We’ve enjoyed an avalanche of delicious MTG news from the MagicCon Amsterdam weekend, not least the full reveal of five Reality Fracture planeswalkers, four of whom have been split by Jace into dual, ‘echoverse’ versions of themselves. At an exclusive MagicCon press panel, though, Magic’s top team told Wargamer’s Matt Bassil a lot more about how this world-bending set’s story comes together.
One of the biggest ‘universes within’ highlights of the MTG release schedule – which is much busier now than it was last week – Reality Fracture is a big, multi layered story about a “collision of Multiverses”. But “the crux of the story,” MTG head designer Mark Rosewater tells us, “is about one character and him dealing with trauma”.
That one character, of course, is iconic Blue planeswalker Jace Beleren, who’s on a slightly megalomaniacal, magical quest to reprogram the multiverse the way he thinks it ought to be. In the process, he’s brought into being warped echoes of the rest of the original ‘Lorwyn Five’, for an ultimate showdown worthy of Wizards’ new pals at Marvel.
Partly, it makes sense to ‘zoom in’ that multiverse-y storyline on one character as its core because, y’know, it’s Jace. Everybody’s heard of him. But there’s another reason, Mark Rosewater tells us in the panel: they’ve learned these super-massive stories need a more close-up, personal anchor to work.
“One of the lessons from March of the Machine was it went a little bit too broad,” Rosewater explains. “You need some concentration of the story.” March of the Machine was a big swing, the long awaited conclusion to the years-long Phyrexian invasion narrative, but ended up as one of the less popular MTG sets of recent years – and Wizards’ top bods have zeroed in on the set’s split focus as an issue to fix.
“The Phyrexians invaded everywhere, in every place, and everybody fought them,” says Rosewater. “It was so, almost, far reaching, it was hard to kind of wrap your brain about what was happening.”
“So we made a conscious decision pretty early on, that, okay, we mostly want this to take place in one place, that there’s one main story.”
Notably, that one place and one main story isn’t an alien invasion or a battle, either – it’s Jace, his actions, and the heroics required to thwart him. “We wanted the story to be a little bit more personal,” Rosewater tells Wargamer, “and the reason we brought the Lorwyn Five in is: it’s not strangers”.
“It’s not like Jace has to run up against strangers. It’s Jace’s friends,” he adds. “These people have to stop Jace, the people that you know, the friends that actually know him and like him”. The idea here, he says, is that “centering in and just making it a little more cohesive” should add “gravitas” to the story Reality Fracture wants to tell.
Telling centered and cohesive stories through the medium of randomly assorted packs of trading cards is no easy task, of course. In general, Magic is better at it than most but, as Senior Game Design Director Brian Hawley tells Wargamer in the panel, “One of the things that’s always tricky with Magic is that different people engage with the game, the IP, the story, and the creative in very different ways.”
“At its heart, Magic is a card game,” he says, “and people are absorbing cards in different orders, and different collections of cards”. That’s not always a problem, he says, because “Magic is very good at telling a kind of environmental story, kind of showing you this view into a world – but it does make it difficult to walk people through a very linear, controlled narrative”. “So having a kind of creative and mechanical center is pretty important for what we’re making,” he adds.
To get to the bottom of exactly how Jace’s face-off with his old allies plays out – and how successfully Wizards has woven this set into an impactful story despite the broad setting – we’ll have to wait for Reality Fracture’s release on Friday, October 2.
Until then, Wargamer will be reporting on every reveal on this set, as well as all the other cardboard delicacies WotC unveiled over the weekend (seriously, have you seen the new Zhalfir afro-fantasy set? It’s going to be SICK). In the meantime, check out our latest story on the MTG Hobbit spoilers, and join the free Wargamer Discord community to chat to us about what you’re most excited for.
Source: Wargamer
