A new Magic: The Gathering set is here, which means a new season of Limited play. One of the most exciting reasons to dive into the Limited format is that every new set brings new challenges and different gameplay styles, and Reality Fracture is no exception.
The first Magic to have a high density of Planeswalkers since 2019’s War of the Spark, Reality Fracture also has the task of showing off an entire new universe (Jace’s Echoverse) populated by alternate versions of popular characters from the trading card game’s history (called Echoed Legends). It was a big challenge, but after spending more than a few hours with Reality Fracture during its early access event on Magic Arena, I can say the designers delivered a fun, challenging experience.
Reality Fracture’s lead Limited designer explains his approach to archetypes
Speaking with Polygon via email, Ben Weitz, a senior designer at Wizards of the Coast who worked as lead Limited developer for Reality Fracture, explains what steps he took to ensure the set would be a success for Draft and Sealed players. One of the main challenges he faced was the presence of 10 archetypes for Reality Fracture Draft. For players not familiar with Limited, archetypes represent specific deck templates that are supported by the card pool. For example, Reality Fracture has five archetypes that represent each college in the magical school of Hexhaven (Jace’s Echoverse twist on Strixhaven), and each is based on the allied color pairs. There are five more archetypes for the enemy color pairs, each built around one of the original “Lorwyn Five” Planeswalkers: Jace, Chandra, Liliana, Garruk, and Ajani.
However, fitting 10 archetypes inside a single set’s card pool can prove to be difficult. The most recent example is Lorwyn Eclipsed, where five color pairs clearly suffered by being less supported than the others. However, Weitz says this wasn’t an issue with the latest set. “Reality Fracture has full support for each of the 10 color pairs; we did not reduce the number of cards aimed at any of them as we did in our experiment in Lorwyn Eclipsed,” Weitz says. Still, subtle differences exist between allied and enemy color pairs.
“The enemy color pairs definitely have quieter themes than the allied ones,” Weitz says. “In my mind, what’s important is to make sure that those quiet color pairs have something aspirational to do, so that even if you miss out on the theme, your deck is still cool. The Echoed Legends gave us a perfect opportunity to seed those synergies intentionally. For example, Jiang Yanggu, Alone and Yuriko, Blade of the Mighty combine for a powerful attacks-alone subtheme.”
As a player, I prefer sets that have fewer archetypes, but Weitz convinced me to try all the possible combinations in Reality Fracture. “I want every color pair to have a reason to draft it, even if some will inevitably be weaker than others,” he says.
Empower Jace lets you play better games of Magic
The most intriguing mechanic in Reality Fracture Limited is Empower Jace. Rather than presenting a wide array of Planeswalker cards like War of the Spark did, Reality Fracture lets every deck play with the same Planeswalker: the Jace token created by Empower Jace, which comes with two simple abilities that can Surveil or draw you cards. Weitz confirms that finding the right balance for such a novel mechanic was a challenge.
“Balancing Empower Jace was difficult, but rewarding,” Weitz says. “Because it’s so synergistic with itself, we had to modulate the density very carefully. We made sure a colorless creature [Keeper of the Quiet Hour] Empowers to give people another tool that they can draft later on in a pack.” Empower Jace comes with different numbers attached to it, representing how many loyalty counters the Jace token will have on entering the battlefield. Weitz says that there’s a sweet spot for that.
“We found Empower Jace 2 was clearly the most fun number: It lets you use your Jace in the turn it comes down, but then also draw a card when you play your next Empower Jace 2 card. We tried to stay away from multiples of 3, except on the blue spells that are supposed to just be card draw spells.”
The best thing about Empower Jace is that it makes every deck better. During my time in early access, I found that it helps mitigate some of the most aggravating issues in Limited play, such as flooding (drawing too many lands) or mana screw (not drawing enough lands). This was a conscious part of the design process.
“Dave Humpherys, one of our best designers, gave a seminar on Limited to other designers,” Weitz says. “A lesson I remember well from it is that Limited plays best when sets have a ‘smoothing’ mechanic to help players hit the right density of lands and play interactive games. For Reality Fracture, it was clear that we could put Empower Jace on some two- or three-mana cards, and that could help players get enough lands to play the games. You’ll see cards like Campus Crier, Keeper of the Quiet Hour, or Solve for Disappointment at common to try and help with that.”
One of the best ways to play Magic inspired Reality Fracture’s design
Empower Jace and the Echoed Legends are Reality Fracture‘s core design pillars. However, they weren’t equally easy to develop. “We set it up so that the commons that Empower Jace were powerful and exciting, but that was fairly easy compared to working on the Echoed Legends,” Weitz says. “Legends represent characters in the Magic Multiverse, which means that their mechanics need to capture their powerset or their personality somehow, but we also have to figure out a way to mirror that onto their Echoverse version in a way that’s easy to see at a glance. Most importantly though, we wanted them to just be cool cards.”
Speaking of the inspirations behind the set’s design, Weitz mentions War of the Spark for the high density of Planeswalkers, and Secrets of Strixhaven for having creatures with the Prepared ability. However, there is also a further source of inspiration that truly surprised me.
“What makes Reality Fracture so unique is that we also looked to Cube environments and play patterns to try to design appealing synergies for the set,” Weitz says. Cube is a popular way of playing Magic that consists of custom-building a curated card pool for Draft. Famous examples include the Vintage Cube, with the Arena Powered Cube being its Magic Arena version. “The individual cards we looked to for inspiration I will not mention here, because I hope that their Echoverse versions are clear enough that it’s obvious.”
Reality Fracture will be released on Oct. 2. Prerelease events will be available from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1.
