Magic: The Gathering – Reality Fracture looks cracked and we’re here for it

The next set for Magic: The Gathering answers a very important question: what happens when the face of your game becomes the villain?

Reality Fracture – officially releasing on 2nd October, but arriving a week early for MTG Arena – brings a close to Jace Beleren’s saga. Almost 20 years after his first printing and three years after he went completely off the rails, the Blue mage who started out as the self-insert for most Magic players has come full circle. He started out as a villain controlled by an evil sphinx who kept wiping his mind. He then became the tool of a dragon who kept wiping his mind. He broke free, becoming the Guildpact (essentially God) of a plane (universe) called Ravnica, became head of the Gatewatch (known among players as the Jacetice League) and lover to the gorgon Vraska (Magic’s best power couple).

Over the past three years, he has assumed what is presumably his final form as The Theorist — a villain who has seen far too much and is simply over it. Jace’s story is still being released online, where you can read it for free.

Importantly, Jace doesn’t see himself as a villain — they never do, do they? To him, the multiverse messed around and now it’s about to find out. The most powerful mind mage in the multiverse has simply seen a common denominator and thus solution to all of the suffering he has had to endure. Cut out the root of this awful existence and start again.

It’s time, he thinks, to build a brand new multiverse to replace the current, rotten one. No Phyrexians, no Nicol Bolas. Nobody that will stand in the way of Jace’s happiness ever again. There is no suffering in Jace’s Echoverse. You will be happy, like it or not. If you try to get in the way, you will be cut from existence.

Empower Jace

So, it’s pretty apparent that Jace is central to this set, which is difficult to imagine when he’s a Mythic-rare character. Per Magic’s tenets of design, the main theme of each set has to show up in every pack — a turtle in each pack of TMNT, for example.

To really up the amount of Jace being seen in the set, lead designer Mark ‘Maro’ Rosewater tells us that his team came up with a brilliant idea as a way of bringing Jace into the set at the Common rarity. In playtesting, the mechanic was both fun and powerful, which is exactly what you want to hear as a fan.

This new mechanic is Empower Jace. It’s essentially Amass, for those who remember it from War of the Spark, but instead of creating a Zombie Army, you create a Jace Token that ticks up in loyalty with each Empower trigger. Importantly, this Empower ability only adds Loyalty to the token — if it empowered all Jaces, it would be a stupidly overpowered mechanic. The way it’s worded at the moment looks like it also work with the likes of Jace Mirror Mage, but seemingly it’s just supposed to work like Amass. We’ll learn more when we get the official rules text in a week or two’s time.

As far as Reality Fracture is concerned though, Maro tells us that you should expect to see this Jace Token appear “in pretty much every Limited game”.

As you can see, the Jace Token comes with two abilities: minus 1 to surveil and minus 3 to draw a card. Empowering Jace adds extra Loyalty so you can keep filling your Graveyard and your hand, ensuring you squeeze every drop of advantage out of the Token. And since drawing cards and controlling your library are some of the most powerful things you can do in Magic, Jace Tokens, are going to be an important part of Reality Fracture.

While there’s no other Empower in this set (such as Empower Vraska), the door is now open for this to appear in future sets.

What if?

Obviously, not everyone is happy with the idea of Jace writing them out of existence, replacing them with his ideal version of them. It’s kind of a dick move, to be fair.

Having both versions of a character kicking around the same set — the classic What If? scenario — presents a really cool space for players to explore. We’ve seen a few of these cards already, such as the what if Chandra was an Ice Mage, instead of a Fire mage, but we’ve now seen multiple Ajani and multiple Karns, too.

Importantly, this is not a set where the colour pie goes out of the window. Maro ensures us that WotC learned its lessons from Planar Chaos, when the theory behind each of Magic’s five colours went out the window. In Reality Fracture, each of these colour-shifted characters fits with what that colour is supposed to do.

One example I’m really excited about pertains to one of my favourite cards from when I first started: Rise of the Dark Realms is shifting from Black to White, in keeping with the master necromancer’s new White colour identity.

Both Black and White can recur from the graveyard, so it’s not a pie break. It is, however, pretty damn cool to see. I’m looking forward to seeing how much power this adds to my Commander decks. We even see a Phryrexian Processor-style card shifted into Green, doing Green things. Again, in certain printings known as Facet Foils, you can even see Jace’s inspiration for these new creatures and events reflected in the broken glass — or the fractured reality — in the art.

When it comes to collecting cards, you should note that you’re going to see a lot of these cards paired inside booster packs. The designers were super aware that new players won’t know it’s a ‘What if?’ set if they don’t know the characters. Putting them together really drills this idea home.

WotC had to do a fair bit of work behind the scenes with some printer jiggery-pokery to make sure that this happens in reality. So, if you open a pack with Red Chandra, you should expect to see Blue Chandra alongside her. In certain printings (i.e. the more expensive ones), they even make a really cool diptych.

Fracture flavour

This is shaping up to be a very cool set, with the Lorwyn Five making a long-awaited return, alongside Vraska and a few other fan favourites. It combines the epic conclusion to Jace’s saga with new and unique mechanics that fit with the theme of rewriting the multiverse.

Strixhaven, which we visited earlier this year, has been turned on its head. Hexhaven’s five schools are extensions of what Jace’s mind, and what thinks should be taught in his perfect reality. Dragons, are replaced with Sphinxes that answer only to him. Jace obviously has a dim view of Sphinxes, but when the entire multiverse is born from a tortured soul’s brutal past, things were never going to come out sunshine and rainbows, were they?

Which brings us to the delightfully twisted art in this set. It’s not quite as perfect for Halloween as Duskmourn was, but we’re here for it.

Not only do his Sphinxes look awesome, but the students of school all walk around with a Living Eye of Jace hiding somewhere on them, ensuring that the paranoid guy who thinks he can solve everyone’s problems is watching everyone at all times.

On MTG Arena, where you’ll likely spend most of your time playing with digital cards, you can see the warped mind of Jace materialising as an MC Escher-inspired background.

We absolutely can’t wait to get our hands on this set. The Halloween horror slot every year is always an absolute banger, and Reality Fracture is shaping up to be one of the best yet.

Reality Fracture comes to Magic Arena on September 29th, but you can get your hands on the cards a week early at a local prerelease event. You can find your local game store at this link.

Tags: Magic: The Gathering, Magic: The Gathering Arena, MTG Arena