What makes horror scary? You can talk about tropes and psychological generalizations, but consuming media is a subjective, personal experience for each individual. Sure there are trends, but the specifics are, well, specific to each person.

So how do you make horror scary for everybody? How do you take a beloved plane like Mirrodin and successfully convince every single Magic player that it’s becoming a horrific hellscape of depraved villainy? You utilize the color pie. New Phyrexia shattered Magic’s oldest villains into five factions, each one playing up the nightmares of each color. Today’s article will dig into the concepts behind each faction of New Phyrexia and how those factions inspire fear through the color pie.

The Machine Orthodoxy

Despite being part of New Phyrexia, the Machine Orthodoxy still follows White’s goal of peace through structure. Because the Phyrexians are so focused on the physical nature of things, they don’t push these beliefs into the cosmological and moral extent that most White religions do. Instead, they have a literal interpretation of the collective and the laws that govern it.

Some White Phyrexians take this idea of unity to such an extent that they suture individual bodies together to function under one mind. The whole white-metal-as-skin aesthetic reinforces this idea that everyone should shed their identities and be the same. Law is law, and it must be enforced. The Machine Orthodoxy is not shy when it comes to brutally subjugating nonbelievers and converting them to Phyrexia’s ways.

The color pie offers an excellent lens for examining why these things are scary. In particular, playing up White’s enemy-color relationships reveals why we find these ideas revolting.

In the White/Black conflict, Black favors the idea of individualism and the power of one person to decide their own fate. The Machine Orthodoxy totally eliminates personal desire and sense of self, deconstructing the identity we humans cherish so much. There isn’t a “you” under Elesh Norn’s rule, just Phyrexia.

For Red/White, Red champions freedom of action. Liberty isn’t even a luxury in the Machine Orthodoxy, as no such concept exists. If you are captured by the White Phyrexians, you are literally forced to worship them against your will. You are broken down and rebuilt with their scriptures as your only guides of action. All autonomy is lost for the greater good of Phyrexia.

The Progress Engine

The Blue faction of New Phyrexia embraces perfection through knowledge. This perfection isn’t an end state, but a constant state of progress. It’s getting better all the time, as a group of fine young gentlemen from Liverpool once said. But what does Jin-Gitaxias’s science define as “better?” How does he determine “progress?”

Methodical experimentation for the sake of efficiency and function. That’s the way of the Progress Engine. Understanding the fundamental nature of each species of life, the workings of machines, and the nature of reality itself. These are ideas that don’t seem so bad on the surface, but then you see how cold and unrelenting the Blue Phyrexians are. There is no regard for the feelings, rights, or pleading of their subjects. Labs are one part surgery one part slaughterhouse. Life as it exists is seen as inferior to the rebuilt, repurposed you that comes out the other end of these horrific laboratories.

The scariness laden in the Blue/Red conflict arises from Red’s reliance on emotion. The Progress Engine has no sympathy. No empathy. No concept that the things they are doing to people are horrific. Sheer logic rules, and Red can’t stand such a chilling disposition. It would be one thing if Jin-Gitaxias acted out of hate, but even that is a concept foreign to these Phyrexians. They feel nothing, making them totally unrelatable, and thus frighteningly alien, on an emotional level.

Jin-Gitaxias can’t get no satisfaction according to the Green side of the Green/Blue conflict. Green believes that you are born with all your potential already inside you. Blue, however, thinks that you can adapt to any potential. The Progress Engine takes this to an extreme, constantly adapting the old into the new. They just never stop. No matter how many times they cut you up, they’ll just cut you up again later. This sense of adaptation also reaches unnaturally disturbing levels, such as harvesting living brains for organic supercomputer networks. Yikes.

The Seven Steel Thanes

The original Phyrexians were mono-Black, so the Black faction in New Phyrexia should already feel familiar. They seek power through opportunity, and the Phyrexian lust for power seems to always walk down the darkest, most terrifying path.

The leadership of this faction is constantly contested; seven powerful Phyrexian horrors vie for power by undercutting each other whenever possible. They are known as the Steel Thanes, each one more monstrous than the last. Sheoldred is the current Praetor, her network of informants and assassins keeping her in power…for now. The Thanes each believe themselves to be the true ruler of Phyrexia; all others are to be slaves groveling at their feet. Or dead. Dead works too.

In the Black/Green conflict, Green is abhorred by Black’s desire to control its own life. Its manipulations interfere with the way things are supposed to work, and that idea is seen plenty in New Phyrexia’s Black faction. Life and death lose all meaning as discarded metal and flesh are salvaged and reconstituted as unnatural Horrors and Demons and monsters of evil. They slay without purpose; Phyrexians simply enjoy the destruction of others.

This wanton destruction also plays into White’s fears in the White/Black conflict. The Black Phyrexians have such disdain for the sanctity of other people that they will murder literally anyone that stands in their way. This isn’t limited to the Mirrans, as the Thanes expend plenty of resources killing other Phyrexians too. Nothing is sacred to these monsters, and no one can be trusted. Any Phyrexian, at any moment, will rip you to shreds just to rip you to shreds.

The Quiet Furnace

Certainly the strangest faction of New Phyrexia (more on that in a moment), the Quiet Furnace is all about Red’s desire for freedom through action. Red just wants to be able to do whatever it feels like doing, and Urabrask’s leadership as Praetor exemplifies this ideal.

Urabrask is known as The Hidden because he spends so much time in the furnace layer working. In fact, that’s pretty much all this faction does. They toil in service of Phyrexia, melting slag and repurposing metal and recycling the dead and stoking the fires of the forge. And they like it that way. Red Phyrexians are pumped to go to work and don’t like when the other factions get in their way.

What makes the Quiet Furnace so strange is their empathy. That’s right, they are Phyrexians with the capacity to feel. This capability is at odds with their regular Phyrexian programming, and it makes Red Phyrexians fairly uncomfortable when they come in contact with the Mirran resistance. They mostly just ignore the Mirrans, not trying to help them in any way, but also not actively hunting them down. They don’t like the other four factions, and neither does Urabrask. The Praetor resonates with that feeling of hatred enough to let the Mirrans be.

Of course, these Phyrexians are still Phyrexians. They still live in a burning land of molten metal and choking smoke. It’s a dangerous place all the same, which is the reason White is still scared of the Red Phyrexians. The Red/White conflict is about chaos vs. order, and there is certainly no order in the furnace layer. Being ignored by the Phyrexians means they are equally likely to accidentally stomp on your hut than not. It may not always be a dangerous place, but it’s no safe haven either. Complacency is a trap in Urabrask’s domain.

The Blue/Red conflict pulls from similar themes. Blue is all about using logic to predict future events, and the chaotic nature of the furnace layer makes it totally unpredictable. It’s unsettling to never know what’s going to happen. Even the Phyrexians themselves are wholly unpredictable. They might slaughter you. They might start to kill you then stop. They may just ignore you. And you’ll never know why they made that choice. The only constant in the furnace layer is lethal surprise.

The Vicious Swarm

Green desires acceptance of the natural way through harmony with nature. The Vicious Swarm, New Phyrexia’s Green faction, takes a monstrous approach to this motivation.

In what remains of the Tangle, the Green Phyrexians evolve the most powerful predators on the plane. They hone in on the natural relationship between predator and prey. Phyrexia is the ultimate predator, while the rest of the Multiverse is prey to be consumed. Green Phyrexians have their minds broken to only focus on the hunt. They don’t need to eat; hunting is done for the pure sake of being the best hunter. These monstrosities are literal killing machines, grown to be the biggest, strongest, most physically dominant beings on New Phyrexia.

Blue’s biggest fear in the Green/Blue conflict is failure to adapt. If Blue fails at achieving a potential beyond what nature gave it, then its failure is a total collapse of its worldview. You can’t outsmart something that doesn’t think. You can’t outmaneuver something more agile than you. You can’t outnumber a ceaseless swarm that hungers for your death. This is the fear of the monstrous, the fear that something out there is bigger, scarier, meaner, and deadlier than you. The fear that none of your intellect will do any good against the raw power of nature.

Black’s greatest fear is powerlessness, which plays right into the Black/Green conflict. For Black, this powerlessness can be expressed as a lack of control over one’s destiny. If you can’t fight off predators, then your fate is sealed as prey. Black also doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to stop a charging predator. You can’t reason with it, trick it, bribe it, curse it. If a monster strikes at you from the darkness, you are powerless to stop it.

ALL WILL BE ONE

The color pie reflects the humanity that exists inside each and every one of us. Each color has its own fears, and the pentachromatic presentation of New Phyrexia allows the villains to play into every single one of those fears. That makes the most terrifying part of New Phyrexia the totality of its horror. No matter what scares you, the Phyrexians have found a way to exploit that fear.

Until next time, planeswalkers, may you all have a terrifying, but Phyrexian-free, Halloween weekend.