Quick recap: Urza nuked a continent, became an immortal planeswalker, and figured out that Phyrexia stole his brother. Most grief takes years to process. Urza’s took millennia, and his version of therapy was preparing to kill a god. This chapter is the long game — and friends, nobody in fiction plays a longer game than Urza.
Storming Hell Solo (Do Not Try This)
Urza’s first move as a newly minted immortal was about as healthy as you’d expect: he flew a war machine straight into Phyrexia and started blasting. He tore a hole down through multiple layers of that nightmare plane before Yawgmoth personally swatted him, invaded his mind, and sent him fleeing across the Multiverse half-mad. For years the Phyrexians hunted him from plane to plane. Somewhere in there he picked up an unlikely ally — Xantcha, a Phyrexian-made being who’d gone rogue and chose to stand with him. Even in this story’s darkest stretch, there’s a defector from hell with a conscience. I love her.
Here’s the wild part: for a long stretch, Dominaria was actually protected — sealed off from the rest of the Multiverse as a side effect of the Sylex Blast. But seals don’t last in this story. They never do. When the barrier finally fell, the door to Dominaria swung open again, and both Urza and the Phyrexians came home.
Killing the Devil’s Errand Boy
Remember Gix, the demon who corrupted Mishra? He came back too, seeding Dominaria with sleeper agents — Phyrexian infiltrators who looked human. Urza hunted them, and it all came to a head back where everything started: the Caves of Koilos. Urza destroyed Gix, but the victory cost him dearly — his friends, including Xantcha, gave their lives in that fight. A pattern worth noticing: everyone who stands near Urza’s war ends up paying for it. He notices too. He just decides it’s worth it. That’s Urza in one sentence.
The Weapon and the Bloodline
After that, Urza got organized. He knew Yawgmoth was preparing a true invasion of Dominaria — hell emptied out onto one plane — and that no single hero could stop it. So he built two things across centuries. First, a weapon: a living skyship called the Weatherlight, capable of hopping between planes, designed to one day anchor something called the Legacy — a collection of artifacts that together could kill a god.
Second — and this is where Urza’s morality really goes off the rails — he built a person. The Bloodlines Project was a multigenerational breeding program to engineer the perfect hero, the missing living piece of the Legacy. Generations of families, guided and manipulated without their knowledge, until finally a child was born: Gerrard Capashen, a kid with no idea he was designed to be the trigger of a doomsday weapon.
Sit with that. To fight the monsters who turn people into machines, Urza turned people into components. The line between him and the enemy gets thinner every chapter — and in Part 4, the invasion finally comes, and we find out which side of that line he lands on.