'Magic' Just Revealed 26 New Reality Fracture Cards, Including 5 Overpowered Sphinx Commanders

During a press preview attended by Polygon, Wizards of the Coast revealed 26 Reality Fracture cards and shared new details about the set’s mechanics. These include a powerful new Jace Planeswalker, "Echoverse" variations of classic Magic characters like Karn and Ghalta, and plenty of lore details about Hexhaven and Jace’s ultimate plans for the multiverse.

Reality Fracture is the culmination of the three-year story arc that began with Wilds of Eldraine in September 2023. After spending years fighting destructive villains like the Phyrexians, Eldrazi, and Nicol Bolas, Jace has decided that the multiverse itself is fundamentally broken. His solution is the Echoverse, an alternate reality where none of those threats ever existed. Completing the Echoverse, however, requires overwriting the existing multiverse and replacing everyone in it with Jace’s supposedly improved versions.

Reality Fracture launches fully on Oct. 2 with prerelease events beginning Sept. 25. Here are the biggest cards and details Wizards revealed during the presentation.

Jace is taking over every Reality Fracture game

Jace may be the main antagonist of Reality Fracture, but designing an entire set around one person posed an immediate problem. Wizards could put Jace on a mythic rare Planeswalker card, but that alone wouldn’t make his presence felt throughout every game of Limited.

The solution was Empower Jace, which seems like 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. If that player already controls one of those tokens, it adds those counters to the existing one instead. Jace can spend one loyalty to surveil 1 or three loyalty to draw a card.

Empower Jace was inspired by Amass, the mechanic that creates and enlarges an Army token, which most recently appeared in The Hobbit. Designer Jeremy Geist originally called his version “Amass Jace” before the design team settled on the final name.

That means Reality Fracture will do something Magic has never attempted before: Common cards can create a Planeswalker. Rosewater said the mechanic allows Jace to appear in “almost every single Limited game” since some version of Jace and/or an Empower Jace card will appear in most packs.

“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.”

Protege’s Awakening demonstrates how quickly those fractions can add up. The four-mana blue sorcery Empowers Jace 6 and draws a card, leaving enough loyalty on the token to draw to two more. Tam’s Resistance puts a +1/+1 counter on a creature, temporarily grants it vigilance, and Empowers Jace 4, while Repurposed Enforcer repeatedly Empowers Jace whenever it attacks.

Other cards turn that token into considerably more than a repeatable source of surveilling and card draw. Way of the Cryomancer Empowers Jace 5 and gives every Planeswalker an ability that copies its controller’s next instant or sorcery. Way of the Pyromancer Empowers Jace 2 and allows Planeswalkers to generate red mana by adding loyalty.

Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes goes even further. Its landfall ability Empowers Jace 2 whenever a land enters under its controller’s control, while also letting Planeswalkers turn lands into creatures by placing +1/+1 counters on them.

The Theorist, Jace Beleren, a four-mana Planeswalker, is ostensibly the set’s big bad. He creates Illusion tokens, returns permanents to their owners’ hands, and can draw three cards before placing +1/+1 counters on his controller’s creatures based on the number of cards in their hand.

Interestingly enough, Empower Jace cannot add loyalty to The Theorist or other Jace Planeswalkers. The mechanic specifically looks for a token Planeswalker, a restriction Wizards added after discovering that empowering regular Jace cards was broken. There are still some ways around it, however: Skolnik revealed that two Jace cards in the set can create token copies of themselves, which Empower works on. In theory, you could use something like Lithoform Engine to make a copy of any Jace Planeswalker.

Wizards did admit that adding Empower for other Planeswalkers might happen in future sets, but for Reality Fracture, only Empower Jace appears.

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 very first example provided in early previews was the iconic pyromancer Chandra and her icy Echoverse variant. 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. It also 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 entering the battlefield from causing abilities to trigger. It effectively puts a Torpor Orb effect on an inexpensive artifact creature, making it a powerful answer to the enter-the-battlefield abilities that fuel countless Commander decks.

The two Ghaltas also 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 creatures its controller owns. It also gives those creatures trample.

Ghalta the Immovable reimagines the Elder Dinosaur as a white toughness-matters card that's a triceratops instead of a T. rex. Its cost is reduced by the greatest toughness among creatures its controller owns, while its other creatures can attack as though they didn’t have defender. Those creatures also assign combat damage using toughness rather than power.

Reality Fracture’s biggest cards already feel broken

Among the many cards revealed, one of the most noteworthy seems to be Hexhaven Invigorator, a color-shifted riff on Phyrexian Obliterator that's just as powerful. At a cost of four green mana, Hexhaven Invigorator 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 then shuffle. Even one point of damage generates mana, while deliberately hitting it with a larger damage spell could pull a large number of lands directly from a deck.

Return to the Light Realms is an echo of the card Rise of the Dark Realms, shifting the focus to more of a resurrection than zombie-like reanimation. The nine-mana white sorcery returns every nonland permanent card from its controller’s graveyard to the battlefield. The flavor text references Liliana the Faultless, the white-shifted version of the necromancer Liliana.

Loyal Tutor is a card that will see a lot of use in this set, which is so focused on Planeswalkers in general. It's a one-mana white instant that searches its controller’s library for any Planeswalker, reveals it, and places it on top. It's not the first Planeswalker tutor in the game, but its low cost and versatility will likely make it a staple moving forward.

Reality Fracture also brings back Prepared, a key mechanic introduced in Secrets of Strixhaven. These creatures have an additional spell on them that can be cast if they reach the prepared condition outlined on the card. Designers said that each Hexhaven school has only one Prepared spell at common and uncommon, with more experimental versions appearing at higher rarities.

Pompous Battlemage, for example, is a one-mana Goblin Sorcerer with prowess and Improvised Act as its prepared spell, which lets its controller discard a card to draw a card. Diviner of Victory similarly carries Unwind History, a Prepared bounce spell that costs less based on how much its owner has scried or surveilled that turn.

The most tantalizing Prepared card may be Bloodline Recollector. Wizards described it as containing a black reinterpretation of Ancestral Recall, one of the most powerful spells in Magic’s history. Original Magic artist Mark Poole illustrated its serialized headliner treatment, which will be limited to 500 copies in Collector Boosters.

Meet Hexhaven’s five founder sphinxes

Strixhaven’s five enemy-color colleges were founded by Elder Dragons. In Jace’s version of the school, those dragons are instead sphinxes representing five allied-color disciplines. That means that Reality Fracture pushes the typically blue creature type into new colors.

Aerid Konstrari leads Hexhaven’s Gruul (red-green) school of constructive arts. The 5/4 flying sphinx creates Heartwood tokens when it enters or dies, but it also has a six-cost ability to create a Heartwood token and get +X/+0 based on the number of artifacts you control. A focus on artifacts is a bit unusual for Gruul, but this remains a hugely powerful ability that can make Konstrari a big finisher with the right deck build.

Denzilore Fatehold represents an Azorius (white-blue) school obsessed with predicting the future rather than learning from the past. The 3/4 has flash and flying, and whenever its controller scries or surveils, it places a +1/+1 counter on each creature they control. While this does require you to focus entirely on scry and surveil, putting counters on all of your creatures is downright overpowered.

Ingris Stingerquill, a Rakdos (black-red) 1/4 with flying, turns attacking creatures into a ping of direct damage. Whenever one of its controller’s creatures attacks, that creature deals 1 damage to each opponent. For four colorless mana, Ingris can also create a 2/2 Cadet tokens and give the rest of its controller’s creatures haste.

Kwia Vigorbloom might be the most powerful of the five. The Selesnya (green-white) sphinx is a 6/6 with flying, vigilance, lifelink, and ward 2. Once per turn, whenever its controller gains life, Kwia creates a colorless Lotus artifact token that can be sacrificed for three mana of any one color (it's a deliberate reference to the iconic Black Lotus card). Because that ability can trigger during each player’s turn, a Commander deck built around life gain could mean several Lotuses during every trip around the table.

Finally, Uldaros Theorix embodies Hexhaven’s Dimir (blue-black) school of dangerous theoretical magic. When cast, the 5/5 flying sphinx can exile a nonland card of each card type from its controller’s graveyard, then cast any number of spells with a combined mana value of 6 or less from among them without paying their mana costs.

These five elder sphinxes likely reside in the Hexhaven tower itself, which is depicted across 15 borderless basic lands in the set. What's the prize if you get all 15 of them in play and stack them up vertically?