The Planeswalker Jace Beleren has spent nearly two decades at the center of Magic: The Gathering. As the most powerful mind mage in the Multiverse and a member of Gatewatch, Jace spent much of his life fighting to protect many worlds from all sorts of threats alongside fellow Planeswalkers like Chandra Nalaar and Liliana Vess. Together, these characters essentially function like the mascots of the trading card game, recognizable heroes at the forefront of the ongoing narrative.
Yet Jace emerged as the villain in Magic’s upcoming Reality Fracture set. And, already, Wizards of the Coast has established Jace’s replacement as part of Reality Fracture’s series of short stories detailing the set’s storyline.
Warning: Spoilers for the plot of Reality Fracture follow.
Let’s wind back the clock for a minute. During the sixth short story covering the events of 2025’s Tarkir: Dragonstorm set, Jace realizes the Meditation Realm itself was a “substrate to all reality” that is “moldable by sheer force of will.” By leveraging the magical power of the dragon Ugin’s Spirit Gem, Jace attempted to rewrite reality to avert various disasters and deaths that have occurred over the years. Wouldn’t the Multiverse be better without the Eldrazi or Nicol Bolas? What if Vraska never had to become a Phyrexian? Yet once he cast the spell, Jace “shattered like glass” and apparently died.
In the new Reality Fracture storyline, however, we learn that Jace’s psyche fractured, and those pieces were able to create a new body for him to inhabit. One of those pieces, the Theorist, seized complete control and began removing various other aspects of his personality until there was only one left. Ruthless and calculating, the Theorist created an alternate reality called the Echoverse and planned to replace the core Multiverse with it, erasing events like the War of the Spark and the Invasion of New Phyrexia from existence.
Within that Echoverse, Jace also created a magical school called Hexhaven that functions as a dark mirror to Strixhaven and filled it with Echoverse variants of characters like Liliana. But Jace also created an authentic person using pieces of himself. Her name is Tamira, or Tam for short, and she was always Jace’s backup plan to live on after his eventual death — in some sense at least.
Introduced in the Lorwyn Eclipsed storyline as a gifted but reserved first-year at Strixhaven, Tam initially seemed like just another levelheaded student making new friends. As a student of Quandrix College, she could bend probability and solve problems quickly with her reality-warping magic, but her emphasis on cold logic over compassion alienated her friends. All along, that was because she was essentially a part of Jace and trained under the Theorist for quite some time.
Then there was the major heel turn in episode 6 of the Secrets of Strixhaven short stories when Tam pushed Oracle Jadzi through a magical portal, betraying and abandoning her friends. “I was made to do this,” she admitted before stepping through the portal herself. “The days we spent together were the happiest of my life.” On the other side, she reunited with the Theorist.
Reality Fracture picks up soon after that, with the Theorist eager to kill Jadzi so he can perceive the creation of the Multiverse since the soul of every oracle is tied to creation. With that knowledge, Jace can successfully overwrite the Multiverse with his Echoverse, but as Liliana explains to Tam in episode 2, doing so would “smother the souls of everyone in the original.” She also notes that the “doubles” in the Echoverse “don’t quite have full spirits.” Tam begins to see all of it as “fake, fake, fake.”
Tam has growing concerns about the nature of the Theorist’s plans. Meanwhile, she also questions whether the people at Hexhaven and throughout the Echoverse are even capable of something like friendship. Based on Liliana’s assessment, they’re essentially soulless husks that will consume and replace everyone and everything in the real Multiverse.
This tension simmers through episode 6 when Tam confronts the Theorist and ultimately decides he needs to be stopped. She was made for the explicit purpose of helping him succeed, but choosing to oppose him instead is really the first choice Tam has ever made that’s entirely hers.
That makes Tam one of Magic’s most interesting new characters in years. She entered the story as just another student, then had this crucial villainous turn, but as she begins to grow into a genuine person, she makes difficult and brave choices to do the right thing. Reality Fracture lets her sit with her sins rather than wiping the slate clean with one heroic gesture. When Tam reunites with her former classmate Kirol as the two Multiverses begin to collide, she admits, “You trusted me, and I failed you. So it’s my job to fix it.” Kirol does not immediately trust her again, but Tam still acts even without that reassurance.
Meanwhile, Vraska, Chandra, Ajani, and Garruk spend much of these short stories gathering the pieces of Jace’s mind that the Theorist trapped in mind prisons. Vraska stabs the Theorist as those fragments rush back inside. Together, they sever his connection to the spell merging the Multiverse with the Echoverse and take control of his body, fusing all the disconnected pieces of Jace back together. For a brief moment, Jace is whole again. He understands that the spell is tied to his life, and he dies in Vraska’s arms.
The spell stops, but the Echoverse is still intertwined with the original Multiverse. In the grand finale, Jace’s Planeswalker spark rises out of his body and enters Tam. “Energy pummels her, as if she’s standing at the base of a waterfall,” reads the story. “Tam cries out in response, falls to her knees, the pressure and potency of magic overwhelming her, filling her. Her heart feels like it’s burst open, and all her insides are a modest cup doused with the water of a vast lake.”
Tam uses the newfound power boost to call the Eldrazi titan Emrakul, asking her to emerge from the moon of Innistrad to devour the Echoverse. Emrakul agrees, carefully separating the artificial reality from the original Multiverse before consuming it.
This spark was me, and now, it is you.
When Kirol asks who she really is, Tam does not invoke Jace, the Theorist, or the purpose for which she was created. “I can’t wait to find out,” she says. Then, after Kirol offers to begin their relationship again with a new introduction, she supplies a name of her own: “I’m Tam. Just Tam.”
As the Echoverse collapses, Jace — not the Theorist or another isolated fragment, but a final impression carried within the spark — speaks to Tam and calls her his “fail-safe.” Since the Desparking, Planeswalker sparks have become extraordinarily rare. Jace created Tam so she could inherit his spark upon his death. “This spark was me, and now, it is you,” he tells her. “I only ask that you continue our work. Make things better.”
The rest of Jace’s various qualities then seem to crystallize within her. Tam gains his curiosity, diplomacy, survival instincts, and capacity to begin again. The story declares that “she is him” and that “they are one,” but this does not amount to Jace returning as a separate consciousness inside her head. Tam is described simultaneously as “a beginning,” “a continuation,” and a “clean slate.” She was made from Jace and now possesses his spark and various aspects of his psyche, but she has the freedom to choose what all of that means.
That distinction is what makes Tam more than a convenient substitute for a dead mascot. She is powerful enough to reach Emrakul across the Multiverse, save reality, and planeswalk home to Strixhaven, but she is not simply Jace Beleren in a new body. She inherits his abilities and bits of his personality but is not bound to repeat his choices.
The closing scene makes the succession explicit. After Jace’s funeral on Vryn, Tam finds Vraska. She arrives in a blue cloak, carrying Jace’s spark and mannerisms in a gorgon body that reflects the woman he loved. Vraska feels as though she is looking at a ghost, but Tam introduces herself as someone new and promises, “I’m here to help make things better.”
Jace Beleren is dead. His replacement is not a resurrection or an exact copy, but something far more interesting: a person born from the pieces of his identity who now has the power to decide which parts of his legacy are worth carrying forward. That feels like a meaningful way to end one era for Magic and begin another.
