In Magic: The Gathering, the Phyrexians are the kind of villains who don’t want to kill you because they’d rather recreate you. Sure, the remaking process can kill you, but that’s not the point. The point is to take away everything you thought was yourself and turn you into a twisted mirror image and become the thing you hate. Swings and roundabouts, actually.
It’s the villains you fight once, and the second they come at you with the faces of your friends and family in their ranks. They’re the bailiffs of Star Trek, but also the tyrants of 40K, the cenobites of Hellraiser, and the zombies of everything, all thrown together and sporting a fashionable new hat.
Magic’s next expansion set, Phyrexia: everything will be one (opens in new tab), travels to New Phyrexia, the plane they rebuilt to their own liking. Body horror is a clear influence on the art of the set. The Phyrexians assimilate their former enemies through a process called “compleating”, perfecting their targets while simultaneously incorporating them into the greater biomass. It begins with an infection via glistening oil that mutates the body and warps the mind, and ends with a surgical procedure that combines flesh with metal.
The end results are not homogeneous, as Phyrexians lack the hive mind that bad guys they resemble from other universes often have. Instead, they are fractionalized and unruly, schism and then reattached. (Easily their main divisions match the colors of Magic. Just imagine!) Depending on what kind of Phyrexian someone completes, they can end up in a mixture of exposed red muscle and bone white armor, or lose their limbs and become encased in a shiny metal juggernaut, or their uncovered head stapled to the top of a spider crab. Dealer choice.
None of them seem particularly pleasant options. “Body horror has been identified with Phyrexians since their inception nearly 30 years ago,” said Ovidio Cartagena, lead art director for this set and several others due later in the year. “This time around, we designed many new types of Phyrexians, keeping some of the body horror aspects, but we finally get to see a ‘fully finished’ world, where flesh has been eliminated or more successfully adapted to Phyrexian exteriors .”
According to Cartagena, in envisioning what an entire world designed by Phyrexians would look like, “much inspiration was drawn from various illustrated versions of the Divine Comedy, as well as Hieronymus Bosch and his ‘spiritual successors’ of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Dante’s Divine Comedy is an epic poem about a descent through hell, then ascent through purgatory and finally paradise. It is the first book, Inferno, that people usually remember thanks to its vivid depiction of a hell, where each circle houses different kinds of sinners and the demons responsible for their punishments. Heaven made by Phyrexians would resemble our hell, Cartagena thought. Sure, New Phyrexia’s atlas looks like a colorized and modernized version of Antonio Manetti’s woodcuts of the Inferno (opens in new tab).
The poster girl for Phyrexia: All Will Be One is Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite of the Machine Orthodoxy faction, from a tier of New Phyrexia called the Fair Basilica. She’s the one with the clunky headpiece that looks like a hood with wings, and her followers go for a look that draws on Catholic iconography and porcelain dolls as much as insects and anatomy lessons.
“Elesh Norn’s overconfidence is evident in the beauty of her own faction and environments,” says Cartagena, “so I wanted to see a villain that was both scary and attractive.”
That’s what Junji Ito delivered. Famous horror manga creators like Uzumaki and Tomie signed up alternative art for Elesh Norn that immediately saw her labeled as “panharmommycon” on the internet, referring to the Parnharmonic (opens in new tab) card and the fact that the internet can be horny for anything.
“Junji Ito is a legend and I’m honored to say he illustrated a Magic: The Gathering card for Phyrexia,” said Cartagena. “When you work with an artist of this caliber, you can imagine they get a lot of creative freedom.”
Elesh Norn also received a treatment that surrounds her with marble statues posed as dramatically as any Mannerist sculpture or audience photo tagged “accidental renaissance (opens in new tab)The illustration by Martina Fačková was a specific request from Cartagena, who says it was “informed by a scene in Dante’s second circle of hell, where souls are blown about in whirlwinds, and has been illustrated by William Blake, Gustave Doré, and others .
“Of course Mannerist art was a great source of inspiration, as my art training comes from the classical tradition and those sensibilities fit very well with fantasy art,” Cartagena said.
Cartagena was pleased with how the image turned out, and it appears in various marketing materials and on a map. That’s a wonderful result for what he describes as an “Easter egg” for classical art. “Keep your eyes peeled for other references to the Divine Comedy in art; I found it amazing how much of that classicism fits nicely into a biomechanical hellscape.”
It’s a shame that some players only see these artworks on the top half of a map they look at before playing, and I wish Arena had a gallery for full screen viewing. (Maybe when it comes to Steam later this year?) But Cartagena notes there are plenty of other ways people can see these photos, and the artists he works with contribute art that deserves to be seen in different ways .
“This art is always seen in other contexts besides the cards, such as in prints, playmats, websites, galleries, and so on,” he says. “That makes me very happy. There are several masterpieces in this release that deserve thoughtful observation.”
Phyrexia: everything will be one (opens in new tab) launches in Arena on February 7 and in paper format on February 10. Prerelease events run from February 3-9 and you can get the viewfinder (opens in new tab) to find one near you.