Magic’s Most Expensive Banned Card Is Officially Coming Back, but There’s a Catch

Official previews for Magic: The Gathering’s upcoming Reality Fracture don’t begin until Sept. 8, but fans of the world’s oldest trading card game know principal designer Mark Rosewater’s early teases mark (pun intended) the real start of preview season. As he has done for every set for quite some time now, Rosewater published a post on his personal blog earlier this week detailing partial information featured on all sorts of new cards.

Rosewater offered a total of 40 hints as snippets of rules text, creature type lines, and card names. Some of the most intriguing teases suggest that Reality Fracture will feature an instant players can include any number of copies of in their decks, a new cycle of dual lands with a new restriction determining whether they enter tapped, and a mechanic that creates a type of token no other mechanic has ever produced.

Based on these hints, it’s clear that Reality Fracture has a lot of emphasis on planeswalkers — which is something we already knew from previous announcements at MagicCon: Las Vegas and Amsterdam. One card will allow a planeswalker to deal damage equal to its loyalty. Another prevents planeswalkers from being put into their owners’ graveyards when they hit zero loyalty. Reality Fracture is the end of an ongoing saga, so many of Magic’s most prominent planeswalkers and legendary creatures will appear, alongside their Echoverse counterparts from the alternate universe that the misguided mind mage Jace Beleren has created.

Rosewater also teased alt-reality versions of characters like Lyra, Tomik, Winter, and Yoshimaru. These characters respectively come from the planes of Dominaria, Ravnica, Duskmourn, and Kamigawa. Winter, Misanthropic Guide’s Echoverse counterpart, for instance, is Winter, Team Player. In every case, the colors are likely inverted as the alt-reality version of the character is portrayed as the exact opposite.

Arguably the biggest tease of all references the most famous — and most valuable — Magic card ever printed: Black Lotus. According to Rosewater, a card in Reality Fracture creates a colorless artifact token named Lotus with “{T}, Sacrifice this token: Add three mana of any one color.” (The {T} indicates that you tap it to activate an ability.)

Image: Wizards of the Coast

You can call it “Lotus,” but we all know what it is. Black Lotus is coming back to Magic — just not as an actual card.

Black Lotus was part of Magic’s original 1993 release and remains the defining member of the Power Nine, a group of extraordinarily powerful early cards. It costs nothing to cast and can be sacrificed to generate three mana of any one color, giving its controller an enormous boost of mana, potentially before an opponent has even taken a turn. It is banned in Commander and Legacy play formats and restricted to one copy in Vintage. In 2024, a mint Alpha Black Lotus sold for $3 million at auction.

This wouldn’t be the first time Magic has printed a descendent of Black Lotus. Each subsequent iteration, however, comes with some kind of limitation to keep all that explosive power under control. Gilded Lotus costs five mana but can generate three mana every turn without being sacrificed. Jeweled Lotus is almost identical to Black Lotus, except its mana can only be used to cast a Commander. (Jeweled Lotus is also currently banned in Commander.) Lotus Petal also costs zero and sacrifices itself for mana, but it produces only one rather than three. There’s even a Blacker Lotus joke card that compels you to rip it to shreds when you activate its ability to generate four mana.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

The Lotus coming in Reality Fracture, however, is essentially just a Black Lotus token generated by another card. Rosewater’s gotten pretty adept at providing deliberately vague wording. The actual card in question could be hugely powerful, or just a flashy callback.

An instant or sorcery could create the Lotus once and then disappear, though that might be the least interesting possibility that’s probably expensive to cast — you pay a fair amount for the initial investment and save the explosive mana boost for later. It could also come from an activated creature ability, a conditional trigger, or a permanent that repeatedly produces Lotus tokens at a higher cost. The most intriguing possibility is that this is a planeswalker ability, perhaps even one belonging to the Jace card that headlines the set’s sole preconstructed Commander deck.

(Notably, one card from Magic’s new Mystery Booster Commander set also has a very similar card. The planewalker Arzakon has a -3 ability that creates a Black Lotus with the exact same mana ability. Is this a coincidence, or a subtle hint that Reality Fracture could be crossing over with Mystery Booster Commander as well?)

Whatever creates the Lotus formerly known as Black will almost certainly come with some additional cost associated with it. But in a set built around fractured realities and alternate versions of familiar characters and cards, allowing players to create the most notorious card in Magic history feels essential.

Pre-release events for Reality Fracture begin on Sept. 25, but we should discover in advance who or what is responsible for generating Magic’s most dangerous flower sometime before then.