MTG's Reality Fracture set reunites the Lorwyn Five after 20 years with 16 newly revealed cards

Published Jul 17, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT

“Jace has decided to make a new multiverse, a better one free of all of those bad guys he spent his life battling, free of suffering and loss,” principal story lead Roy Graham said during a press preview for the set. “Sounds pretty good. The only issue is it's unstable. There's only one way to make it stick: Overwrite reality as we know it and replace it with his grand vision. Obviously, not everyone is totally on board with being erased and replaced.”

Jace’s reality, known as the Echoverse, has created versions of the Lorwyn Five with different color identities. Ajani spent years searching the multiverse for his brother’s killer before coming to terms with his loss and becoming a mentor and leader. But the Echoverse variant Ajani Unrelenting was overcome by his anger and became a living avatar of vengeance. In the Echoverse, Liliana’s brother never died, so she didn’t mess with necromancy and demonic contracts, instead continuing to study healing to become a noble in Benalia. Garruk donned the Chain Veil and became a merciless killer who devours souls and summons monsters.

Planeswalkers aren’t the only ones taking on new forms. Tinybones, the skeletal rogue introduced in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, has become Titanbones, a giant druid who protects the creatures of Yavimaya. Whenever legends have an Echoverse equivalent, both cards will appear in a pack together to make the contrast clearer.

Welcome to Hexhaven

The Theorist’s base of operations is Hexhaven, a twisted mirror of Strixhaven.

“It’s a ruthless pressure cooker where the strong are made stronger and the weak are left behind,” Graham said. “The stakes, after all, are very high. Jace needs every cadet at their finest in order to help him overwrite reality.”

While the schools of Strixhaven are all based on opposing colors, the five schools of Hexhaven are allied colors:

• Fatehold (blue-white): Predict the future to make the best choices
• Theorex (blue-black): Students in the school of dark math tend to go insane by bending reality
• Stingerquill (red-black): Merciless, aggressive voice mages without the restraint or elegance of Silverquill
• Constrari (red-green): Builders who also make towering puppet soldiers
• Vigorbloom (green-white): Practitioners of transformative healing magic

“There’s a mixing of old and new,” head designer Mark Rosewater said. “One of the fun things about this set is you’ll recognize some elements of these schools, but with new elements woven in.”

Lessons learned from Time Spiral

Rosewater said his team was very careful not to replicate the mistakes of the 2006 set Time Spiral, which had timeshifted cards that messed with the game’s color identities. The team also limited their ambitions for Reality Fracture, abandoning an early idea to make something on the scale of March of the Machine where they imagined changes across the planes, like what Amonkhet would look like without Nicol Bolas.

They also wanted to make sure the Echoverse cards could stand on their own. Dark Confidant isn’t getting reprinted, but the Kor cleric Enlightened Confidant offers a new spin on the card. Craterhoof Behemoth is reimagined as Craterclaw Colossus, a giant puppetbeast made by Constrari students.

“We made sure every Echoverse version is just a cool card in a vacuum,” Rosewater said. “If you’re someone who knows about Magic, there are a lot of deep references there, but you’re not required to know them to understand the card.”