In early 2023, Magic: The Gathering continued its four-part Phyrexian storyline with the premier set Phyrexia: All Will Be One. If the name didn’t tip you off, this set took us on a trip into the belly of the beast, to the sinister plane of New Phyrexia itself. Black wastelands of scrap, gleaming white spires, and rivers of molten slag all feature in this inhospitable world of metal monsters.
Phyrexia All Will Be One gave us a proper look at the New Phyrexian homeworld, to see how Elesh Norn puts her feet up on her days off. The Phyrexians invaded in Dominaria United, so now it was payback time.
With the knowledge gained in The Brothers’ War, a strike force of heroic MTG planeswalkers planned to take the fight right to the source… But half of them would be compleated in the process!
All Will Be One featured plenty of poison, proliferate, and an enormous helping of the Phyrexian creature type. From card spoilers to Phyrexia: All Will Be One’s release date, here’s everything you need to know about this past set. Check out our MTG 2023 release schedule for details on the rest of that year’s MTG sets.
MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One release date
MTG Phyrexia All Will Be One came out on February 10, 2023. That’s the date of Phyrexia All Will Be One’s global tabletop release. Before that, there was a week of prerelease events, running from February 3 – 9.
The set pretty much followed MTG’s regular cadence, with a week of spoilers running from January 17 to January 25. Fans will be used to this by now, but at the time it was quiet the innovation that this set (and the next one) would be available in paper at prerelease events prior to its digital launch. That’s reflected in Phyrexia: All Will Be One’s MTG Arena launch date of February 7.
MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One cards
On December 13 we saw our first official card previews for MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One. One particular highlight is Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines. This Phyrexian Praetor doubles all your ETB triggers, while negating all your opponents’ (ouch!). The wide variety of different gorgeous-yet-grim art variants also makes Elesh Norn pretty desireable (just look at the Junji Ito Elesh Norn art).
Then there’s Blue Sun’s Twilight. Obviously playing off the ‘Sun’s Zenith’ cards, this is part of a cycle, showing monuments to all of the Phyrexian Praetors. Jin-Gix’s spell here lets you seize control of another creature, and make a copy of it if you pay an extra price. This is part of a cycle, and all the Praetors have their own versions.
You should also check out the set’s many, many planeswalkers – there are ten in total! Koth, Fire of Resistance is a rare planeswalker who cares a great deal about Mountains, while Kaito, Dancing Shadow works great with ninjas. The Eternal Wanderer can protect herself incredibly well, and wipe the board. These are three of the five planeswalkers that survived the mission – but other beloved characters were not so lucky…
Also on the heroes side, Boros creature Jor Kadeen can pump up and draw cards, if you’ve got enough MTG equipment. While on the bad guy’s side of the struggle, there’s a terrifying black reprint, Phyrexian Obliterator. Then, oh no! Poor Slobad was compleated, becoming Slobad, Iron Goblin, who can sacrifice artifacts to make mana, to create more artifacts.
Lukka was the first compleated planeswalker to be revealed, getting offed pretty much as soon as the ‘walkers arrived. His new card, Lukka, Bound to Ruin looks punishing in a creature-heavy deck, with three useful abilities, each of which can be used right out the gate. Nahiri, the Unforgiving is a cheapo walker that can loot, and grab temporary creatures and equipment out of the yard.
Meanwhile, Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting turns your foe’s creatures into treasure. Nissa, Ascended Animist can create huge tokens and huge damage boosts, and Jace, the Perfected Mind is a mill-happy card drawer.
Other notable cards include Ezuri, Stalker of Spheres, a sinister MTG elf that loves proliferate. Mondrak, Glory Dominus, is basically Doubling Season on a stick, but can quickly make itself indestructible. It makes for an awesome MTG Commander, and is designed to look like a biblically accurate angel!
What else? Well, there was a new Atraxa card that got a lot of play in some of the best MTG Arena decks, and also revealed the existence of an entirely new, then-unreleased MTG card type, Battle. There was also a new Mirran sword, the Sword of Forge and Frontier, which offered some great card advantage and ramping opportunities.
Clearly the Phyrexian oil containers were rusting, as this was a particularly leaky MTG set, with grainy images of all sorts of cards turning up on social media. We don’t cover those here, but one particular mishap caught our eye: prior to the set’s release, Phyrexia: All Will Be One cards were showing up in Dominaria Remastered packs.
MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One mechanics
One of the more controversial new mechanics in Phyrexia: All Will Be One was Toxic. Players dealt damage by a creature with Toxic get a number of poison counters equal to the Toxic value. Wizards has said it was nervous to use them, but poison counters were at last back in Standard. (Despite Wizards’ trepidation, it took almost an entire year for a Bant Toxic deck to find a real spot in the Standard meta).
Making poison even more dangerous, we had Proliferate, which lets you add a counter of the same type to anything that already has a counter. Like poison, this mechanic was another shoe-in for the set.
Not only is the proliferate keyword tied intrinsically to the Phyrexians, first appearing in Scars of Mirridon, there were counters all over the shop in Standard at the time, from sagas, to brand new counter types like stun and shield.
Adding to their number, oil counters were another new mechanic, a kind of all-purpose counter designed to help proliferate do lots of different things. There aren’t any regular +1/+1 counters in the set though, as Wizards felt this would get confusing.
When it comes to Poison, ten is traditionally the magic number, and it’s been a bit of an all or nothing mechanic in the past. Corrupted was the final new mechanic, and it tried to solve this problem.
Essentially, it was a threshold that triggers once an opponent has gained three or more poison counters – meaning there was value in just a smidgen of poison, as well as a lethal dose.
MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One Commander decks
Another ‘sort of leaky’ incident, the two Phyrexia All Will Be One Commander decks were revealed early on Amazon. The first, representing the baddies, is led by a relative of one our all time favourite MTG commanders, Atraxa. Ixhel, Descendant of Atraxa is a white, green, and black Phyrexian angel with Toxic 2, who lets you steal and cast other players’ cards, provided they have a poison counter.
The Boros commander, Neyali, Sun’s Vanguard, leads the rebel’s Commander deck. She’s a token-based commander, letting you exile cards from your library and play them on turns when you attack with a token.
Both are pretty standard card advantage engines, though they go about earning you value in very different ways. Of note, every color except blue is represented in the decks.
MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One story
In the 2022 Wizards Presents showcase, it was stated that in Phyrexia: All Will Be One “our villains grow ever stronger”. That’s because this is the set where the Phyrexians’ plans come to fruition, before a massive showdown in March of the Machine marks the finale of the storyline.
What exactly were those plans? Well, you see those tentacle thingies at the bottom of the image above? Those are the ‘branches’ of what Phyrexia dubbed its ‘invasion tree’, Realmbreaker. In the very next set, March of the Machine, Realmbreaker goes smashing into planes throughout the multiverse, setting the stage for an interplanar war.
In Phyrexia: All Will Be One, the heroes were trying to take their newly forged Sylex superweapon and dive through the many layers of Phyrexia to reach Realmbreaker’s Seedcore and blow it up. Spoilers: This didn’t go very well.
Before Phyrexia: All Will Be One it had been a good decade since we visited New Phyrexia, and the plane had changed quite a bit since we last came a-calling. Phyrexia: All Will Be One, therefore had a whole new world to show us, with nine spheres to explore, from the “tangled copper wilderness” of the Hunter’s Maze to the spooky, cathedral-filled Fair Basilica.
One key detail of the story, is that a grand total of five, yes five, planeswalkers were compleated in MTG Phyrexia: All Will Be One. Ultimately it was fairly obvious that this process would be reversed, but it was still good fun to theorize about the list of possible victims.