Jace wants to rewrite the multiverse and create cool new planeswalker echoes in Reality Fracture, Magic: The Gathering’s latest set
If you’ve been following the wider storyline of the Magic: The Gathering trading card game (TCG) for the past few years, you’ll know that the character of Jace Beleren has had a rough go of it. The TCG’s latest release, Reality Fracture, is the culmination of a three-year narrative arc that has been building since the Wilds of Eldraine set in September 2023. Reality Fracture centres on Jace, the most powerful mind mage in the multiverse who, as Roy Graham, Head of Story for Magic: The Gathering explains, “has reached his breaking point.”
“After fighting the Phyrexians, facing the Eldrazi and having his memory wiped again by Nicol Bolas over the past several years, Jace has had enough. He is no longer willing to be the finger in the dam of all of the threats facing the multiverse, and has decided that the problem has to be fixed at its very core,” Roy explains.
“He’s going to do that by building an entirely new multiverse, piece by piece. A multiverse forged in his own image called the Echoverse in this card set, which is fully complete with people, planes and histories. While it bears a lot of superficial similarities to the existing multiverse, it is notably free of the major threats that Jace has faced over his time in the Gatewatch. There are no Phyrexians, no Eldrazi and no Nicol Bolas.
Sounds pretty great, right? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy.“While the world is perfect in Jace’s eyes, the steps he has to take to make this vision a reality are nothing short of catastrophic. Jace is not just trying to make a new multiverse off to the side. He is trying to overwrite the existing multiverse, erasing the real versions of everyone he knows and replacing them with new and upgraded versions – at least from his perspective.”
“We had to focus on two separate scales,” continues Zach Stella, Principal Art Director for Magic: The Gathering. “The story is operating on an epic scale of the multiverse being rewritten, but at the same time Hexhaven and the world that Jace has created is constructed of his memories, his fears and his insecurities and how it connects back to all the characters. So we also got to tell an intimate story at the same time as telling a grand one.”
As you might imagine, not everyone is totally on board with getting red-lined out of existence, and first to step up and try and stop Jace are the other members of the Lorwyn Five: Ajani Goldmane; Liliana Vess; Chandra Nalaar; and Garruk Wildspeaker. “All the characters, save for Jace, will come face to face with an alternate version of themselves, each in an enemy colour. These doppelgängers show a path they could have taken had things turned out a bit differently,” explains Mark Rosewater, a writer for Magic: The Gathering at Wizards of the Coast.
“We’ve been teeing up this doppelganger battle in all of the teases that we’ve done for Reality Fracture,” Roy says. “Jace needed powerful mages in the echo of his former allies and friends. We’ve already shown off blue Chandra, black Garrick, white Liliana and red Ajani. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in the story we had to pit our beloved heroes against these dark versions of themselves.”
“We did a similar what-if theme once before, in Planar Chaos, the second set of the Time Spiral block. And there, we messed not just with the fabric of reality, but the fabric of magic itself. We messed with the colour pie, and we learned an important lesson – stop messing with the colour pie! This set does a lot of what-ifs, but whenever we do something in a different colour, it is true to that colour,” says Mark Rosewater, the head designer for Magic: The Gathering.
“While the what-if theme sounds fun, how does the audience even know that’s a thing? For example, compare our normal Karn with the alternate reality Karn. Normal Karn is colourless, alternate reality Karn is all five colours. But if you saw the five-colour version and didn’t know who Karn was, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.
“Our challenge was to communicate that theme in a single booster. So we came up with a really cool idea – what if every booster pack you open has the same character twice in different colours? Then when you open red Chandra, you also open blue Chandra. You get to see these characters in two different versions, and the way you know that they’re paired is you see them paired.”
“One of the challenges very early on is that a lot of our villains, like the Phyrexians and the Eldrazi, are a whole race. We can make lots and lots of Phyrexian cards, but there is one Jace. How exactly do we make commons feel like Jace? One of the challenges I gave my team was to take existing mechanics and make wild swings,” Mark Rosewater remembers.
“Jeremy Geist came up with a cool idea to take the mechanic Amass and do a different tweak on it. The Amass mechanic normally makes a creature token, an army token. We used it originally in War of the Spark to make a zombie army, but Jeremy asked what if instead of a creature, it made a planeswalker token? And not just any planeswalker token, but a Jace token? So Empower Jace works much like Amass. Whenever you use it, if you don’t have a Planeswalker token, you make one, and you put that many loyalty counters based on how Empowered Jace is. If you already have a Jace token when you use Empowered Jace, you add more loyalty counters to it. The Jace token comes with two built-in abilities: -1, he can surveil one; and -3, he can draw a card.
“We gave a lot of thought to Jace’s version of Strixhaven,” Zach Stella says, discussing this new version of Arcavios. “We called it Darcavios when we were first working on it. It tickles me to no end that Strixhaven has a game called Mage Tower, and here the entirety of Hexhaven is a literal mage’s tower. It’s a 10,000-foot tower that climbs into the sky, and Jace’s inner sanctum is at the top.” “There is something so elemental and satisfying about an evil wizard in a giant tower,” Roy adds.
To represent this, each basic mana type has 15 cards that can be stacked together to create a full-length piece of art showing Jace’s tower. These are found throughout the collection, so can be opened in regular play boosters, but Collector boosters will always contain one of the 15 tower lands.
“Jace has a very complicated relationship with sphinxes,” says Zach Stella. “He’s not the biggest fan of them, but since all of Hexhaven is based on his memories, his fears and his insecurities, things have manifested from his psyche. All of our founder dragons [who established Strixhaven University] have now become sphinxes in this alternate universe. This is the first time we’ve got to see sphinxes that are not necessarily blue-aligned, so there were a lot of creative challenges on how we would approach these, and they’re very closely tied to the visual aesthetic for each of the schools in Strixhaven.”
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