Magic: The Gathering is diving back into one of its most complicated characters with a new comic focused on Jace Beleren. The series explores his fractured memories — and it couldn’t come at a more interesting time to tee up the next major multiversal war.
Magic: The Gathering: Untold Stories—Jace is a four-issue miniseries from Dark Horse Comics written by Eisner Award-winning author Michael W. Conrad and illustrated by Caitlin Yarsky. Issue #1 will be released April 1. “Dive deep into Jace’s lost memories to uncover the manipulation by his mentor, Tezzeret, in pursuit of a dangerous magical artifact with the potential to reshape or destroy the Multiverse as we know it,” an official description reads.
“Jace is the kind of character that has haunted me for years, he’s that good-looking guy that makes me throw my cards in the bin and extend my hand begrudgingly to the dreaded blue player who just ended my game,” Conrad said in a press release. “Beyond that the lore surrounding him has captured my imagination, and has refused to let go. I identify with Jace in that I don’t entirely trust my own memories and perceptions of the world. This has made approaching an at-times aggravating character a bit therapeutic. I mean, if Jace can cope with having his mind messed with by everything from an ancient sphinx to someone he once deeply admired, surely I can unpack some of my own, far more pedestrian trauma… In this way it has been a cathartic experience to spend time in his troubled mind.”
The first five preview pages provided to Polygon show Jace meditating in a ruined temple as fragments of his past bubble up in his mind. His lover, the gorgon Vraska, is there with him as he seemingly tries to reconstruct fractured memories. In one “lost memory” at “a time of great uncertainty,” Jace sees himself falling to his death. “I’m afraid that if I don’t share these recovered memories they’ll be forever lost,” he says to Vraska. “I no longer trust myself with such things.” He says that parts of himself have been erased entirely as a result of engaging in psychic battles over the years.
Jace recalls a warning he once received from Alhammarret that underscores that impact. The sphinx mind mage that tutored Jace on their native plane of Vryn, Alhammarret secretly manipulated Jace and repeatedly erased his memories to stir conflict between two warring factions. Jace’s Planeswalker spark first manifested during this time period, and when he eventually killed Alhammarret, it destroyed many of Jace’s memories.
Page five shows three figures central to Jace’s mental damage over the years: Alhammarret, Nicol Bolas, and Tezzeret. Like Alhammarret, Tezzeret recruited and manipulated Jace, ultimately leading to a clash in which Jace wiped Tezzeret’s mind. And Nicol Bolas is perhaps the biggest bad in all of Magic. Some time later, when Jace tried to invade Bolas’ mind, the dragon crushed Jace’s mind, triggering a mental failsafe and once again wiped his memories.
Despite being a powerful mind mage, Jace is particularly vulnerable precisely because his memories are so fractured. While these comics might paint a more sympathetic portrayal of Jace, it’s also seeding the ground for his villainous backstory — especially if these memories are indeed tied to some kind of “magical artifact with the potential to reshape or destroy the Multiverse.” In more recent lore, specifically one short story pinned to the Lorwyn Eclipsed set released earlier this year, Ajani described how Jace was casting some kind of spell in the Meditation Realm that nobody could identify. But “he lost control of the spell, and it came apart in his hands, and then he came apart with it.”
The going theory is that Jace was attempting some kind of reality-warping spell, which is problematic, to say the least. That alone didn’t necessarily position him as a villain since he was trying to undo the Phyrexian invasion, but the context of the bigger picture here might. This comic seems to take place after the War of the Spark when the planeswalkers defeated Nicol Bolas but before the March of the Machines arc when Vraska is captured by Phyrexians. It seems possible that, at some point, Jace unlocked a memory that leads him to pursue this dangerous magical artifact. Is it Ugin’s Spirit-Gem, the item he interacted with that destroyed his body? Or something else?
Recent short stories tied to Secrets of Strixhaven reveals that the plane’s archaics — ancient beings capable of warping reality with power tied to time and knowledge — are behaving in strange, coordinated ways. When Chandra arrives, she claims Jace is still alive and has tampered with her mind, leaving lingering damage and confusion. She also suspects he’s manipulating the archaics, though Ajani refuses to believe her. Chandra tries to attack one particularly massive archaic that had abducted Oracle Jadzi, and Ajani tries to stop her using force.
Whether Chandra is right remains unclear, but it’s pretty unsettling to see two of Magic’s greatest heroes fighting because of Jace. Taken together, the comic’s focus on fractured memory and Magic’s ongoing story both point in the same direction: Jace Beleren’s mind and body have been torn apart — and he may be in the process of doing the same to the very fabric of the multiverse.