As someone who picked up the game as a teenager in 2011, I missed the boat on a lot of inside jokes and lingo. What does "Vorthos" mean and where does the term come from?
From what I gather, it either refers to story enthusiasts or the stories themselves, but it's such a strange word. What's the story behind it?
Skrelv's official lore is as follows:
"Skrelv was a mite who fulfilled his intended purpose and was supposed to be recycled for parts. Instead, he bit a guy's finger and ran off. After that, he built a nest."
That's it. You're all caught up. I love Skrelv.
In a 2011 article,Mark Rosewater revealed that the "Scars of Mirrodin" block had its story premise changed at the last minute. While the final story focused on the war, the original plan was to start on an already converted New Phyrexia and go from there. I thought it would be fun to speculate on what the original plan was using some scraps that were left behind.
Surprisingly, the plan was always to turn Mirrodin into New Phyrexia, stretching all the way back to when Karn created Argentum. The idea was that Memnarch would start the process by terraforming the plane and discovering a way to create flesh/metal hybrids. Meanwhile, Karn himself carried glistening oil that could infect the plane. At the end of the Mirrodin block, Karn empties the plane of its non-indigenous inhabitants. Shortly afterward, he gets de-sparked during the mending, leaving him stranded. The idea was that Karn and his golems would get infected over time and turned into Phyrexians. By the time we came back to the plane, it had become Phyrexia and Karn was the Father of the Machines.
At this point in the article, Rosewater stretches the truth just a little (for very understandable reasons). Mirrodin happened to be the block that was on store shelves when Yu-Gi-Oh came out and reignited interest in trading card games. As a result, Mirrodin was near and dear to a lot of players who either started playing or returned to Magic at the time. Although Mirrodin was supposed to be a stepping stone to New Phyrexia, it was now a fan favorite that couldn't just be replaced offscreen. (Naturally, Rosewater couldn't mention Yugioh on Wizards' website, so he just says that the set sold well, but doesn't elaborate on why.)
To fix this, the story made a slight retcon so it could pivot. Instead of emptying the plane at the end of the Mirrodin block, Karn had only sent the older generation of Mirrans back home. Now, Mirrodin was home to living beings who would fight off the Phyrexians. We would return to Mirrodin (unheard of at the time) and give it a day in the sun before the Phyrexians took over.
New Phyrexia was a "bottom-up" block, so the card mechanics were designed first, then a story was built around them. This meant that by the time the story premise was changed, the three sets were already well into development. It seems like the design team just changed the flavor of some cards to make them Mirrans, swapped some cards between the first and second sets, then went from there. While we don't know for sure, we do know that the "Mirran to Phyrexian ratio" was one of the last things that was figured out.
Also, it was definitely confirmed that "Mirrodin Pure" was never going to happen. The "two possible sets" thing was a marketing ploy. No matter what happened, Phyrexia was going to win. Wizards has outright confessed this a few times.
Knowing all of this, if you go back and look at the three YouTube trailers for the block's sets, it's pretty clear that they were from the time when the block started with New Phyrexia, since they're pretty inaccurate to the sets that we finally got.
The "Scars of Mirrodin" trailer is almost devoid of Mirrans. Instead, it exclusively shows Phyrexian cards, nearly all of which are from the following set, Mirrodin Besieged. It's safe to say that this trailer was intended for a "New Phyrexia" set and Wizards just changed the subtitles so that the conversion of Mirrodin was still in-progress.
Next, the "Mirrodin Besieged" trailer was clearly made in a hurry on a shoestring budget. It's just a bunch of idle animations of Mirran cards. There's no voiceover work, just some stock music and sound effects. I'm curious if there was an older trailer that was thrown out once the story changed.
Finally, we come to the "New Phyrexia". Unlike the previous two trailers, this one mostly uses artwork from the correct set. It also has the same level of production as your average Magic trailer. The difference is that the story is just completely different from what we're told from the cards. The trailer tells the story of how the Phyrexians accidentally turned themselves into Phyrexian/Mirran hybrids.
The Scars of Mirrodin block also had a tie-in novel called Quest For Karn. It's a good read (if a little dark). Unlike the trailers, it lines up pretty well with the final story, with the only distinction being that the Praetors are absent. In all likelihood, this was probably just because the author didn't have time to turn a three-way power struggle into an eight-way power struggle. They appeared in plenty of flavor text, so they always existed.
Similarly, the online prose stories were written after the changes were made, so they aren't much help.
Finally, we can get some insight from the cards themselves. Going by the trailers, it seems like a lot of cards were swapped between sets to roll out mechanics like proliferate and infect more slowly. However, we can only confirm the handful of cards that appeared in the wrong trailer. It's also worth noting that names and flavor text can be changed with a few keyboard strokes and artwork can be replaced. For all we know, the Mirran cards with metalcraft used to be Phyrexians.
What's more interesting are the colorless artifacts. Some of them don't really fit into the story and imply that the Phyrexians were originally meant to meet a different sort of Mirran resistance. Cards like "Precursor Golem" and "Steel Hellkite" depict Karn's mechanical creations that originally inhabited argentum. We also have a tower that belonged to the "Ur-Golems" which the Phyrexians never found and is being used as a weapon against them. There's also a cycle of mechanical replicas of tribes from the original Mirrodin block, likely created by Karn. There's also a card called "Platinum Emperion" that sticks out to me, but I'm not really sure what to make of it. If you look at Platinum Emperion's pose and outline, it's clearly based on Bosh from the old Mirrodin block. Was Bosh supposed to come back? If so, why did his card become a generic golem at the last minute?
Slobad is also conspicuously absent from the block. While Geth and Glissa are around, Slobad just sort of disappears. "All Will Be One" revealed that he became a Phyrexian, but that was wayyyyyyyyyy after the fact. My theory is that Slobad was originally going to be the red planeswalker who called Venser for help before being replaced by Koth. Keep in mind that both the Vulshoks and the war itself were eleventh hour additions to the story, so Koth only makes sense.
With all of the above, I actually think I figured out what the unised story was. Obviously, this is all speculation, but if someone at Wizards is lurking in the subreddit, let me know how I did!
Set 1 - New Phyrexia:
After being stranded on Mirrodin, Karn began repopulating Mirrodin with golems and replicas of Mirrodin 's original inhabitants. However, Karn's latent Phyrexia corruption slowly drives him mad and he begins creating Phyrexian monstrosities. Now calling himself "Father of the Machines" Karn has begun using Memnarch's mycosynth to turn his creations into mechanical/organic hybrids. He's even begun attempting to merge with the plane, just like Yawgmoth did. While Karn goes about his business, he has constructed five Praetors to govern the five regions of New Phyrexia The concerned golems, led by a rebuilt Bosh, flee to a remote sixth region that escaped Karn's notice, hoping to find a solution.
Set 2 - Quest for Karn:
The previous events cause Slobad's spark to ignite. He seeks the aid of Karn's old friend Venser and Elspeth Tirel. The three infiltrate New Phyrexia only to find that Karn's illness has left him an almighty idiot. Slobad is horrified to find that Glissa has not only become a Phyrexian, but manipulated Karn into perpetuating his actions. Meanwhile Tezzeret has become Glissa's rival, attempting to use Phyrexia for his and Bolas' nefarious ends. The trio of planeswalkers are able to foil their adversaries' plans and come face to face with Karn himself
Set 3 - Scars of Mirrodin:
In a last-ditch effort, Venser sacrifices his life and spark to not only restore Karn, but give him new planeswalker abilities. While Karn has been saved, it's too late to undo the harm that's already been done. Karn no longer controls the Phyrexians, so he'll need to return with a solution. With Karn gone, the praetors compete for the throne, but that in itself is strange. Since when do natural-born Phyrexians fight amongst each other over personal ambition? Not only are they associated with all five colors of mana, but they have things like individuality. The Phyrexians have returned, but now they suffer from a Mirran infection.
After obsessing over this topic way more than I should have, I actually think I reverse-engineered some of Wizards' scrapped ideas. The story begins and ends in the same place, except the entire block is an exploration of New Phyrexia, rather than a return to Mirrodin. That said...I definitely think we got the better story. Creating New Phyrexia with a titanic battle was better than an unsupervised Karn being sick. Besides, unless you read the Fifth Dawn novel AND remembered it half a decade later, you probably didn't know that Mirrodin was empty. The retcon definitely helped appeal to the audience.
The only thing that was really lost was that the time we spent on the war took away from Karn creating the Phyrexians. The story is definitely that an insane Karn built them, but the out of context cards make it look like they appeared out of nowhere, kidnapped Karn, and drugged him. Karn's guilt isn't just from failing to protect Mirrodin...he was the one who destroyed it on the first place.
Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to call me crazy in the comments.