Magic: The Gathering/The Brothers War

Left: Urza. Right: Mishra.

The Brothers' War, by Jeff Grubb, is the first post-revision Magic: The Gathering novel. It is one of the earliest novels chronologically (corresponding to the Antiquities expansion in the card game) and tells the story of the war between the brothers Urza and Mishra and how it devastated the world.

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This novel contains examples of:

• Anti-Villain: Ashnod. She does some nasty things, but she does try to justify them with some semblance of morality (claiming that she "saved" prisoners of Urza's forces who were slated for execution by turning them into Transmogrants and only torturing Tawnos because her torture is far less worse than the Fallaji's) and leaves Mishra when it's clear that he's gone completely overboard.
• Apocalypse How: The Sylex sets on an explosion that wipes out Argoth and sends out shockwaves that level terrain and form new mountains thousands of miles away. It touched off both The Dark and the Ice Age, and was so powerful it cracked the Multiverse so that Dominaria and a handful of other planes were separated from the rest of the Multiverse...a problem that wouldn't be fixed until the events of the Time Spiral block, several millennia later.
• Bald Woman: Hurkyl is described this way, although it's noted that she grows her hair out long again while at Terisia city because she is away from the lice-infested underground seaside school of Lat-Nam.
• Beam-O-War: Seen during the fight between Urza and Mishra that resulted in Tocasia's death.
• Bio Augmentation:
  • Ashnod's transmogrants, applying the art of artifice to the human body.
  • The Priests of Gix replace body parts with machines and eventually convince Mishra to do the same.
• Cain and Abel: Well, obviously.
• Chekhov's Gun: Tawnos's Coffin, which ends up allowing him to survive the final battle of the war.
• Clockwork Creature: Tawnos' clockwork avians, dragon engines, Yotian soldiers... it's an artificers war, so what did you expect?
• Dating Catwoman: Tawnos and Ashnod are in love, despite being generals on opposite sides of the war.
• Engagement Challenge: The Warlord of Kroog, searching for a powerful warrior to wed his daughter, decrees that whoever can move a giant jade statue from one end of the palace courtyard to the other will win the hand of Princess Kayla. Urza completes the challenge by building an automaton to lift the statue.
• Fantastic Nuke: The sylex.
• Foe Yay: Tawnos and Ashnod.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Both Urza and Mishra, as well as Tawnos.
• How We Got Here: The opening sequence depicts Tawnos and Ashnod on "the night before the world ended" sitting on the bodies of a dead giant that the islanders of Argoth worshipped as a deity and a mechanical humanoid. Most of the rest of the novel is the decades of conflict that led up to that point.
• It Will Never Catch On: Most of the characters are sceptical about Hurkyl claiming to have developed a technique that allows one to channel magical energy by concentrating on a certain land....
• Lost Technology: The secrets of Thran artifice have been lost to time.
• Made a Slave: Mishra, after being captured by a Fallaji tribe. His intelligence doesn't go unnoticed, however, and he manages to work his way up to a position of power.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: After Kayla has a one-night affair with Mishra, Urza is never certain whether the son born nine months later was his own or his brother's.
• Precursors:
  • The Thran.
  • It's implied that there may have been other, older Precursors that built the Golgothian Sylex. It's inscribed with glyphs in Thran, but also ancient Fallaji and other root languages, implying that it may have been built by a primeval civilization that was the originator of all of them.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Urza wins. Technically. Except his brother is dead, Argoth has been vaporized, and most of the world is devastated, causing an ice age.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Mishra is red, Urza is blue.
• Unwanted Spouse: Urza's wife, Kayla. He was more interested in the relics in her father's vault than her.