Urza says he’s sane. Perhaps he is. Measures of sanity among planeswalkers are hard to come by. He has lived for over three thousand years. He heals by merely willing it. With a thought, he steps from world to world to world. His very appearance is a matter of convenience, clothes and even features projected by his mind. How can conventional notions of sanity apply to a planeswalker?
Perhaps they cannot, but his madness began before he was a planeswalker. Three thousand years ago, a mortal Urza battled his mortal brother. Their sibling rivalry turned fratricidal. So began the Brothers’ War. In his rage to kill Mishra, Urza enlisted the armies of the world, sank the isle of Argoth, gutted the continent of Terisiare, and wiped whole nations from the globe. He ushered in an ice age. In repayment for all this madness, he became a planeswalker.
Urza says he regrets the destruction. True regret would be a good sign.
It wasn’t regret that later sent Urza on his own private invasion of Phyrexia. It was revenge for his brother. Somehow, Urza convinced himself he hadn’t killed Mishra, that the Phyrexian Gix had done it. True, Gix seduced Mishra with promises of awesome power and in the end transformed him into a monstrous amalgam of flesh and artifice. But Urza was Mishra’s slayer. Not in his mind, though.
