I hadn’t looked close enough at all the individual cards in Magic: The Gathering’s latest expansion, Reality Fracture, before I started opening packs, which may have been the best possible way to experience the new set.
Almost every pack contained something that made me stop and think, Wait, which one of my Commander decks wants this? That sensation is a major reason Reality Fracture has quickly become my favorite Magic set in a long time: because it’s fun to open, and because it forced me to remake basically every deck in my rotation. The cards are just that good.
Reality Fracture makes every pack feel unusual
The set’s echoed-pairs system gives every play booster its own mini-narrative. Each pack contains two “Echoed Pair” cards: one character from the traditional Magic Multiverse and an alternate version from Jace’s Echoverse. That means opening a pack feels like discovering a collision between timelines, or at the very least a familiar hero and their evil alt-reality doppelgänger.
Beyond the echoed cards, there is a traditional rare-or-mythic slot and a foil slot that can contain another rare or mythic card. Under the right circumstances, it is theoretically possible to open four mythic rares in a single pack. That’s obviously not going to happen often, but knowing it could happen adds some extra spice to the experience.
One of my best echoed pairings included the Echoverse verse of Garruk, Veiled Butcher as a wonderfully nasty black Planeswalker. He forces players to sacrifice creatures and discard cards. Even his +2 loyalty ability can destroy weak creatures or at least severely nerf them by giving them -4/-1. But Garruk, Curse Breaker was the card that immediately found a home for me. My Multani, Maro-Sorcerer Commander deck is filled with big creatures, but it needs blanket trample effects to help Multani actually damage opponents (he comes with shroud inherently, and his power and toughness are equal to the total number of cards in all players’ hands). Curse Breaker draws cards whenever my creatures with power 4 or greater enter, creates its own 4/4 Beasts with trample, and can give all of my creatures +2/+2 and trample with his -4 loyalty ability. That’s three separate things my Multani deck wants on a single card.
Ghalta the Unstoppable joined it almost immediately for many of the same reasons. As long as I have something with 8 power in play (which is Multani most of the time), that means Ghalta costs a single green mana to play for an 8/8 — and he gives all of my other creatures trample.
Verdant Kraken came close to finding a place in Multani as well. While it costs a staggering seven mana for a 6/6, Verdant Kraken creates a 3/3 green forest tentacle land creature token at the beginning of each players’ upkeep (that’s four times every round!). So you get a sizable token body that’s also a land. That’s even better for my Toph, Hardheaded Teacher deck, which is a strange midpoint between Gruul (red-green) ramp/landfall synergies with Lesson spellslinger vibes that emphasizes earthbending. This version of Toph earthbends 1 every time you cast a spell, doubling that number if the spell in question is a Lesson. It may sound unfocused, but somehow it works really well.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Image: Wizards of the Coast
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