Yawgmoth

Yawgmoth, known as The Ineffable by his servants and The Lord of the Wastes throughout Dominarian mythology, was the medical genius of the Thran Empire who was banished for his highly controversial solutions to medical ailments. Upon discovering the artificial plane of Phyrexia, Yawgmoth felt an increasing desire to utilize this mechanical plane to his own ends. He became the god of that plane, but his true dream was to return to his home plane of Dominaria and turn its inhabitants into "perfect beings" under his rule. The main antagonist throughout multiple MTG sagas, he is arguably the most well-known and most powerful villain in the MTG multiverse.

Early life

Yawgmoth was born during the last century of the Thran Empire in the middle of the conflicts between the elite imperialists and republican rabble. Yawgmoth became a eugenicist because of his fascination with the human body, thinking of it as a marvelous machine. Unfortunately for him, the republicans lost the power struggle and all their followers, including the eugenicists, were exiled.

During his exile Yawgmoth journeyed the globe, visiting many different civilizations, and showing them all just how ruthless and cold-hearted he was. During this time he committed many atrocities, of which the following are known to us:

• Yawgmoth set the Black-Cough upon the dwarves of Oryn Deeps, inciting a workers rebellion that nearly killed the dwarven king and ended 1000 years of dwarven rule.
• He turned the Creeping Mold of Argoth into a virulent plague that ate away the elves there. He also kidnapped their priest Elyssendril Lademmdrith and her healers, ordering the elves to pay ransom for their leader and their cure. When the elves paid, he delivered to them only sweetened water and 12 dead healers.
• He set the White Death upon the minotaurs of Talruum, just to study its effects.
• He gave the leaders of the cat people nations rabies, after which they tore each other to pieces.
• He poisoned the human tribes of Gulatto Meisha.
• He pithed and vivisected the Bey of the Viashino of Shiv.

Why he committed these horrors is unclear. He claimed only to be interested in the working of plagues and other diseases, but greediness for power or a perverse interest in pain could also be part of his motivations.

After five years in exile, Yawgmoth was recalled to the Thran capitol of Halcyon, where people didn't know of his inhumane actions during his exile. The chief artificer Glacian had caught a strange disease that was only made worse if treated by Thran healing magic, so Glacian's wife Rebbec used her influence as chief architect to bring back Yawgmoth, hoping his expertise in eugenicism could find a cure.

Thran stones

Yawgmoth discovered that Glacian's disease, which he called phthisis, was caused by powerstone radiation. Most of the Untouchables, exiled Thran that lived in the Caves of the Damned, under the powerstone-producing mana rig, had also caught the disease. Upon hearing this, the man who stabbed Glacian, Gix, started rallying his people to rebel and take vengeance upon the Thran.

Yawgmoth convinced Halcyon’s elders to give him more funding and apprentices to study the disease. From the healer Xod he got the idea to use metals to create a serum against phthisis. When Gix led a massive rebellion on Halcyon, Yawgmoth managed to quell it by offering free serum to the Untouchables. For his actions, Yawgmoth was made a member of the council of Halcyon, and was allowed to make laws to regulate public health. Yawgmoth started sending inflicted people down into the Caves of the Damned, and had healthy Untouchables return to the city, using this to eliminate his enemies from the city. During this time, Rebbec and Yawgmoth started falling in love, although neither of them acted deeply upon it.

Yawgmoth was diluting the serum he gave to the Untouchables, claiming not to have enough resources to make enough. This caused Gix to feel rebellious again, and he started to send Untouchables, both healthy and sick, up to Halcyon. Yawgmoth used this to get more funding and complete control over the Halcyte Guard.

One day the planeswalker Dyfed visited Glacian, wanting to meet the genius in real life, and also to learn about his own spark, though she said nothing of it. Yawgmoth walked in on the meeting and managed to talk Dyfed into aiding him. Dyfed agreed to find a plane where Yawgmoth could build his own paradise.

When Gix led another large riot on the city, Yawgmoth was prepared. He made an artifact, based on Glacian's designs, to control all powerstone technology in the city. With it and the Halcyte Guard, he managed to stop the invasion and force Gix into complete obedience.

After the city had been rebuilt, Halcyon held a great festival to honor Yawgmoth, but shortly before it a strange group of delegates appeared. They were representatives of the nations Yawgmoth hurt so badly during his exile and they came to declare war on all who stood by Yawgmoth. The council voted on whether Yawgmoth could stay, but the votes went 50/50. Only because Yawgmoth and Rebbec were members of the council themselves, Yawgmoth got to stay. He immediately overthrew the council and imprisoned its elders, as well as the delegates.

Sometime later, Dyfed opened a permanent portal from Dominaria to Phyrexia, the plane which Yawgmoth wanted to make his paradise. Yawgmoth bound himself to the plane within its core, becoming a god while staying there. He started to bring phthisis patients to Phyrexia, where they were implanted with empty powerstones that drain away their sickness. The newly arrived slowly began to evolve as well, growing longer, thinner, stronger and faster. Yawgmoth hid the two halves of the powerstone Dyfed cracked to power the portal inside Glacian’s wounds.

Yawgmoth fared quite well while warring with the alliance of nations against him. Using the Halcyte Guard, soldiers mutated in Phyrexia and stonechargers, he could overcome any army that stood against him. Even when Dyfed turned on him he did not give in. When she was stunned at the horror Phyrexia had become, he stabbed her in the back of the head with a powerstone dagger, disabling the planeswalker, hoping to disect her and learn what she had that enabled her to planeswalk. Rebbec removed the powerstone however, mercy-killing Dyfed.

But not all went well for him. He had used the Null Sphere to filter away the deadly gasses left behind by the stonechargers before they reached Halcyon. When the artificers that controlled it sacrificed their own lives to sabotage the Sphere, Halcyon was destroyed, all its inhabitants fleeing to Phyrexia or being eaten away.

Yawgmoth had planned to stay in Phyrexia for a while and emerge again when the death cloud had lifted, but Rebbec had finally seen what a monstrosity he was, and used the powerstones Yawgmoth had planted in her husband to close the portal between Phyrexia and Dominaria, locking Yawgmoth and his followers out for all eternity.

Or at least until the stones would be removed.

Sleeper Agents

For ages Yawgmoth altered the Thran that had come to Phyrexia while fleeing the gasses from the stonechargers into true Phyrexians. Using planar portals the Phyrexians journeyed to many planes which they conquered, while they used its inhabitants as raw material for the Newts, as Phyrexians who had not been augumented were known. But Yawgmoth was not happy, for somehow Rebbec had completely locked him out of Dominaria.

Then came the day the archeologist brothers Urza and Mishra disturbed the powerstone sealing the portal while exploring the Caves of the Damned, now known as the Caves of Koilos. Yawgmoth sent Gix, now a fully completed Phyrexian and a member of his Inner Circle, through the portal as a scout. Gix planned to manipulate the Brothers, who had started a war. Having his minions, the Brotherhood of Gix, infiltrate both sides and eventually replacing Mishra with a Phyrexian, Gix hoped to magnify the war until it had destroyed all civilization on the continent, allowing for a simple infiltration by the Pyrexian Forces built up by Yawgmoth over the centuries. During the war's end, Urza activated the Golgothian Sylex, an artifact so powerful it completely devastated the world of Dominaria. Gix fled back to Phyrexia, telling Yawgmoth of what had happened. Gix's plans to infiltrate Dominarian society via the Sleeper Agents was approved by the dark god, but the first few attempts failed for all the Agents looked alike. The sudden apearance of many people looking exactly similar had caused panic among the Dominarians, who proceeded to kill any they came across. Gix planned to try again, but by then the Shard of Twelve Worlds was completed. The Shard had been a side effect of the Sylex Blast: it locked twelve worlds from the other planes of the multiverse, trapping many planeswalkers inside, but also keeping the Phyrexians outside. A furious Yawgmoth had Gix thrown into the 7th Sphere of Phyrexia, where he would be tortured for all eternity.

Then Urza, who had died in the blast, but was reborn a planeswalker, attacked Phyrexia. Moments before he activated the Sylex, Urza discovered his brother had been turned into a machine and had gone completely insane, blaming those responcible for turning his brother into a machine for all the wrongs of the Brothers' War. To add more fire to his hate, Urza's eyes had been replaced with the Mightstone and the Weakstone, the two halves of the powerstone that contained Glacian's spirit. Having met the Newt Xantcha, who had been intended as a Sleeper Agent but had been turned into an expendable servant now that the Agents couldn't be deployed, Urza had discovered Phyrexia was responsible and had created a monstrous machine-dragon to attack the plane. He managed to blast a gigantic hole in the plane, all the way down to the 4th Sphere, but then Yawgmoth himself invaded his mind and made him go even more insane. Urza fled and for years he traveled from plane to plane, the Phyrexians always on his heels, for Yawgmoth couldn't let someone who planned to destroy Phyrexia go unpunished. Urza was eventually healed by Serra, but after he left the Phyrexians even invaded her realm and corrupted it.

Then Freyalise, desperate to be free from the Shard, cast the World Spell, opening Dominaria to Yawgmoth once again. He released Gix from his torment, since he knew more about fighting Urza and infiltrating Dominaria than anyone else, but while Gix was initially successful Urza returned to his homeplane as well. He first destroyed all Sleeper Agents and then killed Gix.

Lord of the Wastes

Yawgmoth started with a different plan: instead of infiltrating Dominaria, he would prepare for a full blown invasion. He started to amass an army and created the plane of Rath, which he planned to fill with troops and then merge it with Dominaria, placing all his forces there in a single moment.

He did continue to send troops after Urza though. One of the more succesful ones was K'rrik, a Sleeper Agent who tracked down Urza's academy on Tolaria, where mages where trained and artifacts were built to fight Phyrexia. K'rrik succeeded in destroying the place, but Urza sent the silver golem Karn back in time to prevent this. He succeeded, but the timemachine overheated and destroyed the academy nonetheless. When Urza returned ten years later he found that the timestreams of the island had been twisted. In someplaces ten thousand years happened in a single second, in other it was the other way around. Trapped inside a slow-time bubble K'rrik had ages to prepare for an attack on Urza, but the planeswalker eventualy managed to defeat him with the help of the nature-spirit Multani.

While the evincars of Rath started to overlay small parts of the plane with Dominaria, in preparation for the coming invasion, the artificial plane filled up with beings from Dominaria on which the Phyrexians could experiment. Among them where the Kor, humans with strange elongated skulls. When the Inner Circle member Croag, who oversaw the progress of the plane, discovered humans with Phyrexian traits in them in Benalia, the truth about the Kor was revealed: Urza had started the Bloodline project, a grand plan to manipulate the breeding patterns of several groups of Dominarians to create perfect warriors to fight Phyrexia. The project resulted in ordinary humans with an afinity for tracking down and fighting Phyrexians, and in the Metathran, genetically engineered warriors with no will of their own, eerily similar to the Phyrexians they were designed to fight. After discovering this Yawgmoth increased the raids on Dominaria, tracking down the Bloodline results and killing them. Croag devastated the nation of Keld, where the renegade Bloodline researcher Gatha had created humans like Kreig, who were able to severely wound an Inner Circle member. Some slipped through the attacks though, like Gerrard, the true heir to Urza's Legacy, a collection of artifacts made for the single purpose of destroying Yawgmoth. The attacks where so frequent at times though, that they started to play a role in local myths. Stories about the Lord of the Wastes, a machine-lord who waged eternal war on Dominaria, started to appear from Benalia to Jamuraa.

Phyrexian Invasion

During the Invasion Yawgmoth mostly stayed behind in Phyrexia, guiding his troops from afar. It wasn't until the last moments of the war that he returned to Dominaria after 9000 years. He did so in the form of a hemisphere-spanning death cloud that killed Dominaria's defenders and resurrected them to fight for Phyrexia.

But there was still hope for the plane though: Urza and Gerrard hovered high overhead on the Weatherlight, the main part of the Legacy. They punctured the Null Moon itself and used the white mana it had been gathering ever since those Thran artificers launched it into the sky and caused Yawgmoth's first defeat. Yawgmoth tried to flee back to Phyrexia, but the Stone Druids had activated the volcano under the Stronghold, covering the only portal to Phyrexia left under deep magma. Yawgmoth was hurt by the white mana, but survived and took the form of giant tentacles that attacked the Weatherlight, but this time Gerrard took out Urza's gemstone eyes, the two halves of the powerstone that had locked out Yawgmoth and contained the spirit of Glacian. He put them in the cavities in Karn's chest and completed the Legacy. The exact working of the device are unknown, but it somehow infused the axe of Tahngarth, who hit one of Yawgmoth's tentacles, and killed him.

False Demise?

Or so it seemed.

101 years later the godlike being Karona was looking for beings like her. She first summoned a "god" for each color of magic, and the black one appeared to be Yawgmoth. Later she traveled across the planes and ended up in Phyrexia, devastated by the Nine Titans, but still holding together. There she met Yawgmoth, who revealed he was still alive and rebuilding.

However, it's most likely that, given the nature of Karona, this was actually an alternate reality, timeline, or simply a dream. Many are confident that the Lord of the Wastes is dead (Lord Windgrace states having searched Phyrexia after the Invasion to ensure no trace of Yawgmoth survived). So confident, in fact, that the place of his death (Urborg, or, more precisely, skies above the island) has earned a new moniker among the people - Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Art depiction controversy

Due to his importance as a character within the storyline, and lack of explicit presence as a card within the game, has led to fans asking for years about his true appearance. This led to a Ask Wizards question, which incorrectly answered that he's represented in Yawgmoth Demon because this card represents a Yawgmoth demon, not Yawgmoth as a demon; this answer was later removed from the website.