Reality Fracture Vision Design Handoff, Part 3
Two weeks ago, I started showing you the vision design handoff document I created when I turned in Reality Fracture to Set Design. That first part talked about the paired characters that were at the heart of the design. Last week, I talked all about Hexhaven, the setting for Reality Fracture, a what-if take on the world of Arcavios and Strixhaven with ally-color colleges. Today, I'll be digging into the what-if theme of the set and how we thought Set Design could tackle it.
Execution of What-If
The main theme of "Ziplining" is what-if. So far, we've mostly talked about the macro-implementations: the paired sheet and the alternate setting (and turning point), but the Vision Design team did explore more subtle options. These mostly involve cycles or individual card designs, which mainly appear at higher rarities. We want the paired sheet and alternative setting to be understandable for players who might not be aware of story specifics. On a micro-level, our what-if designs should be deep cuts for the enfranchised players who are aware of references to specific cards or characters. These designs should be cool in a vacuum but still function as Easter eggs for enfranchised players.
A big challenge of this set involved keeping things understandable for all players while including a lot of Easter eggs for enfranchised fans. Yoni and his Set Design team did a great job of balancing these two needs.
Color-Shifted Cards
We can include famous cards from the past adjusted to a new color. Note that because we don't want to repeat the errors of Planar Chaos, new implementations of these cards need to be in color pie-appropriate colors. There are two versions of this idea. First, a spell can be mostly, if not completely, identical, with the major change being the new color.
Collective Company
3W
Sorcery
Look at the top six cards of your library. Put up to two creature and/or artifact cards with mana value 3 or less from among them onto the battlefield. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
The set did a little of this, redoing old spells but in a new, appropriate color.
The second version can be a riff on an existing card, but the change to the new color comes with the addition of elements that reflect how the new color would do the effect.
Scorching Tithe
3R
Enchantment
Whenever an opponent draws a card, they may have this enchantment deal 2 damage to them. If they don't, you create a Treasure token.
The set also did this, recontextualizing old spells in a new color.
Card Type-Shifted Cards
These are similar to color-shifted designs, but rather than changing what color something is or what color it affects, they change what card type something is or what card type it affects. Note this type of design might also change the card's color.
Elf Engineer
1G
Creature — Elf Cleric
1/2
When this creature enters the battlefield, you may search your library for an enchantment card, put it into your graveyard, then shuffle.
G, T, Sacrifice an enchantment: Return target enchantment card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.
The set also had these designs, taking a known effect but having it affect a new card type.
Alternate-Reality Versions of Specific Cards
These cards are similar to those of the last two categories but focus on showing how iconic cards would be represented differently in a new multiverse. Note that these could include color changes but don't inherently need to. These changes could also address Play Design's concerns about the original cards.
The Meatpie Merrymaking
XGG
Legendary Enchantment
When CARDNAME enters, distribute X +1/+1 counters among any number of target creatures you control.
Whenever a creature you control enters, put a +1/+1 counter on target creature you control.
Whenever a creature you don't control enters, you gain 1 life.
Brainclamp
2
Artifact — Equipment
Equipped creature gets +1/+1.
Whenever equipped creature dies, draw two cards.
Equip 2
Because we showed off less of the other worlds, we didn't end up doing these designs in the set. Both designs really made me smile though, and I hope to find a set one day where we can make them.
Use of Ability Words
We tried making some characters on the paired sheet with ability words from the world they're from. We then gave their paired cards an alternate version of that ability word. We ended up removing them from the file as they were becoming traps in Limited, but the Set Design team might want to reexamine this decision. It's also possible to use alternate ability words on non-paired cards. If you do, we advise doing it at higher rarities.
Daxos, Abandoned Demigod
3W
Legendary Enchantment Creature — Demigod
3/2
Constellation — Whenever CARDNAME or another enchantment enters under your control, you gain 2 life. If this is the first time this ability has triggered this turn, draw a card.
Daxos, MeletiCorp Masterpiece
2B
Legendary Artifact Creature — Soldier
2/1
Automation — When CARDNAME or another artifact enters the battlefield under your control, each player loses 1 life. If this is the first time this ability has triggered this turn, draw a card.
One of the biggest traps in design is when you make one card that you really like and it encourages you to make a whole theme out of it. Then it turns out, there just isn't as much design potential there as you'd hoped. This was one such idea. The concept was cool, but it didn't execute well.
Dead Characters as Living Creature Cards
The paired sheet requires you to have a living version of the creature, but that doesn't stop us from seeing how dead characters might be tweaked. The handoff file, for example, has a cycle of deans from Hexhaven that are all known dead characters. Dead characters can also be done as one-ofs.
Gideon, Dean of Strategy
2WU
Legendary Creature — Human Soldier
4/4
Vigilance
Whenever you exile one or more cards from your graveyard, put a +1/+1 counter on CARDNAME.
Activated abilities of creatures you control cost 1 less for each counter on CARDNAME. This can't reduce their cost below 1.
Jaya, Dean of Provocation
1BR
Legendary Creature — Human Wizard
3/3
Whenever a nontoken creature you control dies, create a 2/2 colorless Cadet creature token.
Attacking creature tokens you control have menace and deathtouch.
Obviously, a brand-new multiverse where things went differently offers us a chance to see beloved characters that no longer exist in the main Multiverse. At handoff, we used characters that were dead in the main Magic Multiverse and made them deans of Hexhaven. Sadly, the logic of it didn't make a lot of sense, so Set Design removed them. We did manage to make a Gideon.
The Lorwyn Five
The five ally-color combinations play up the five Hexhaven colleges and the larger environment of the set. The five enemy-color combinations focus more on the story of the set: the siege by the heroes to save the Multiverse. To simplify the theme and give it a stronger connection to the story, each enemy-color theme is tied to one of the five original planeswalkers who are commonly referred to as the Lorwyn Five (as they premiered together in Lorwyn). Here are the five enemy-color pairs with the character it's attached to:
Usually, when Vision Design hands off a file to Set Design, we will make some suggestions for what the draft archetypes could be. Because most of that work starts while building the real file, there's usually a decent departure between the archetypes in a handoff document and what sees print. Reality Fracture is no exception.
White-Black — Liliana
This archetype cares about the graveyard by bringing things back and using it as a resource. Liliana, being a necromancer, ties directly to this theme.
This ended up being more of an attrition theme than a graveyard theme.
Blue-Red — Chandra
This archetype cares about spells being cast and plays into many of the themes carried over from "Yachting," magecraft in particular. This theme is tied to Chandra as she is known for casting giant spells.
This shifted from caring about any spells and big spells to more of an "instants and sorceries matter" theme.
Black-Green — Garruk
This archetype is about playing larger creatures. This theme is tied to Garruk who is known to associate with big creatures. This is the theme of the five that is the most in flux.
Interestingly, this is one of the themes that stayed the closest to the handoff. You never know what will happen.
Red-White — Ajani
This archetype is most tied to the legendary theme, which includes make history, as Ajani is leading the heroes on their attack. This theme is also the most aggressive and tied to combat.
Red-white obviously stayed aggressive, but pretty much everything about how we did that shifted. "Make history" and the whole "legendary matters" theme were cut.
Green-Blue — Jace (and Petra)
This archetype is tied to the empower Jace mechanic and is about Jace's resources in stopping the heroes.
This is the other archetype that mostly stayed the same. Empower Jace was always a big part of the set, so having an archetype associated with it was a given.
These color pairs are also represented in the rare ten-card cycle of paired cards where we see monocolor versions of each character. In the handoff, which character is a planeswalker versus a creature varies character to character. The Magic Multiverse version is listed first.
- Ajani (planeswalker versus creature)
- Liliana (creature versus creature)
- Chandra (planeswalker versus planeswalker)
- Garruk (creature versus planeswalker)
There is some chance they all become planeswalkers. The one exception, as I stated above, is that Jace does not have an alternate version, so Petra functions as the mono-green mirror to his mono-blue version. (Jace has a multicolor planeswalker at mythic rare.)
We were interested in the idea of having the Lorwyn Five pairs be a mix of creatures and planeswalkers to demonstrate the differences between the multiverses. We were enamored with the fire Chandra and the ice Chandra, so that was going to be the one pair with two planeswalkers. Ajani was the one other character who was confirmed to have his spark, so we suggested that he be a planeswalker in the Magic Multiverse and just a creature in Jace's reality.
Liliana lost her spark in the Magic Multiverse, and the story wanted her to not have her spark in the Echoverse, so we made her a pair of two creatures. We hadn't yet said whether Garruk had his spark (he did, but no one knew that), so we pitched him as being a creature in the Magic Multiverse and a planeswalker in the Echoverse. In the end, it was determined that this caused more confusion than it was worth. Also, the Franchise team wanted Garruk to be a planeswalker, so we made each Echoverse version match their Magic Multiverse version.
Jace's mythic rare planeswalker ended up becoming mono-blue, and we did his multicolor version in the Commander deck, where he's a four-color commander.
Connective Mechanical Themes
The biggest note we got from the Vision Summit was that there was too much going on, so we made a move to consolidate our mechanical themes. To do this, we chose to take the themes from the enemy-color archetypes and apply each to an ally-color college archetype that overlaps in a color. These overlaps are all three-color shard pairs (a color and its two allies).
During the final month of vision design, we have a meeting called the Vision Summit where we show off the set for the first time to a number of folks in R&D. We get a lot of feedback and use that for our final push before we hand off the file to Set Design. One of the main notes we got was that there was too much going on. (Vision Design even had one more mechanic called "graduate" that we pulled.)
This was us trying to tie a lot of themes together to simplify things. Set Design solved this problem by pulling some things out of the set, like "make history" and the "turning point" Sagas.
Green-White-Blue — Jace overlaps with Everbloom (Science)
Theme: Counters matter
These are the three colors that empower Jace will focus on. These three colors will also make use of +1/+1 counters such that it can have rewards for cards having counters or trigger off putting counters on cards. Green-white will also have a "life matters" theme that ties to counters.
The core idea here was tying together two themes, empower Jace and cards that care about having counters on them.
White-Blue-Black — Liliana overlaps with Forehold (History)
Theme: The graveyard
Liliana's archetype wants to return things from the graveyard, and Forehold wants to use the graveyard as a resource. Both can use milling (in blue and black) and sacrifice (in all three colors) to fill the graveyard. White and blue can also lean into the "spells matter" theme to get more cards into the graveyard.
Blue-black did keep a milling and graveyard theme, which I guess came out of this.
Blue-Black-Red — Chandra overlaps with Quandrix (Math)
Theme: Spells matter
We are carrying over magecraft from "Yachting," and it will appear primarily in blue, black, and red. Blue-red will lean heavily into "spells matter" (as blue-red often does), while blue-black will be more of a control deck that leans heavily on spells.
Another thing that got pulled from the set was magecraft.
Black-Red-Green — Garruk overlaps with Stingerquill (Language)
Theme: Aggression with big creatures
Stingerquill and Garruk are both midrange themes that want to cast larger and larger creatures. Black, red, and green will all have a "large power matters" theme (currently set at 4 or greater).
We do love our "large creatures matter" themes.
Red-Green-White — Ajani overlaps with Melodari (Art)
Theme: Ramp into legendary creatures
Melodari carries over its ramp theme, which plays nicely with trying to cast large legendary creatures. Make history, as well as a larger "legendary matters" theme, will be centered in red, green, and white.
Ramp stayed, but the "legendary matters" theme left.
This tight structure of tying the ally-color archetypes of the colleges to the enemy-color archetypes of the Lorwyn Five might not end up working out once Set Design starts trying to build the set, but Vision Design was eager to find a tight structure to at least try to tie the whole set together.
It did not work out. But I like when Vision Design takes a stab at the archetypes when they can. Sometimes they do work out, so it's worth spending some time on it.
In Conclusion
"Ziplining" had big ambitions when it started out. We wanted it to be a capstone event set while embracing a what-if theme. We went through a lot of changes along the way, but I'm proud of all the work the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams did (along with the Worldbuilding team). I think we are handing over something that has the potential to be a memorable set. I'm eager to see what Yoni and his team can do with it. If you have any questions about this document (said or unsaid), please come talk to me.
Thanks,
Mark Rosewater
I generally am pretty bold with my vision designs. I like to swing for the fences and am well aware that often Set Design will have to pull back a bit. This set embraced the challenge given to it and created something that lived up to the promise of its vision design. I can't wait for you all to play with it.
After 9,000 words, we've come to the end of this handoff document. I hope you enjoyed the journey to see what we handed off. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on this article, Reality Fracture, or any of the components I talked about. You can reach me through email or social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Join me next week for a look at the origin stories of several characters from Reality Fracture.
Until then, may you find all the Easter eggs we've hidden for you.