Over the last three years, since the Wilds of Eldraine set, Magic: The Gathering's core expansions have been building to a climactic storyline. It's very comic book, a multiverse-threatening crossover that's been set off by the planeswalker Jace Beleren trying to create a new multiverse, one that's free of all the threats Magic's setting has faced in recent years—Phyrexians, Eldrazi, etcetera—but which will overwrite the existing multiverse once it's complete.
This sets up a bunch of mirror matches where famous planeswalkers face off against their doppelgangers: the pyromantic Chandra versus a cryomantic version of herself while none-more-goth necromancer Liliana is up against a version of herself who practices life magic and, horrifyingly, wears white.
Of course, not everyone playing Magic knows who all these characters are. Tomik Vrona, for instance, is a member of the shady Orzhov Syndicate who excels in finding legal loopholes. If you know him as a lawyer for the magic Mafia, seeing him in Reality Fracture as a sparkmage who delights in breaking not only the laws of the legal system but also physics comes as a bit of a shock. If you don't know all that Tomik lore, it's not going to land as hard.
Which is why Reality Fracture's booster packs will give you an echoed pair together. You'll be able to see both versions of Tomik, or Ajani, or whoever at the same time and understand the contrast between them.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
For me, Magic is often a social game, living up to the Gathering in its name. It's an excuse to sling cards and chat to people without having to care about poker or whatever. The setting and characters are secondary to the play, and the sweeping drama of Jace's girlfriend breaking up with him so hard he rewrote reality, or whatever is actually going on, is always going to be secondary to the jokes we make around the table.
I'm glad that someone on the production team did the hard work to insure paired cards would land in packs together, because it means I get to see a fire wizard and an ice wizard together and know exactly what's happening without having to know the events of a tie-in novel trilogy or a six-issue limited series.
Reality Fracture will be available digitally in Arena on September 29 and will have its global release on October 2, with pre-release events starting on September 25.
