The world of Magic: The Gathering will break with the upcoming release of new mainline set “Reality Fracture,” something Magic maker Wizards of the Coast says fans have been asking for for a long time. Once I heard about the Echoverse, I was like, ‘Okay, we have our “what if” set.'” Releasing Oct. 2, “Reality Fracture” takes on “The Echoverse,” which Wizards describes as “Jace Beleren’s magnum opus, an artificial Multiverse of his own design” that will bring a host of warped cards and characters to Magic. Per Wizards, “Your favorite legends will take on new colors, your favorite cards will be twisted into new versions, and the story of Jace Beleren will reshape the Multiverse as you know it.
It’s an exciting time to be a fan of Magic‘s Multiverse, and we’re bringing this mind-bending celebration to Commander!” “Research was a huge part of ‘Reality Fracture,'” Wizards of the Coast worldbuilding design manager Meris Mullaley says. We talked at length at how legendary characters would think, behave, or appear if they embodied a different mana color.” Variety has an exclusive first look at four new cards (one with two art variants) from the upcoming set: See more from Variety‘s interview with Rosewater and Mullaley below. Mark Rosewater: The only brand new mechanic is empower Jace.
The set has a “what if” theme and Jace was the antagonist of the story, so we were looking for an existing mechanic that we could stretch into something completely new that would allow us to expand the feel of Jace in the cards. Empower Jace was inspired by the amass mechanic (first seen in War of the Spark), but instead of creating a creature token, you’re creating a planeswalker token. We’ve never made common planeswalkers, so having common cards create a planeswalker token was dipping into space we’d never previously explored.
Empower Jace was popular from the very first playtest, and never left the set. We think players are going to really enjoy it. Rosewater: Very early in the set’s design, we were planning to have the expansion set on a while number of planes in the Echoverse, but after getting feedback on March of the Machine that the story spread around too much, we decided to center it on just one plane.
This also allowed us to tell a much more personal story. The first plane we considered was Mirrodin Pure, an alternate take on the planet Mirrodin that we had hinted at many years ago, but never made. We ended up changing to Hexhaven, a what if version of Strixhaven, as that was a setting we’d just been to and there was a clean way to create a new version of it, doing something players had been asking for (ally-colored colleges rather than the normal enemy-colored ones of Strixhaven).
Meris Mullaley: Hexhaven offered newer Magic players a recent setting they would be familiar with, with Secrets of Strixhaven being the preceding Magic multiverse set. Mirrodin has a deep history and is loved by fans and that inspired our creative choices for legend pairs like Karn. Rosewater: We didn’t create Hexhaven until we were making Reality Fracture.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
