Magic: The Gathering has a secret language that few can translate

As complicated as Magic the Gathering is – with all its different and ever-changing keywords, strategies, products, storylines and even entire game formats – would you believe that it has its own secret language too?

Phyrexian was first launched in 2010. It is a language spoken in fiction by a hideous species of cybernetic monsters on the plane of Phyrexia. Publisher Wizards of the Coast has never fully explained how it works. For more than a dozen years, a dedicated group of amateurs have been working to translate it, card by card, with only a few lines of new text that occasionally come with new decks. What they have discovered is a language that is both foreign and part of our world.

Fernando Franco Félix, Scientific Advisor for Spacetime from PBS, is perhaps the leading expert on Phyrexian outside of Wizards. A polyglot – that is, a master of several languages, in this case including English, Spanish and Esperanto – he has been f ascinated by Phyrexian for years and has a small but dedicated following on Youtube

“I’ve always loved languages,” Félix told Polygon from his home in Aguascalientes, Mexico. “What I always say is that a language is like an art gallery and every aspect of the language is like a work of art. I see languages ​​as the greatest collaborative work of art in human history. They have millions of people and without even realizing it they are creating this system, which is beautiful.”

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Of course, Phyrexian was not created in multiple cultures over thousands of years. It is a constructed language, also called conlang. This makes it similar to the languages ​​found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, or modern conlangs like Star Trek’s Klingon and game of Thrones‘ Dothraki and Valyrian. Of course, you can easily find documents online that will teach you how to speak like an Elf or a Klingon. Not so with Phyrexian.

“They explained that it was a real language [and] that they hired linguists to create this language,” Félix said, “but they never explained how it works. I saw that as a challenge.”

As it turned out, Félix was more than up to the challenge. He and his community of collaborators have created a Phyrexian dictionary. In January he used it to become the first person to translate a magic Map written in Phyrexian before the English language version of the map was released to the public.

But how? Félix says it’s mostly a guessing game.

“You’re trying to make good guesses,” said Félix. “You’re trying to see if your suspicions hold up. If they can’t keep up, try to come up with something else. If they hold up, you probably did it right and can move on.”

Félix explained that while Phyrexian is a unique construction, it derives many of its quirks from existing languages. For example, it uses a consonantal root system, just like Hebrew and Arabic, to create a selection of easily recognizable root words. But Félix thinks that his system of verb conjugation is clearly derived from German. Its alphabet has features similar to Hangul, the alphabet used in Korea. The script used to write Phyrexian shares features similar to Hindi and Sanskrit. Phyrexian also uses a rigid set of punctuation marks, including notations to mark tenses, quotations, and sentence beginnings and endings. There’s even a way to mark the spot where a reader should pause for breath, a sort of break embedded in the grammar of Phyrexian itself.

But for the past 12 years, fans have only been able to watch Phyrexian in a very narrow context, which is the rules written on trading cards. Sometimes at the bottom of these cards there is a bit of flavor text, a quote, or a succinct epithet presented with limited context. Félix and his community are hungry for more. These texts are fragments of Phyrexian literature.

“My dream is that one day [Wizards publishes] a very short story, less than 1,000 words, but all written in Phyrexian,” said Félix. “Then let’s just go into town with it. I’m pretty sure we could decode it.”

What about actually speaking Phyrexian? This may take a little longer to fully tease out. Phyrexians are part-machines, after all, and their speech contains elements that would force native speakers to bang their specialized metallic mouthparts together for emphasis.

“We have very few examples of spoken Phyrexian,” Félix said, “and the ones we have are very distorted because they’re supposed to be spoken by these monsters, and they’re very difficult to understand.”