Reality Fracture MTG Mechanics Explained: Empower Jace & Prepare

Reality Fracture ships with one brand-new keyword action, one new kind of token, one mechanic returning from earlier this year, and a returning keyword on a couple of legends. Empower Jace builds a planeswalker token and stacks loyalty on it, Heartwood tokens are permanent red-green mana rocks, prepare is back from Secrets of Strixhaven, and exhaust shows up on Liliana. Here is how each one works, rules first, then what it means at a four-player table.

Empower Jace is a keyword action, like amass or investigate: an instruction a card gives you, not an ability a permanent has. "Empower Jace 2" means put two loyalty counters on a Jace planeswalker token you control. If you don't control one, first create a blue Jace planeswalker token, then put the counters on it.

The token is identical no matter which card made it. It's a planeswalker named Jace with exactly two loyalty abilities, "−1: Surveil 1" and "−3: Draw a card," and no plus ability at all. Every activation spends loyalty, and the only ways to refill it are empowering again or adding counters some other way.

Three rulings to know before your first game with it:

• Only tokens count. The Theorist, Jace Beleren is a Jace, but he's a card, not a token, so empowering never adds loyalty to him. If you control no Jace token, you make one, even with three nontoken Jaces on the board.
• The token isn't legendary. Empower Jace won't create a second token while you already control one, but a copy effect can, and two Jace tokens coexist without the legend rule. If you control several, you choose which one gets the counters.
• It enters at zero and survives. The token is created with 0 loyalty and the counters land immediately as part of the same instruction, before the game ever checks whether a zero-loyalty planeswalker should hit the graveyard.

Protege's Awakening is the common that shows the scale: for empower Jace 6 and a card. That is a six-loyalty planeswalker plus a cantrip, at common. Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes turns every land drop into empower Jace 2 and also gives every planeswalker you control a −10 that piles a +1/+1 counter onto a creature for each land you have.

Theorist's Sanctum is an Island that empowers Jace 2 for and , every turn, forever. It enters untapped if you behold a Jace, the Tarkir: Dragonstorm mechanic: point to a Jace you control or reveal a Jace card from your hand. A Jace token you already made counts, so once the engine is running the land never enters tapped.

Treat the token as a battery. Empowering charges it; the abilities drain it. Six loyalty is two draws across two turns, or one draw and three surveils across four, and then it's an empty planeswalker until you charge it again.

The pod math is kinder than the duel math. A walker that only surveils and draws is rarely the scariest thing on the board, so an opponent who attacks it is spending damage that could have gone at a player. At most casual tables a value walker gets ignored until it's clearly winning the game, which means a Jace token with a repeatable charger like the Sanctum often draws cards for far longer than it should. Blue decks that already run counter synergies get more: proliferate adds a loyalty counter to the token, and Doubling Season doubles the loyalty every empower adds.

A Heartwood token is a red and green artifact with ": Add or ." It stays on the battlefield and taps every turn, which makes it a mana rock rather than a one-shot Treasure. Two things follow: Heartwood is ramp that survives the turn you make it, and every Heartwood is one more artifact for anything that counts artifacts.

Aerid Konstrari, one of Hexhaven's Founder Sphinxes, makes one when it enters or dies and can pay to make another while pumping itself by your artifact count. Woodwork Prodigy is the repeatable source: its prepare spell, Soul Tether, creates a Heartwood for , and the creature re-prepares every upkeep. Left alone for three turns, that is one permanent mana rock per turn.

One printing note: the earliest Heartwood tokens use a colorless artifact frame, but the token is red and green by its reminder text.

Commander note: they're artifacts, so Vandalblast and Farewell clear them along with everyone's Signets, and because they aren't creatures they dodge the sweepers that kill mana dorks.

Prepare returns from Secrets of Strixhaven and works the same way it did there; our prepared explainer from that set covers the original cards. A preparation card is a creature with a spell printed beside its abilities, in the split frame Adventures use. The card is a creature card in every zone: creature tutors find it, reanimation spells return it, and a spell tutor can't see it.

The spell half is never cast from the card. When the creature becomes prepared, a copy of its spell appears in exile, and while the creature stays prepared you may cast that copy. Casting it works like casting anything else: pay the mana cost, pick targets, use the stack. Casting it also unprepares the creature.

The copy in exile disappears if any of three things happens: you cast it, the creature leaves the battlefield, or the creature becomes unprepared some other way. A creature can't be prepared twice at once, so it never holds two copies. And if an opponent takes control of a prepared creature, they get to cast the copy, not you.

The set splits prepare cards into two camps. Some, like Pompous Battlemage, enter prepared and are done once their spell is cast. Others, like Stingerquill Voxmancer and Woodwork Prodigy, re-prepare at the beginning of each of your upkeeps, so their spell comes back every turn the creature is alive.

The whole mechanic rides on the creature surviving, and a four-player pod carries three times the removal of a duel. Cast the copy before you pass whenever the mana is there, because a prepared creature holding an uncast spell is offering the table a two-for-one. The upkeep re-preparers are better here than they look: every turn they survive is a free spell, and a 1/2 goblin rarely gets targeted ahead of a commander.

One detail that matters for spellslinger builds: the copy resolves and ceases to exist. It never touches your graveyard, so it won't feed flashback, delve, or anything that counts spells in the yard. It does count as casting a spell, though, so prowess and magecraft trigger normally. Pompous Battlemage has prowess and pumps itself off its own sorcery.

Exhaust, first printed in Aetherdrift, appears on a small number of Reality Fracture cards. An exhaust ability is an activated ability you can activate only once. Liliana the Repentant carries the headline version: for at sorcery speed she returns a creature or planeswalker card from your graveyard to the battlefield and grows by a +1/+1 counter. Her other ability mills you two cards whenever another creature or planeswalker enters under your control, so she stocks the graveyard she reanimates from.

"Once" means once per object. If Liliana leaves the battlefield and comes back, she's a new object and the exhaust is available again. That matters more in Commander than anywhere else, because she's a legendary creature for : put her in the command zone and every recast resets the reanimation.

Empower Jace is the one with real Commander legs, mostly through the Sanctum. A land that manufactures card draw every turn slots into any blue deck, and the proliferate and counter-doubling decks get a new engine on top. Heartwood tokens are strong for Gruul artifact builds and quietly bad news for anyone whose ramp already folds to artifact sweepers. Prepare is fair value, better in the re-preparing versions. Exhaust is one card, but it's a card that wants to be your commander.

Previews continue through the rest of September. The running spoiler roundup tracks every new card as it lands, the release date and product hub covers everything confirmed so far, and the full card list lives on the Reality Fracture set page.

If you build around the Jace token, record the games. It's the fastest way to find out whether the engine wins pods or just draws you cards while someone else does.