Reality Check, Part 1

Welcome to the first week of Reality Fracture previews! Today, I will introduce the Reality Fracture Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams, begin the story of the set's design, and show off two preview cards (an echoed pair, no less). I hope that sounds fun.

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Grounded in Reality Fracture

Before I explain how we made Reality Fracture, I'd like to start with who made it. This week I'll introduce the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams. Next week, I'll introduce the Set Design and Commander Design teams. As always, I had the lead of each team introduce their members. Today, that's just me, as I led the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams for Reality Fracture.

Facing Reality Fracture

Reality Fracture is what we refer to as a capstone event set. It's a set focused on the conclusion to a years-long story arc. The previous two capstone event sets were War of the Spark and March of the Machine, both of which I led the vision design for. Like those two sets, Reality Fracture began with the goal of bringing life to the story. Traumatized by a series of events that ended with him being compleated, Jace decided he was going to do something to protect the Multiverse from high-level threats. His idea was to create an alternate version of the Multiverse, which we call the Echoverse, where he could rewrite history and eliminate horrible things. There, certain things would never have happened or existed. Imagine a world, for example, where Nicol Bolas, the Eldrazi, and the Phyrexians never existed.

When I first heard the story, I was excited. I'm a huge fan of what-if themes. Many of the universes I enjoy love to dip their toe into alternate realities where things happened differently. I thought it would be super fun to bring that to Magic. There were two small problems we had to tackle.

First, this isn't the first time we'd done a what-if set. Many years ago, I created a plan for the Time Spiral block. I had a cool time theme I was interested in based on some mechanics we'd saved up over the years. This was my second block as head designer, and I was championing the idea that every block should have a plan that gave each set in the block a specific identity.

The Time Spiral block was about time, and I needed to divide the block into three parts, so the answer seemed obvious: past, present, and future. The past set was easy. Magic players enjoy nostalgia, and we had many years of Magic sets to reference. The future set was a bit stranger, but I understood what I wanted to do. That set would hint at the future of Magic, teasing where we might be headed mechanically and creatively.

But capturing the present was tricky. Wasn't every set about the present? Eventually, I came up with the idea that the middle set shouldn't be about our present but an alternate present. Why not make a what-if set?

If the first set would show what Magic has done and the third set would show what Magic might do, the second set should show what Magic could have done. I've always been fascinated by the color pie. I was well aware of the fact that we mechanically made certain choices in the game, but Magic could have used the same flavor and represented things differently color by color. What if the middle set did that? We called it Planar Chaos.

The set took some of the Magic mechanics and redistributed them. For instance, card draw represents knowledge (a blue trait), but what if it represented growth (a green trait)? What if discard was about blue's ability to make people lose their memories? What if white's controlling nature gave it access to counterspells? The set took mechanics and effects that were squarely in one or more colors and put them in different colors that didn't normally get access to them. The bonus sheet consisted of colorshifted versions of past Magic cards. The poster child was a black Wrath of God, Damnation.

In the end, the set caused a lot of problems. Once a card accesses something its colors normally can't access, its colors now have access to that ability. Communicating that this was a special, one-time exception was nearly impossible. To this day, when I explain why a color can't do something on Blogatog, players point to a Planar Chaos card to show that it can.

So, we were doing a what-if theme, and the only other time we had ever done that theme, it had gone horribly wrong. That was problem number one.

The second problem occurred in what we call a "seeds meeting." Before we begin exploratory design for a set, we'll have a meeting with all the stakeholders in R&D to walk through what the intent of the set is. The idea for the meeting involves getting everyone on board with what we're signing ourselves up for with the new set. Aaron Forsythe, my boss and the vice president of Magic Design, had a concern.

What-if stories are fun if the audience is familiar with the normal version of the story. For example, Chandra as an ice mage is a cool concept if you understand that Chandra is normally a fire mage, but if you don't know that she is normally a fire mage, the twist won't register. Chandra is one of Magic's most popular characters, so maybe enough players know about her, but there are very few characters that players know as well as Chandra. To fill out a set, we'll have to rely on some characters many players don't know.

In R&D, the terminology we use is "inside baseball." If something is too "inside baseball," too much of the audience won't understand it because they won't get what's being referenced. The Time Spiral block had been the perfect example of this. Two of the big metrics we monitor are sales and play. Back then, when sales were up, play was up and vice versa. But something odd happened with the Time Spiral block that had never happened before. Play went up, but sales went down. What was going on?

With some research, we learned of players we dubbed "the invisibles." There are a lot of Magic players, especially less-enfranchised ones, that don't play in places we can observe, so when we did market research, we weren't seeing them. During the Time Spiral block, play was up because the enfranchised players understood and enjoyed all the references. The less-enfranchised players did not understand the references and disliked the block.

This was problem number two. Was there a way to design it so that got everyone on board, even players less familiar with Magic's worldbuilding?

As we didn't want to repeat the mistakes of Planar Chaos, we didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the Time Spiral block as a whole. Aaron was happy to start exploratory design on the set, but if we couldn't solve the "inside baseball" problem, he said we'd have to switch themes. As the story we wanted to tell really leaned into the what-if theme, not being able to solve this problem could cause all sorts of issues for the story. I told Aaron I was confident we could solve them.

Solving the First Problem

This was the easier problem to solve. The key to solving it was to look back at Planar Chaos and identify what we did wrong. While I focused on the color pie switching, that wasn't the only thing we did in Planar Chaos to capture the what-if theme. We also showed versions of characters with stories that had different outcomes. What if Braids was more constructive than destructive? What if Mirri had become a vampire? What if Akroma was built to reflect her creator's anger? This part of the set was pretty cool. Also, we used the Planar Chaos bonus sheet to take cards that had been printed in the wrong color and redo them in the right color. Players really enjoyed that.

The key was to approach the what-if theme from the creative side. Yes, you know this character as one color, but what if they were this other color? Now, the new cards still had to fall in the normal color pie. To represent the alternate-reality Chandra, we used blue tools and mechanics, but we had a lot of fun showing her as something radically different than what you know as Chandra. I was confident that we didn't need to mess with the color pie to design fun what-if cards.

Solving the Second Problem

We started our very first meeting with the following question: If you don't know who Chandra is, what made you understand that the icy Chandra isn't the normal Chandra? There was another related issue. When we have a theme, we want you to pick it up right away. How could we communicate the what-if theme within a single booster?

In exploratory design, we often start by finding answers and not limiting ourselves to what is and isn't possible. If we could do anything, what would solve the problem? The idea is that by eliminating any obstacles, you can find the clearest answer. Then you can examine what is doable once you've found something that solves your problem.

I pitched an idea. What if every time you opened the icy Chandra, you also opened the fire Chandra? How would you know the icy Chandra is a riff on the fire Chandra? Because you would see them together. Fire and ice are clearly opposites. That would communicate the theme pretty loudly. Everyone liked the solution. There was just one small issue. We couldn't do it.

To explain this next part, I'm going to have to get a little in the weeds on how we make Magic cards. Normally, when I talk about Magic design, I'm focusing more on the intangible side of design. How do we come up with ideas? But one of the challenges of making Magic cards is working within the physical limitations that come with producing cards.

For example, why are sets the size that they are? When we print Magic cards, we have to print them on large sheets that we then cut into individual cards. Set sizes are chosen to optimize how we have to lay out the cards on the sheets.

Why can't we just have two cards always appear together? Here's the easiest way to explain it. When we print a sheet, we cut it into cards. We can then put all cards from that sheet (not just any one sheet, but many copies of that one sheet, or sometimes multiple sheets together) into a hopper. A hopper can hold a giant stack of cards. When we print a booster, each slot in the booster is allocated to a specific hopper. For example, a slot could be for common cards, so it gets cards from a hopper with common cards.

When the sheets are cut, the cards always appear in the same order, but there are ways to mix up the order of the cards. I'm not going to get into how we do that, but there are techniques. If you want two cards to appear together, you can stick them next to each other on a sheet, but they won't always fall together into the same booster.

There are ways to address this, but it usually requires human interaction. Having humans involved slows down printing and makes it more expensive to print, which causes a lot of problems when you're printing at the volume Magic is. Now, there are some automated ways to do this, but most printers don't have that capability. We have only one printer that can do it with the speed and consistency required to print Magic at the volume we need.

Battlebond, the one set which required two paired cards to appear in each booster, was printed at that printer. Why didn't we just print all of Reality Fracture through that one printer? Battlebond was a small supplemental set. Reality Fracture is a full-size premier set. Plus, Magic has grown quite a bit since Battlebond released. Having one printer print all the cards for a single premier set wasn't an option.

The reason I know so much about this is that many years ago, I tried to make a set with paired cards, the original Innistrad. During design, each double-faced card was supposed to be paired with a single-faced card that went into your deck. When you cast it, it would put the double-faced card onto the battlefield from outside the game.

Once I knew we wanted double-faced cards, I went to our Print team to see if such a thing was viable. They talked with the printers and the best they could do was a solution where the paired cards showed up in the same booster 88% of the time. That wasn't good enough, so we ended up creating the checklist cards as a solution for players not using opaque sleeves (which was a small amount).

I really liked the paired cards as the feature to communicate the what-if theme, so I decided to see if there was a way to solve the problem without the need of technology. Could we find an answer that any of our printers could do?

I went back and looked at why we could only get to 88% accuracy during Innistrad design. That number always felt so exact. Here is what I learned. You can drop as many cards as you like from a hopper, and you can drop them in a row. As I explained above, they were always cut in the same order, but you couldn't control where they made the cut.

For example, let's say I have a sheet of paired cards. The first two cards are A1 and A2, meaning they are two different cards that are versions of the same character. The sheet would then have B1 and B2, C1 and C2, and so on until you run out of room on the sheet. Let's say I put all the cards in this sheet into a single hopper. I can drop two cards from the same sheet, and they'll drop in order, but I can't control which two drop.

Imagine we have the following cards in order: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. If I drop two cards from the sheet, I could get any of the following combinations: A1/A2, A2/B1, B1/B2, B2/C1, C1/C2, or C2/D1. Half of those (A1/A2, B1/B2, and C1/C2) are exactly what we want, but half (A2/B1, B2/C1, and C2/D1) are a mix between two different pairs. There are a few tricks to get it a bit higher than 50% accuracy, but we can't get it to 100% accuracy.

Then it hit me. There was a way to guarantee 100% accuracy. We could drop three cards instead of two. Here's what you can get: A1/A2/B1, A2/B1/B2, B1/B2/C1, and B2/C1/C2. Now all of them include a pair. Yes, they also include another card from an incomplete pair, but that's okay. Each booster still contains a complete pair.

We went to printing to make sure that this idea was viable. They said it was, and we had the core of our design. This was so important that we would build the set around it (more on that next week).

Once we knew we could make the pairs, we then created a number of rules for ourselves:

• To play up the what-if theme, each alternate-reality card in the pair had to be a different color or colors than the original. We wanted the contrast to be visually striking, so we knew changing colors was key. It was important that you got the what-if theme clearly from a single booster.
• We made each pair include two cards of the same rarity. We also limited ourselves to uncommon, rare, and mythic rare pairs. There are no common pairings.
• The contrast between the cards had to be simple and straightforward. Using the fire Chandra and the icy Chandra as a template, we wanted things that were clearly opposites. We would do this by focusing on one core aspect of the character in the main Multiverse and contrasting that quality on their alternate-reality version.
• The pairs would always be the same character in the same card type. If one was a creature, the other would also be a creature.
• Where possible, we wanted there to be some mechanical throughline that connected the two cards. The cards weren't designed in a vacuum. We designed them as a pair.
• Each card needed to be exciting by itself. Sometimes you would get the card without its paired card, and it needed to be cool on its own.
• The paired cards should not be designed to work together mechanically. Each needed to do their own thing. When drafting, you would only be able to take one card most of the time. We didn't want it to feel bad when you left one card in the pair behind.

While we mostly followed all the rules, we did break them a little bit on special occasions where we thought we had something cool. This led to Reality Fracture's echoed pairs.

Before I wrap up today, I want to show you my two preview cards, and they just happened to be an echoed pair.

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Facing Reality Fracture

That's all the time I have for today. Next week, I will get into the rest of the design process. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, Reality Fracture, or on any of the topics I covered today. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week for part two.

Until then, may you find the pair of characters in Reality Fracture that speaks to you.