a creature.
“Sorry, can’t hear you over the music!”
—Pinkie Pie, Partying One
Vinyl, Soul Jockey 2BB
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Rogue
If a creature with toughness 0 or less would die, exile it instead. You may play that card as long as it remains exiled and may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast it.
2B: Other creatures get -1/-1 until end of turn.
3/3
Pinkie Pie, Partying One 3BB
Legendary Creature — Pony Praetor
Creatures you control have lifelink.
Creatures your opponents control have “Whenever this creature is dealt damage, you lose that much life.”
“All will be fun!”
4/4
The United Forges
Phyrexia is all about destroying free will so that all will serve to further the Great Work.
Red mana is all about freedom, passion, and individual expression.
Understandably, the red-aligned Phyrexians were having some problems even before the ponies got involved. The Quiet Furnace was so named because of its inhabitants focusing on their work to drown out the glimmers of empathy they felt for the incompleat, and the shame brought on by that concern. This internal conflict ranged from subsapient horrors hesitating before the kill to the praetor, Urabrask the Hidden, ordering his forces to disregard the Mirran refugees flooding into the Furnace Layer from the hostile surface. The work was all. The work had to be all.
Urabrask’s role in the invasion of Ungula was much the same as his role in Phyrexian politics in general. He did what was expected of him, and nothing more. A few probes into remote regions devoid of the equine life that so fascinated Jin-Gitaxias. Gathering samples of the curious “minerals” of the new plane to test their suitability in the continued reforging of New Phyrexia. Retaliating against native aggression. Nothing more.
Not until the war, impossibly, began to turn against Phyrexia. The other praetors demanded Urabrask contribute more to the effort… then one by one, went ominously silent. It wasn’t until a group of squealstoker goblins found Pinkie Pie leading reluctant Mirran refugees in a “Congratulations on Surviving This Long” party that Urabrask learned just what had happened. So he did the unthinkable.
He asked to negotiate.
There was no climactic battle between Rainbow Dash and Urabrask. No grand, high-speed clash of red-hot claws and rocket-engine wings. There was only a meeting between equals and peers, those who recognized not just the virtue and value of loyalty, but also that some did not deserve it. The deal was simple, for Urabrask is no conniving schemer: Take the Mirrans away, and leave the Furnace to its work.
The refugees of Mirrodin, including the native planeswalker Koth, the phyresis-immune Melira, and a very conflicted Elspeth Tirel, now have homes in Equestria. By sheer coincidence, they ended up flooding into a thoroughly unprepared Our Town, prompting Starlight Glimmer to get while the getting was good. Some are happy to leave the war behind them. Others want to return and reclaim their homeland. All of them are leery of the Equestrians, especially their unlikely prismatic savior.
Rainbow Dash, for her part, has mixed feelings about her altered state, from rocket thrusters in her wings like a Mirran dragon’s to literal iron hooves to a body temperature that has a tendency to spike along with her temper. She wants to offer the same chance to the native Phyrexians that Urabrask gave to the Mirrans and show them what they’re missing while cooped up underground. But at the same time, she knows she’s changed into something worse, and that she doesn’t always see that. Nowhere is that more clear than what she and Twilight did for and to Scootaloo.
Twilight had been a flurry of activity. Now she’d just… stopped. Eyes pointed at a checklist but seeing nothing. “Is everything okay?" said Dash.
Twilight sighed. "I'm having to perform a complete double pterectomy, remove most of the pectoral flight muscles, replace them with a red mana reservoir tied to Scootaloo's personal magic, install more than two dozen feet of highly reactive wiring and the accompanying spooling mechanism, and augment her cerebellum such that she'll have even a degree of the prehensility exhibited by the average pegasus wing. No, Rainbow. Everything is not okay."
"What's wrong?"
"What's wrong is that I'm carving up your biggest fan like a griffin's dinner because you asked me to. Do you know where I got the wire that's going to replace her wings? I had to kill a phoenix. I had to find one of the few incredibly endangered Mirran phoenixes managing to persist in the Oxidda Range and kill it in a way from which it couldn't recover. Do you know what kind of incredibly foul magic has to be used to kill a phoenix and make it stay dead, Dash? Do you understand the kind of horrific act I committed at your request and my own initiative?"
"So your conscience is kicking in? Now?"
"I know, it's a little late. But still, what am I doing to this filly? What have we become? What are we becoming even now?"
"You're fulfilling her dreams, Twilight. You're doing what ponykind couldn't have ever done before now. Sure, you're doing it kind of creepily, but I'm sure that Scoot's gonna thank you for it.”
For now, Dash’s equinity and compleation are in an uneasy balance. No one in either plane knows what she’ll do next, herself included. She swore to look after those Urabrask couldn’t… but neither had thought to pin down precisely what that meant.
Scootaloo Incandescent 1R
Legendary Creature — Pegasus Phoenix
Flying, trample, haste
When Scootaloo Incandescent deals combat damage, sacrifice it.
At the beginning of each end step, if an opponent lost 4 or more life this turn, return Scootaloo from your graveyard to your hand.
3/1
Urabrask’s Surrender 1RR
Sorcery
Gain control of target creature until end of turn. Untap that creature. It gains haste until end of turn. If it’s a Phyrexian, sacrifice it at the beginning of the next end step.
“I’ll help all of them. I promise.”
—Rainbow Dash the Awesome
Rainbow Dash the Awesome 3RR
Legendary Creature — Pegasus Praetor
Flying
Whenever Rainbow Dash or another creature enters the battlefield under your control, that creature gets +2/+0 and gains haste until end of turn.
Whenever a creature enters the battlefield under an opponent’s control, tap that creature. Rainbow Dash deals 2 damage to it.
3/3
The Harnessed Wilds
The Vicious Swarm was nominally the work of Vorinclex, the Voice of Hunger, though the compleated, soulless corpse of Glissa oversaw much of the actual work. Both saw the ideal Phyrexia as a nightmarish, circular food chain of endless predation, but Glissa acted to realize the goal with the same drive and determination that had once saved the plane, turning the copper pseudoforest of the Tangle into an ever-escalating cycle of exaggerated savagery.
She employed the same tactics in the invasion of Equestria: Strike first, strike hard, and never relent. The issue was that she struck the Everfree Forest, which had its own opinions on the matter. Unlike the sparsely populated Mirrans, still reeling from losing their best and brightest in the wake of the Fifth Dawn, Equestria could spread news faster than Phyrexia could spread infection. All the Everfree needed to do was contact an old, respected adversary. Granny Smith did the rest.
That’s not to say that the Swarm did no damage. The battles in the Everfree between a malicious genius loci and abominations of unnatural selection were unspeakable at best. Those involving the lagomaths, Angel Bunny’s race of hyperintelligent rabbits, were perhaps even worse. The less said about Punchline, Ungula’s first dryad, made of poison joke and bearing the Element of Mischief, the better. But Phyrexia left scars in all species that even the Everfree’s rampant growth struggled to heal, and the battles came at a fast enough rate that attrition threatened to overtake the forest.
That was when the Apple family provided reinforcements, along with Zecora and Fluttershy. Fluttershy in particular delivered the most righteous Stare of her life to Vorinclex, giving him the first and last moment of shame he ever experienced. Short-lived as it was, it was enough for the Apples to gain the upper hand, enough for Vorinclex to retreat. From grazing herbivores.
Glissa terminated him personally when she heard that.
From there, it was a brutal slugfest of a war, ingenuity versus relentless, mindless aggression. Glissa was a merciless foe… but not exactly the best general, especially when most of her troops had no capacity for tactical thought. Even accelerated evolution takes time, and the Equestrian forces pushed back footholds even as the Everfree devised its own new surprises for attempts to be tricky with portal deployment.
But eventually, one blunder on both sides saw both Big Macintosh and Applejack in the Tangle. Glissa was vicious, merciless, and experienced.
She was also an elf, a species not exactly renown throughout the Multiverse for raw physical might. Whereas Applejack’s phyretic hypertrophy had, by this point, made her even bigger than her brother and given her organic bronze armor over a good portion of her body. The tables turned in that final battle, and Glissa did still win in a sense, with numbers and muscle winning the day.
In every other sense, Applejack had won the Swarm by right of conquest. She just wasn’t sure what to do with it. So, she fell back on what she knew and decided to see what her new labor force could do in the way of farming.
As it turned out, quite a lot. A new form of artificial selection took place, putting down those monstrosities too mindless to train and seeing what agricultural techniques translated across the planes. Like her ancestors before her, Applejack finds herself a frontiersmare settling the wilderness, much to the natives’ confusion. She expects the first tanglebloom harvest to make it to Ponyville’s farmers’ market in a few moons, and has even found a way to use glistening oil to improve crop yields at Sweet Apple Acres.
It’s unclear just how much impact Applejack’s new practices will have on either plane. Especially given how she’s the praetor who’s spending the most time on New Phyrexia. The memories encoded in the oil still expect a single leader, one monolithic and deified Father of Machines. And the Apple family’s never been shy about adoption, especially after so many of their members came out of the war for the Everfree somewhat changed.
Vorinclex’s Defeat 1G
Sorcery
Choose target creature you control and target creature you control don’t control. If the creature you don’t control is a Phyrexian, the creature you control gains deathtouch and indestructible until end of turn. Then those creatures fight each other.
“Get off my land.”
—Applejack, Voice of Vigor
Macintosh, Apex Harvester 4G
Legendary Creature — Pony Druid
As Macintosh enters the battlefield, choose yup or nope.
• Yup — Whenever you tap a basic land for mana, add one mana of any color that land produced.
• Nope — Activated abilities of lands your opponents control cost (gp) more to activate unless they’re mana abilities. ((gp) can be paid with G or 2 life.)
4/4
Applejack, Voice of Vigor 4GG
Legendary Creature — Pony Praetor
Trample
Untap all lands you control during each other player’s untap step.
At the beginning of your upkeep, tap all lands your opponents control.
“This here Tangle’s under new management.”
5/5
The Objectors
Obviously, ponies aren’t going to be happy after the world’s greatest heroes stop an invasion only to restart it after tweaking it to better suit their tastes. The realization set in with some earlier than others. Twilight’s dramatic arrival in Canterlot alerted the capital to some kind of corruptive magic, but the full details never made themselves known until it was too late.
Now the uncorrupted Equestrians find themselves in an uncomfortable situation. The center of the nation is infected… but contained. Pockets of Phyrexian activity elsewhere are also refugee camps. By all accounts, the Bearers are doing everything in their power to keep the threat from spreading… but aren’t doing anything to actually cure it within their borders. The rest of the world watches, waiting to see how the next domino falls. No one on either side—if it even is a matter of sides anymore—is sure what happens next.
Alicorns appear to be immune to the effects of the glistening oil, at least in terms of passive exposure. None have been captured for more extreme experimentation, and none intend to. They do still have a country to run. Twilight claiming Canterlot as a blend of research facility, cult of personality, and quarantine zone hasn’t changed that. It has, however, made Fillydelphia the interim capital of the nation, which has led to issues of its own.
Needless to say, Celestia is reevaluating a lot of plans. Among other concerns, Sombra is overdue. Element of Cunning or no, she’s working with little to no idea of what to expect in the future. These are strange times for everypony, most of all for the mare who’s found millennia of past experience worthless in the face of this new challenge.
Luna is split. She owes it to her saviors to try to cleanse them in turn, but has no idea how, or even if it is possible beyond what has already been done. Still, those same saviors threaten the rest of her ponies merely by existing… but to remove them would merely cause the hydra to grow yet more heads. The uncertainty tears at her, as do her subjects’ unquiet dreams.
The planetary dynasts do what they have already done, maintaining Equestria and reality in their own ways. Cadence and Vigilance, love and war, still plan for the Bearer-praetors’ inevitable betrayal, the former despite her convictions and the latter because of them. Prudence and the rest of the ETSAB are taking away the lessons of the war, hardening Ungula against interplanar invasions and searching through alternate realities to see how they could have done better, and what options yet remain. Temperance, Princess of Endings, contemplates whether it is within her rights and capabilities to simply kill the obvious threat to Equestria. And the wandering diplomat Princess Divergence… should get back to Equestria at some point this year. Probably.
Lyra, one of the most notable veterans of the war for her audacious use of alternate versions of herself, now finds herself behind enemy lines and offering vital intelligence for the Crown. The other local members of the ETSAB retreated to safer points in time when the full impact of Rarity’s augmentations became clear. Lyra could theoretically shift to another worldline at any time… if it weren’t for Bonbon’s choice to help as best she could. Which included servos in her rear legs.
Ditzy Doo isn’t quite as trapped. Indeed, like Koth before her, she’s asking for help throughout the Multiverse. Most of her contacts are understandably incredulous (and Tezzeret isn’t answering her summons at all) but between them and all the medical lore she can, ahem, aggressively borrow, she’ll do whatever she can to fix this. Above all else, she’s looking for hints as to Karn’s whereabouts.
And then there’s Fluttershy. There can be no Kindness in Phyrexia. Introducing the glistening oil to her system resulted in a violent rejection. More than that, it provoked an immune response. Fluttershy served as a field medic during the Everfree War, and she is unknowingly the reason why more of the Apple family hasn’t been compleated. She’s staying close to her friends. At times, she seems like the one thing keeping them all together as they visit at her cottage. And she could well be the key to truly ending Phyrexia. All she needs is a way to properly transmit her immunity.
All she needs is a horn…
Lyra Ad Infinitum GUR
Legendary Creature — Unicorn Wizard
At the beginning of each upkeep, create a 1/1 blue Unicorn creature token.
G, Sacrifice a Unicorn: Lyra gains indestructible until end of turn.
U, Sacrifice a Unicorn: Tap target creature.
R, Sacrifice a Unicorn: Lyra deals 1 damage to any target.
2/2
Ditzy, Solace Seeker 1WU
Legendary Planeswalker — Ditzy
+1: You gain 2 life. You can’t get counters until your next turn.
-2: Return target nonland permanent to its owner’s hand.
-6: For each card type other than creature and land, search your library for a card of that type, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
3
Cadence, Love in War 3UR
Legendary Creature — Noble Soldier
Alicorn (This card is also a Pony Pegasus Unicorn.)
Flying, haste
When Cadence enters the battlefield, untap target permanent an opponent controls. That permanent gains haste until end of turn. If you’re poisoned, gain control of it. Otherwise, gain control of it until end of turn.
3/3
Fluttershy, the Purifier 3GW
Legendary Creature — Pegasus Druid
Flying, vigilance, protection from Praetors
Creature you control can’t have -1/-1 counters put on them.
Hoofcraft — At the beginning of your upkeep, if you control three or more Ponies, Pegasi, and/or Unicorns, you lose a poison counter.
4/4
Didn't play durring the phyrexia events, so this is interesting lore to take in.
Though, I wonder what would happen if phyrexia were to encounter the technocyte.
Stupid Complicated Game Alert: Worth mentioning in the case of Trixie that spells on the stack consider what was paid for X as part of their converted mana cost. Don't expect to use this on a lethal fireball (but if you do, your copy will resolve first and you'll win the game before the original can kill you)
Play Design Alert: Did Scootaloo Incandescent originally have enough power to trigger her own resurrection effect? It feels like that got trimmed down later in the process due to power level concerns.
Inside Baseball Alert: According to elsewhere, Rainbow Dash lacks flavor text because there wasn't room on the card for it... and the original proposal seems to have been written assuming an actual Defeat.
Stupid Complicated Game Alert: The ex-Bearers were designed a long time ago, and I feel Fluttershy ought to upgrade to protection from Praetors and from Phyrexians now that the latter is a thing she can have.
So, basically, the Mane 6 and co. saved Equestria from being Phyrexia Part 3....but then they realize that they LIKE their new upgrades, so they take over what's left of Phyrexia and try to reform it into something positive, like they always do with the villains. Problem with that is, well, Phyrexia is wrong, in terms of how life is supposed to be, and so they're not really making everything better, they're making it....very, very awkward.
And the only hope of getting things back to normal is if Fluttershy becomes an Alicorn.
Did I get that right?
If that's what it takes, then no wonder it wasn't addressed in canon!
I still have some ideas of my own from years back of MLP vs. Phyrexia. The first difference between mine and yours was making Phyrexia indirectly responsible for Nightmare Moon. This also made the Elements capable of purging Glistening Oil in my version of events.
I had snow as something that could confuse Phyrexia, as New Phyrexia didn't have any, including a card that made it so that Phyrexian Mana couldn't be paid with Snow Mana, and cards that could introduce Snow. I had Urabrask actually betray the other Praetors altogether, but he still managed to hurt the side he was on unintentionally. When Karn appeared, I gave him a transformation ability, with his non-Planeswalker side being a vehicle (and then made a card that let people search for double-faced cards, which were only cards that could transform back then; I named it "Cross-Franchise Help").
The wyrdest thing I did, was having Twilight give virgin birth to the reincarnation of Urza Planeswalker, with Miracle Sparkle being a natural-born Alicorn.
The end of this story had all of Phyrexia defeated save one, and The Last Phyrexian was a card of its own, with flavour text about how Phyrexian can never truly be destroyed.
As fitting an end as any, I suppose. The planeswalker's-guide-styled post was an interesting look into this worldline, though I understand its being left permanently in quarantine.
The card designs were cool, especially your tweaks to the formula on defeats.
It seems to me that kindness being something tbat conspicuously rejects Phyrexia is something that Twilight’s research could latch on to. If she manages to hack the oil, and make it accept all six elements, adding Kindness makes the Phyrexians go from an aggressively hegemonizing swarm to a simply a new mode of life. Because yeah, kindness and empathy are what they’re lacking.
Of course that introduces a final conflict: whether an ascended Fluttershy cures Phyrexia entirely or whether they introduce Kindness to the oil and see what happens. So it comes down to a choice between the Destroy and Synthesis ending, really.
Having never read the original story, I can nonetheless understand why you never actually finished it properly. It gives me vibes of my own first, less-than-ideal fic on the site, in that it comes across more as an interesting, edgy what-if scenario than a character-driven narrative. The focus just seems to be describing the series of events and changes to the settings, like the Planeswalker's Guides as Bugsydor said, rather than exploring the psychological toll Phyresis would have on the Mane Six, which would have far more depth as the focus. Still, this blog was a neat read.
If I was going to write something similar to this today, it'd probably be a rewrite of the War of the Spark (which certainly needs it), with Bolas executing his 'brilliant' plan on Equus instead of Ravnica. This makes more sense for him on a tactical level, as the average pony is far less accustomed to combat than the average Ravnican, and his Eternals would thus encounter significantly reduced resistance. Not to mention that Jace and the rest of the Gatewatch would lose access to the large network of allies he'd gathered over the years during his time as the Living Guildpact. And the power of friendship makes more sense as a means of stopping the old Dragon-God than the whole 'I made my God-Eternals capable of harvesting my own spark for some reason despite all other harvested sparks automatically going to me' thing.
I'm sorry to see the story officially dead, but such is life.
I'm a little confused by the first half of this sentence. Did you accidentally omit a word? Am I just being thick?
Should the compleated Ungulans have the Phyrexian creature type introduced with Vorinclex? IIRC, MaRo has said they'll be updating existing cards to add it.
Was Noxious Harvest an earlier card, or is there a new set specifically of Phthisis is Magic-inspired cards to browse?
Can you elaborate on the fight with Glissa? How did she win? What happened to her?
Anyhow, thanks for this ending of sorts
5441339
Since this technically is a What Would Have Been scenario, given the prologue!
----
Was hoping for a Punchline card since... Oh wait, no, the only Bearer of Discord that got a card is Crackle and that one isn't even about being the Bearer of Vanity.
5441334
Adding to this, Fluttershy reforming and reformatting the oil rather than destroying it would be the parallel to her befriending Discord. Teaching Phyrexia to be kind would change its corrosive nature, since its biggest problem is that it's like a plane missing a color of mana: fundamentally incomplete. Phyrexia could become a truly benevolent entity, only accepting volunteers and being a positive internal society. Something there's nothing wrong with joining. But if you DO join you will be fundamentally changed.
Taking this further, a TRULY reformed Phyrexia, instead of what we have now, would come down to my ideas on Harmony and Discord. Phyrexia Nova (as opposed to the current New) would be a highly harmonic concordance, even more than Ungula is normally. There's less individuality (but still some) and incredible coordination and unity. And outside of the Nova we have the Elements of Discord, with the wildness and chaos and mess and vibrancy of true individuality. Each supports the other, and Phyrexia Nova takes the lessons it already learned from assimilating other colors than black to realize the value of synthesis with other kinds of beings. It isn't trying to dominate anymore, it's seeking perfection through collaboration.
5441377
Think the 'not' was meant to be a 'now', what with her followers turning to a more fashionable coat.
5441377
By my reading, she didn't actually "win" in the conventional sense. Applejack was the epitome of the ideals Glissa espoused, and that was enough for Phyrexia.
I'm still salty about NPH.
I just felt everyone needed to know that.
And no, I don't mean Neil Patrick Harris.
...Neat cards, though.
Dang man, this looks like a lot of quality thought-material. A pity that the story will not be completed. I suppose if it's been on ice that long, though, it's probably best to move on.
It's inspiring to see so much thought about corrupted/semi-corrupted versions of the M6, each trying to do the right thing as their basis of understanding of "the right thing" shifts out from underneath them. Such things catch my interest for, uh, purely speculative purposes, I assure you.
Oh I like that.
5441245
File footage of technocytes encountering glistening oil:
5441252
Scootaloo is deliberately designed to not trigger without outside help. Such as, for example, Rainbow Dash.
5441272
More or less, yeah. It's a considerable mess for everyone on both planes.
5441284
Probably not the only method that would get Scootaloo airborne, but yeah, not a viable option when dealing with standard Equestrian medical ethics.
5441300
I have to appreciate the irony of snow confusing Phyrexia. Never stopped Heimdar.
The mental image of Karn as an honorary Autobot is delightful, and I thank you for it.
5441305
Yeah, I figured a broad overview was the best way to cover the remaining ground.
5441334
This is Magic we're talking about. Choosing the color of your ending particle effect can be very important indeed.
In all seriousness, you do paint a wonderful image of Phyrexia Nova. Some timelines need a Princess Fluttershy more than a Twilight.
5441339
In past-me's defense, the story itself was more character oriented; the Planeswalker's Guide formatting is a consequence of condensing several dozen unwritten kilowords into a single blog post.
That said, I do like the idea of a spin on War of the Spark set on Equestria... though in the Ungula setting, Bolas deliberately omitted the pony plane from recieving the Beacon's transmissions. Pinkie Pie lives there, after all. If any force in the multiverse could upset his meticulously crafted plans, it's her.
5441377
Basically, folks on both sides held down Norn (i.e. flesh both compleated and not compleated.)
The issue there is that they are still all of the relevant types listed above. Crowbarring in Phyrexian on top of that feels a bit much.
Noxious Harvest was a one-off nod to My Little Praetor in the... "Campfire Tales" blog? Huh. I'm sure I had reason that made sense at the time.
As has been noted, Glissa only won in the sense that her philosophy did, with raw muscle and numbers winning that final fight. In every other sense, including who survived, Applejack was the victor.
5441386
Sorry to disappoint there. As I recall, I did make a design for her, something along these lines:
Punchline, Noxious Prankster BRG
Legendary Creature — Dryad
Reach, deathtouch
Whenever a creature dealt damage by Punchline this turn dies, that creature's controller reveals cards from the top of their library until they reveal a creature card. That player puts that card onto the battlefield, then shuffles their library.
2/5
5441706
Heh. I've been calling the crystal eyesore that for years. The way I figure it, if we never got a name, netiher did Ponyville. Thus the placeholder eventually became the official title, just as Rarity warned Twilight.
Glad you found the blog enjoyable on a purely speculative level.
It's interesting to note that at least some of the Mane Six shifted positions in the color pie - if I recall correctly, you assigned Kindness to white, Honesty to green, Loyalty to red, Generosity to blue, and Laughter to black, with Magic being colorless? So Rarity went white and Twilight went blue. What implications does this have for the physical Elements and/or their personalities? (Also, I just noticed your canon Pinkie card is red, not black. Are there other pie changes for the Ungulaverse?)
I also note that all of the compleated Bearers are now mono-color, which is appropriate. (And some of them were already. Looking at you, Applejack. ... And at you, phone autocorrect, which thought I wanted "Superman" at first swipe.)
I came here to ask what Ditzy was up to, but I see you've covered that. I'm curious how she prevented the Phyrexian incursion in the timeline where she was warned of their attack, though.