MTG’s Reality Fracture is breaking the rules of Magic in one clever way

As part of MagicCon: Las Vegas, Wizards of the Coast revealed a first look at Reality Fracture, the upcoming Magic: The Gathering set releasing on October 2, 2026 that’s set to tie-up the game’s current storyline. In Reality Fracture, The Planeswalker Jace Beleren, now calling himself The Theorist, has created the Echoverse in an attempt to undo the suffering caused by the Phyrexians and the Eldrazi. Part of that scheme involves making new versions of many of Magic’s most iconic characters.

Head designer Mark Rosewater said that his team has talked about doing a What If…? set for a while, but were concerned about how creating twists on characters would land for players who weren’t as familiar with Magic’s lore. Their solution is that every booster pack of the set will include a character and their Echoverse counterpart. The example Rosewater showed off is a pack with two Mythic Rares: a reprint of Chandra, Torch of Defiance and the new Blue card, Chandra, Chill of Compliance.

“Jace is trying to make his version of the perfect multiverse, and his idea of the perfect multiverse carries some of his own biases,” Reality Fracture creative and narrative lead Meris Mullaley said in a virtual press conference. “Chandra’s impulsiveness was something that he bumped up against a lot. Where did that come from? What in her life shaped her to become that way? Maybe she’d be happier if she was more cool-headed. And so as Jace is crafting his multiverse and corrupting the Echoverse, he’s like, What if her dad didn’t die? What if rather than being killed by the consulate on Avishkar, he and Chanda were helping run Avishkar.”

Rosewater and Mullaley teased that Reality Fracture will also include alternate versions of Ajani, Liliana, Garruk, and Vraska, among many others. Despite this, Rosewater said that the set won’t have a higher rate of mythic rare cards than usual.

“Making it work so we could do this was really, really complicated, and we came up with a really clever solution,” he said. “We’re not going into the details right now, but it was not an easy task.”