Reality Check, Part 2

Last week, I started talking about the design of Reality Fracture and introduced the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams. Today, I'm going to continue my story and introduce the Set Design and Commander Design teams.

Back to Reality Fracture

Before I get to the second part of the story of the set's design, I would like to introduce two more design teams that worked on Reality Fracture. As is the norm, the lead of each team will introduce their people. Set Design was led by Yoni Skolnik, and Commander Design was led by Gavin Verhey.

In Reality Fracture

Last week, I talked about how we solved the problem of conveying a what-if theme in a single booster. But the echoed pairs weren't the only problem we solved in exploratory design.

Reality Fracture has an antagonist: Jace Beleren. One of the challenges with having the antagonist of a Magic set be a single character is finding ways to make you feel their presence. When the antagonists are the Phyrexians or the Eldrazi, we can make many different cards representing their influence. A singular character who only has one or two cards is a lot trickier. We encountered the same problem during War of the Spark when Nicol Bolas was the antagonist. The answer then was to build a zombie army for Nicol Bolas, the Eternals. While Bolas wasn't on a lot of cards, the Eternals could be. Yeah, we could build Jace an army, but was there a way to just get Jace himself into play more often?

Interestingly, the solution to this problem came from a different prompt I gave to the Exploratory Design team. We were doing paired cards, so I explored a paired set of mechanics. The idea was that the set would have the normal mechanic that players knew and an Echoverse version of it. At the time, we referred to Jace's Multiverse as "Multiverse-J."

Jeremy Geist, my strong second on the set, had a pretty cool idea. What if we used amass? The normal Multiverse version would make an Army creature token like normal, but the Echoverse version would make a Jace planeswalker token. Here are the first three cards Jeremy pitched with the mechanic he dubbed "amass Jace."

Mage-Ring Advisor
2U
Creature — Human Advisor
2/2
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, amass Jace 2. (Put two loyalty counters on a Jace planeswalker you control. If you don't control one, first create a legendary planeswalker token named Jace Echo with 0 starting loyalty, "-1: Scry 1" and "-3: Draw a card".)

Into the Jultiverse
2U
Instant
Draw a card. Amass Jace 3.

Evangel of Helius
3W
Creature — Cat Cleric
3/3
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, amass Jace 2.
Jace planeswalkers you control have "-2: Put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control."

Sometimes in design, someone designs something and you just know it's going to end up in the finished product. We fell in love with "amass Jace" from the very first post that Jeremy made. When we got to vision design, we put it in the file and it never left.

Here are a couple interesting things about empower Jace. First, the finished design is almost exactly as Jeremy first pitched it with just a few tiny changes. "-1: Scry 1" became "-1: Surveil 1" when Set Design changed the set from using scry to using surveil. We have a general rule that we only use scry or surveil in any one set to avoid confusion in Limited. The original version let you put loyalty counters on any Jace, and the finished version only lets you put them on a Jace token (which does include the token from Jace, Mirror Mage). Finally, the name had to change. While the mechanic was clearly inspired by amass, it wasn't actually amass and the Rules team insisted it needed a new name.

I should point out that we explored other possibilities for loyalty abilities. We knew we wanted a cheap one and a more expensive one. Even once we agreed on the abilities, we discussed whether the costs were correct. But in the end, Jeremy got it right on his first stab at it. He truly is a great designer.

We also realized that the mechanic took up a lot of "complexity points," meaning the inclusion of this mechanic lessened how complex all the other mechanics in the set could be. We thought it did such an amazing job of solving the Jace problem while being both flavorful and innovative that we were fine with that trade.

There was a lot of discussion about what rarity this mechanic should be at. When we first added it to the file, we put it at common, but we were prepared to make it an uncommon-and-up mechanic if needed. In the end, we decided that if the as-fan was high enough, we could just commit to this mechanic being the one big thing you had to learn for this set. We decided that the cards that added loyalty abilities to your tokens (again, something Jeremy had in his first pitch) would only be at higher rarities.

We did explore having both amass for a creature and "amass Jace" in the set, but we decided amass didn't make sense as the Gatewatch wasn't building an army. It took up space that we'd rather spend on other things. Also, it was a what-if set. We could just do the what-if version of amass and not do the normal one. It fit perfectly. (Also, changing the name to empower Jace made it a little less clear it was what-if amass.)

We left exploratory design with the idea of paired characters and empower Jace. It was a pretty good exploratory design process. But we still had one other big problem to solve.

Harsh Reality Fracture

We entered vision design with an understanding of many of our themes and some of our mechanics, but we really didn't have a good sense of what the structure of the set should be. Our first stab at it was a tried-and-true execution: ten two-color pairs. One of the cool things about the story involves Jace rewriting the entire Multiverse, which meant every plane had a story. What was Zendikar like without the Eldrazi or Mirrodin without the Phyrexians? We worked with the Creative team to pick the ten coolest planes to talk about and tried to match them with the ten two-color archetypes.

I won't go too deep into this as it didn't last long, but here's an example of what we did. Because the Eldrazi never existed, we thought it would be interesting to see what Zendikar looked like. Zendikar, at its core, is mechanically about lands, which meant it probably had to have green in its color pair. We also wanted to see Mirrodin without Phyrexia. Mirrodin is an artifact-centric plane, so it probably needed blue in its color pair. We did this with our ten planes and tried to fit them into the ten color pairs. I don't have the exact list we came up with, but we had to swap out a few planes to get to a workable ten-plane system. Ravnica was very helpful as we could have it be any of the ten two-color pairs.

As that happened, we were starting to get more detailed feedback from March of the Machine. One of the biggest pieces of feedback: the story was a bit too broad. It was hard to focus when so many stories were happening on so many different planes. So, we focused Reality Fracture on one plane and just glimpsed at other planes. The Creative team had a meeting about what would be the ideal plan and figured out the best option: Mirrodin!

Technically, "Mirrodin Pure." You see, back in the Scars of Mirrodin block, we watched as the Phyrexians waged war against Mirrodin. The block led to a giant war in the middle set, Mirrodin Besieged, and the third set would show the outcome of the war. In a big departure, we didn't officially announce the name of the third set. Rather, we announced two possible set names and said it would be one of the two. Stores actually ordered it not knowing the final name of the set. We announced it would be called New Phyrexia if the Phyrexians won and "Mirrodin Pure" if the Mirrans won. We even made logos, boxes, and a sample card from each potential set. The art we used for "Mirrodin Pure" finally got used for a card in the Reality Fracture Commander deck.

The idea was that Reality Fracture would take place on "Mirrodin Pure," the Phyrexian-less Mirrodin. We spent some time figuring out what that would mean for the set. What themes would players expect if the setting was Mirrodin? (It would have to have an artifact theme, for instance.) In the end, we soured on the idea of setting the story on Mirrodin for several reasons. First, New Phyrexia came out in 2011. Focusing on a story beat from fifteen years earlier felt pretty "inside baseball," meaning it would really only land with heavily enfranchised players. Also, in the Echoverse, the Phyrexians never existed, so it wouldn't be "Mirrodin Pure," just a revisit to Mirrodin.

Here's what we needed:

• A world that was a cool what-if take on an existing Multiverse plane
• Something recent enough players would be aware of it
• Ideally, a world that could deliver on something we knew players wanted to see

The second requirement meant we wanted it to be something within the last few years, so we looked at our in-Multiverse sets that focused on a single plane. Here were our options going back to 2023:

• New Phyrexia (Phyrexia: All Will Be One)
• Eldraine (Wild of Eldraine)
• Ixalan (The Lost Caverns of Ixalan)
• Ravnica (Murders at Karlov Manor)
• Thunder Junction (Outlaws of Thunder Junction)
• Bloomburrow (Bloomburrow)
• Duskmourn (Duskmourn: House of Horror)
• Tarkir (Tarkir: Dragonstorm)
• The Edge (Edge of Eternities)
• Lorwyn-Shadowmoor (Lorwyn Eclipsed)
• Arcavios/Strixhaven (Secrets of Strixhaven)

A bunch of these weren't usable for different reasons. New Phyrexia no longer existed (and Zhalfir, the plane that replaced it in the Multiverse, is a set coming next year). Ixalan and Ravnica had been backdrop sets that weren't focused on the core of their planes. The Edge wasn't a plane which would muddy the story. Lorwyn-Shadowmoor was already about two different versions of the same world. That left six other options.

• Eldraine (Wild of Eldraine)
• Thunder Junction (Outlaws of Thunder Junction)
• Bloomburrow (Bloomburrow)
• Duskmourn (Duskmourn: House of Horror)
• Tarkir (Tarkir: Dragonstorm)
• Arcavios/Strixhaven (Secrets of Strixhaven)

As we started thinking about what-if versions of these planes, I had a flashback to when Strixhaven: School of Mages released. A very common question I got was "When were we going to meet the ally-color colleges of Arcavios?" I said there weren't any. When we were designing the set, we poured all of our ideas and concepts into the five colleges. We didn't leave enough material to build five more colleges. But the idea of ally-color colleges made for an intriguing what-if premise.

We knew that Secrets of Strixhaven would be the most recent in-Multiverse set, so most players would know it, and it allowed us to deliver on something we knew players had requested, which made it the perfect choice. The Creative team pitched the idea that Jace remade Strixhaven to aid him in his quest, and we ended up with Hexhaven, a military school run by Jace.

To capture the feel of Strixhaven, we decided to use the prepared mechanic from Secrets of Strixhaven. Prepared spells played well, communicated the connection to Strixhaven, and would allow us to make colorshifted prepared spells to show what-if versions of spells. To simplify things, we created a single prepared spell for each school and only used that on common and uncommon cards of that school. We allowed rare and mythic rare cards to have different prepared spells. We also chose to make a single "familiar" creature token for all the schools, a colorless 2/2 Wizard Soldier named Cadet.

Because this was a capstone event set, we wanted to make sure enough of the set was focused on the story. Empower Jace and Hexhaven captured Jace's side, but we needed to represent our heroes. Originally, that was going to be Garruk, Liliana, and Chandra (plus Vraska and Tam). We realized that would include four members of the Lorwyn Five.

Two weeks ago, I told the story of the Lorwyn Five, our first planeswalker cards. Their cards were designed for and released in Lorwyn, but we weren't confident they were going to be in the final set. Some of them were originally going to be in Future Sight but were removed because we weren't confident about the design of planeswalker cards. So, we consciously chose to leave them out of the story.

That meant Magic had never had a story with all of the Lorwyn Five together. We talked with the Story team and got Ajani involved. We then designed each of the five to have a what-if version in an enemy color. The one exception being Jace, who has a slightly different echoed pair.

We designed the five ally-color pairs around the schools of Hexhaven.

White-Blue Fatehold Surveil Aggro: Use surveil and foresee the future of your library to build up threats and pressure your opponents.

Blue-Black Theorix Graveyard Math: Mill yourself to reach threshold and have the graveyard as a source of strength you can count on.

Black-Red Stingerquill Face Burn: Add insult to injury by using cards that deal damage directly to your opponent, which in turn lets you strengthen your cards and press the attack.

Red-Green Konstrari Mana Ramp: Create Heartwood tokens to get tons of mana and show your opponent the art of building big!

Green-White Vigorbloom Life Gain: Grow your creatures in a variety of ways while boosting life to overwhelm the battlefield with harsh medicine.

The five enemy-color archetypes were built around the Lorwyn Five and the two colors that represent them and their Echoverse counterparts.

White-Black Liliana's Attrition: Look to the graveyard for effects that allow you to continue deploying small creatures to the battlefield until you bury your enemies.

Blue-Red Chandra's Prowess: Cast noncreature spells to trigger abilities and keep up the heat on your opponents.

Black-Green Garruk's Bestiary: Bring out fearsome creatures to hunt down your foes. Combine deathtouch and trample to smash through any defenses!

Red-White Ajani's Army: Strengthen your creatures with +1/+1 counters to go aggro with reckless abandon!

Green-Blue Jace's Mastery: Keep empowering Jace to provide a steady flow of cards or pick your path to victory with cards that grant your planeswalkers abilities!

Because the set was light on mechanics other than empower Jace and prepared spells, the team dipped into a number of deciduous mechanics, such as flashback, landfall, and threshold, to help fill out the file.

The final big aspect of the design involved playing up the what-if theme. This was done in several ways.

Echoed pairs: As I explained last week, we set it up so a character and its doppelgänger shows up in every booster. It shows you their main Multiverse version and their Echoverse version, which are always in a different color or colors.

Spell Tweaks: We took classic Magic spells and redesigned them as if they were originally created in a different color, sometimes on prepared spells.

Color Shifts: We took some spells and put them into another color (similar to the Planar Chaos timeshifted sheet). We always did something that was appropriate for the color pie.

Flavor Bends: We took cards normally associated with one color and found flavorful reasons to put them into another color (always following the mechanical constraints of the new color).

Completing Cycles: We took cycles or collections of effects that had versions we hadn't done yet and made one.

Glimpsing Other Worlds: While most of the set focuses on Hexhaven, there are some glimpses of other worlds. The Reality Fracture Commander deck goes all in on this theme.

Ally Hosers: Many sets have a cycle of enemy-color hosers. We turned that on its ear by making a cycle of ally-color hosers.

In short, we had as much fun with the what-if theme as we could.

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Virtual Reality Fracture

And with that, we come to the end of our story. I hope you enjoyed hearing about how it all came together. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article, Reality Fracture as a whole, or any small component of it. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week as I start showing off Reality Fracture's vision design handoff document.

Until then, may you have fun finding all the Easter eggs we hid.