The Brothers' War (BRO): Set Guide & Card List

Some stories are too big to tell on one plane, in one era, or in one medium. The Brothers' War is Magic's most ambitious attempt to revisit its own foundational mythology - the catastrophic conflict between Urza and Mishra that shaped Dominaria for centuries. Released in November 2022 as the third set in the Phyrexia arc, BRO doesn't just retell a classic story. It puts you in the middle of it.

What is The Brothers' War?

The Brothers' War (set code: BRO) was released on November 18, 2022. It is a Standard-legal set of 387 cards set on Dominaria, and serves as part of the larger Phyrexian story arc that ran through Dominaria United (DMU) and concluded in Phyrexia: All Will Be One (ONE). In terms of narrative scope, it's effectively a flashback - a deep dive into the Antiquities War, the centuries-old conflict between the brothers Urza and Mishra that first appeared in the Antiquities set way back in 1994.

The set is structured around a split identity: Urza's artifacts and blue-white order versus Mishra's chaotic red-black warmachines. That binary tension runs through nearly every mechanical and aesthetic decision in the set.

Lore aside: The conflict between Urza and Mishra was first novelised by Jeff Grubb in The Brothers' War (1998), a book that remains one of the most beloved pieces of Magic fiction ever written. The novel is set during the Antiquities era and features an enormous cast including Tawnos, Ashnod, Gix, Kayla bin-Kroog, Titania, and Feldon - many of whom appear as cards in BRO.

Themes and mechanics

The Brothers' War is fundamentally a set about two brothers and the war machines they built. Mechanically, that translates into an artifact-heavy environment with a strong focus on large, impressive constructs - and on the two distinct philosophies that built them.

Prototype

Prototype is the headline new mechanic, and it's one of the more elegant designs in recent memory. A card with prototype can be cast either for its full cost as a large Artifact Creature, or for a reduced prototype cost as a smaller, weaker version with the same abilities. Think of it as choosing between shipping the finished war machine or deploying a battlefield-ready prototype while you're still building the real thing.

This gives aggressive and midrange decks genuine flexibility. You're never holding a dead card in your hand - you can always cast the prototype version on curve, and the full version becomes a late-game threat.

Unearth

Unearth is a returning mechanic - it originally appeared in Shards of Alara (ALA, 2008) - and it fits the graveyard-as-battlefield-wreckage flavour of BRO perfectly. Unearth lets you exile a creature from your graveyard for a mana cost to return it to the battlefield, where it gains haste but is exiled at end of turn. It rewards you for trading your creatures off aggressively, knowing you can get one more use out of them.

Rules note: Because unearth creatures are exiled rather than put back into the graveyard, they can't be unearth'd again, and effects that trigger on death don't trigger when they leave the battlefield at end of turn. Worth keeping in mind with any graveyard synergies.

Meld (returning)

Meld returns from Eldritch Moon (EMN, 2016), and BRO uses it to tell some of the most iconic moments in Magic lore. Three meld pairs exist in the set, each representing a pivotal transformation from the Antiquities storyline. The mechanic rewards players who assemble both halves by combining the two cards into a single, oversized permanent - the physical card literally spans the back of both cards combined.

Meld is inherently high-variance; assembling both halves is difficult, and your opponent knows what you're building toward. But when it works, it delivers some of the most dramatic moments the game can produce.

Powerstones

Powerstone tokens are a new token type introduced in BRO. They're Treasure-adjacent - artifact tokens that tap for {C} (colourless mana) - but with a key restriction: that mana can only be spent to cast artifact spells or activate abilities. You can't use Powerstone mana to cast your spells freely, but in an artifact-dense environment like BRO Limited, they're excellent acceleration.

This is very much a flavour call. Powerstones are central to the lore of the Antiquities era - both brothers' entire civilisations ran on them.

Limited and Draft

Draft in The Brothers' War is defined by artifacts. Nearly every deck wants them, every colour has them, and the Powerstone engine rewards you for going wide on artifacts even before you're casting your best cards.

The format is generally considered to be on the slower side - Prototype creatures and the Powerstone ramp engine mean games frequently go long enough to cast the big stuff. Early game board development is still important, but a resolved large Prototype creature can dominate the late game in a way that most formats don't allow.

Key draft archetypes

• White-Blue artifacts - the Urza side of the set, focused on artifact synergies, card advantage from artifacts entering the battlefield, and going wide with smaller constructs.
• Black-Red aggro/unearth - the Mishra side, leaning into the graveyard with unearth and fast pressure. Trades early and recycles threats.
• Green-X ramp - Green's role in BRO is primarily accelerating into the large Prototype creatures, often splashing a third colour for the payoffs.
• Blue-X Powerstone tempo - Using Powerstone generation to cast artifact threats ahead of schedule while holding up interaction.

One of the pleasures of BRO Draft is that the Prototype mechanic gives most decks access to cards that function at multiple points on the curve, which smooths out draws in a way that benefits slower, more interactive strategies.

Notable cards and impact

The Brothers' War arrived during a period of high Standard power level, and several of its cards made immediate impressions across multiple formats.

The meld pairs deserve special mention from a design standpoint - assembling Urza, Lord Protector and The Mightstone and Weakstone into Urza, Planeswalker, or combining Mishra, Lost to Phyrexia from his two component pieces, are among the most visually and narratively striking moments BRO offers. These aren't just big finishers; they're the climax of the story playing out on your table.

Powerstones as a token type also had broader implications, showing up in Commander precon decks released alongside BRO that leaned into the artifact and colourless-mana themes.

Format check: BRO rotated out of Standard in 2024 alongside the other 2022 sets. Its cards remain legal in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage (subject to individual card legality), and many artifact-matters cards from the set have found homes in Commander.

Lore and setting

The Brothers' War is set on Dominaria, but in the deep past - the Antiquities era, thousands of years before the present-day storyline. It follows the catastrophic war between the brothers Urza and Mishra, who as children discovered the halves of the Mightstone and Weakstone beneath the ruins of Koilos. That discovery cleaved them apart and set two civilisations on a collision course.

Urza built his empire on artifice, order, and blue-white mana. Mishra, corrupted by Phyrexian influence he didn't fully understand, built his from red-black chaos and deals made with powers he couldn't control. The war consumed Dominaria for decades and ended with Urza detonating the Golgothian Sylex at Argoth - an act of destruction so total it triggered an Ice Age and remade the world.

The set frames this history through a modern lens: Teferi uses a device called the Temporal Anchor to send Saheeli Rai and Kaito Shizuki back in time to witness the war firsthand, searching for a weapon that might stop the Phyrexian invasion in the present. This narrative wrapper connects BRO to the broader Phyrexian arc, though the heart of the set is firmly in the past.

Lore aside: The conflict was first documented in-universe as The Antiquities War, an epic poem attributed to Kayla bin-Kroog, Urza's wife. Subsequent in-universe scholarship debated the poem's reliability - including a peer-reviewed essay that appeared in The Duelist #1 in May 1994, which presented competing theories about the veracity of the war's account. Jeff Grubb's 1998 novel The Brothers' War remains the most complete prose retelling, featuring characters including Tawnos, Ashnod, Gix, Tocasia, Feldon, Titania, and Harbin.

The flavour text throughout BRO draws heavily on Kayla's poem and the weight of history - there's a sense throughout that you're reading an account of events that even the characters know will be mythologised.

Set legacy

The Brothers' War occupies a unique place in Magic's publishing history. It's one of the few sets to directly revisit Magic's own foundational mythology at full scale, and it does so with genuine craft - the Prototype mechanic is clean and reusable, the meld pairs are spectacular when they come together, and the aesthetic commitment to the Antiquities war-machine aesthetic is total.

For players who grew up with the Jeff Grubb novel or the Antiquities set, BRO is a love letter. For newer players, it's a well-constructed introduction to some of the most important lore in Magic's history, delivered through mechanics that tell the story without requiring you to have read the book.

In my opinion, the Powerstone token is one of the quietly underrated design contributions of the set - a colourless acceleration piece that rewards artifact-heavy builds without breaking formats that don't care about artifacts. It's the kind of simple, flavourful, mechanically honest design that doesn't get talked about enough.

The set's place in the Phyrexian arc means it's somewhat dependent on the surrounding context - you get more out of it knowing where the story goes - but BRO stands on its own as a thoughtfully assembled, lore-rich Magic set. ✨