After three years of buildup, the Magic: The Gathering storyline reaches its next climax in Reality Fracture. Unlike other story arcs, the threat this time comes from the most recognizable character in Magic’s history, so much so that Magic’s proprietary font is named for him: the mind mage Jace Beleren.
After years of solving multiversal threats – and occasionally falling victim to them – Jace has decided to solve all suffering permanently. That solution is replacing the entire multiverse itself, at the high cost of everyone already living in it.
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Reality Fracture is simultaneously the highest and most intimate stakes in a very long time for Magic. Wizards of the Coast has its work cut out for it in trying to make this set satisfying. The solutions they’ve come up with might lead to the best event set they’ve ever made.
Unlike many threats in the Magic multiverse, Jace isn’t a massive monster or a collective. He’s one person. Powerful, but still generally a singular entity. That presents a design problem to solve: how to make Jace feel present throughout Reality Fracture? Thankfully, WOTC avoided the same kind of designs they’ve used for other sets, such as making multiple Jace cards. Instead, the answer comes in the form of Empower Jace, seen on cards like Protege’s Awakening.
Reality Fracture Card Previews
Protege’s Awakening | 3 Colorless Mana, 1 Blue Mana
Sorcery
Empower Jace 6. (Put six loyalty counters on a Jace token you control. If you don’t control one, first create a blue Jace planeswalker token with “-1 loyalty: Surveil 1” and “-3 loyalty: Draw a card.”)
Draw a card.
Empower Jace is a mechanic that works similarly to Amass, recently seen in The Hobbit set. When a player is instructed to Empower Jace, they will either put loyalty counters on a Jace planeswalker token equal to the number indicated.
And if a player doesn’t have a Jace token in play, Empower Jace will first create the token for the loyalty counters to go onto.
Jace Token
Token Planeswalker – Jace
-1 loyalty: Surveil 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put that card into your graveyard.)
-3 loyalty: Draw a card.
0 loyalty
This Jace token is the first token that is also a planeswalker, and it accomplishes a few different things. First and foremost, this token allows Jace to remain omnipresent without needing to print multiple cards for him. Previous Jace cards are able to make token copies of themselves, but those have been tied to generic Copy tokens.
Empower Jace will work with those tokens, though, for Jace fans looking to put all these cards in a single Commander deck. Finally, the token requirement keeps the mechanic from going wild with the actual Jace planeswalker card in the set.
This mechanic will appear throughout the set at every rarity, ensuring that limited games will almost certainly see Jace appear. These extensions of himself play help highlight the power Jace has now and do a great job tying the story pieces into the actual gameplay.
Jace even imposes himself on the lands in Reality Fracture. Each basic land gets three borderless versions that form a vertical panorama of Hexhaven’s fortress towers, and the Empower Jace mechanic gets a strong utility land.
Theorist’s Sanctum
Land – Island
(Tap: Add 1 Blue Mana)
As this land enters, you may behold a Jace. If you don’t, this land enters tapped. (To behold a Jace, choose a Jace you control or reveal a Jace card from your hand.)
2 Colorless Mana, 1 Blue Mana, Tap: Empower Jace 2.
Hexhhaven is the Echoverse (the name for Jace’s created reality) equivalent of the recently visited school of Strixhaven. The colleges of Hexhaven are color-shifted versions of their inspiration, with a little bit of Jace’s own trauma thrown in for fun.
Instead of Elder Dragons founding the school, there are Elder Sphinxes just like Jace’s original manipulative mentor. This allowed WOTC to experiment with what a sphinx can do in Magic.
Denzilore Fatehold | 1 Colorless Mana, 1 White Mana, 2 Blue Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Sphinx
Flash
Flying
Whenever you scry or surveil, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
3/4
Fatehold’s sphinx is the most in line with traditional sphinx design, being in their common colors. However, the +1/+1 counters this sphinx bestows are a bit more aggressive than a White/Blue deck would normally play around.
Commander players with Elminster decks might salivate at having a potential win condition to go along with all their looking ahead. Denzilore also highlights the difference between Fatehold and Strixhaven’s Lorehold. Where Lorehold looks to the past (the graveyard), Fatehold tries to look into the future (the deck).
Ingris Stingerquill | 1 Black Mana, 2 Red Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Sphinx
Flying
Whenever a creature you control attacks, that creature deals 1 damage to each opponent.
4 Colorless Mana: Create a 2/2 colorless Wizard Soldier creature token named Cadet. Then creatures you control gain haste until end of turn.
1/4
The Echoverse version of Silverquill turns words into weapons. Ingris Stingerquill rewards aggression with additional damage as an attack trigger alongside an ability to increase that damage.
This sphinx might find its home in Standard alongside Hawkeye cards from Marvel Super Heroes. Hawkeye, Master Marksman has his own attack triggers that can deal damage on top of Ingris’s trigger. Then Hawkeye, Young Avenger can increase the amount of damage Ingris puts out, based on her own attack power.
Uldaros Theorix | 3 Colorless Mana, 1 Blue Mana, 2 Black Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Sphinx
Flying
When Uldaros Theorix enters, if you cast him, exile up to one target nonland card of each card type from your graveyard. Copy those cards. You may cast any number of spells with total mana value 6 or less from among the copies without paying their mana costs. (Permanent spells cast this way become tokens.)
5/5
Theorix is looking at mana values just like its Quandrix counterpart, but in a very different way. Uldaros wants to leverage the graveyard for additional value as a refund to players for casting it.
That 6 mana exchange still seems like a lot, but Superior Spider-Man Standard players will eventually need new targets to borrow the identity of. Uldaros looks like a really strong candidate, even if it can only retrieve a removal spell or a 5/5 Deceit.
Aerid Konstrari | 1 Colorless Mana, 1 Red Mana, 2 Green Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Sphinx
Flying
When Aerid Konstrari enters or dies, create a Heartwood token. (It’s a red and green artifact with “Tap: Add 1 Red Mana or 1 Green Mana.”)
6 Colorless Mana: Create a Heartwood token. Then Aerid Konstrari gets +X/+0 until end of turn, where X is the number of artifacts you control.
5/4
The Konstrari are still artists like the Prismari, but they’re more like artisans. They make battle constructs to puppet, empowering them with more and more mana. Just like their Red/Blue counterparts, the more mana that can be put into something, the better the payoff.
Aerid does it all for their college: ramping and getting more powerful the more constructs and Heartwood tokens are in play. Red/Green is a color combination that is still exploring using artifacts – usually these two colors are best at destroying artifacts. But Meria, Scholar of Antiquity from Dominaria United might be a fitting Commander for Aerid to join, if not lead, their own deck.
Kwia Vigorbloom | 3 Colorless Mana, 1 Green Mana, 2 White Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Sphinx
Flying, vigilance, lifelink, ward 2 Colorless Mana
Whenever you gain life, create a colorless artifact token named Lotus with “Tap, Sacrifice this token: Add three mana of any one color.” This ability triggers only once each turn.
6/6
This one’s just absurd. Gaining life is trivial, often incidental as part of other effects. It’s also worth noting that Green/White was just on the cusp of becoming the dominant deck in Standard, prompting the banning of Avatar the Last Airbender set’s Badgermole Cub.
Kwia Vigorbloom’s 6-mana cost will make it slower to come down, but not by much. Avatar still has Momo, Friendly Flyer, that can reduce the cost of flying creatures, and the reason the Green/White deck was so potent was its effective mana ramp. Even so, that both Vigorbloom and Witherbloom care so much about lifegain showcases their parallels between the multiverse and the Echoverse.
Being a parallel of Strixhaven also means instants and sorceries matter to the school. To highlight that, Prepared is returning on a select number of cards. It isn’t a focus like in Secrets of Strixhaven, but the consistency is nice. It also means the individual cards can be real heaters, such as Pompous Battlemage.
Pompous Battlemage | 1 Red Mana
Creature – Goblin Sorcerer
Prowess
This creature enters prepared. (While it’s prepared, you may cast a copy of its spell. Doing so unprepares it.)
The really compelling part of Reality Fracture isn’t a mechanic; it’s how packs are configured. Echoed Pairs puts two instances of a character – the canonical multiverse version and the Echoverse version – in the same pack together. Wizards of the Coast had to engineer a solution to guarantee this, putting a duplicate of one of the two cards on the same printing row.
The use of Echoed Pairs serves not only a storytelling element for Reality Fracture but also opens up the chance to introduce Magic’s large roster of characters to newer players.
While players who aren’t in the know might not recognize a character, their two cards will help showcase the history and journeys these characters have taken. Take the long-suffering silver golem Karn, for example:
Karn, Argent Defender | 2 Colorless Mana
Legendary Artifact Creature – Golem
Artifacts and creatures entering the battlefield don’t cause abilities to trigger.
1/3
Besides completely wrecking my Simulacrum Synthesizer Standard deck, this Karn shows the current state of the character. Having a direct hand in the return of the Phyrexian through his creation of Mirrodin, Karn is now working to make amends, and his effect shutting down triggers from artifacts and creatures aligns with the art.
This appears to show him clearing out the remnants of the Phyrexian invasion. But in his Echoverse version, this never happened.
Karn, Gilded Guardian | 2 Colorless or 1 White Mana, 2 Colorless or 1 Blue Mana, 2 Colorless or 1 Black Mana, 2 Colorless or 1 Red Mana, 2 Colorless or 1 Green Mana
Legendary Artifact Creature – Golem
Vigilance, trample
When Karn enters, draw a card for each color among other artifacts you control.
5/5
Because Jace’s Echoverse doesn’t have New Phyrexia in it, Karn’s created plane Mirrodin doesn’t fall and instead thrives. He himself sits golden and at peace at its core, embracing the power of the five suns that gave rise to the Praetors in New Phyrexia. It’s a version of Karn that could exist with Jace’s “adjustments.”
This kind of indirect storytelling highlights that there may be those who’d embrace Jace’s plan to remove their suffering. Long-time Magic fans might question how Karn could even exist without Phyrexia, but I’ll leave the Reality Fracture story to pay that off.
Other Echoed Pairs are introductions to popular and iconic characters and their personalities. These types of pairs might be hints to deep lore, but they are a chance to make a character someone’s new favorite. Elder Dinosaur Ghalta from Ixalan gets a cameo spin in this exact way.
Ghalta the Unstoppable | 8 Colorless Mana, 1 Green Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Dinosaur
This spell costs X Colorless Mana less to cast, where X is the greatest power among creatures you control.
Trample
Other creatures you control have trample.
8/8
True to Ghalta’s other cards, this new entry gets a cost reduction and an effect that rewards having other powerful creatures in play. There’s not a lot of story to unpack here; Ghalta is just an unstoppable force of nature, a display of power. However, what if Ghlata was an immovable object instead?
Ghalta the Immovable | 8 Colorless Mana, 1 White Mana
Legendary Creature – Elder Dinosaur
This spell costs X Colorless Mana less to cast, where X is the greatest toughness among creatures you control.
Creatures you control can attack as though they didn’t have defender.
Each creature you control with toughness greater than its power assigns combat damage equal to its toughness rather than its power.
0/7
Despite the walls of text that the White Ghalta needs thanks to Magic’s rules, the differences between these cards are quite simple to grasp. Green Ghalta attacks, White Ghalta defends. That defense doesn’t mean inaction, either. These kinds of pairs are great entry points into Magic’s worlds and characters.
Between Empower Jace and many of the Echoed Pairs being planeswalkers, support for the planeswalker card type is finally getting a dedicated focus for the first time since Phyrexia: All Will Be One. Some will tie directly into supporting Empower Jace:
Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes | 1 Green Mana, 1 Blue Mana
Creature – Avatar
Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, empower Jace 2. (Put two loyalty counters on a face token you control. If you don’t control one, first create a blue face planeswalker token with “-1 loyalty: Surveil 1” and “-3 loyalty: Draw a card.”)
Planeswalkers you control have “-10 loyalty: Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature for each land you control.”
2/3
Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes not only can maintain a token Jace pretty reliably, but it also gives a top-end payoff to any other planeswalker card. In limited games of Reality Fracture, that might likely be a Jace token.
But in decks with multiple planeswalkers, they all can become even more of a threat to the board than they already are. This avatar can also serve as a reliable blocker for these planeswalkers it’s building up.
In addition, a cycle of enchantments will help create a build-your-own-planeswalker situation while doing more historical recap for newer players.
Way of the Pyromancer | 1 Colorless Mana, 1 Red Mana
Legendary Enchantment
When Way of the Pyromancer enters, empower Jace 2. (Put two loyalty counters on a face token you control. If you don’t control one, first create a blue face planeswalker token with “-1 loyalty: Surveil 1” and “-3 loyalty: Draw a card.”)
Planeswalkers you control have “+1 loyalty: Add 1 Red Mana”
Way of the Pyromancer is a visual crash course on the fiery planeswalker Chandra’s core – her passion manifests in the Red mana generation shared with any other Planeswalker in play.
Such as the Jace token the card makes if one doesn’t already exist. This cycle of Ways has its own mirrors as well.
Way of the Cryomancer | 2 Colorless Mana, 1 Blue Mana
Legendary Enchantment
When Way of the Cryomancer enters, empower Jace 5. (Put five loyalty counters on a face token you control. If you don’t control one, first create a blue face planeswalker token with “-1 loyalty: Surveil 1” and “-3 loyalty: Draw a card.”)
Planeswalkers you control have “-3 loyalty: When you next cast an instant or sorcery spell this turn, copy that spell. You may choose new targets for the copy.”
Chandra’s Echoverse counterpart is not remotely rebellious, actively working with the regime of her plane that the canonical Chandra and her family fought against.
She gives planeswalkers the ability to copy instants and sorceries, which is just as much in red as in blue, but reflects the more measured control and resource management the more calculated and cold version of Chandra represents.
Planeswalker fans will really rejoice to see a new tutor for the card type, one that is well overdue. The one-mana tutors of Magic’s past are all powerful, with most of them on Commander’s Game Changer list. This new tutor probably doesn’t hit that level of power, but it’s great to finally see planeswalkers get their version:
Loyal Tutor | 1 White Mana
Instant
Search your library for a planeswalker card, reveal it, then shuffle and put that card on top.
Speaking of new mirrors of iconic cards, Reality Fracture will also have new cards that call back to some of the best of the best. These are not Echoed Pairs that we’re aware of but are immediately evocative for longtime fans, giving them some payoff too.
Hexhaven Invigorator | 4 Green Mana
Creature – Chimera Horror
Vigilance
Whenever this creature is dealt damage, you may search your library for up to that many land cards, put them onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle.
6/6
Hexhaven Invigorator continues a cycle of 4-mana monstrosities that began with Phyrexian Obliterator in New Phyrexia. Each of these cards does something when they take damage in any way; in Invigorator’s case, it is search for lands.
Keep in mind, these don’t have to be basic lands! Most horrifying might be that Vigilance keyword, because Invigorator can attack and block each turn cycle. That could mean a lot of lands coming into play.
Return to the Light Realms | 7 Colorless Mana, 2 White Mana
Sorcery
Return all nonland permanent cards from your graveyard to the battlefield.
This White twist on the Commander All-Star Rise of the Dark Realms could either be better or worse than its reference, depending on how it’s used. Rise of the Dark Realms only looks for creatures, but pulls from all graveyards.
Return to the Light Realms only cares about its owner’s graveyard, but it gets everything back. Decks that focus on noncreature permanents would love to have their own kind of top end like this. Planeswalkers count as well, putting this card into that support category too.
There’s a lot happening in Reality Fracture: a celebration of what Magic is and a look at what it could be, an entry point into its story, and a conclusion to an arc. So far, it looks like Wizards of the Coast has some really compelling ideas springing from all those pressures. Reality Fracture is shaping up to be everything players can hope for from a big Magic: The Gathering event set – here’s to hoping they can stick the landing.
Reality Fracture prerelease begins September 25th, 2026, followed by availability on MTG Arena on September 29th, 2026, and a global release on October 2nd, 2026.
