Wizards of the Coast has officially opened the doors on its latest Magic: The Gathering expansion, revealing 26 brand-new cards during a press preview attended by Polygon and detailing the set’s central mechanic, its story arc, and a roster of five elder sphinxes poised to become the format’s most feared commanders. The expansion, Reality Fracture, marks a departure from the magical college players explored earlier this year in Secrets of Strixhaven, instead presenting Hexhaven as a towering mage academy defined by shifting gravity and five new schools of magic founded by sphinxes rather than dragons. The reveal comes as part of a three-year narrative arc that began with Wilds of Eldraine in September 2023, and the set launches fully on October 2, with prerelease events kicking off September 25.
At the heart of the presentation is Jace Beleren, the planeswalker who has spent years battling threats like the Phyrexians, the Eldrazi, and Nicol Bolas. According to the lore shared at the event, Jace has concluded that the multiverse itself is fundamentally broken and has devised the Echoverse—an alternate reality in which those existential dangers never existed. Completing the Echoverse, however, requires overwriting the existing multiverse and replacing every being within it with Jace’s supposedly improved versions. This narrative premise directly informs the set’s most ambitious mechanical innovation.
Empower Jace: A Planeswalker in Nearly Every Limited Game
Designing an entire set around a single character posed an immediate challenge for Wizards. Placing Jace on a mythic rare Planeswalker card alone would not ensure his presence felt throughout every game of Limited. The answer arrived in the form of Empower Jace, the set’s primary mechanic. Whenever a card instructs a player to Empower Jace, it creates a blue Jace Planeswalker token with the indicated number of loyalty counters—or adds those counters to an existing token if one is already controlled. Jace can then spend one loyalty to surveil 1 or three loyalty to draw a card.
“Just drawing a card is the most fun mechanic in Magic,” principal game designer Yoni Skolnik said during the presentation. “But being able to give you one-third of a card or two-thirds of a card is great for game balance and makes for really dynamic gameplay.”
Yoni Skolnik, Principal Game Designer
The mechanic was originally inspired by Amass, the token-creation mechanic that most recently appeared in The Hobbit. Designer Jeremy Geist initially dubbed his version “Amass Jace” before the team settled on the final name. The result is something Magic has never attempted before: common cards that create a Planeswalker. Rosewater noted that the mechanic allows Jace to appear in “almost every single Limited game,” since some version of Jace and/or an Empower Jace card will surface in most packs.
Several cards demonstrate how quickly those fractional draws can compound. Protege’s Awakening Empowers Jace 6 and draws a card, leaving enough loyalty to draw to two more, while Tam’s Resistance and Repurposed Enforcer repeatedly Empower Jace. Meanwhile, cards like Way of the Cryomancer and Way of the Pyromancer transform the token into a repeatable source of surveilling and card draw, and Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes lets Planeswalkers turn lands into creatures.
Design Choices and the Breaking of Old Rules
One notable restriction shapes how the mechanic functions. The Theorist, a four-mana Planeswalker that serves as the set’s big bad, cannot receive loyalty counters from Empower Jace—the mechanic specifically targets token Planeswalkers. Wizards added this restriction after discovering that empowering regular Jace cards proved broken. There remain, however, creative workarounds: Skolnik revealed that two Jace cards in the set can create token copies of themselves, which Empower does affect. In theory, tools like Lithoform Engine could be used to manufacture a copy of any Jace Planeswalker.
Wizards acknowledged that extending Empower to other Planeswalkers might appear in future sets, but for Reality Fracture, only Empower Jace will be present.
Karn and Ghalta Get Echoverse Variants
Every Reality Fracture play booster pack includes a pair of variants: one recognizable version from Magic’s primary reality and an alternate version created within Jace’s Echoverse. The latest batch of reveals includes two dramatically different versions each of Karn, a time-travelling silver golem from Dominaria, and Ghalta, an enormous Elder Dinosaur from Ixalan.
Karn, Gilded Guardian offers a glimpse at what Mirrodin might have become without the Phyrexians. The five-color 5/5 has vigilance and trample, and it draws a card when it enters for every color among the artifacts its controller owns. Karn, Argent Defender is much smaller but arguably more disruptive. The two-mana 1/3 prevents artifacts and creatures from entering the battlefield from causing abilities to trigger, effectively placing a Torpor Orb effect on an inexpensive artifact creature and serving as a powerful answer to the enter-the-battlefield abilities that fuel countless Commander decks.
The two Ghaltas translate the same character through different parts of Magic’s color pie. Ghalta the Unstoppable is an eight-mana green 8/8 with trample that becomes cheaper based on the greatest power among its controller’s creatures, while Ghalta the Immovable reimagines the Elder Dinosaur as a white toughness-matters card—a triceratops instead of a T. rex—whose cost is reduced by the greatest toughness among its controller’s creatures.
Powerful Cards and a Return of Prepared
Among the many cards revealed, several already feel exceptionally strong. Hexhaven Invigorator, a color-shifted riff on Phyrexian Obliterator, costs four green mana and is a 6/6 chimera horror with vigilance. Whenever it is dealt damage, its controller can search their library for up to that many lands, put them onto the battlefield tapped, and shuffle. Return to the Light Realms echoes Rise of the Dark Realms, shifting toward resurrection rather than zombie-like reanimation, returning every nonland permanent from its controller’s graveyard to the battlefield.
Loyal Tutor, a one-mana white instant that searches the controller’s library for any Planeswalker, is expected to become a staple given the set’s focus on Planeswalkers. The set also brings back Prepared, a key mechanic introduced in Secrets of Strixhaven. Each Hexhaven school features only one Prepared spell at common and uncommon, with more experimental versions appearing at higher rarities. The most tantalizing example, Bloodline Recollector, is described as a black reinterpretation of Ancestral Recall, and its serialized headliner treatment was illustrated by original Magic artist Mark Poole, limited to 500 copies in Collector Boosters.
Meet Hexhaven’s Five Founder Sphinxes
Where Strixhaven’s five colleges were founded by Elder Dragons, Jace’s Hexhaven replaces those dragons with sphinxes representing five allied-color disciplines, pushing the typically blue creature type into new color pairings. Aerid Konstrari leads the Gruul school of constructive arts, creating Heartwood tokens and gaining artifact-based bonuses. Denzilore Fatehold represents an Azorius school obsessed with predicting the future, placing counters on each creature whenever its controller scries or surveils. Ingris Stingerquill, a Rakdos 1/4 with flying, turns attacking creatures into direct damage, while Kwia Vigorbloom, a Selesnya 6/6 with flying, vigilance, lifelink, and ward 2, generates Lotus artifact tokens that can be sacrificed for any one color of mana.
“Just drawing a card is the most fun mechanic in Magic,” principal game designer Yoni Skolnik said during the presentation. “But being able to give you one-third of a card or two-thirds of a card is great for game balance and makes for really dynamic gameplay.”
Yoni Skolnik, Principal Game Designer
Finally, Uldaros Theorix embodies Hexhaven’s Dimir school of dangerous theoretical magic, exiling nonland cards from its controller’s graveyard and casting spells from among them without paying their costs. These five elder sphinxes likely reside within the Hexhaven tower itself, depicted across 15 borderless basic lands in the set.
Looking Ahead
With prerelease events set for September 25 and full launch on October 2, players have a clear window to test the format before it goes live. The combination of Empower Jace, powerful variants, and a suite of overpowered sphinx commanders suggests a set built to dominate Limited and Commander alike. As the community digests these reveals, the question is no longer whether these cards will shape the meta, but how quickly players will find ways to exploit them.
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