Mark Rosewater is Magic: the Gathering’s Head Designer. His Drive To Work podcast contains more than 1300 episodes of him providing insider stories about MTG’s design and development. One of the most recent episodes contains some insights about Reality Fracture, including cut plans to incorporate parallel universe versions of several dead characters.
The podcast episode in question Fresh Out of Design – Reality Fracture, was uploaded last month, but recorded in December of 2023, far earlier in the MTG Release Schedule. The premise is that Rosewater created the episode immediately after he and his team were finished designing the set. Reality Fracture then got handed over to the development team, who continued adjusting it until it was released to the public. So Rosewater is providing a snapshot of what Reality Fracture was like while it was still a work in progress, enabling audiences to see what about the set remained the same and what was changed.
42 minutes and 34 seconds into the podcast, Rosewater says, “when we handed over the file, all of the Deans of the colleges [of Hexhaven] were famous dead characters. We had Jaya running the black/red school, and Gideon running the white/blue school”.
Whoever the three remaining deceased Deans were is not specified. While Gideon still made it into the set, alongside a memorial to his fallen prime timeline counterpart, Jaya Ballard is a no show. It’s not directly stated why this idea was cut (for all that Rosewater knew while he was making the recording, it would still be implemented), but a possible motivation is hinted at in a comment from earlier in the podcast.
Six minutes and ten seconds into the podcast, while discussing the difficulties of making a ‘what if’ set about parallel universes, Rosewater says the following, “If you open a blue Chandra in your booster pack, that is only exciting to you if you know that red Chandra exists.” He follows this up with the remark, “What makes it exciting, what makes it ‘what if’, is understanding what is”.
To summarize, Reality Fracture needed to show off both the primary and echoverse variants of characters in each pack. It wouldn’t be possible to do this with a cycle of five Deans, who are all dead in the main timeline, but it was possible to preserve Gideon by excising him from the cycle and placing him in a mirrored pair with his own monument.
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Source: Wargamer
