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No, but even in New Phyrexia, is associated with life, like Noxious Revival and whatever.

Aug 4, 2012 -- 12:20PM, Shamsiel wrote:

No, but even in New Phyrexia, is associated with life, like Noxious Revival and whatever.

You realize, of course, that New Phyrexia is life. Its flavor is that of an infection.

Phyrexia is kind of about New Life Through Death.

The old you dies and is replaced/improved to give you a new, "better" existence.

The removal of organic material, replacing it with unliving metal.

The quashing of individuality and the sense of a self, in favor of being little more than a cog in a machine...

Some of the new factions in New Phyrexia were less about death than Old Phyrexia was, but I don't think you can honestly say that "New Phyrexia is life".

Aug 11, 2012 -- 12:44PM, bay_falconer wrote:

Still, an infection is life. Not life like you might want it, but life.

In our world, yes. But the Phyrexian infection is one of magic. It corrupts life, but I don't really think it is, itself, alive.

I'm going to argue against that. You may or may not remember a thread several years back which tied Magic's colors to its lands. willpell, when he was here, had often deep things to say about the color pie, and I still use that thread to describe colors.

To excerpt from willpell's thread:

And finally we come to the swamp.  Like a forest, a swamp is a very fecund place, but
mostly for the smallest and most straightforward of lifeforms.  Even if mages and other
inhabitants of medieval Dominia don't know what bacteria are, they can look at insects,
parasitic worms, and other such small, simple, merciless lifeforms which operate on much
the same principles.  A swamp is a place where life decays and feeds lesser forms of life,
exactly the inverse of a forest where trees grow so huge that smaller plants must grow
out of their trunks in order ot reach the sun.  Few large or complex lifeforms can
succeed in the ultra-competitive environment of a bracken or bog, and so the inherent
nature of black mana is tied to such cutthroat congestion and the relentlessness it
engenders in those who would flourish there.  This can be seen in the underbelly of a
city's criminal element just as easily as in a peat marsh; it is also present, though less
visible, in more refined circumstances, which the black-aligned figure could turn ugly at
any minute, so they make a point of never losing their edge.  Furthermore, these
inviduals realize that no matter how successful they are, their eventual death is
inevitable, and so they are often not content to settle for getting the good things that
supposedly come to those who wait; they seize their opportunities out of a sort of
desperation, determined to live to the fullest in case they don't get the chance later,
but being more careful than the red-aligned to prepare for the possibility that they will
have to live with those consequences after all.  Basically, they prepare for the worst,
knowing that it usually happens - a lesson they can see demonstrated in the fates of those
who fail to take the swamp seriously.

There's nothing really I can add to that. It's so succint I think it says by itself why there's no in (old) Phyrexia.