As we reported yesterday, Magic: The Gathering designers decided to narrow the focus for Reality Fracture, taking lessons from the overly broad scope of March of the Machine, and ensuring that the core of this set was Jace and his pals. However, it seems like a lot of material that didn’t make it into the main set was shifted over to the precon. This is going to be one to watch for lovers of deep Magic lore, not least because it contains characters that weren’t featured in the main set – because they’re dead.
During a press panel at MagicCon Amsterdam, MTG head designer Mark Rosewater revealed that the original plan for Reality Fracture was to have ten archetypes, with each one being themed around a different, re-shaped world. Similarly, head of story Roy Graham says, the story would take place not just at Hexhaven, but on “key strikepoints, different alternate planes all over the Echoverse”.
Ultimately, Rosewater tells us this was an idea that sounded cool in concept but “had a lot of problems in execution”, however, some of these ideas were preserved in the Commander deck. Darksteel Angel may well be an example of that, a card that shows what might have been if Mirrodin had triumphed over Phyrexia.
Rosewater says MTG precons have become a way to include the things people expect that would “hijack the set”, like deep-dives into Avishkar and Amonkhet during Aetherdrift. Story lead, Graham, calls them “a tool in our arsenal”.
He says, “The Commander deck for Reality Fracture is one where, okay we don’t get to do the 10 different planes, one per archetype, but we still have all of these cool ideas, we have these great lore tidbits.” He says it’s often a case of taking these to the design team, to see if they can find a place for them – which might mean dumping them all into a Commander deck.
Product architect Ben Bleiweiss reveals a little more about the thought process behind Multiverse Reforged, and why it brings back deceased characters that don’t appear in the main set.
“One of the things we were also very cognizant of is: not all of our fan favorite characters are still alive canonically. And so there was a lot of discussion of, all right, what are characters that people would absolutely love to see, but we don’t want to make them into a pair because technically the main version is dead, and it would be really weird to have a dead character and then their alternate version in the main set when we’re pairing everything.”
He explains that in the Commander deck they could just include the alternate version. They didn’t have to worry about the ‘pairing’ feature which ensures every alternate universe character in the main set has a ‘regular’ version that may appear in a pack alongside them, and this let them “pay off a lot of really cool characters and concepts” in the precon.
“I’m sure that there are plenty of figures that Jace wishes weren’t dead, and he had the power to make that happen in his universe,” Bleiweiss hints.
I don’t know about you, but my mind has been racing ever since I heard this, trying to think of which characters the deck is likely to bring back. My mind immediately goes to more recent deaths like Tamiyo, Wrenn, or Jaya. These were casualties of the Phyrexian war that set Jace off on this path, after all. But maybe they’ll go for deeper cuts like Barrin or Dack Fayden. Or hey, maybe we’ll even see Urza again!
Tell me your guesses in the Wargamer Discord. And if you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you need to check out the 2027 sets in the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
